I enjoyed your article. I agree that a certain amount of alienation or detachment is valuable and helps one evaluate and critique one’s society. As a Chinese-American, I sometimes feel I don’t belong to either culture, and I try to embrace my outsider status to think creatively about my cultures. One of my intellectual heroes is Hannah Arendt; my impression of her is that, coming from an assimilated Jewish background and living through the Twentieth Century in Germany, France, and the United States, she had a nuanced understanding of her multiple identities and a willingness to alienate any group of which she was a member in order to seek out and articulate the truth. I sometimes watch the 2012 movie about her directed by Margarethe von Trotta and wistfully imagine myself as a hard-pacing, chain-smoking New York intellectual rather than the usually laid-back suburban high-school teacher I am. Perhaps a late-1950’s-style New-York-intellectual-themed party is the vintage party for me!
I also agree that exploring the past helps us appreciate the fragile beauty of the present and cultivate our faith that the memory of good and beautiful things can endure. I remember one day in 2013 when I finished a day of work in a hospital and went to a lecture at Stanford by a French sinologist (1). One of her interests is the religious life of ordinary Beijingers in the Twentieth Century. For fifteen years, she’s gone to Beijing every summer. Every day while there, she walks through side streets and back alleys and interviews ordinary elderly people about rituals and ceremonies that used to happen in hundreds of little shrines and temples that dotted the old city. The history she’s woven together from her interviews tells that many of these temples remained in use after the Communist take-over, until the Cultural Revolution, and some of them regained their function afterward. It was captivating and relaxing to hear this passionate historian tell funny stories about the people she interviewed. But it also made me remember some beautiful memories of my own childhood; made me savor some moments of my current life; and made me believe that, if historians do their work and we the public read them, then some things will not be forgotten.
Hi Tara,
I enjoyed your article. I agree that a certain amount of alienation or detachment is valuable and helps one evaluate and critique one’s society. As a Chinese-American, I sometimes feel I don’t belong to either culture, and I try to embrace my outsider status to think creatively about my cultures. One of my intellectual heroes is Hannah Arendt; my impression of her is that, coming from an assimilated Jewish background and living through the Twentieth Century in Germany, France, and the United States, she had a nuanced understanding of her multiple identities and a willingness to alienate any group of which she was a member in order to seek out and articulate the truth. I sometimes watch the 2012 movie about her directed by Margarethe von Trotta and wistfully imagine myself as a hard-pacing, chain-smoking New York intellectual rather than the usually laid-back suburban high-school teacher I am. Perhaps a late-1950’s-style New-York-intellectual-themed party is the vintage party for me!
I also agree that exploring the past helps us appreciate the fragile beauty of the present and cultivate our faith that the memory of good and beautiful things can endure. I remember one day in 2013 when I finished a day of work in a hospital and went to a lecture at Stanford by a French sinologist (1). One of her interests is the religious life of ordinary Beijingers in the Twentieth Century. For fifteen years, she’s gone to Beijing every summer. Every day while there, she walks through side streets and back alleys and interviews ordinary elderly people about rituals and ceremonies that used to happen in hundreds of little shrines and temples that dotted the old city. The history she’s woven together from her interviews tells that many of these temples remained in use after the Communist take-over, until the Cultural Revolution, and some of them regained their function afterward. It was captivating and relaxing to hear this passionate historian tell funny stories about the people she interviewed. But it also made me remember some beautiful memories of my own childhood; made me savor some moments of my current life; and made me believe that, if historians do their work and we the public read them, then some things will not be forgotten.
(1) https://buddhiststudies.stanford.edu/events/chinese-religion-lectures/marianne-bujard-searching-pekings-temples-inscriptions-archives