Lettres anglaises

April 3rd - ‘Tis a good day

2010-04-03T17:11:00.000+01:00

It is a good day today so I decided to come back and update this thing. I know I have been not updating for too long and people may not be reading this any more, but Hilary was indeed a very hectic term. All kinds of things happen. It is hard to think about it in retrospect about how much had happened within eight weeks. It is a good day today, though we lost to Chelsea by the cannot-be-more-obvious offside goal from Didier Drogba. Drogba is a great player, but the Russian's team as a whole is just indecent. We lost to Bayern in the middle of the week too, but I do respect this German team. As Ryan Giggs says Bayern is a team of great pedigree. Bayern played well in the game and they deserved the win. Rooney's injury had been the worst news this week.

I am now in London behind the London Eye. I will be going back to IWU briefly for a visit between April 18th and 21st, for those who don't know.

Nov. 19 - Chris Patten and Amartya Sen!

2009-11-20T00:38:00.001Z

I saw Chris Patten and Amartya Sen today!

Today at Sheldonian Theatre there was a Distinguished Public Lecture, titled "The Pursuit of Justice", by Professor Amartya Sen. Chairing the lecture was Lord Patten of Barnes, the current Chancellor of University of Oxford and previously the last Governor of Hong Kong.

Interestingly, Professor Amartya Sen started and ended commenting about the two kinds of knowledge and the contradiction of theory and practice. He especially mentioned Raphael's Athenian Academy. I don't want to praise myself but this contradiction between knowledge of theory and knowledge of practice was something that I have been thinking about since the beginning of 2009, and I am pretty sure this is my original thought, just like the "Matt Hastings Question" in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding about the logical validity of waking up next morning finding oneself floating in the air.

Professor Amartya Sen reminded me of a question that I had earlier this year when we dealt with Rabindranath Tagore in Religion 309. India has produced some great intellectuals in the twentieth century. Rabindranath Tagore and Amartya Sen are two perfect examples of influential public intellectual who are very influential both domestically and internationally. This tradition could easily be traced back to Rammohun Roy, the father of modern India. Tagore was an international celebrity with no doubt. Sen was the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. I wonder, when can China produce great intellectuals like such? I can't imagine at the moment any Chinese being the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, or of Balliol College, Oxford. Looking back at the century, China never had intellectuals of such tremendous influence: 100+ people lining outside of Sheldonian after it was full, waiting to hear an Indian speak. When can we have such great intellectuals? Also, India has produced a great many brilliant scholars including Spivak, Amin, Ranajit Guha, Sumit Sarkar, Dipesh Charkrabarty, Sugata Bose, and many more. Not many scholars in China are as thoughtful as they are on issues of critical social theory. Wang Hui and several others are pretty good, but that's it. I really wish China could produce more great intellectuals to benefit the entire human world.

The link to this event is http://ophi.qeh.ox.ac.uk/subindex.php?id=eventsSenJustice.

P.S. By the way I spoke at the Oxford Union on Monday! Although it was only a crappy nervous speech for the emergency debate... It reminded me of the days when I prepared for provincial secondary school student English public speaking competition back in 2003 and 2004.

Nov. 10 - Coincidence!

2009-11-11T01:32:00.002Z

Coincidences in life always come up unexpectedly. Well, they are so by definition, so I guess my previous sentence was an analytic judgment, according to the most revered, most self-disciplined Immanuel Kant.

I went to a talk today at St. Antony's College. This seminar series was recommended to me by Professor Brian Hatcher, who sent me an email more than two weeks ago saying, "Chao, If you can make it, look for this event...The Chair is a friend of mine. Introduce yourself and say hi for me!" So I went, and both I and Dr Bose, the Chair that day, wondered how Professor Hatcher got to know about this seminar series. This is how mysteriously wonderful this guy named Brian Hatcher is.

