Word: fairbank
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...Fairbank did not always have this sense of mission. His stumbling onto the continent was in fact pure chance, a sort of accident of history. During lunch one day at the Signet, Fairbank, the Harvard undergrad studying English trade history, happened to hear Sir Charles Webster, the British historian just back from Kyoto, say that a new archive on 19th-century Chinese history had been opened in Peking. Fairbank decided that it was worth spending half of his Rhodes scholarship to take a look. Wilma C. Fairbank, then his wife-to-be, recalls that one of his classmates said...
Thomson's experience just after receiving his Ph.D. is an example of the empathy of his mentor. Having gone to work for the State Department in 1960, Thomson recalls he soon received "several nibbles" from Harvard and Yale to join the faculties there. But when he consulted Fairbank about the offers, Thomson says his teacher's reaction was only lukewarm. Thomson took this hesitancy as a cue: Fairbank felt his student should first complete his stint in government. But when Harvard's History Department approached Thomson again in 1966, Fairbank was there with open arms. "He felt it was time...
Then there is the almost legendary story of the calm, collected Fairbank and his frantic graduate student who could not manage to turn in his thesis. After Fairbank's usual strategy of telephoning the delaying student at 8 p.m. on Sunday failed to persuade him to work a little faster, Fairbank showed up at the student's home at that ungodly hour--to pay a visit. (Ungodly, that is, for the grad student; for Fairbank, who is always home by 10 p.m. no matter what the occasion, it was the middle of the morning.) Fairbank noticed a mass of typewritten...
There are three themes in Fairbank's alumni reports, dating from 1939, after he had returned from China, to 1964, when he reflected on his time spent as a professor, "a calling which becomes steadily more so," and they are themes that recur with the persistence and regularity of Fairbank's vision of history. The first theme is his determination to master the next-to-impossible Japanese language. The second theme is "the country's need" for "a good course on Far Eastern history." Fairbank himself realized this goal when, sometime shortly before the second world war, he and Edwin...
...third theme, Fairbank's growing personal identification with the Chinese, enabled him to teach Chinese history the way he believes it ought to be taught, but it also provided some unexpected, and serious problems. In 1949, following his years working in the Office of War Information and as special assistant to the American ambassador in Chungking, Fairbank wrote in his alumni report, "During the last 20 years, while Chiang Kai-shek has been fighting Mao Tse-tung, I have been trying to read Chinese and by coordinating my activities with theirs in this way, I now find myself...