[This post was inadvertently published before it was finished, which is why some of you may have had trouble accessing it. My apologies for the confusion. Below is the finished post. Well, as finished as it’s ever going to get.]
When I learned I’d be teaching at a university in China, one of the things I was most looking forward to was getting to know my colleagues as colleagues. While I love teaching, I also enjoy being a part of the larger academic community, learning about other faculty members’ research and teaching interests. I thought the Peace Corps would present a unique opportunity for me to do this with Chinese university teachers, with the added benefit of learning about another culture, its interests, and research methodologies. I envisioned exchanges that were mutually beneficial, with both me and my Chinese peers getting fresh ideas.
The first three semesters of my service have been nearly void of that. Thanks to my program manager, I was able to meet and talk with a Lacanian specialist who lives in Chengdu. I’ve had a few conversations with a dean here about his work and was able to recommend some sources to him, but there’s been very little of this interaction at site. Many factors contribute to this lack, three that I have been able to identify. One is that very few teachers here in Anshun have offices. Various deans have dedicated office space, and we occupy the foreign teachers office. Everyone else must use what free computers they can find in others’ offices. It’s hard to talk shop when there’s no shop in which to talk. Additionally, many small colleges in China are beginning to see an increase of faculty who either hold graduate degrees or are in the process of earning them. With much of the faculty not having received the research training one gets in graduate school, it follows that they would have little or no research to discuss. The third factor I see is that because smaller colleges in China are often tied directly to a profession–we are at a teacher’s college, the skills students are expected to learn are directly related to that profession and thus are limited. As a result, the classes offered are also limited, which means teachers need only refine their classes each year and not imagine new topics or create new syllabi.
One exception took place recently, when I was able to have coffee with the head of an English department at a major Chinese university. This professor just happens to also work on testimony studies, so we were able to discuss the joy and challenges of that particular field. As the conversation unfolded and I learned that she could expertly discuss many of the same sources I used in my dissertation, I realized that I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed the academic version of shop-talk. Because we work in different periods of American literature, we took turns discussing different testimonial texts and the specific research opportunities and challenges they presented.
Just as I was feeling comfortable, the cultural gap popped up, as it is wont to do when things begin to feel familiar. She knew that I worked in what I call “testimonial fiction.” She asked me what exactly it was, and I quickly explained its fiction that has at least one character with the same name as the author and at least some biographical similarities. These texts often take a moment from the actual author’s life as their center but fictionalize them. I explained that my interest arose from the fact that testimony is such a widely accepted genre now but that these writers chose to write a fictional version of these narratives anyway. When she asked where the term came from because she had not been able to find any mention of it anywhere, I explained I came up with it (as far as I know, anyway) because I could not find an already existing term that suited these texts. She commented that I was “very brave” to use my own term, a response that confused me a bit, but I chose not to pursue it.
The issue came up again, however, when she discussed the difficulty she had in her dissertation with the blurry line between fiction and fact one often finds in testimony. I replied that I thought this difficulty is a defining characteristic of testimony, that it claims to be fact but often turns to fiction to express its reality. Although she agreed, she said that her board did not accept this explanation because it did not fit neatly enough into research that had come before her and that she had to find a way to explain how her work built on that which preceded hers. Of course, this step is also crucial in academic work at American universities: one must show how his/her research is working within the already-existing concerns of a particular field. However, we generally consider that the first step, with the ultimate purpose being to show how one’s work is new and/or different from that which already exists. In other words, we have to argue that our research fills a hole in the field, and it’s often preferable if it is a chasm no one was aware existed. For her, however, the end goal was to make room for her work not by finding a gap that has been unattended to but by building on top of someone else’s existing structure. The advice she received was not to strike out on her own but to follow the path someone else had laid out.
Ultimately, I think our approaches are not as different as they may seem. Both of us are building off other scholars’ writings. Both of us are studying texts that either have not been studied much or have been studied with different concerns in mind. The appropriate end goals specific to our educational systems, however, could not be much different. It was a great reminder of just how culturally determined education is. This revelation on a larger scale is quite obvious, but the ways in which those differences manifest continue to surprise me.
HorseHorseTigerTiger 