Living memory

I forget sometimes that though I first went to China only in 1988, I’m old enough to be connected, personally, with some of the earlier witnesses of China’s long twentieth century, which leaves me only one degree of separation from many others. Especially living in Honolulu: I’ve met Sun Yat-sen’s granddaughter and Zhang Xueliang’s cardiologist, among others.

Coming back to my office after the gym the other day, I ran into the 94-year-old Dr Lo Chin-tang 羅錦堂, on his daily ramble around campus. Dr Lo, a scholar of Chinese literature specializing in early modern drama, was emeritus before I was even hired here, but we worked together on an exhibition of calligraphy and painting from local collections 14 years ago (easy to remember because I was enormously pregnant during the planning stages of the show and the mother of newborn twins when it opened). We reminisced a bit and I showed him pictures of my now 13-year-olds.

Dr Lo in his eighties, as he was when I first met him.

The thing I remembered about Dr Lo was that he was awarded the first doctoral degree in the humanities granted in the ROC (in 1960), and that in defending his thesis on Yuan drama, the examination was led by the eminent vernacular novelist Hu Shi 胡適. After seeing him the other day, I wanted to know more, and found this admittedly rather hagiographic biography on Sohu. Even reading through the hero-worship, it’s still bonkers. There’s an image of an article that includes a photograph of the thesis defense, which apparently included Hu Shi, Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋, Tai Jingnong 台靜農 and other leading lights of literary history. There he is with the calligraphy master and co-founder of Fudan University, Yu Youren 于右任, who was the principal witness at his wedding. He apparently locked horns with Fu Sinian 傅斯年, then president of the university, and collaborated with Dong Zuobin 董作賓, editor of Dalu Journal (大陸雜誌). It’s like a who’s who of 20th century literary studies.

Of course it’s just because they were all gathered together in Taipei at the same time, and it must have seemed entirely ordinary while it was all happening, but it does make a person wonder: what of this will become history? Sometimes you can tell, but sometimes you have to wait to find out.