Interviews with Scholars of the Ming

Abstract

I should begin with my early years because significant influences took place when I was quite young. I come from a really nondescript small town in western Washington state, and my family was not academic. My brother and I were the first in our family to go to college, so over the years I’ve frequently had something like the following question put to me: “How did a nice girl like you end up doing this Chinese stuff?” I’ve thought about my answer to this question quite a bit. My somewhat unusual orientations had their roots very early in life. For me, the earliest realization that I could marginally call “intellectual” had to do with language. It was the discovery, when I was in early grade school, that the process of learning a foreign language was not just memorizing an alternative English word. I realized that languages were patterns, and it dawned on me that different languages reflected different ways of looking at the world. It was an astounding discovery: reality as I knew it was not a given. We slice and dice our sense of reality and organize these slices and dices in different ways. We use verbal languages, as well as nonverbal ones like musical and mathematical languages, for instance, to express different apprehensions of reality. So the relationship between language and reality struck me as very fluid. That kind of interest accompanied me into high school in the early 1960s, when “pop Zen” à la Gary Snyder was in the air and, somehow related to that, I first learned something of semantics and could put a label on what had always interested me. When I went to college at the University of Washington (UW), I discovered to my delight that I could take an introductory course on semantics, using the classic textbook by S. I. Hayakawa. As a result, I became determined to gain fluency in a language, and preferably also a writing system, that was completely different than what I had been formed by within the Indo-European language group. This was part of rebellious me in the rebellious 1960s. I was really bothered by the notion that the way I thought about the world had been pre-formed by the language I had grown up speaking— that my mind had been prearranged! As long as I stayed within the Indo-European languages, I would be stuck in the same patterns. Nobody had asked my preference in this! I’d had no chance to choose either my parents or the language I was born into! I discovered that the UW had one of nine full-range programs in the country in East Asian languages. So, at the beginning of my sophomore Ming Studies, 77, 48–56, May 2018