MCLC: Link on Rulan Chao Pian

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: Link on Rulan Chao Pian
***********************************************************

Source: Caixin (12/20/13):
http://english.caixin.com/2013-12-20/100619991.html

A Debt of Gratitude
Harvard’s Rulan C. Pian gave her students more than good tones – her love
of teaching gave them an inspiration that has lasted a lifetime
By Perry Link

When I went to college in 1962, I knew that I liked languages, English as
well as others. In high school I had taken French, and I thought that in
college I would try Chinese. I had lived two years in India as a boy, and
might have taken Hindi, but Harvard didn't offer Hindi. It did offer
Sanskrit, but I wanted to talk to people who were still alive.

"Don't do it," said the undergraduate adviser for Far Eastern Languages,
as the department was known in that era. "In your freshman year you should
get started in a basic discipline. Chinese takes a lot of time. You can do
it next year."

For this reason I did not meet Rulan C. Pian until fall of 1963, at the
beginning of my sophomore year. I took her course Chinese B. It was a
beginning course, but B didn't stand for beginning.  (I never did learn
what the B stood for.)  The adviser a year earlier had been right about
one thing: the course took a lot of time. I split my time 50-50 – half on
Chinese B, half on everything else.

There were 12 students in Chinese B that year. A few had had some Chinese
before, but none had had R.C. Pian before, so it was fair. She started us
with tones, and then went to the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization that her
father, Chao Yuen-ren, had helped to invent. People have always said that
I have good tones (for a foreigner), and here is the reason: Gwoyeu
Romatzyh + R.C. Pian. Later in my life I taught beginning Chinese about
thirty times, and I always used the Gwoyeu Romatzyh + R.C. Pian formula.
It works. More importantly, lots of other things don't work.

It may seem odd to say that a 19-year-old boy from upstate New York fell
in love with a 41-year-old Chinese lady who was married, but that is sort
of what happened. Rulan did not seem 41. She bounced around the classroom
as if there were springs in her shoes and spoke in a voice so charming and
clear that you wanted to learn Chinese only because she spoke it. Some
students called her Dragon Lady, but that was based on a confusion. She
was not frightening, only meticulous. If your "h" was insufficiently
guttural, she told you, and you had to do it again.

People talk about "tough love." In her, some students felt the "tough,"
but I felt the "love."  I wasn't alone, either. There was another student
in Chinese B, like me a sophomore and, as it happened, a dorm mate of mine
named Tom Schaefer. Tom and I liked our Pian classes so much that we would
walk back to our dormitory together playing a game of how much real-world
talk we could actually do using the limited vocabulary of Chinese B. I
have lost track of where Tom went in life.

Besides me, quite a few other professors in China studies – Ezra Vogel,
Frederic Wakeman and Andrew Nathan, to name three – began Chinese with
R.C. Pian. I don't want to continue trying to name names because I
inevitably will miss many, and I would not want the many who are missed to
feel they are less important in my view than the many who are named.

In my junior year I took second-year Chinese, also with Rulan and
continued to do well in everything except memorizing how to write
characters. I still split my time 50-50. In my senior year, though, I
could not afford a 50-50 split because I was majoring in philosophy and
wanted to write a senior thesis on ethics and epistemology. When I
graduated, Harvard gave me a "travelling fellowship" that let me go
anywhere in world I liked, so I chose to go to Taiwan and Hong Kong.
(Americans couldn't go to mainland China in 1966.) In preparation for that
adventure, I took a third-year summer-intensive Chinese course at
Middlebury College. Rulan's friend Liu Chun-jo was the school's director.

When I landed in Taiwan a few weeks later my first big shock was that
nobody on the island sounded like R.C. Pian. I don't mean that most people
were speaking Taiwanese, although that was true; and I don't mean that the
minority who spoke Mandarin had heavy "southern accents" – no retroflex
initials, and so on – although that, too, was true. I mean that even the
few who spoke northern Mandarin did not have that clear, bell-like voice
that, to me, was what "Chinese" was supposed to sound like. I wished that
Rulan could come over and straighten everybody out for me. I couldn't do
that, of course. So I wrote to her asking for advice. What should I do
amid all these imperfections?  She wrote back: "Stick with what I taught
you."

After a year abroad I went back to Harvard, but switched from philosophy
to East Asian Studies for an M.A., and then to Chinese history for a Ph.D.
In my second year in graduate school, Rulan hired me as a teaching fellow
in Chinese, and that was the beginning of a 40-year span in which I taught
Chinese, on average, every other year, and participated in writing two
Chinese-language textbooks. When the Vietnam War heated up and it looked
like I might be drafted, Rulan and her colleagues figured out how to hire
me as a full-time teaching assistant in Chinese. That got me a "teaching
deferment" from the draft and let me stay at Harvard, albeit not enrolled
in graduate school, until I turned 26 and was exempt from the draft.

