WHAT TO READ...

The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia
Frances Wood ( University of California Press, 2002)

The Silk Road is a colorful tour through Central Asian history, archaeology and art history from pre-historic jade crafting up to the recent destruction of artifacts by the Taliban regime. The chapters are topically focused, and organized in chronological order, giving a sense of movement through various areas of concern through the course of Central Asian history. The topics include: jade and silk production; Xiongnu and Han trade; Central Asian fashions in the Tang court; the Dunhuang caves; Marco Polo; and multiple chapters about later European explorers. While each of the early chapters is located in a particular time-frame, Wood is not limited by them, referring to data from other periods as necessary. Each chapter mixes historical and geographical detail with poetry, travelers’ impressions and lively anecdotes, making the book an entertaining introductory survey of the area now known as the Silk Road. The pages are populated with famous characters: from Xi Ling, the legendary creator of silk, to Yang Guei Fei and Xiang Fei, popular concubines in the imperial Chinese court; from Buddhist missionaries Fa Xian and Xuan Zang to Nestorians and Jesuits like William of Rubruck and Bento de Goes; from Alexander the Great to Marco Polo to Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and Pelliot. Not only human characters, but also animal characters roam there too. Wood describes in detail the varieties of game and wildlife sought after by Han Officials, British trophy hunters and Moghals alike. Two explorers during the Great Game, a period characterized by Russian and English competition for influence in Central Asia, are characterized through their relationship to animals: the affection Aurel Stein shows toward his dogs, serves as a humane counterpoint to the behavior of his contemporary, Sven Hedin, who carelessly abandons both animals and porters alike to die from cold and disease.

The text is peppered with sumptuous color prints of fine art from the many periods and cultures in the region’s history, black and white photos by European explorers during the Great Game and the early 20th Century, and modern color scenic and ethnographic prints. These are strategically placed alongside the vignettes which populate Wood’s narrative, bringing to life excerpts from the tales of travelers past. To assist the reader are two maps inside the front and back covers, one focusing on trade routes and major oases in the Taklamakan basin and its surrounds, down to Gandhara and Nepal, and the other showing the larger trade route stretching from Luoyang to Tyre and Antioch. Also included is an altitude chart which shows the elevation and distance between major stops on the trade route.

Curiously, although Wood packs some 1500 years of history into the first half of the book, she devotes almost the entire second half of the book to only the last two hundred years. In telling an adventure-story of the events and characters who found and made public the majority of archeological finds on which modern Silk Road scholarship is based, she does not hold back her judgement on these characters. The French Paul Pelliot’s brilliance is tempered against his “frightening” severity; the Swedish Sven Hedin’s extensive explorations are contrasted against his ruthless grave-robbing; and the American Langdon Warner’s moralizing about saving cave frescoes from the desecrated state he finds them in is set against his premeditated purchase of fixatives and chemicals in Beijing for the very purpose. However, little criticism is applied to Aurel Stein, the Englishman to whom the Dunhuang cave 17 was first opened, and who is portrayed as a congenial, sociable lover of good company and animals as are later English travelers like Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart.

This should all show that Wood’s book serves as a delightful introduction for the novitiate. As a critical scholar, Wood is at her most rigorous when writing about Marco Polo, and gives a good picture of the many versions of his Divisament dou Monde, and the problems of Polo’s unreliable data therein. She also draws interestingly on a variety of English and Italian literary sources, showing some elements of the European picturing of Central Asia. Although footnotes point the way towards serious Western scholarship for those who would like to pursue it, Wood also cites more popular works without differentiating between them. It is also unfortunate that none of the extensive and detailed Silk Road scholarship in Chinese or Japanese is included as Wood’s intent is to reveal the ongoing imagination of Central Asia from within and without. Such inclusion seems important, as even the English language translations (and concomitant framings) of Chinese texts that she cites may be influenced by the Eurocentric imagination she describes. This being said, I heartily recommend The Silk Road for its vivid tales, insightful anecdotes and fascinating prints. As James Elroy Flecker’s poem indicates in the conclusion, the historical fascination with the sands of Taklamakan may have been as much with imagination as hard goods:

“We travel not for trafficking alone,
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned,
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand”

Reviewed by Michael Stanley-Baker, M.A. Candidate, East Asian Languages and Cultures Department

Did Marco Polo go to China?
Frances Wood (Secker &Warburg, 1995) 

It is not unusual for people to be stunned when they first hear the title of this book since the majority of the readers of Marco Polo’s Description of the World took it for granted that he did indeed go to China. There are, however, some critics who have doubted the authenticity of Description of the World ever since its publication. Frances Wood’s book, therefore, seeks to answer a question posed by many of her readers. Dr. Wood argues that Marco Polo himself probably never traveled much further than the family’s trading posts on the Black Sea and in Constantinople, and was not responsible for Italian ice-cream or Chinese dumplings, this does not mean that the Description of the World does not remain a valuable source of information on China and the Near East, in particular. His usefulness as a recorder of information otherwise lost is similar to the case of Herodotus (c.484 BC to c.425 BC), who did not travel to all the places he described and who mixed fact with fantastic tales, but whose work is nevertheless not to be discarded lightly.

