Academia

‘An eternal yet banal sensation’

There is a wonderful quote in a book I otherwise think is fair-to-middling (if that – Edvard Radzinsky’s The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II):

Nicholas kept a diary for thirty-six years without interruption. He began it at the age of fourteen, in 1882, in the palace at Gatchina, and ended it as a fifty-year-old prisoner in Ekaterinburg ….

This diary contains no reflections, and opinions are rare. He is terse – this taciturn, retiring man. The diary is a record of the principal events of the day, no more. But his voice lingers on its pages.

The mystical force of genuine speech.

The revolution punished him without trial, not allowing him a final say. The portrait of this puzzling man was created only after his death – by his opponents and his supporters. Now he himself can speak in the words he himself once wrote. I leaf through his diary. One experiences an eternal yet banal sensation in the archive: one feels other hands, the touch of hands across a century.

I just spent a week in the Shanghai Municipal Archive (上海市档案馆) tying up some loose ends. Archives are funny places: even when you’re not reading something as personal as a diary, there is something of that ‘feeling other hands.’ Even in the neatly typed and seemingly impersonal reports, those echoes are there – personal voices come from the most unexpected places. Most of my materials are bureaucratic detritus – typed records of things no one has thought about in decades, reams of 统计表 (tongjibiao, charts of statistics), scribbled communiqués back and forth between various government ministries. No smoking guns, no highly recognizable names. Certainly no diaries from deposed emperors. And yet ….

Archives in China are doubly funny places: even when your materials are merely the detritus of a somewhat bloated bureaucracy, there’s a shroud of secrecy drawn over them. Talk to a China scholar who has spent any time in PRC archives, and you’re likely to get an earful about some horrific experience or another. While my project isn’t precisely Shanghai-centric, topic-wise, I made a strategic decision in doing most of my work in the city. The archives there are pretty mellow, and access is quite open. We all know there are files nobody but Party historians are getting access to, but at least at the SMA, the stuff that’s out in the open is there for the taking. It’s a downright pleasant place to work – the fact it’s tucked on one end of the Bund and overlooks Pudong doesn’t hurt.

I hauled home a not insignificant chunk of photocopies, and I’m in the process of sorting and scanning them (well – the hundreds of pages of statistics are joining the hundreds of pages I already have; scanning adds an extra step as it is, no reason to be a masochist about it). It’s entirely banal yet somehow extraordinary. As much as putting the pieces of my narrative together is driving me batty at the moment, there is something really wonderful about wallowing around in sources and feeling those ‘other hands’ – even if they are unseen hands of an unknown bureaucrat, and not those of a highly mythologized ex-tsar.

Just one mountaineering party (of 600 million)

Research is a funny thing; you sometimes find connections where you least expect them. I’ve been trawling through the database Duxiu, checking up on a few things that have popped up in archival sources. I checked up on a common search (the dramatist Meng Chao – who really made his name as a poet in the Republican period) and turned up an article I’d never seen before. It was published in a journal I don’t usually associate with dramatists (Xin tiyu – on sports and athletics) on a pet subject of mine: high altitude mountaineering. Specifically, the 1960 ascent of Mt. Everest (or Qomolangma), which may or may not have been successful. I’ve been dying to write a paper on mountaineering in China after 1949 – I read one of the few (maybe the only?) academic books on Himalayan climbing last year & it simply increased my feeling that there’s a cool story to be told about China’s role in all of this.

In any case, it was with some surprise that I noted this poem written by a central figure in my dissertation on a subject I nurture a hope to write more on. Perhaps this is the shove I need? Check out this glorious stuff:

Ice axes like iron plows
Clawing at the ancient virgin ridge;
Crampons like sharp knives
Splitting open the numerous layers of the icy mountain;
The oxygen is exhausted,
A heroic spirit fills up their hearts;
Their physical strength used up,
Heroic willpower surpasses the east wind.

The monograph I mentioned above is great because it puts mountaineering expeditions into a bigger narrative about conquest, colonialism, dominating the earth – I haven’t yet turned up anything written on this from the Chinese side of things, but here’s my start.

Chinese earth has brought forth heroes.
Heroes have climbed one of the highest peaks,
What high peak is left that cannot be climbed!
The heroes have produced a great miracle,
What miracles are left that cannot be achieved!

Long live Chairman Mao and the Party etc.

Six hundred million heroes
Are just one mountaineering party
Climbing mountain after mountain
Climbing range after range
Six hundred million heroes
Gathered atop a high summit …

I personally love the description of the PRC as “one mountaineering party” and endeavor to use this more often when talking about the socialist period.

In other news, my first article was recently published – featuring (who else?) Meng Chao & his gorgeous ghost. “A Ghostly Bodhisattva and the Price of Vengeance: Meng Chao, Li Huiniang, and the Politics of Drama, 1959-1979″ is out in the Spring 2012 issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. I owe huge amounts of thanks to Ye Wa, Larissa Heinrich, Paul Pickowicz, Jenny Huangfu, Amanda Shuman, my research seminar classmates from 2009, and two anonymous reviewers at MCLC for their advice and comments, though of course – all errors remaining are mine alone.

A few notes on obvious matters

Because isn't this what everyone aspires to?

