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C.T. Hsia as MentorBy Charles Laughlin , published January 23,
2014, 12:38a.m.
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 inpart 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 cilyrical 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 di dnt.
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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 novels 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. Hsias 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. Hsias sem inars 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 Ive 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. Hsias
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. Hsias 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 , lets face it , entertaining presence in the field
of
Chinese literary studies today , and for that he will be sorely
missed.
