Word: fairbanks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ignored modern China. Chiang Kai-shek was organizing a huge, bloody trap to "exterminate" thousands of Communists, but the first American journalists wouldn't arrive on the scene for another few years. Sometime between that luncheon and his arrival at Oxford months later as a Rhodes Scholar, Fairbank decided that Chinese history might be an interesting thing to try. He borrowed a book from the ex-missionary who taught Chinese at Oxford, sat down and began to memorize the characters. Thirty-eight years after that luncheon the ranking State Department East Asian man would invite Fairbank, as the most respected...
...China Fairbank had to explain in 1967 was considerably less comfortable for foreigners than the nation saw in 1932 when he first arrived in Peking. With $1000 the young student settled himself and his wife for three years in a large house with several servants, hired a Chinese tutor, and then, finishing his doctoral thesis, returned to the Harvard faculty. The war began and he was called back to China as a special assistant to the U.S. ambassador...
...without anything to give. You can't go and say 'gimme, gimme.' If you have something to give, that's OK, that's polite." It wasn't always in the line of duty. When the Nationalists began to crack down on a number of their intellectuals critics in Kunming, Fairbank headed south to help the scholars...
...search for the Chinese way of doing things occasionally got the better of him. John Carter Vincent, then number two man in the American embassy, remembers visiting Fairbank and finding him "living like a Chinese in a cold, barren office trying to keep warm in a padded Chinese gown. He was in such a bad state with a cold that I brought him back to the embassy and had him stay there until he got over...
...Fairbank doesn't like to waste time with colds, or anything else. He has been found in the morning shaving with one hand while reading a book in the other, or at graduate semniars, clipping his nails while reports are read. He religiously dictates everything he writes. Edwin Reischauer, University Professor and a time conservationist of lesser repute, recently suggested they skip lunch to meet and plan a course. "But you have to eat," replied Fairbank. Reischauer looked skeptical. Fairbank continued, "If we don't eat then, we'll have to use up some time before or after our meeting...