Another day, another disgruntled post on how breaking into games journalism is hard (well, more a post about how breaking into games journalism is hard and I QUIT). I was struck yet again about how similar it all is to academia – so many people wanting so few positions, the same advice given to aspiring hopefuls (‘Don’t do it’), the complaints about that advice not being supportive enough, the accusation that it’s an exclusive and exclusionary club. Yet I think the author misses the mark here: it’s not necessarily an exclusionary club, and all the help in the world from people who have ‘made it’ won’t spell success for all the hopefuls. There are too many people who want jobs, or even just occasional nibbles on their freelance pitches, and not enough jobs; even when you remove all the people who don’t have the writing or intellectual chops, there are still too many people. Just like there are too many English PhDs and not enough jobs for English PhDs (insert department of choice here – it’s true for most of them, to some degree or another).

The ‘don’t do it’ advice is not so much exclusionary as it is cautionary. People say it knowing that the gung-ho person asking for advice is probably going to do whatever it is they’ve planned on, regardless. Sometimes it’s advice given from a position of knowing a lot about someone’s work. What we think about ourselves is often not what others see: it doesn’t matter how good a writer you think you are if you can’t convince others you’re brilliant. But regardless of raw talent or qualifications, the ‘don’t do it’ advice underscores a fundamental truth of breaking into games journalism (or academia): for most people, trying hard and being good isn’t enough. There is a high chance of failure, not because journalists are big mean exclusionary jerks, but because there aren’t enough jobs. Whether the author in question ‘worked hard enough,’ I don’t know – but even if he did, the chances of success are not stellar.

Of course, some people do make it, and a couple of people responded to the original posts with tales of success and the difficulty in finding that success. Scott Nichols gave us a nice article on the ‘club,’ and then another touching on some related issues. Brendan Keogh wrote a nice post about his success thus far. After some perfectly reasonable advice on how to break into games journalism, he has this to say:

At the end of the day, only one thing is true: to make it as a videogame journalist, you need to write a post about how to become a videogame journalist on your personal blog. So there you go. I made it. And you can too!

It occurred to me that – since he’s a smart & witty guy* who had just written in preceding paragraphs about “the ‘just keep writing until you make it! Don’t give up!’ crap pep talks” – this was perhaps a bit tongue in cheek, and what follows is certainly not an attack or criticism of his post, but I’m using it as a jumping off point. Because the ‘You can too!’ optimism is … not true. Rather, it isn’t going to be true for most people, and these kinds of statements are indicative of a problem that goes far beyond games journalism. It’s the insidious lie that if you just work hard enough and want it badly enough, you too can be a success!, something that has been drilled into – at least in the US – most people’s heads since childhood. It’s not true. It never has been true, and repeated statements to the effect that it IS true will not make it so. Sometimes, despite raw talent and ability, and despite doing everything ‘right,’ you will fail to attain your goals. In the case of academia or games journalism, both places where (for the most part) there are far, far more qualified applicants than there are available spots (freelance or salaried), chances of failure are quite high, no matter how talented you are or how well you sell yourself.

There is an element of luck to all of this. It’s something we don’t like to admit: a lot of success or failure has absolutely nothing to do with us and a lot to do with how things fall into place. I don’t mean to suggest that people who have ‘made it’ have done so without a lot of hand work, and have simply lucked into their positions. And while I don’t always like playing counterfactual history, it’s perhaps worth pondering if, say, Leigh Alexander would be where she is today if she had tried starting her career two years earlier, or two years later. Maybe she would be, or maybe not. I would offer that Leigh partially got her start on GameSetWatch, which no longer exists at all & hasn’t existed in that circa 2007 form for a pretty long time (closing off that particular avenue for aspiring Leighs-to-be): institutions (and the people involved in them) have a big impact on careers (a point I will return to shortly). On a personal level, would I have had the scrap of a “career” I did had that job opening been posted at another point in time? No. Would Kotaku of today hire me, or have need of putting up such a posting? No.

Or, another example, this one culled from the academic world. I spent my dissertation year in Shanghai supported by the prestigious Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship. In typical grant fashion, these things are decided on the basis of a ten page prospectus of your dissertation topic, a two page bibliography, and three letters of recommendation from professors. The LORs were out of my hands after I secured letter writers, but I spent a lot of time and effort putting together the best prospectus I could. I won one. But had I applied one year later, my letter writers would have been the same, my project would have been the same, and I would have left empty handed, as the competition was cancelled due to lack of funding. The year before I applied, two of my classmates both won the Hays – would I have been just as successful that year? Maybe, maybe not.

To say that some of my success was due to timing is simply to acknowledge that much of what happens in our careers has very little to do with us. It doesn’t mean that I think I was undeserving, or that my project isn’t good, or that I didn’t work hard. But I’ve found my graduate career a fine balancing act between self-criticism (‘I did XYZ very poorly and it needs work’) and admitting that sometimes, despite our best efforts and the quality of our offerings, the ‘stars weren’t aligned.’ Again, I don’t believe things are predetermined or that hard work has nothing to do with success – but I think we’d all be better off if we just admitted that yes, being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people, or any number of other things that have nothing to do with our talent or ability can impact our careers or lack thereof.

