Each issue we profile several members of the IU East Asian Studies Community. Know someone you think should be "profiled"? Email your suggestion to sfurukaw@indiana.edu.
Sometimes things have not gone exactly as Professor Heidi Ross planned them. When she started college at Oberlin, she was an environmental studies and biology major. First semester of her freshman year, she had two extra credit hours and decided to take a course called "China" because it sounded intriguing. While she had an unexplainable interest in Chinese landscape paintings as a high school student, she had no experience with China whatsoever. The class, which was team taught by five Oberlin professors, captured her interest, and soon she decided to study Chinese. At first the Chinese classes were a nice balance to the science courses and labs, but soon she found herself thinking more and more about China and less and less about biology.
Though many Oberlin students graduating with degrees in Chinese spent a year teaching in the Shansi Program, Professor Ross decided to take a job teaching at Jingyi Women's University, where she lived in the same dorm as her students and continued to improve her Chinese skills. Teaching English in China provided her with a fascinating new lens through which to consider cultural similarities and differences. After two years at Jingyi Women's College, Ross returned to the U.S. to begin her graduate studies in International Education at the University of Michigan.
While gender issues were at the forefront of discussion during her years as a grad student, it was not until after she returned to China to work as the first American teacher at an elite foreign languages school in Shanghai that Ross began to consider the implication of gender in her study of Chinese education. She would often see clear examples of gender socialization at the school where she taught, but when she tried to discuss these experiences with Chinese colleagues, she was met with blank stares. Realizing that her colleagues did not see their behavior as gender-specific, Ross began to think more systematically about how Chinese schools create boys and girls. It was during this time that Ross had another plan-altering experience.
The principal of the foreign language school where Ross was teaching told her about Shanghai Number Three Girls School, an old, unrenovated school in a state of gradual decline after the Cultural Revolution. As she was taking a tour of the school, which had once been a missionary school run by Southern Methodist women, Professor Ross learned of its rich history as a institution where girls from many of Shanghai's most wealthy families and girls from often poor Christian families were educated together. This former finishing school for the rich and famous of Shanghai was alma mater to the three Soong sisters, powerful women who would by marriage and political calling ally themselves to the causes and careers of Chiang Kaishek and Sun Yatsen.
The school's rich history and old Victorian structures remained vivid in her memory as she returned to the U.S. and finished her dissertation. Soon after receiving her Ph.D., Ross contacted the Number Three Girls School alumni association and began to meet with various alumae. The encounters that she has had with these women have in many ways redefined the way Professor Ross thinks about China. The development of the school and its educational trajectory are in many ways parallel to the way that China itself has changed. Though the women who graduated from Number Three came from very divergent economic and political backgrounds, they shared strong commitment to citizenship, service and community building.
Currently, Professor Ross is working on a book about the Number Three Girls School compiled from the thousands of pages of notes from meeting with these women. "It's a really interesting project because there are several ways that I can go with it. I could pass on the narrative of the lives of the various women I know, and they would tell us a lot about China at the time as well as about how they have gone out into the world since their school days. Or, I could talk about the school from a more academic perspective, looking at the implications of how this school is similar to or different from other schools at the time. In many ways, the lives of these Number Three School alumnae have become intertwined with my own, so deciding how to put this research on paper is a little overwhelming."
Professor Ross has discovered that following newly uncovered paths is much more rewarding than sticking to her plans. She is excited to be at I.U. and looking forward to combining her interests in education and East Asian studies in classes on comparative education. This semester she is teaching a class on Education and American Culture. She will teach courses on comparative education and East Asian education in the spring. Written by Susan Furukawa
A Little Luck and A Lot of Hard Work
Don't tell anyone, but Professor Scott O'Bryan didn't start studying Japanese until his senior year in college, and then, it was in part by chance that the University of Vermont student of Political Science and Comparative Religions ended up going to study in Japan for a semester. He knew he wanted to go overseas, and since he had lived in England and Sweden as a boy, he planned to study in one of those two places. When neither of those programs panned out, he found Japan. "I was flipping through the program catalogue, and when I came to the page on Japan an early but hazy interest in Japan kicked in and I just knew that was where I would go. It was a lightening-bolt moment, really."
He left for Japan with some vague notions of investigating Japanese Buddhism. "I didn't find Buddhism in the way I expected to, but I fell in love with Tokyo! It was the first city I ever really loved." After graduation, Professor O'Bryan worked as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts State House. "It was a fascinating time; I was working for the great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt; Dukakis was governor and running for president. Still, I knew that I had no desire to run for an office myself, so I started thinking again about Japan and about entering graduate school." While working in Boston, Professor O'Bryan had continued his Japanese studies by taking night courses at Harvard. "I seemed to be pretty good at learning Japanese and decided to try to go back to Japan," he explained. He saw a flier about an intensive summer language program hanging on the wall at Harvard and decided to apply.
He finished the summer Japanese program and moved on to find work in Tokyo with the business card of one acquaintance in his pocket. He took a job at a Japanese software company and began applying to graduate school. The following fall he went to Yale do to an M.A. in East Asian Studies and then onto Columbia where he completed a Ph.D. in history. His specialty is twentieth-century Japan, with a focus on postwar intellectual history. "I'm interested at the intersections between thinking about the nation and twentieth-century conceptions of national economies, particularly in the Japanese case after the empire came to an end." Professor O'Bryan's work attempts to tell a history of the fixation on rapid macroeconomic growth that came to dominate visions of national purpose and power after the Second World War. "I'm also interested in the cultural tensions between ideals of frugality and the mass consumption society that emerged in the context what we might call a sort of GNP-ism." He has currently started to research the implication of these issues in regard to environmental history. "Ironically or not, some economists who championed high growth in the 1950's and 1960's became leaders in the environmental movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s."
This fall, Dr. O'Bryan is teaching "War and Peace in Modern Japan" and "Revolution and Nationalism in Modern Asia." In the spring, he will teach a graduate colloquim call "Modern and High Modernism in Mid-Twentieth-Century Japan" and an undergraduate modern Japan survey. He has come a long way since that spring afternoon when he was looking through a travel abroad programs catalogue, and he realizes the combination of luck and hard work that brought him to I.U. "I always tell students to keep their eyes open and follow their noses. I went to Japan on what in part seemed like a lark, but somehow I also knew it was exactly what I was supposed to do. I found the program through which I was able to go back a few years later thanks to a flier hanging on a wall. You can't overestimate the value of fliers and catalogues." Nor can you overestimate the value of taking risks and following your nose! Written by Susan Furukawa
Last updated: 10/10/2003
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~easc/newsletter/
Comments: 
Copyright 2004, The Trustees of Indiana University