I wrote my dissertation on the rise of popular fiction in Shanghai in the
early 20th century, and I dedicated the work to R.C. Pian. Some of my
fellow students – and, I fear, some of my graduate-school advisers as well
– found it odd that I was honoring a "language teacher" in this way. They
wondered if it was because Rulan had helped me with the dissertation. She
indeed had given me a bit of advice on it, but the reason for the
dedication was Chinese B. I felt that Chinese B was the most important
course I had ever taken. Getting started well in Chinese language seemed
to me the key to everything else. I wanted to get inside Chinese culture,
and to the extent that I had succeeded, it was because of language, and my
grasp of language was because of Chinese B. I couldn't imagine trying to
understand Chinese without tones, and she had given them to me. I have the
same view today, 37 years later.

I finished the chapters of my dissertation during a seven-month marathon
from July through December of 1975. On half-year leave from Princeton,
where I had begun teaching, I rented an apartment in New York and barely
left it. One of my few diversions was to listen to audiotapes of Hou
Baolin performing xiangsheng (相声). At first I couldn't understand the
routines very well, but I loved them, and eventually did figure some of
them out, memorized a few, and finally even performed one at a CHINOPERL
"frolic." Rulan was among the listeners, and I could tell that she was
delighted. I could almost hear her saying to herself, "Look what I did!"

A few years later her friend Liu Chun-jo invited me to Minnesota to give a
talk on xiangsheng, with a performance. Rulan was there, and she agreed to
be my "straight man" penggen de (捧哏的). This was OK with me because, as
everyone knows, the penggen de is the actor who is really in charge; my
role was to be the "funny man" dougen de (逗哏的), who blabbers all over the
place, very much out of control. So we performed together. I remember that
Rulan's only question was, "So I'm the straight man, am I?  What's the
opposite of straight man?  Crooked woman?"

She understood irony, as this question of hers shows. In fall of 1989, the
first time she saw me after I had brought Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian to the
U.S. embassy in Beijing the day after the June 4 massacre, she said, "So,
I read in the newspaper how you are causing trouble again!"

When Rulan retired in 1992, I went to her retirement party in Cambridge
and brought my 11-year-old daughter Monica with me. Monica had learned
Chinese pretty well during a year in China in 1988-89, and she, like me,
liked xiangsheng, so we performed a piece for Rulan. We also dressed up
like a walrus and a carpenter to perform a recitation of The Walrus and
the Carpenter that her father had translated and included as Lesson 22 in
his classic textbook Mandarin Primer, whose every page I had studied in
college. Rulan had always required us to memorize the lesson texts, and I
had done that for lesson 22 in 1965, so in order to do it again in 1992, I
did not have to start from scratch. To make tusks for the walrus, Monica
and I melted two white candles sufficiently to bend them into tusk-shape.

The last time I saw Rulan was in March, 2013. I had gone to Colby College
in Maine to give a lecture and on the way home stopped in Cambridge to see
her. Monica was teaching philosophy at Tufts, so she came along. I had
just published An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard
2013) and had dedicated the book to her father, so wanted to give her a
copy.

At age 90 her long-term memory was still good. She knew exactly who I was,
and was obviously pleased that I had come to see her again. But her
short-term memory was not so good. She asked me, "What are you teaching?"
and I explained. I was teaching Chinese literature and a course on human
rights in cross-cultural perspective. I had also volunteered to do a
freshman course on writing English. After my explanations, she smiled
sweetly and we changed the subject back to her father and my book. About
five minutes later she turned to me again: "So!  What are you teaching?"
Before Monica and I left that day, she asked the same question two more
times, clearly with no sense of revisiting covered ground.

In that respect she had declined. But where she had not declined was that
each time she asked the question her voice, although a bit hoarse now, was
still warm and sincere, and still had a glint of that bright-eyed, bouncy
spirit that I had found so alluring in 1963.

The author is Professor emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton
University. Rulan Chao Pian, died on November 30 at the age of 91, was an
American ethnomusicologist who taught Chinese language and Chinese music
at Harvard University, and later appointed fellow of the Academia Sinica
in Taiwan in 1994. Her father, Chao Yuen Ren, was a Chinese American
linguist who shaped the Geoyeu Romatzyh, a Chinese romanization scheme