It doesn’t mean ‘don’t ever try,’ but it means ‘be prepared for failure.’ And preparing for failure is difficult and painful, especially when you are working your hardest and doing your best at the same time. I’ve given some really depressing advice to undergraduates thinking of grad school, and it’s not coming from a place of bitterness or failure – just one of being tired, and of being aware of how much the daily grind really takes out of you. I think the same can be said for the ‘don’t do it’ camp of battle-tested freelancers and writers. It’s hard. You’re probably not going to make it. And you need to go in understanding that the chances are you’re investing a lot of time, tears, and writing into an unsuccessful venture. Just as aspiring PhDs need to be comfortable with the idea of investing an unholy amount of time and effort and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end in terms of long-term, gainful employment.

You'd be amazed at the faults that can be hidden with a little work

Which leads me to a seemingly unrelated issue. There is absolutely an element of gamesmanship or showmanship here (academia, games journalism, whatever) – knowing how to package yourself to hopefully get the best results – but it’s hard to know how to play the game if you’re ignoring the game. And, for the most part, people ignore the game of games journalism (there’s a touch of irony here … somewhere … maybe). It’s incredibly difficult to know how you fit into the bigger picture if you’re paying no attention to it, and the ‘But I love it so’ statements ignore the bigger picture. This is not entirely the fault of stars-in-their-eyes wannabe journalists: one of my greatest frustrations with the chatter of games journalism (or – more to the point – the critiques of games journalism) is that we spend astonishingly little time thinking about structures, about how all these different parts fit together. How does the aspiring writer fit into the system? How do the freelancers fit there? The stars? How do pressures from above impact the sorts of writing being produced – or who is being hired? Once we get past obvious hot button issues like ‘breasts = page views,’ there is precious little to be said about how all of this writing, all this knowledge is produced. You know, the producing that people want so badly to be doing.

We spend a lot of time lauding or tearing down individual writers and publications, and very, very little time thinking about how they fit together, or what they say about this culture of writing, reading, playing, consuming. It is mostly guaranteed that any time criticism or defense of a particular publication comes up, comments sections will be stuffed full of mind bogglingly ignorant commentary on how publications function, how it is that writers conduct their business. And really, it’s hard to blame such commentary on willfully ignorant participants – we never talk about structure(s), so why would anyone bring such things up? I would go back and cull a few examples from discussions that happened a few years ago, but it’s too depressing. Instead, I’ll just say that while academia is hardly a model to be emulated, a little more of the self-aware, self-critical examination of the ‘big picture’ (à la – dare I say it? – area studies) would be useful for all of us, past, present, and wannabe writers.

It won’t stop the frustration of people who feel they’re outside of the ‘club,’ and it certainly won’t stop the the fact that most people aren’t going to be successful, but it may take the edge off that ‘don’t do it’ advice. It may give us a little insight into how things function in this little journalistic subculture of ours, and really – won’t we (and our work) just be all the better for that?

—

*I had a crazy dream a few nights before I posted this that Brendan took serious offense to this & it led to a lot of people I’m very fond of on Twitter, like Kris Ligman, getting angry at me & saying particularly nasty things. It goes without saying that I hope that doesn’t actually happen, since none of this is coming from a place that’s critical of Brendan!

From Shanghai to Kunming & weiqi to Warcraft

My very first poster advertising ME!

As if I didn’t have enough to do in my last two weeks in China, I enthusiastically accepted an invitation extended by a good friend of mine: come to Kunming (the ‘Spring City’ in China’s Yunnan province) and give a lecture on a topic of my choosing to his study abroad students in the Duke in Chinaprogram.

So thanks to Brent Haas, one of my favorite people from grad school & one of the very finest teachers I’ve ever seen, for showing me a good time in a lovely city & allowing me the opportunity to talk about some of my favorite stuff. As it turned out, the school administration was pretty excited to have a guest speaker, so my audience was significantly bigger (and more diverse) than I was anticipating: around 100 students, most Chinese. What follows is a condensed version of my talk (I also have a bit of discussion afterwords and some thoughts on what I could have done better – things to file away for next time. Here’s hoping next time goes just as well!). The talk itself was a bit basic, but I think I’ve started pulling out some core themes (and in the process of getting ready, came across some more good sources: YES!)

From weiqi to Warcraft: Games & Play in Chinese Culture (and some serious stuff, too)

I have, for about as long as I’ve been in grad school, felt like someone trapped on the margins of two fields. I longingly press my nose up to the window pane of game studies, and wish that I were truly as comfortable being an academic there as I am being, uh, whatever it is my status is (former blogger of some renown at one point in the quickly receding past, at least among certain quarters?). At the same time, I’ve tried to mash myself into what I think Chinese historians ‘ought’ to be (with some success), while at the same time trying not to be that. Mostly, I would just like to feel like I’m doing a better job of straddling two fields that don’t see a lot of each other: I am usually the only historian at game studies things and almost always the only Chinese historian; while I am delighted there are more and more ‘China studies’ people looking at contemporary gaming culture, I don’t think we’ve hit a critical mass – yet. At least, those of us skewing more towards the historical haven’t.

