MCLC: C. T. Hsia as mentor

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Laughlin, Charles <cal5m at eservices.virginia.edu>
Subject: C. T. Hsia as mentor
***********************************************************

I'd like to share with the list my reflections on being one of C.T. Hsia's
last PhD students.

Charles Laughlin

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C.T. Hsia as Mentor

I write the following as a tribute to C.T. Hsia, as a student of his and
as a modest contributor to the field he created almost single-handedly
with the publication of A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. I had been
trying to visit Hsia over the course of the fall semester because I had
not seen him for about two years. But my own difficulties prevented it
until late December, when I had the opportunity to visit him in New York
on Dec. 19--as it turns out, just one short week before he passed away.

I started my PhD studies in Chinese literature at Columbia University in
1988, three years before C.T. Hsia retired, which means that I took the
full three years of PhD coursework under his direction. I applied to six
graduate schools, and Columbia was one of the two that made compelling
offers to me. My decision to go to Columbia was in part based on an
attraction to New York City, but the real reason was the opportunity to
study with C.T. Hsia; I had read his History and The Classic Chinese Novel
in college and was aware of his preeminent stature in the field of modern
Chinese literary studies. I had no idea that the timing put me right at
the end of his teaching career.

That being said, if students ought to choose their advisors based on
intellectual affinities, I probably would not have wanted to be C.T.
Hsia’s student. At the University of Minnesota where I did my
undergraduate work on Chinese Language and Literature, after establishing
a solid basis in language and literary history, I began in my last couple
of years to veer strongly in the direction of critical theory. Yu-shih
Chen had started to nudge me in that direction before I spent 1986-87 as
an exchange student at Nankai University in Tianjin, and the following
year when I returned, Rey Chow was teaching at Minnesota while completing
her first book, Woman and Chinese Modernity. I also took a course on
critical theory from John Mowitt, in which I wrote papers about Lu Xun and
Yu Dafu using ideas from Derrida, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School. It
seemed to go without saying that graduate school would take me deeper into
theory, allowing me to help take modern Chinese literary studies to a new
level of sophistication and interaction with comparative literature.

What happened was quite the opposite: at Columbia I immersed myself deeply
in the study of Chinese literature. I took every graduate seminar C.T.
Hsia taught from 1988-1991: Tang dynasty “chuanqi” short stories, Song
dynasty “ci” lyrical poetry, late Qing fiction . . . I think there was one
on modern Chinese fiction. I also took his year-long undergraduate survey
of modern Chinese literature in translation, which covered the pre-1949
period in the fall semester, and then socialist literature from the PRC
plus writers from Taiwan in the spring. The New Era literature of the
post-Mao period had not yet hit the syllabus; at any rate, Prof. Hsia did
not seem to be very impressed with works from the 1980s. Almost all of the
classes I took for my six semesters of PhD coursework were in the Dept. of
East Asian Languages and Cultures. Sometimes people asked me why I did not
take courses in Comparative Literature, Philosophy, or History (except for
one modern Japanese history course) and to tell the truth I am not sure
why I didn’t.

C.T. Hsia’s seminars were a lively affair, to a large extent because of
Hsia’s own peculiar energy, which kept the pace quick, and his propensity
to drop politically incorrect bombshells without warning, which usually
mixed profound insight with shock value. I say this knowing it would not
have offended him; C.T. reveled in being “politically incorrect.” I
remember at the beginning of every semester he would go around the room
(seminars usually had about 6-8 students), touching base with each
student, either to ask his or her name, or to catch up with returning
students; this would be the occasion for frequent jokes. Names were of
special fascination to him: he would make guesses (sometimes accurate)
about your ancestry based on your surname and your appearance, and then
explore the significance of your given name, musings that would often lead
him inexplicably and inexorably toward what seemed to be his favorite
non-academic topic: the Golden Age of Hollywood. If you bore any
resemblance to a star of the 1930s-1950s, Hsia would certainly let you
know, just about every time he saw you, and he would even speculate about
your personality based on such resemblances.

Yet just when we began to wonder whether Professor Hsia took teaching
seriously at all, we would be caught by surprise by waves of scholarly
erudition. Looking back on it, I think Hsia was probably dismayed at how
spotty even the best graduate training in Chinese literature had to be in
the US, due to the linguistic and time constraints of students (up to the
1990s there were still not that many native speakers of Chinese doing PhDs
in the US); it was pathetic how little time we had to learn from such an
immense corpus, which required such extensive reading and sophistication
to master, when most students only had average to reasonably good Chinese.
I remember Hsia speaking with admiration of one scholar (not of old, but a
contemporary) who, when he went about studying a certain major literary
figure, would as a matter of course read the author’s complete works, even
if it were 20 volumes. He encouraged us to read entire dynastic histories
to really master a period. That being said, one had to be aware of one’s
limitations. One day when I had finished my PhD and was preparing to leave
Columbia and take up my new teaching position at Yale, I mentioned to Hsia
that I had an interest in translating Li Ruzhen’s novel, Flowers in the
Mirror (Jinghua yuan, c. 1820), which Lin Yutang and his daughter had
begun to do some decades before. He looked at me in shock and said
something to the effect of, “Don’t be ridiculous! Your Chinese will never
be good enough to do that!”

