Peter J Carroll

I took first-year Chinese on a lark as a college freshman. Having studied French and Spanish in high school, I wanted to try a “hard” language. Arabic, Japanese, and Russian were also in the running, but I chose Chinese, which turned out to be fun. In my second semester, I began to explore courses in Asian history, religion, political science, and art history. Bit by bit, my original plan of majoring in French and Political Science fell away, and I found myself an Asian Studies major. 
My trajectory shifted again when I went to grad school. In college I had enjoyed reading the Neo-Confucian iconoclast Li Zhi 李贽(1527-1602 CE), so I thought that I might focus on 17th + 18th century intellectual history.  Instead, my teachers and the plenitude of books and newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries piqued my interest in late Qing and Republican era history.
History excites me because it requires piles of evidence and ample imagination. The past is constantly in retreat, but with a novel, a newspaper article, and a government document one can conjure different worlds and other lives. As the saying goes, “the past is another country,” but it can be visited. The imminence of the past has been demonstrated by some of the people I have had the privilege of knowing.
For example, when I studied in Beijing as a junior in college, an older classmate introduced me to his very elderly father, Mr. Gu. Mr. Gu had worked as a journalist for many years and had spent time in Shanghai and Calcutta, among other places. He ran a journalism night school, where I ended up teaching conversational English. The students in my class had very different language abilities, so I can’t say that I succeeded as a teacher. I did, however, enjoy meeting aspiring journalists from all walks of life and experiencing what had once been an elite, grand courtyard house in a hutong neighborhood that has since disappeared. At my last class, the students presented me with a Chinese dictionary, in which they had inscribed, “The key to Chinese culture,” (True!) and a statue of a Laughing Buddha with children, a symbol, they said, of a suppressed past that was only beginning to revive. I still have both.
It was only many years later that I realized that Mr. Gu was, in fact, Gu Zhizhong 顾执中(1898-1995), a very celebrated figure. In 1927, he broke the news, in the Chinese press, that Chiang Kai-shek 蒋介石and Song Meiling 宋美龄were engaged. As a leading journalist in Shanghai, he covered the tumult of the Republican period and knew virtually everyone in politics. He established a long-lived, influential journalism school in Shanghai and became a key journalism educator. During the Second World War, he worked in Rangoon, Calcutta, and Chongqing, among other places. He survived the turmoil of the Mao years and lived to an old age, writing about his fascinating life and translating the classic Ming novel Fengshen yanyi 《封神演义》(Creation of the Gods) into English.  I did not know all this when I knew him personally. In retrospect, I marvel that I had such direct access to the period and places that I study. Such connections remind me that the analytic and imaginative work of historical scholarship is ground in lived experience. As such, it is—or, at least, can be and should be-- immediate and compelling.