In any case, part of trying to straddle these two worlds is trying to capitalize on what I do have that most people don’t. I tend to fall back to what I know best: the popular press. And here is the real heart of my personal project: I want to flesh out these flat, one-dimensional representations of what Chinese gaming culture (and by default, China) is, and think in broader terms about how we got to where we are today and where we might be going. I went through and culled a small-but-pretty-representative handful of articles on China from Kotaku to illustrate exactly what we are up against:

  • Prisoners in labor camps forced to farm gold. Here we have a trifecta of ‘China issues’: gold farming, World of Warcraft, and human rights violations
  • Game addicted, neglectful parents sell their children for more money, more time to game
  • World Bank proposes gold farming as potential revenue stream for developing economies (this one was more a matter of tone (negative) and photograph illustrating article (Chinese gamers))
  • A bounty of counterfeit, shanzhai 山寨 Nintendo DSes seized at Japanese port (this one elicited quite the laugh from my Chinese audience)
  • And finally, perhaps the most typical: man in Beijing dies after marathon gaming binge at internet café (wangba)

I certainly don’t want to deny bad stuff happens; on the other hand, it’s an awfully skewed portrait. Well, who cares what a bunch of Kotaku readers think, right? Unfortunately, such a blasé attitude is naïve at best and dangerous at worst; I think the overwhelmingly negative or derisive tone is one that is echoed in many places. There’s also this weird tendency to put China in this Confucian post-socialist vacuum, by which I mean many people see China as consisting of Confucius … then Mao and after … and precious little in between. How often have things been written off as some weird communist quirk? Or how often do people intone about ‘tradition’ this and ‘traditional’ that?

This spills over a touch into academia (the sort of ‘amnesia,’ not thinking China is an odd blend of Confucian traditionalism and communist … something), where the past 10 years sometimes seem to be devoid of a longer history. Often, the most you get is a quick gloss of post-Cultural Revolution, reform & opening (gaige kaifang 改革开放). I recognize that not everyone is a historian, nor is interested in being one; but I really hate that a really rich history is essentially ignored. Surely there’s a way to marry these two fields together. So I guess that’s what I’d like to do, recognizing that I’m never going to be a superstar in either field independently. I’ll settle for being pretty decent at mixing them together.

In any case, my goal for the talk was to illustrate (a) the utility of games in studying Chinese history (b) the utility of considering a broader sweep of history when discussing contemporary games and gaming culture and (c) discuss some of the challenges and pitfalls of games research (particularly from the historian’s point of view). I guess it was a bit simplistic, but then, it was a talk to a pretty mixed audience, so I guess that’s to be expected!

I. Liubo 六博 ‘six sticks’

Tomb figures, Eastern Han (25-220 CE)

On the surface, liubo seems a slightly odd choice to begin a lecture on the history of games with, since precious little is actually known about the game. We have some textual references (dating to the Warring States period, 5th-3rd c. BCE) in sources such as the Analects 论语 and the Mencius 孟子, and physical objects: sculptures, paintings, game boards, paraphernalia. A lovely complete game set was pulled out of the Mawangdui 王堆马 tombs (circa 2nd c. BCE, Changsha, Hunan), which also included some extraneous pieces that seem to be unrelated to liubo.

But I picked liubo for a few reasons: first, it illustrates the difficulty of studying old games that have died out. Liubo was clearly very important for a relatively long period of time (several hundred years at least), though it began declining in popularity by the later Han and has not been played for at least 1500 years. While extrapolating back from modern rules has its own problems, it at least gives us something to go on. Scholars debate exactly what kind of game liubo was: a racing game, where one had to go from point to point? A battle game, where one had to defend one’s territory? It’s simply not clear, and the texts and objects are pretty silent.

Second, while we really oughtn’t need be reminded that games can be serious business, sometimes people do need a little reminder. Liubo is good for this, as it seems to have had some ritual function. These ‘TLV’ mirrors are so named because of the T, L, and V shapes that appear on their surface. Those shapes just so happen to resemble a … liubo board? Indeed. And one example is even inscribed with wording that informs us the liubo board was inscribed to dispel evil. Well. Again, the link between the game, the mirror, and any ritual functions is pretty unclear. The inscription, while tantalizing, is merely one sentence, and we have no other idea of how these three things – mirror, game, ritual – fit together.

Bronze TLV mirror, 1st c BCE (British Museum), black marks illustrate the liubo board (?)

Finally, liubo overlapped with weiqi and this has caused a massive amount of confusion. I’ll come back to this, as I think it’s very important in understanding part of weiqi‘s history, and by extension, a part of the history of games in China as a whole.

II. Weiqi 围棋 ’encirclement game’

Woman playing weiqi (c. 722) - Painting on silk, Astana graves, Xinjiang

While at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference in September 2011, I was intrigued by the number of people who brought up weiqi (or go 碁, as it is more commonly known). Poor China – one of the most quintessentially Chinese of games is, for most people, forever identified with Japan! In any case, weiqi has an illustrious past, and is still a very popular game that is taken quite seriously. In terms of its history, by the Tang dynasty (618 – 907) it was one of the four arts (siyi 四艺) that a gentleman was expected to have mastery of, alongside playing the qin(zither), painting, and calligraphy. The game was overwhelmingly associated with the male literati-scholar elite, though (as a famous Tang dynasty painting proves) some women played, as well.A piece by Wang Yucheng 王禹偁 (954-1001), a Song dynasty poet and official, gives us some indication of weiqi‘s importance. After being demoted from his position in the civil service, he built himself a bamboo tower and waxed rhapsodic on it’s soothing qualities:

I … built a bamboo tower with two rooms. It is a good place to play the qin, for the musical melodies are harmonious and smooth; it is a good place to chant poems, for the poetic tones ring pure and far; it is a good place to play weiqi, for the stones sound out click-click.

