Identity and Chineseness

I have lived in Edinburgh for nearly three months and I am ready to go in a few days. Writing down a few lines is a good way to refresh the mind and soul.

Living abroad is a fantastic experience. It broadens your mind and deepens your soul no matter it was a good or bad experience. Living in a foreign and exotic city is an art. Long term planning is needed. Strategies have to be made.

Unlike travelling, staying in the house doing nothing is no harm. You don't have the guilty feeling of wasting valuable (financially, in fact) time to travel around.

As soon as I settled down with the hope of ease and comfort to make myself at home, I, and my wife, felt the strong sense of Chinesness deep inside our souls. Here I am. I came back to Britain again.

Researching in NLS the other day, I read an interesting piece in a local magazine featuring identity. Its foreword caught my eyes and emotion. It reads:

“Reflecting on my own identity, I realise that my Scottishness came into sharp focus when I moved out of Scotland. This seems to be a common occurrence for Scots. As one of our contributors points out, you don’t necessarily practice your Scottishness at home over the breakfast table. But when you move away you are forced to think about whom you are and hwere you fit.” (Mandy Rhodes (ed.), Scottishness: Reflections on Identity (Holyrood Magazine 2006), foreword, p. 9)

a thought-provoking foreword

Speaking of reading academic books, I love to read foreword, acknowledgement, and postscript, more than the content itself. The first thing I would read is not the chapter titles nor the introduction/conclusion but, if available, the acknowledgement or the postscript. (The first thing I would "do" to a book is a bit different. Sometimes I would smell a book by flipping it through quickly to reveal its "soul". If you are with me, you know what I mean)

I just enjoy anything beyond the content. I say "beyond" because a good ones humanizes a book. If the content is hard, they are soft. They give personal touch to months of hard work. An acknowledgements pay tributes to not only supervisors, teachers, fellows, library staff (not limited to professional librarians but I always wonder if the circulation staff would be aware of it), institutions, funding bodies, family, friends, spouses, children, etc. but author's long and lonely, difficult but sometimes exciting journey to materialize all of them into a book.

A hearty ones blow life into a thick dull brick. They colour a book more than any sound argument in the content. The arguments are there to be confirmed or challenged. Take it or leave it. Acknowledgements and postscripts stand firm. If the content is soft, they are hard.

If you are lucky enough to read a personal/sensational ones, you can be sure that the author is a genuine person and the book is all too lucky in your hand.

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After a hearty b&b (beef & beans) dinner with my wife and wash-up, I withdrew to my book stool facing the window. I picked up a brick at the bottom of a pile of paperbacks and hardcover. A foreword took my heart.

It was a collection of essays to honour Anthony Hobson, an eminent bibliophile who inherited his father's, G. D. Hobson, a Sotheby's partner, pioneering achievement in the field of bibliophily.

In fact, to say the least, the content page interested me less than the foreword written by Frederick B. Adams, I assume, a close friend of Hobson.

The Bibliography of the volume does not include any sale catalogues, however essential, written by Hobson for Sotherby's for a simple reason that Hobson "regards them as professional work in the line of duty and not as personal writing." It rang me a bell.

It led me to think about my work. As as a university teacher/researcher, teaching and researching are my duties. How could I distinguish my academic writing from professional work or personal writing? I produce almost no personal writing beside this blog! The line is difficult to draw. I nevertheless recall a piece of professional work "in the line of duty" that I still hesitate to put it into my bibliography. Yet, I will record it for my annual report just now.

Furthermore, Adams reveals the secrets organising colloquiums: careful planning, diplomacy, patience, and conviviality. These are by no means secrets to anyone who has experience but it's just hard to achieve. I consider the second and the last are the two indispensable keys to success. Diplomacy helps smooth preparation and conviviality shows hospitality. These are what I have learned after some years of work.

Marx or Haggis?

Marx's name jumped up to my screen today when I was researching the publishing history of nineteenth-century Cape Town. I didn't have any clues about how they could be linked together.

My specific target was a Dutch emigrant from Holland to colonial Cape Town in the mid-nineteenth century. His name was Johann Carel Juta. Juta established J. C. Juta Co. in 1853 and it quickly flourished to become a key publisher and bookseller in Cape Town and South Africa. It is now one of the oldest publishers and booksellers in South Africa. Interesting enough.

Surfing the web by all means, to my surprise, the story did not end here as other typical colonial enterprises go when Marx hit me on face.

Juta was the brother-in-law of Marx, whose younger sister Louise was Juta's wife. Marx quite liked this "good, sensible chap". In his letter to his friend Engels in Manchester, Marx claimed that Juta was travelling to Manchester soon and might pay him a visit. Marx's intention to put his brother-in-law in his friend's care is obvious. Did Juta eventually visit Engels? Perhaps. Who knows?

All these make the Cape Town story complicated and interesting.

Marx. Manchester. It probed me to come up a fun literary venture. I live in Edinburgh now. Short-term though and about to leave in one-month's time. My apartment in Old Town is haunted by history. Chambers' statute is around the corner and Hume's is not far away. Scott's is a little farther. The essence of Scottishness is around me.

I spent a year in Manchester, strolling up and down the Victorian industrial city, where Marx and Engels seeded Marxism, and where I found myself in solitude and loneliness.

If time and strength allow me, I would write something titled like When Marx meets Hume/Scott/Chambers: My Life in Manchester and Edinburgh, or Four Years Apart: My Life in England with Marx and Scotland with Hume/Scott/Chambers.

I revealed my plan to my wife. She replied in a poker face: "Why not When a Chinese meets Haggis?" Speechless.