And back from the digression. I went to the talk today. The topic today was on the book Prisoner of the State. The lecturer was Dr Zhang Wei 张炜 (Zhang as family name), a quite prominent figure and insider. (Surprisingly I just found out several minutes ago that Dr Zhang is the supervisor of Anna File's master thesis at Cambridge. You're so so lucky, Anna.) Throughout the talk I noticed the guy who sat across from me at the other side of the table. The American face looked very familiar to me. So after the talk I went up and asked his name. As expected, he was indeed a person whom I met more than three years ago in my high school in Shanghai! It was June of 2006, and the Yale accapella singing group took a tour to Asia, visited my high school (like Professor Tom Lutze did back in 1973) and gave a performance. He and I were the two emcees of that day. He studied Chinese at Yale and was going to be a junior. He was the student representative of Yale to welcome President Hu Jintao when Hu visited Yale earlier that year. President Hu Jintao was very impressed with his Chinese language skills so Hu sent him to his own alma mater, Tsinghua University, for his studying abroad. We met each other in June 2006 and never had any contacts ever since. It was such a coincidence and to my great surprise that I met him today. He asked me what have happened to me in the past three years and what brought me here. I started recounting my life and memory began to appear unreal again. It was such a different me back in 2006. Even the appearances--he could not recognize my face today. Later I took out a citizen ID card of the People's Republic of China, which had on it a photo of me when I was young, and he said, oh, that was how you looked like when I met you.

It just reminds me of the summer of 2008, when, in that August, I was going through the customs between Mainland China and Hong Kong. The customs officer looked up and down several times at my face and the picture on my passport, and finally said to me, "Oh, you look thinner back then."

Nov. 5 - Essays after Essays after Essays after Essays

2009-11-06T06:30:00.002Z

I, historically, wrote 4668 words in three nights. This is a new record. 6:30 a.m. Now is time to sleep.

And, the 405th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot!

Oct. 31 - October.

2009-10-31T22:17:00.002Z

October. Period.

The falling leaves reminded me of the trick or treat that we went on last year. Matt(s), Hannah, Abbie, Brett, Janet, Laura, Michael--remember the Siberian Communist coat last year? And of course the dog-beating stick, which was later turned into a flag by Matt James with his overbought underwears. We did compare the different level of generosity between Obama supporters and McCain supporters. This is the fun part of being in a split area. Yeah, October, and the Presidential Debates too. Winks!

One of my very good friends used to keep an annual blog entry named "October". Now she has given up this habit, due to changes in life I guess. This is the source of my inspiration for the title of this blog entry. Reggie you know about all these.

October is the time when new people walk into your life, and some others walk out of it. It has always been following this pattern. Now it's been a year, three years, five years, since they came or left. Life never ceases to surprise you, or to bring you Pandoras. Again I started to read those stuff from past years: personal journals, photos, chat history. Reading primary sources of my own life is the greatest delight of being a historian.

Yesterday evening I had a long chat with a high school friend now studying in Oxford. She is one year senior than me, and used to be the head of the literary club when I worked under her. That's how we met. Yesterday evening we said, isn't it miraculous, that we are both here in Oxford five years after we got to know each other? Five years ago if either of us had said to the other, "let's meet in Oxford five years from now", the other would definitely consider this person crazy. But now it is so. She said to me, it is really remarkable that you have achieved this far with such a humble origin and background. I don't mean to praise myself here but this was what she said. It reminds me of my happy dad, who couldn't fall asleep at all for the whole night when he heard about my being admitted to this Pembroke program. He promised to buy a big sack of firecrackers at lunar new year next year and light up all of them, as a celebration for the entire Ren family. My dad took the College Entrance Examination three times, three years in a row, failing one after another. Finally he succeeded in going to a two-year college for an associate degree. That was the only way that he could change his life from staying in the village forever. If he had failed the third time, he would be still either working in the fields every day, or picking up bricks in the construction sites in the cities as a migrant peasant worker.