Dr. Wood points out that Description of the World is not a travelogue of Polo’s trip to China. It is much more of a geographical or historical work than a personal account of things seen, and beyond the prologue, it contains remarkably few references to the Polos themselves. Wood claims, in accordance with the thoughts of many contemporary Chinese scholars, that Marco Polo’s book, however full of wonderful descriptions, is also filled with inaccuracies and discrepancies. She looks at the omission of discussions of foot-binding and a visit to the Great Wall as significant, for example. While consistent inaccuracies and omissions may indicate this is an imagined journey, the fact that Wood assumes that the lack of an orderly itinerary outlined in the travelogue reflects that Polo did not reach China weakens her argument somewhat.

But even as she uses discussions of these omissions to bolster her argument, Wood is contradicting herself. She writes, “It could be argued that during the Mongol period, when the Polos were supposed to have been in China, [foot-binding] was not so widespread and, since women whose feet had been bound could not move far, possibly invisible to foreign travelers” (p. 72) or “It could also be argued that the enclosure of women meant that Marco Polo would have seen few upper-class Chinese women” (p. 73). Similarly, Wood spends a whole chapter on the omission of the Great Wall, surprised that Polo fails to mention it but also aware of the fact that it was not until the Ming (1368-1644), some decades after the Polos’ visit, that parts of the wall, including the sections nearest the capital, were faced with brick (p. 97). Indeed, without a careful study of construction and reconstruction of the Great Wall before or during the Yuan dynasty, which has already been done by some Chinese scholars, it would be a stretch to take the omission of the Great Wall as proof that the author had not been to China. On one hand, Dr. Wood’s work thoroughly embodies her academic honesty; on the other hand, the evidence she provides seems to indicate that she is still torn on the issue. It is true that scholars could not find evidence about Marco Polo in the historical records, but until Dr. Wood has more evidence, she is left with an unfinished argument.

Reviewed by Ling Jiang, M.A. student of Chinese, East Asian Languages and Cultures Department

PROFILES

Fortuitous Coincidence

Sara Friedman calls her current path of study a “fortuitous coincidence.” When she went to Yale her first year as an undergraduate, she knew that she was interested in foreign languages, but had no intention of studying Chinese. Yale had a rather lengthy “class-shopping” period, during which students had time to try out the classes they wanted to take, and Friedman found herself sitting in and enthralled with first-year Chinese. “The teacher Lu Taitai was so dynamic and made Chinese seem so interesting that I was immediately hooked. I ended up majoring in East Asian Studies,” Friedman explains. “My dad used to joke that I studied Chinese so that I could read the menus at Chinese restaurants.”

Yale's strong East Asian Studies program allowed Friedman to explore China from a variety of disciplines in classes taught by exceptional scholars. She focused on history and finished her degree with a senior thesis on Chinese women who attended Christian colleges during the 1920s and 1930s. After graduation, she joined the Princeton in Asia program and went to teach English at Fudan University in Shanghai for a year, a year which left her more committed to improving her Chinese and learning about contemporary Chinese societies.

Following her year with Princeton in Asia, Friedman went to Taiwan where she studied Chinese intensively at the Stanford Center. Not only did the program allow her to make tremendous progress with her Chinese, it also gave her more freedom than living in mainland China had. Students were able to live on their own and deal with day-to-day problems in a way that wasn't possible when she lived in Shanghai. “This is what helped my Chinese more than anything else,” she points out.

After working for a year as an editor and translator for an international advertising agency, Friedman moved into international marketing for a Taiwanese shoe company that also had offices in the U.S. There she coordinated operations between the two offices and produced the company's marketing materials and sales promotion products. During this time, she continued to pursue an interest in journalism by doing free-lance writing for English-language magazines in Taiwan. “I thought I would like business, but it was neither meaningful nor challenging enough to hold my interest for any length of time. I liked journalism, but I was frustrated with the limits to the depth of research I could do. In the end, my stories had to be suitable for the general public which means I did not have the time or readership for the kinds of articles that I really wanted to write,” says Friedman.

At about this time, she was finding that several of her friends from a feminist discussion group were going back for graduate degrees, many in anthropology. “When I started to think about applying to graduate school, I realized that I wanted to be in a discipline that allowed me to talk to people about their life experiences. Anthropology seemed to make a lot of sense. It would allow me to study issues in depth, and I thought that I would be able to draw upon my interest in history well,” Friedman reflects. Cornell University had the strong interdisciplinary focus and range of China scholars that Friedman was looking for in a graduate program.