For C.T. Hsia, scholarship was not complicated; you had to read, and you
had to read a great deal. The more you read, the better a reader you
become, until the sensitivities you develop after a lifetime of reading
make you rather impatient with new material, which rarely achieves the
heights of your best reading experiences. Hsia may have been trained by
the best in New Criticism at Yale, which could be viewed as the
theoretical trend of his time, but the act of literary criticism for him
was not a complicated matter: all criticism necessarily involves some kind
of comparison, and the rest depends on how brilliant you are. Brilliant
critics have excellent training, which meant not that someone taught you
how to read or explained the meaning of texts to you correctly, but that
the student influenced by the erudition of a brilliant reader, a supremely
sensitive interpreter, one who could look at one line and spin out pages
of its significance. If C.T. Hsia provided good training, it was not a
systematic program; you just knew that you would have to read extensively
and respond intelligently (in class and in research).

Hsia demonstrated this in his The Classic Chinese Novel, a superb
introduction to the most important works of long fiction in China’s late
imperial period. He did as one would expect do New Critical readings of
these novels’ fictional art and moral universe, but what takes one by
surprise is that for each one, Hsia also presented the state of the field
for each novel’s textual history (the principal concern of traditional
Chinese literary scholars) and, though himself not a specialist in
traditional Chinese fiction, provided his own educated guesses as to the
likely authorship, date of earliest publication, and authentic version of
the story, when these were not yet established.

You knew what was expected of you, as his student, in terms of
preparation, but you never knew what awaited you in the classroom each
week. I remember one time Prof. Hsia was utterly flabbergasted at me in
class, because he discovered to his horror that I had never read a novel
by Charles Dickens. This was possibly in the context of discussing novels
by Lao She, the modern Chinese writer most profoundly influenced by
Dickens. Hsia’s shock showed a real pedagogical concern for his student,
but also revealed that we were moving into an era in which American
students would likely no longer recognize the supposedly classic Western
influences on modern Chinese authors. For a man like C.T. Hsia, who really
carried the torch of May Fourth cosmopolitanism through the end of the
20th century, Western literature was nothing less than the savior of
Chinese civilization, and for any well-educated Westerner to be ignorant
of the literary canon was scandalous.

The associative and often disjointed flow of his seminars, as likely to be
interrupted by a 30-minute diatribe on American politics as by a
digression on the etymology of a Chinese character and its surprising
relationship to ancient theatrical rituals, or an intensely close reading
of a key passage of a modern story, made each one a unique experience.
C.T. Hsia’s seminars in Chinese literature covered broad categories much
larger than could be comprehensively covered in a semester, but this gave
him the freedom to improvise while still demonstrating his mastery by
being able to provide scholarly insight on dozens of authors and works
seemingly without much preparation.

C.T. Hsia was strict, and it often felt arbitrary, but he would also not
hold back when he perceived excellence in his students. For better or
worse, what he valued in me was my writing ability. For someone who wished
to be a brilliant critic or an accomplished scholar, it was not much more
gratifying to be praised for my writing ability than for my Chinese
language ability, but over the years, I have come to value this praise,
coming from such an enthusiastic and discriminating reader of English
literature. I used to think it mattered a lot that American students learn
about Chinese culture, but I’ve begun to realize that it is much more
important for them to learn how to write well, and this realization was in
part inspired by C.T. Hsia’s encouragement.

Hsia was an unsystematic mentor who held his students to the strictest
standards without really showing us how to meet them; he was a New Critic
passionately committed to the political significance of literature; he
championed little-recognized writers marginalized by the revolutionary
mainstream while yet giving credit to the literary talent of many of those
devoted to the Communist cause, like Mao Dun, Xu Dishan and Ye Shengtao.
C.T. Hsia’s greatness lay in his ability to encompass and energize these
contradictions, compelling his readers and students to react to him. He
was confident in his fundamental convictions—no room for relativistic
quibbling there—but his vision of truth did not come easily. Many of us
may not be able to accept his arguments, others may view his methods and
concerns as outdated, but it is difficult to find such a forceful and
astonishing and, let’s face it, entertaining presence in the field of
Chinese literary studies today, and for that he will be sorely missed.

Charles A. Laughlin
University of Virginia