Wing-tsit Chan 陳榮捷, 1901-1994: Excerpts from an Oral Autobiography

Abstract

Wing-tsit Chan with his books as photographed by his granddaughter Jenny Lei Thomas. REMEMBERING WINÚ-TSITCHAN Wing-tsit Chan B£Hͧ, 1901-1994: Excerptsfrom an OralAutobiography Introduction Shortly after the death ofWing-tsit Chan on August 12, 1994, RogerAmesproposed the idea ofpublishingsomething that would serve as a memorial to him. As I thought about it, Ifelt there could be no morefittingway to memorialize this extraordinary man than to make a sélectionfrom his oral autobiography, since his own memories of his life would be more vivid and his reflections on that lifefar more telling than anything I could write about him. Whatfollows are excerptsfrom an oral history project that Professor Chan and I did together between June 1981 and June 1983. Thefirst two tape recordings were made in June 1981 at River House, the Breckinridge Conference Center ofBowdoin College in York, Maine, duringfree hours late in the afternoons during a conference on "Individualism and Holism in Chinese Thought," coordinated by Donald Munro. Subsequent recordings were made between December 1982 andJune 1983 in Kent Hall, Columbia University, where Professor Chan came unfailingly every Friday during the academicyear, despite an arduousjourneyfrom Pittsburgh, toparticipate with Wm. Theodore de Bary in a graduate seminar in Neo-Confucian Thought. These selections are adaptedfrom the transcript madefrom those tapes byMartin Amster, who has also provided invaluable research help along the way. In the course ofthe tapingsessions with Professor Chan there was no real need for aformal interview. He would sit down, I wouldplace a microphone infront of him, and he would simply talk. He knew exactly whathe wanted to say. Occasionally he brought notes, but only about theparticufor subjects he planned to discuss at a given session, notabout the substance or details ofwhat he would say. Though I would occasionally interrupt him to request clarification ofdetails, he never needed to be drawn out. He was a born storyteller, andI think his life history emerges here as a moving story, with something ofhis great warmth and humor and honesty—and above all, his affirmative spirit—coming through at manypoints. This story is nowpreserved in the Oral History Project ofthe Columbia University Library, as part ofa distinguished collection oflives offeminent Chinese.©1995 by University/ /> r J & J JJ ,„ J have organized thefollowing excerptsfrom Professor Chan's story under nine headings: (1) Childhood; (2) Student Years atlingnan, 1916-1924; (3) Graduate Study atHarvard, 1924-1929; (4) Academic Dean atlingnan, 1929-1936; (5) Professor at the University ofHawaii, 1936-1942; (6) Professor at Dartmouth College, 306 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 1942-1966; (7) Anna R. D. Gillespie Professor ofPhilosophy at Chatham College, 1966-1981; (8) Returning Home, 1979; and (9) Reflections on a Life. These were not categories that Professor Chan himselfever contemplated, nor do they correspond directly to what was discussed at agiven tapingsession; however, they seem to me to draw attention to a kind ofsymmetry in a remarkable story that began in a traditional south China in 1901 and is drawn together in reflections on a homecoming to a different, yet still recognizable China in 1979. The actual story did not end there, ofcourse: Professor Chan continued to take loving care ofhis wife, Wai-hing, for whom hefelt the most tender devotion, until her death in 1993. He made repeated trips to China—to revisit his home and to visit sites associated with Chu Hsi—taught more seminars, published more books, and received more honors, including in 1992, the Distinguished ServiceAward ofthe Association for Asian Studies. But I do not think that the things he valued and caredfor changed in thefinalyears ofhis life. While I would devoutly love to have had tape recordings to document thefinal decade, I doubt that his reflections on his life would have been substantially alteredfrom whatyou will discover here. Irene Bloom, December 1994 Childhood At the beginning ofhis account, Professor Chan recounts that he was born on August 18, 1901, in K'ai-p'ingM2?, about sixty miles southwest ofCanton. WIN6-TSITCHAN Our village is one of seven villages, all Chans, tracing to one ancestor, on a large island. In other words, we were surrounded by rivers. We have been there for about eight hundred years. Originally we came...