Also, it is very nice to get connected again with a rarely-contacted friend in the final hours of October. Every friend has behind him or her so much story, just like every book, or every cup of drink, says my friend Liu Hong.

Two days ago, after another all-nighter writing about Hindu and Muslim concepts of Indian nationhood, I lifted the curtain, and saw a worker on the tree several yards away outside of my window. It was early in the morning, and he had already cut most of the branches of the tree, holding only to the trunk. I smiled, and waved to him. And he waived back. The next time I looked out, it was a pile of well-cut log. I guess it is time for something to rest in peace and memory, and for other to sprout anew.

Oct. 25 - Untimely Meditations & Unorganized Updates

2009-10-25T23:22:00.002Z

English tea, Gloucester cheese, Premier League. Such is my Sunday afternoon. The only unsatisfying thing is that Manchester Untied lost to Liverpool at Anfield. One of my next door neighbours is from Liverpool, and a hardcore fan of the team. I certainly had to admit to him that Liverpool played better than United today. I was watching football on my computer this afternoon, accompanied by Twinings black tea (in a Blackwell mug), Gloucester cheese, and the setting sun that leaned little by little towards the west, shining into my westward window. It reminds me of my first year at IWU when I lived in Munsell 412, with a westward window, through which I could always watch the sunset. I took many pictures of sunset in that year.

The past week has been the most stressful week ever in my college life so far. Two 1600-word essays in three nights, respectively on Fernand Braudel and Mahatma Gandhi. During the night of my Gandhi essay, I was really stressed out (although my tutorial next day turned out to be unexpectedly good), so I made phone calls and talked to Reggie for more than an hour (I'm glad that I purchased the unlimited international landline calls from Skype). Oxford is a great place, and the stress indeed helps give me a good academic training, but the best thing in life is definitely to have a good friend whom you can easily reach at any time.

So here my thoughts take me back to IWU again. During the summer break there was one day when I made plans about my course for senior year. I have the habit of planning, and actually it is pretty remarkable to see the changes that I make through a long term of time when I do my plannings. After this very rich summer when I finally think back of my classes in senior year, I suddenly discovered that I did not want to attend that many lectures any more. It was not that my intellectual curiosity had faded, but quite the opposite: I found that I can actually learn a lot on my own, rather than being shepherd-ed by professors in class. I used to be desperately trying to register for as many lecture courses as possible to expand my span of knowledge. But now, after this summer, and especially after two weeks of tutorials, I find that independent study is also a great way of achieving knowledge. This was a surprising change for me, especially when I first discovered it in the summer break. We'll see what I will be planning to do after this year of tutorials.

For some unknown reason I am often reminiscent of the year that we lived in Dodds. Probably it's the physical closeness of Dodds to the classroom buildings? My second year in college was really my most memorable one so far--I thought so much over the year (probably too much), and achieved great internal peace and serenity, which finally and completely rescued me out of the crisis of mind of 2007. I really miss those days when we were basking the late afternoon orange sunshine and debating about social and ethical issues in the lounge in Dodds 4D.

It is surprising how much college has changed us--not only me. Recently when I talked with students from other parts of the USA I found myself surprisingly buying into the values of the Midwest. I have to say that I LOVE the Midwestern spirit. It took me so long to come to this state of mind. Right before I left the US in early May, when I went through a pile of sketching paper that I used in my freshman year, I felt that I was already very far away from that "me" two years ago, so far that that "I" two years ago seemed a stranger to me. (But is it still the same me? John Locke would have a lot to say about that. "Damn Christ Church!") You never know how much college will surprise you, and you never realize how much college has changed you. As Student Senate Vice President Matthew T. Hastings proudly announced at the beginning of his welcome speech at the orientation convocation, "I love college."

I have been pouring a lot of words here without any attempted organization of words. I guess it is now time to go to bed and welcome a brand new week ahead. I will be meeting Megan and Brandon on Wednesday (in Blackwell!!!), and the IWU London Program group will be coming to visit Oxford on Friday as well. Lots of IWU connections next week. We dress blue, and bleed green.

