It is August 30. I am sitting in my room on Peking University’s campus, and I happen to be looking down at the face of exactly the person with whom—eight years ago—my China story began. The Qianlong Emperor stares up from the cover of the book in front of me. In fact, I don’t know much more about him than I did eight years ago. But, I’ve planned to enroll in a course at PKU that will teach me about him, together with other periods and people from China’s history. This book is assigned in that course. I glance down at it again. In a sense, he has been staring at me for eight years; I’m looking forward to meeting this person who set my China story in motion.
Eight years back, I knew I liked animals. I’d also had some experience with applied neurology via a number of concussions. I liked physics and thought medical imaging was cool. The outdoors were nice, and I enjoyed playing my trumpet. I had been told by my parents, who were both lawyers, not to be a lawyer. Thus: I drifted each month between thinking of becoming a veterinarian, a radiologist, a ranger, or (every two months) a musician, and being a lawyer was definitely out.
Then, at the start of high school freshman year, I found myself master of a little project on the Qianlong emperor. For a history class, my classmates and I were tasked with representing the views of different early modern world leaders in a roundtable discussion. We were to choose the people we would represent. Everyone wanted to be Maximilian Robespierre (controversial leader of the French revolution). Heated bargaining ensued. A quiet person by nature and, in any event, convinced any leader would be interesting, I resolved to choose last. As everyone wanted to spearhead a European revolution and no one quite remembered which Chinese emperor was which, I was soon tasked with reviewing what a Qing dynasty was and figuring out what it meant to lead one.
The project was two pages and done before the week was through; it set in motion something much longer. Peering into a world of Confucian governance ideas, Manchu traditions at court, specific views of international trade, and the banes and boons of tremendous territorial expansion, I grew completely excited and completely incapable even of explaining why. I learned just enough to feel a very strong pull towards learning more. By the end of that year, veterinarians, radiologists, rangers, and musicians had joined the ranks of lawyers. My history instructor acquainted me with Jonathan Spence. The road that stretched off before me was marked by signs I couldn’t read and about as long as it could be; I’d picked a place with a very long past.
With a lot of curiosity and a network of warm, wise mentors, my interest in Chinese history—and my love of history more broadly—deepened in high school and college. From the U.S., in classrooms, I explored literary Tang China, modern rural China, friends-with-the-Soviet-Union China. My interests only grew stronger. I was very lucky.
I had been to China in books and classrooms, but one can only get so far just studying a place from far off. I wanted to study China from China. This is where things got more complicated.
Over eight years, my luck with getting to China did not quite match my luck with studying it. Rather, these efforts went about as smoothly as my effort to get back to my bags after checking in yesterday, minus the escort back from a far corner of campus where I had been found wandering. Effort #1 took place in high school. My high school offered fellowships each year for a few juniors to do summer research projects internationally. Without a word of Chinese, I was soon headed for a Sichuan river habitat, to work with a kind researcher on a project about declining biodiversity. In the end, though, logistical obstacles got the best of this effort, and I didn’t get to China.
Three years later, I tried again. To the Shanghai municipal archives, in search of China’s mid-twentieth Russian diaspora, I was bound. I was in fact in Kazakhstan when the ghost in my China Logistics Department got wind of the plan. He made quick work of Effort #2. Suddenly very sick, I returned to the US and was better too late to get to Shanghai.
But in 2024, I am happy to say that my ghost retired. It is August 30, and now, incredibly, through Yenching Academy, I am here. New approaches to history, studied from across the social sciences via Yenching’s interdisciplinary emphasis, await in our curriculum. Field trips in parts of China I would have dreamed of visiting, had I known to imagine them eight years ago, lie on our itinerary. Classmates and professors with perspectives from across global and intellectual worlds will soon sit across me in classrooms.
The Qianlong Emperor continues to stare up at me, framed on one side by instructions for logging into PKU WiFi and by my old boarding pass on the other. Eight years after he set my China story in motion, I have stepped into the city from which he ruled. Smiling, I take out my pencil and turn the page.