I personally love the genre of weiqi poetry (see article by Chen Zu-Yan – which the following examples are taken from) – and there are some truly splendid and varied examples.

In Liu Yuxi’s 劉禹錫 (772-842) “Song of watching a weiqi game, as a send-off for Master Xuan’s journey west” 观棋歌送儇师西游 (written after watching a talented Buddhist monk play), we get an inkling that weiqi is perhaps not as solitary as the game is sometimes presented. Master Xuan was playing another person, and probably had a number of (male) friends standing around watching:

First, I perceived dotted stars in the dawn sky;
Then, I saw soldiers fighting in late autumn.
Your deployment was as wild geese in flight – nobody understood it,
Until the cub was caught in the tiger’s den, and all were shocked.

Weiqi was the best kind of social activity: moral and wholesome while providing a platform for male bonding. Liu’s poem also gives a taste of the martial imagery used to discuss weiqi – proponents of weiqi noted its utility as a military training tool. Weiqi was applied to any number of grander situations, my personal favorite being Zha Shenxing’s 查慎行 (1651-1728) “Inscription on Zhang Qiji’s ‘Painting of Men Watching a Weiqi Game’” 题章岂绩观棋图 (I haven’t yet seen the painting this is based on):

The cosmos is a weiqi board,
The battlefield of Black and White –
Trivial as worms and ants,
Great as marquises and kings.

These examples illustrate a few key points of scholars’ attitudes towards weiqi: its reflection of cosmic elements, its utility as a training game for military strategy, and the connection to self-cultivation that was an important component of Confucian traditions. The utility of weiqi as a military training tool is debatable, considering the lousy track record of Song and Ming dynasty weiqi-playing officials on the battlefield!

But the point of the four arts was not that one was supposed to be innately skilled at weiqi, or painting, or writing poetry: one was to acquire these skills through study and practice. In theory, any ‘gentleman’ could acquire mastery of weiqi: this sort of cultivation was key to the examination system that supported the Chinese civil service. The dream of a meritocracy was increasingly important in the Ming and Qing dynasties, when even Farmer Zhang’s kid could study hard and reach the position of a high official. Or, that was the theory at least. If the cosmos is a weiqi board, the cosmos is essentially fair – because anyone could acquire skill in weiqi (and by extension, life), you just had to work at it. Even Confucius approved of weiqi!

Well … so they say. Here, I crib off of people who know much better than I the intricacies of very ancient texts (the Lien article cited below is really wonderful for an introduction to some of these philological and historical issues). But what can we state with reasonable certainty? We know that weiqi existed by the Han dynasty (the physical record picks up here). Prior to the Han, we see no references to the game – instead, we see references to things like boyi 博弈. In citing Confucian classics, historians have relied on what appears to be the anachronistic readings of Warring States texts by Han dynasty scholars. That is, we’ve generally assumed that the boyi of the Warring States had the same meaning as boyi in the Han (since that’s what those Han scholars thought – and that is how they glossed much older texts). I think the most convincing arguments point to this anachronistic reading and make a good case for weiqi‘s later appearance.

Here’s where we, as China scholars, have amnesia: it wasn’t until relatively recently that scholars started interrogating these questions seriously. After all, what difference does it make? The game was popular – and has stayed popular. What difference does a few hundred years make? Well, when we’ve erased an entire portion of weiqi’s history, we’re missing a big part of how weiqi fits in with broader trends in Chinese culture and society.

My favorite find of the past several months, YE Lien’s spectacular article on Wei Yao’s 韦曜 (c. 204-273) “ Disquisition on boyi [weiqi]” 博弈论 contains the following gem from Wei Yao (keep in mind, this is about that most unassailable, Confucian, glorious, edifying game – weiqi!):

Among people of this generation, many do not engage in classical studies. They like to play board games: they abandon their work and neglect their tasks, forgetting to eat or sleep, using up the whole day and exhausting the sunlight, then carrying on with tallow candles. … Regular affairs are neglected and not taken care of .… Sometimes they gamble for clothing and belongings …. The sense of honor and shame is relaxed, and expressions of anger and perversity are unleashed.

Statements like this are timeless – think of Cicero’s “O tempora o mores” (Oh the times, oh the customs!) – and certainly not confined to China, but think for a moment. This most Confucian of games, a game we talk about as being practically limitless in its multitude of moral qualities, had a period of several hundred years where not only was it not the be-all, end-all of literati board games, it was actively castigated by some quarters as being addictive, dangerous, and bad for the spiritual and physical health of China’s youth.

This tension is (I think) incredibly important to understanding the status of games in Chinese culture, from the ancient times until present, as the tension carries down through the late imperial period to the present day. Yet we’ve spent very little time talking about this tension (or games in general). But had Wei Yao been born in the waning years of the Qing dynasty, his essay would have been perfectly at home. He would have had the perfect target – majiang 麻将 (mahjong).

III. Majiang 麻将 mahjong

Here’s another quintessentially Chinese game – one that was often put in direct opposition with weiqi (unfortunately for China, mahjong has retained its associations with the Middle Kingdom, despite being filtered through Japan – unlike weiqi!). Mahjong was the wild, wasteful, decadent, horrifying other to weiqi’s tempered, wholesome, and educational self. It is a social game for four people, played with colorful tiles; the object is to build certain combinations of tiles – not unlike many card games.

