Profiles

Fortuitous Coincidence: Sara Friedman
Perfect Sense: Lin Zou

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). Written by Susan W. Furukawa.

Perfect Sense

Lin Zou 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. Written by Susan W. Furukawa.

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