MCLC: Julia C. Lin (1928-2013)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Nick Kaldis <nkaldis at gmail.com>
Subject: Julia C. Lin (1928-2013)
*******************************************************

Hello all, 

It is with great sadness that I post this obituary for Julia C. Lin (林明
暉), just sent to me by her son Tan.

Nick

======================================================

Source: Athens Ohio Today (8/20/13):
http://www.athensohiotoday.com/obituaries/julia-lin/article_436f09b3-2511-5
530-bd46-4f14bf43d447.html

ATHENS ― Julia Chang Lin, a scholar of Chinese literature who brought a
forgotten generation of women poets in China and a new generation of
post-war Chinese women poets to a western audience, died on Thursday, Aug.
1, of complications from neuroendocrine cancer in New York City. She was
85.

The daughter of Tsang Foh-Sing and Sung Zong-Cui, she was born Ming-hui
Tsang in Shanghai on May 4, 1928, and raised there and in the small
southern coastal town of Amoy. Her mother, who died when Julia was eight,
was a nurse; her father, a successful ophthalmologist who received his
education at the University of Pennsylvania. His patients included Madame
Sun Yat-sen. (Both of her grandmothers were doctors, long before Chinese
women were accorded either independence or ready access to such
professions.)

She attended St. Mary’s Hall School for Girls and St. John’s University in
Shanghai. On the same day in May of 1949 that the Communists marched into
Shanghai, a telegram arrived from Smith College, announcing her acceptance
and awarding her a scholarship. The family housekeeper, Liu Ma, sewed the
telegram and two $10 bills into the collars of Julia’s Chinese dress. As
the Nationalist government bombed the coast, she was smuggled to the
United States on a fishing boat with her best friend, Shirley Wang.

Detained for weeks on an island held by the Nationalists, Julia arrived at
Smith one month after the semester had started, in October 1949 (these
events are recounted in an article from the University of Washington
alumni magazine: 
http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/dec08/julialin.html.
Decades would pass before she again saw her two brothers, whom she had
helped raise after their mother’s death. By the time she made her first
trip back to China, in 1979, her father, two grandmothers, and Liu Ma had
died.

Though her godmother, Hao Po, hoped Julia would enter the medical
profession, Julia had, even before she left China, discovered English
literature. After graduating from Smith with a BA in English in 1951, she
earned an MA in English from the University of Washington in 1952, and in
1965 a PhD in the emerging field of Chinese Language and Literature.

At Washington, she developed her skills as a writer and translator of
poetry. She spoke Mandarin, Shanghainese, English, Cantonese, French,
Fukienese (her husband’s native tongue), and a bit of Japanese. One of her
teachers, Theodore Roethke, liked one of her poems, “Song of the Crazy
Monk,” so much that he mailed it off to the prominent literary journal
Botteghe Oscure, which published it. It was Julia’s first publication. Her
thesis advisor at UW was so impressed with her PhD thesis that he helped
secure its publication as “Modern Chinese Poetry: An Introduction.”

In Seattle, she met her husband, the late Henry Huan Lin, son of Lin
Chang-Min, a patriarch, politician and calligrapher instrumental in
establishing the Chinese League of Nations, and stepbrother to Lin Huiyin,
considered the first female architect in China. Julia’s father was opposed
to the marriage, but relatives living in Seattle agreed to give her away.

The Lins eventually moved, in 1959, to Athens, Ohio, where Henry started
the ceramics program (and later became Dean of the Fine Arts College) and
Julia became a professor of English. They raised their family, learned to
barbecue, and even bought a 102-acre farm. She learned to drive a car (a
Chevrolet), boil an egg (hard-boiled) and cook American (Rice-A-Roni),
with the plaid-covered Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book at her side.

One year, her husband installed a kitchen blower to vent out the smell of
cooking to the outside. Guests to the house were always served Chinese
food.

All that aside, her favorite activity (besides going to garage sales, of
course) was sitting in her chair, quietly reading, and occasionally
looking out at a weeping cherry tree at 30 Cable Lane.

In the classroom, Julia was a radiant presence, especially known for her
meticulous enunciation of the sounds of poetry in the classroom. Elizabeth
Dodd, a prominent poet and former student, recalls the “careful precision
of her elocution carrying the knowledge of another language altogether.”

Julia mentored students at formative stages in their careers, inviting
them to her house for tea and conversations that ranged, as another former
student Tom Mantey remembers, from mystery books, to the therapeutic
benefit of green over Black Gunpowder tea, to giving ma-po tofu the proper
mouth-numbing heat known as ma la (not just la). Mantey recalled the
“marvelous gifts from her, which include a gorgeous little tetsubin, an
even smaller Yixing pot around which little squirrels scamper and a set of
baoding balls.” To her son, Tan, now a poet, she gave the “The Complete
Poems and Plays: 1909-1950” by T.S. Eliot on his graduation from 8th grade.

Dr. Lin made groundbreaking contributions to the field of modern and
contemporary Chinese poetry. “Modern Chinese Poetry: An Introduction,”
completed shortly after the Nixon detente made visits to China possible,
enabled her to go to China to gather poetic materials and small literary
journals and produce pioneering scholarly/critical studies of modern and
contemporary Chinese poetry. Lin became friends with many of these poets,
including Shu-Ting, who was persecuted during the “anti-spiritual
pollution” movement that was launched in 1983. Among the poets translated
in her first book, was Ping Hsin and Lin Huiyin whose short lyric
mini-poems were pioneering works in modern China. At Ohio University she
helped inaugurate Chinese language courses and, in her courses and
colloquiums, she was the one-person Asian Studies department, introducing
students to “The Tale of Genji” and “Journey to the West.” After retiring
in 1998, she continued to champion the works of women writers in China.
Her four books have been influential in bringing recognition to, and
appreciation of, Chinese women poets from mainland China and Taiwan. She,
as it turns out, was uneasy about being called a poet, but she was. From
the poem that Roethke so admired, “Song of a Crazy Monk:”

Where are the plum-lipped ladies
Of Tang? In beds of spider dust.
O let them pass, O let them go,
As the Long River eastward flows,
Never to return nor backward flow,
O forget all, O forget none.

To the many who loved her (a friend from Smith spoke of her being one of
the few people one can genuinely say possessed “a real aura of holiness,
and sweetness”), Julia was called Ming-hui, her Chinese name. When she
moved from Athens, in 2004, to Pennswood Village in Newtown, Pa., she soon
found herself as beloved there as she was in Athens.

She was preceded in death by her husband, Henry Lin, in 1989, and her
brother Ke-Yong, in 2010, and was at work on an autobiography when she
passed away.

She is survived by a daughter, Maya, the artist who created the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, and a son, Tan, a poet and English professor, both of
New York City; a brother Ke-Heng of Beijing; a stepsister, Yining Zhang of
Lawrenceville, N.J.; and three grandchildren, Ahn Churchouse Lin, Rachel
Ming Wolf and India Lin Wolf.

A memorial service will be held at Pennswood Village, Newtown, Pa., on
Oct. 19 at 10 a.m. Donations in Julia’s honor can be made to the Henry and
Julia Lin Scholarship Fund. Mail checks to: Ohio University Foundation,
P.O. Box 869, Athens, OH 45701.