I began researching mahjong at the behest of a professor who indicated he would like to understand the origins of the game which “despite a lot of garbage about Confucius and ancient origins, rose in the Taiping era and apparently from Shanghai, to become an extraordinarily popular form of polite gambling in the twentieth century.”

Where the game came from and when is impossible to pin down, though it generally appears to have shown up in Shanghai or Ningbo in the middle of the nineteenth century. What is for certain is that the game spread quickly, and was popular from the social and political elites down to peasants.

And while tracing mahjong’s origins is very difficult, there does seem to be a strong link with madiao 马吊 – a game that had been the bane of late Ming officials. Of course, reconstructing games in absence of physical and textual evidence can be next to impossible. Compounding the problem – at least in the case of madiao or mahjong – was the fact that while everyone seemed to have been playing the game, none of the literati elite would deign to write about it. Except, of course, the ones who were criticizing it – and they weren’t kind enough to leave us detailed geneologies of the games they just wished would disappear.

The famous poet-official Wu Meicun 吴梅村 called madiao the “game that lost the Ming.” His meaning was that while Manchus massed armies on the northern border, southern officials were busy frittering away their days with games and pleasurable diversions. Madiao, for Wu, was a neat, two character encapsulation of the vices of an official class who didn’t take their Confucian duties too seriously. Thinking back to Wei Yao’s complaints about weiqi over a thousand years earlier, Wu’s criticisms look awfully familiar.

Mahjong’s reputation certainly wasn’t an improvement over madiao’s. But, just like madiao – which it seemed just about everyone was playing, though no one was writing about it – the game was extraordinarily popular. The question of why the social elite loved mahjong is difficult to answer, since no one who liked the game really wrote about why they liked the game. But the mahjong itself may offer some clues.

In an early 20th century Japanese text on 'customs of old Beijing,' this depiction of mahjong was flanked by illustrations of an opium den and a "tea house"-cum-brothel

Unlike weiqi, which is frequently presented as a more contemplative, serious game – almost solitaire in two player board game form – mahjong is a game for four players, less technical, and less contemplative. The social aspects of the game appear to be one of the biggest draws, and one of the reasons late Qing moralists went crazy criticizing the game. It was addictive, people spent too much time on it, and neglected the things they ought to have been worrying about – like a crumbling dynasty (is this sounding familiar yet?). Even people who were worrying about the state of the Qing dynasty and later, the early Republic, loved mahjong: the great scholar and reformer Liang Qichao 梁启超 is attributed with the saying that “Only studying is able to make one forget mahjong, and only mahjong is able to make one forget studying.”

Yet, in a move that presaged efforts a century later, an anonymous author in the radical late Qing Zhejiangnese newspaper “The Alarm Bell Daily” expressed the idea that mahjong was good for more than mindless evenings with friends. Tucked amongst dispatches on the Russo-Japanese War, dispatches from foreign countries, and national news of some importance was an article that suggested games – in particular, mahjong – were perhaps one part of the solution to the myriad of problems facing China.

The game had long, involved, and pretty pedantic rules (see the bottom of this post for a description). The important thing here is that the author felt that mahjong – a wildly popular game – could be used to educate the mahjong-playing masses to the new global order. The point of the game was to illustrate the superiority of Western styles of government, the necessity of technology, and the need for a combination of things (government, technology, resources) in becoming a world power. As far as I know the game never made it to a production run, but the intent was there: using a very popular game, one that was seen as having no purpose or negative influences, changing it a bit, and giving it a new, appropriately healthy and educational twist.

Reformed mahjong

IV. The Present

Reformed mahjong was one glimmer of hope in a landscape that was otherwise stuffed full of criticism and anxiety over where the future was headed. Anxiety over games is (obviously) nothing new, nor is it confined to China. This point is obvious, but too often contemporary issues get spun in a ‘Oh, look what those crazy Commies are doing now!’ manner – that is, some sort of authoritarian overreaction. I don’t want to remove the CCP leadership (on national, provincial, and local levels) from their role in all of this, but there is a lot more to this anxiety and desire to control than ‘the CCP behaving as usual.’ Exactly how all of it ties in, I’m not sure – but it is deserving of more than a passing glance.

Wei Yao’s criticism of weiqi would, as I mentioned before, be very at home in 2011 with a few minor changes:

They like to play computer games: they abandon their work and neglect their tasks, forgetting to eat or sleep, using up the whole day and exhausting the sunlight, then carrying on at all-night wangba. … Regular affairs are neglected and not taken care of .… The sense of honor and shame is relaxed, and expressions of anger and perversity are unleashed.

As I’ve said before, the ‘back in MY day’ sentiment – a nostalgic longing for some better past – is nothing new, nor is it constrained to China. It’s not a unique feature by any means – but it’s one that gets forgotten (we can’t really accuse Wei Yao of being a silly Chinese communist, right?). I think we’ve also forgotten to some degree the cycles that games go through: weiqi‘s past position of being eyed with deep suspicion by Confucian moralists has been thoroughly obfuscated.