Though she knew that she was interested in women's issues from the beginning, it took a few more strokes of luck to lead her to her current research interest. In one of her first classes in grad school, Friedman learned about “delayed transfer marriages” while doing research for a paper on Chinese marriage and reproduction. Delayed transfer marriages are marriages in which the wife remains in her natal homes even after marriage and only visits her husband on special occasions such as festivals and harvest time. Only after a woman becomes pregnant with her first child does she move in with her husband's family. Friedman became interested in why this practice, which historically had existed in several parts of China, both Han and minority, only remained among the Han population in one region of Fujian province. While trying to understand why women remained so committed to this custom, she discovered a long history of state efforts to reform these marriage customs. Friedman began to see that marriage was as much a state project as it was an individual or family affair.

It is this discovery which has guided her research on China as well as her research on marriage in general. This semester, Friedman is teaching a course at IU Bloomington called “The Politics of Marriage.” This course looks at marriage across various cultures and over time in order to examine its contested role as a key social, political and economic institution in society. Friedman, who is an assistant professor in both the Anthropology and Gender Studies departments, is happy to be at IU in Bloomington where she finds the wide range of East Asia-related faculty in a variety of departments coupled with excellent Anthropology and Gender Studies departments to be both exciting and inspiring as she pursues her own research. Though she will not be able to offer a China-related course until the 2005-06 academic year, students can catch Professor Friedman in the spring in Cross-cultural Gender Formations (G215) and Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology (E606).

Perfect Sense

A first glance at Chinese literature professor Lin Zou’s curriculum vitae can leave one somewhat perplexed; she has a B.A. in Chemistry, an M.A. in Sociology, a second M.A. in British and American Literature, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. To Zou, however, it all makes perfect sense. “In the 1980s in China, students were encouraged to study science if they could. Science was what caught my imagination then,” begins Zou. She goes on to explain, “When a recruiter from Nanjing University told me I could study polymer chemistry, which was ‘one of the ten most advanced sciences of the twentieth-century,’ I knew that was what I would do.”

To Zou, who rarely traveled out of her province, the transition to Nanjing was an exhilarating one. The trip from Guangxi to Nanjing took two nights and three days by train, and like most students, Zou found herself standing most of the trip. “To college students, taking the train and seeing the rest of China were quite symbolic of the university life ahead of them.”

During the time that Zou was studying at Nanjing, the field of sociology began to undergo a rebirth after its near extinction in the 1950s. “At the time that I was a student, social sciences were discussed openly like never before, and I became interested in social issues and what was going on in China. I decided to enter the Sociology Department as soon as I finished my chemistry degree,” Zou continues. Zou studied economic sociology. As she studied for this degree, Zou was able to participate in several field studies in the small towns of Jiangsu province. She looked at how economic development affected the lives of people living there and employer and employee relations in small enterprises of eight people or less. “Small towns with these enterprises were considered to be the model of economic development. They were seen as transitional areas between city and rural agricultural employment.” After completing her M.A., Zou taught in the Department of Social Sciences at Dongnan (Southeast) University for three years.

Gradually, Zou became more interested in literature than in social sciences because of the difference in methodology. She also began to be interested in the contact between Eastern and Western cultures and what that contact has meant to China. Zou wanted to explore the same questions that drew her to sociology through the field of literature. In order to do this, she felt it was important to know not only Chinese literature but Western literature as well.

After completing her M.A. in British and American Literature at the University of Utah, Zou was finally ready to put all of the pieces together as she pursued her Ph.D. in comparative literature at Berkeley. Her dissertation, The Emotive Self in Change and Exchange—Early 20 th Century Chinese Writers’ Responses to Classical Chinese Aesthetics considers how modern Chinese writers respond to Western ideas and various political crises vis-à-vis classical Chinese aesthetics. “Subjectivity and the question of agency are something that I am quite interested in. How do modern Chinese writers construct different versions of agency and subjectivity by drawing from classical Chinese literature as they respond to Western ideas?” asks Zou.

Zou entered college with a vague notion that she wanted to be a scientist to bring change to the world around her. “The scientific and social science training have definitely helped me in my current studies. All of these disciplines have taught me different ways of looking at the world and thinking about how people and ideas interact,” Zou concludes. In the end, she is still changing the world but just in a slightly different way.

Students can catch Professor Zou this semester in her class “Late Imperial and Contemporary Chinese Literature.” In the Spring, she will teach a graduate course in aesthetic theory and image perception in twentieth-century China as well as a fourth-year modern Chinese intensive reading course.

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