Morning Tea: The last letter writer in Saigon…Non-Western history in the academy…Cultural Revolution diaries

Story in Spiegel Online profiling Duong Van Ngo, a 77-year old trilingual resident of Saigon (excuse me, Ho Chi Minh City) who claims to be the last of the city’s public letter writers. In the old days, these fixtures outside post offices and ports would draft and sometimes translate letters and documents and even scribble off a few lines of poetry for the besotted but illiterate romantic. The author describes Mr. Ngo as “a mediator between worlds — a professional letter writer of the sort that used to exist in the old days. He chooses each word carefully, formulates cautiously, polishes the style of the letter. He knows how important words are and what harm they can do. Ngo doesn’t just translate. He bridges the distance between people, advises and comforts them, discreetly and with perfect attention to form.” Check it out. (Via Arts & Letters Daily)

American Historical Association president Barbara Weinstein in the latest issue of the AHA newsletter, Perspectives, walks the “thin, wavy line between justified complaint and unwarranted whining, I can testify that, even now, historians of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East often feel like outliers in their own profession.” While acceptance of specialists of “other histories” has improved considerably over the years, Professor Weinstein laments that historians of the non-Western histories still must contend with job talks to rooms of non-specialists none of whom may share the speakers research interests, isolation within a department once hired, and then requirements for tenure frequently set with the Americanist or Europeanist in mind. I can sympathize. My Americanist and Europeanist colleagues are very supportive of my work, but I can’t help but think that they (in their heart of hearts) view what I do is a little bit weird and not nearly as “serious” as what they study. Maybe I’m being oversensitive…Anyway, good essay that raises some important issues. (Via HNN)

Finally, a moving piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Hu Jingbei, an economics professor at Tongji University in Shanghai, discusses a diary he kept during the Cultural Revolution and looks back on those days with a combination of horror and wonderment. Now Professor Hu “is on a personal mission to understand how, as a young man of 18, he was so absolutely convinced that Mao Zedong was a hero worth putting all his faith into.” I’m trying to get a link to the actual diaries, but the GFWOC is being uncooperative. Anyone who has a link, feel free to post it in the comments section. UPDATE 3/13: A reader reports that the link to Professor Hu’s website can be found here. (Via HNN)

Tags: Chinese History · Life in Academia · morning tea

1 Caliboy // Mar 12, 2007 at 5:23 pm

Hu Jingbei’s website

His entries from his old diaries are on this
page (look down in the 2006 section):
2 zhwj // Mar 12, 2007 at 6:50 pm

I haven’t poked around his site enough to find where this is linked off of (Baidu cache of a doc file), but that’s one segment of the diaries. There may be others, too. It’s not firewalled, fortunately.
3 無名 - wu ming // Mar 12, 2007 at 11:08 pm

hear, hear on the “other histories” point. the same dynamic is worse in other fields, actually, poli-sci being the worst that i’ve run across. “oh, it’s just people getting travel funds to write about their vacations,” one (americanist poli-sci) grad student once told me, straight-faced.

on the other hand, i think it gives us good practice at the fundamental art of teaching, which is in essence the process of making something outside the listener’s historical context (and thus experience) comprehendable while remaining true to the subject of the past.
4 花崗齋之愚公 // Mar 15, 2007 at 8:38 am

Thanks for the links. I’ve appended them to the post.

Wu Ming,

I know I’m preaching to the choir with you…and you’ve made some good points. Doesn’t make it any less frustrating sometimes, though.

Jottings from the Granite Studio