Too, the strange Chinese hybrids – the ‘addictive (but not TOO addictive) and fun!’ yet ‘morally wholesome and educational!’ – aren’t a new idea (anywhere in the world!). Government bureaus in contemporary China are finally acting on the same impulse as the anonymous Zhejiangnese author of “Reformed Mahjong”: ““In observing the rise and fall of nations,” he wrote, “one should not observe matters of great importance, but instead look at trifling things.” Mahjong – as a ‘trifling thing’ popular across the whole of China – was the perfect vehicle for reform and education. These days, it’s not mahjong, but MMOs.

Here’s one of my favorite examples: Incorruptible Fighter (Qinglian zhanshi 清廉战士), a game put together by the Ningbo government. Designed to teach players about corruption and get some history lessons along the way, it was basically a very slightly modified version of the ever popular Three Kingdoms-themed PC game. Incorruptible Warrior appropriated an existing structure and gave it a facelift without making substantive changes to the gameplay itself. Killing the powerful and notorious Ming eunuch Wei Zhongxian, for example, netted players one hundred experience points, with which they could upgrade their stats in “combating corruption,” “moral character,” and “degree of being corruption-free” (these stood in for more usual designations of “strength” or “magic ability”).

It’s easy to laugh, but is it actually that different from weiqi? It’ll take another couple of hundred years to find out, but this tension between criticism and adopting something, bad, addictive fun and good, educational fun – it’s been here for a very long time, and by ignoring the connections between contemporary and historical games, we’re really missing a lot.
—-
A bit earnest and very simplistic, I guess, but all in all, not a bad first effort (well, I don’t think so, at least). As it turned out, my audience of about 100 students turned out to be mostly Chinese – I had anticipated a much smaller group composed primarily of Duke University students and perhaps some expats. Had I known ahead of time, I would have put my slides in Chinese – I like to think I’m reasonably good with PowerPoint & there were certainly plenty of images (and not too much English text), but some Chinese language guideposts would have been good. Thanks to the efforts of Professor Haas, we did manage to have some conversation at the end of the talk. A few brave students were willing to talk about their affection for historically themed games (one noted he felt like he was learning something about the Three Kingdom period when he played them), casual games (at least in the case of the girls in the room), and Angry Birds (which everyone, more or less, admitted to playing, after a round of denials that anyone played any digital games whatsoever. Naturally!).

As usual, I wound up giving myself more food for thought and feeling woefully unprepared to ever talk about any of this in a really formal, professional setting. Maybe someday. In the meantime, if anyone stumbles across any mahjong references, send them my way ….
—
Chen Zu-Yan, “The Art of Black and White: Wei-ch’i in Chinese Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.4 (Oct-Dec 1997): 643-653

Y. Edmund Lien, “Wei Yao’s Disquisition on boyi,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.4 (Oct-Dec 2006): 567-578

Hopes and Dreams and Money

I had a long post regarding the cancellation of the fiscal year 2011 Fulbright-Hays competition written up.  It – mostly a ‘What winning the Fulbright-Hays has meant to me’ post – depressed me too much, so I’ve deleted most of it.  I was recently told I was being “practically nihilistic” about the future of America and American academia, and this is one reason why.  Even though I have won a Fulbright-Hays and have that money safely in the bank (literally and figuratively), the news was devastating for what it signals about our priorities and the future.  I hope, though, that this tremendous shock to those of us in fields that rely on the Hays and similar grants to get our work done will mean a more positive, active direction for the future.  I’d like to feel less nihilistic, and a lot of us would like for our future to look a little brighter – and maybe we can make it so.

A few links to relevant posts on the issue (also see the Facebook group that has sprung up):

The official cancellation notice (US Department of Education)

Acknowledging the Value of Fulbright-Hays Research Grants (The China Beat)

Has the Fulbright-Hays Cancellation Affected You? (China Dissertation Reviews)

Killing Fulbright-Hays (Sean’s Russia Blog)

The Fulbright-Hays is Cancelled.  Do Something (Christine & Rokas)

What follows below are  a few notes on what this whole disaster has stirred up in my mind, as a recipient of a FY2010 Fulbright-Hays (that would be last year’s competition).

For many of us, tucked alongside the leap from “PhD student” to “PhD candidate,” the crafting of dissertation prospectus, and putting committees together is the scramble to secure funding for our fieldwork abroad.  In the case of doing research in China, we have to put in serious time: even accessing archives can be a true test of patience, and one that requires cooling one’s heels while trying to rustle up letters and introductions from the right people.  It’s possible to fund such ventures on your own, of course, but since a life in academia is generally a losing proposition financially, it doesn’t make much sense to go into debt over it.  And it’s difficult to acquire a nice big nest of savings on a teaching assistantship – or it is at many schools in many areas.  So we write, edit, rewrite, edit some more, solicit letters of recommendation, order transcripts, write, and edit in the hopes that one of those nebulous “committees” will read our applications and deem our projects worthy of funding.

It’s a crapshoot at the best of times.  What do the committees want?  What’s going to catch their eye?  Writing a proposal is partially a game – a game of showmanship.  Knowing what to say, how to say it, and how to frame your proposal to generate the maximum appeal is a fine art.  I was lucky enough to have professors who turned a critical and knowledgable eye towards my essays and CV and helped me put together an application that was, in the end, successful.  It was step one in really learning how to play the funding game.  A successful application meant that I could move to China for a year and research my dissertation – a crucial, unavoidable part of writing a dissertation on modern Chinese history, funding or no.  It’s a step I would have had to take at some point, but winning a Hays meant that I didn’t have to dip into my own (non-existant) funds to do so.  It also meant I got to stay “on track” with my graduate career, and didn’t have to stress about how I was going to put food on the table and work on my dissertation.