P.S. Reggie, Matt(s), Kundan, and all my May Term friends: I made my epic qiezi/eggplant yesterday!!! It was the best qiezi I have ever cooked. I will definitely show my newly invented cooking when I get back to IWU.

P.S.S. This morning I witnessed the magical English weather: within one hour it turned from beautiful sunshine to clouds to rain and back to sunshine again. No wonder they talk about it all the time.

Oct. 21 - Umm...Unlucky Day?

2009-10-21T12:24:00.001+01:00

I was planning on going to a lecture this morning. The lectures here are all very far away, by Wesleyan standards. A walk from Martin to Shirk would be a minimal minimal everyday walk here. So I need to get going pretty early. However, this morning, when I was getting ready to leave for the lecture and went to the bathroom, my room door was shut by the wind and I suddenly found that I didn't have a room key with me. The rooms here are all singles so it is really easy to get locked out. So I have to go to the Porter's Lodge and get a room key, with which I still could not get into the building because I need a fob key to enter the building. I had waited in the wind at the entrance of the building for quite a while before somebody finally came out so that I could have the door opened. Fortunately there is no charge for lockouts. And, of course, I am late for the lecture that I planned on going to.

I have never had one lockout during my two years at IWU. What's wrong with me?

Alright I just want to talk about my experience today, which has some interesting facts about life here. Now I need to return the key to the Podge. Oh by the way Manchester United is going to play Moscow for the European Champion's League this afternoon. Finally, finally there are many people around interested in soccer, I mean, football.

Oct. 17 - Matriculation Day

2009-10-18T00:31:00.000+01:00

Today was the matriculation day for all freshers (the British term for first-year students, obviously) at Oxford. Everyone needed to dress up in sub-fusc, take a group picture together, and then march towards the Sheldonian Theatre to take the Bodleian Oath for Matriculation. We visiting students didn't need to matriculate, but we did participate in the photo. So we dressed up and had pictures taken. Here is one of my photos. The background is the Hall and the Chapel Quad of Pembroke College, Oxford.

Preface

2009-10-17T23:34:00.001+01:00

Hi all. This is Chao's English blog about his year in Oxford. I hope to report my life here to my English-speaking friends, especially the students and faculty back at Illinois Wesleyan University. This is my first English blog, and I will try my best to write as frequently as I can (in my second language), although obviously the essay assignments are pretty overwhelming here.

The name of the blog, Lettres anglaises, comes from the title of one of Voltaire's works, The Philosophical Letters, which was originally published under the title The English Letters. Voltaire went into exile in England in the 1720s, and became the most famous Anglophile--lover of anything English. He witnessed the funeral of Sir Isaac Newton in 1727, and the great respect that Newton received from the general public really shocked him. Voltaire reported that Newton was buried like a king, and nowhere else other than England could you find such great respect for knowledge and wisdom. (Although, obviously, Voltaire himself was buried like a king with great respect by his fellow Frenchmen in the last decades of the century.) Voltaire thought that England embodied most of the Enlightenment ideals better than anywhere else--civil liberty, constitutional monarchy, rationalization of institutions, laissez-faire, and religious toleration. Also England had their great culture ever since the Renaissance: More, Shakespeare, Marlow, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Defoe, Swift, Newton, Hooke, Gibbon, and Scotsmen such as David Hume and Adam Smith. England was considered to be the first modern state, from which the whole concept of "modernity" was born. Voltaire admired this great nation, and I do too.

Although I have been in England ever since 4th October, I never had a chance to sit down and start writing. Today is the matriculation day of all Oxford freshers, so I figured it is a nice day to commence a new blog, probably.

Please feel free to make comments on anything, good or bad, yes or no. Please also leave your name with your comment so that I will know who you are. Thank you very much.