Unfortunately for this year’s applicants, the rules of the game were changed on them last minute.  Actually, the rules weren’t changed: the game was just axed entirely.  The Fulbright-Hays program (which includes more than just the Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) component) was totally defunded at the last minute.  Well – not even last minute.  Last year, we were notified in late April of our application status.  This year, after weeks of being told that decisions were coming, the competition was cancelled in late May.

On the one hand, we’re used to bad news in higher education.  On the other, losing the Fulbright-Hays – for only a year, or even more terrible to contemplate, forever – is more than just bad news.  Maura Cunningham at the China Beat succinctly summed up my feelings on why this is really, really bad news:

What concerns me most about the cancellation of the Fulbright-Hays isn’t necessarily its immediate effects on my colleagues and myself, though those aren’t insignificant. Rather, it worries me—even frightens me—that with this action the U.S. government is signaling its lack of commitment to education and forging bonds with communities abroad. Programs like the Fulbright-Hays grants aren’t just about supporting individual scholars; they have a larger mission of promoting work that collectively helps all of us contextualize the world we live in and recognize how it has come to look the way it does. By not providing the funding necessary to support this year’s crop of applicants, the government is implying that such work isn’t important, that we can exist in a global community but don’t need to understand it.

I have a shelf full of books whose acknowledgements indicate that American leaders grasped the significance of this mission in the past. I am now concerned, however, that few are willing to continue it into the future, and this loss, surely, will be to the detriment of all—not just graduate students.

An easy target for those of us in area studies is area studies itself.  Lots of books exist on the subject; certainly we could spend all day talking about Cold War formations of knowledge and power structures.  There’s no doubt that there were and are problems with that structure, and I appreciate the fact that many dream of alternatives.  But there are legacies that aren’t so negative – such as the Fulbright grants.  In an era when universities are more interested in making money than promoting scholarship and education, there were (and are) funding sources that give money simply for the purpose of advancing knowledge and broadening our view of the world.  And as huge a difference as the Fulbright-Hays has made for generations of graduate students, its funding was really a drop in the bucket compared to other national issues – the FY2010 competition clocked in at under $6 million, funding nearly 150 projects on incredibly diverse topics.

One of my favorite essays, and a particularly terrifying one, comes via the edited volume Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Duke, 2002).  I first read Masao Miyoshi’s “Ivory Tower in Escrow” towards the end of my first year, while in my Japanese history course at UC San Diego (the article was originally published two years prior in boundary 2, the version I quote from below).  Miyoshi describes the “ivory tower” in the United States as increasingly bound to corporate R&D interests (and the increasing irrelevance of the humanities to that project), and considers the role academics in the humanities have played in allowing the humanities to become increasingly irrelevant.  It is startling – saddening – that Miyoshi’s article was published 11 years ago.  How far we have come (?).  What would this essay read like today?  Yet it seems more important than ever to take heed of his warning, issued over a decade ago:

It is pathetic to have to witness some of those who posed as faculty rebels only a few years ago now sheepishly talking about the wisdom of ingratiating the administration—as if such demeaning mendacity could veer the indomitable march of academic corporatism by even an inch. To all but those inside, much of humanities research may well look insubstantial, precious, and irrelevant, if not useless, harmless, and humorless. Worse than the fetishism of irony, paradox, and complexity a half century ago, the cant of hybridity, nuance, and diversity now pervades the humanities faculty. Thus they are thoroughly disabled to take up the task of opposition, resistance, and confrontation, and are numbed into retreat and withdrawal as ‘‘negative intellectuals’’ —precisely as did the older triad of new criticism. If Atkinson and many other administrators neglect to think seriously about the humanities in the corporatized universities, the fault may not be entirely theirs.

If all this is a caricature, which it is, it must nevertheless be a familiar one to most in the humanities now. It is indeed a bleak picture. I submit, however, that such demoralization and fragmentation, such loss of direction and purpose, are the cause and effect of the stunning silence, the fearful disengagement, in the face of the radical corporatization that higher education is undergoing at this time. (48)

I don’t know how world shaking my Fulbright-Hays will be.  I don’t know what my future career looks like. But I know that whatever comes in the future, I don’t want it (or me!) to be labeled  “insubstantial, precious, and irrelevant” or “useless, harmless, and humorless.” I was fortunate enough to win a Fulbright-Hays, an opportunity that this year’s applicants won’t get, and future graduate students may not get, either.  It’s symptomatic of a very diseased whole, and I sincerely hope that the sudden shock of this cancellation means that we will take a good hard look at ourselves and our institutions. I hope that we’ll rise to the challenge that Miyoshi set out eleven years ago.  The time for silence has long passed.

I hope that this year is a fluke (though I fear otherwise), and that life-changing emails like the one I got will start flowing again soon.  But it’s not going to happen by keeping quiet and allowing the status quo to continue.  We have been too silent, allowed ourselves to be too fragmented, and lacking in direction.  This is yet another wakeup call for all of us – maybe we’ll listen this time.