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Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 23 January 2004 · 10:00 pm

The U.S. Army’s Manchu Regiment

Most people have heard of the British Army’s famed Gurkhas, but how many are aware of the American Manchu Regiment? It played a vital role in numerous key military campaigns.

[World War I:] In early October 1917, the Manchus moved to the front. The Regiment first became involved in the then static warfare in the Sous Reuvrois Sector. When subsequently moved to Chateau-Thierry, it met and stalled the Boche Purge on Paris….

The German’s attempt to make the Bevel Forest one of the fierce, slow defensive maneuvers was thwarted and their lines became utterly disorganized. This was one of three successful night moves or raids made by the Manchu Regiment within a period of days that aided considerably in dealing a death blow to the bewildered Germans.

After the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Manchu troops marched into Germany to serve as an occupation force…. The Regiment was awarded battle streamers for Aisne, Meuse-Argonne, Lorraine, Ile de France, St. Mihiel and Aisne-Mame campaigns. In 1918, the Manchus were awarded the French Fourragere for gallantry during the Meuse-Argonne offensive….

[World War II:] On 07 June 1944 (D-Day +1) the Manchu Regiment set foot on the hostile soil of Omaha Beach, Normandy and immediately moved forward to capture Rubercy. Within three days they had intercepted the main rail line between Cherbourg and Paris and had driven through the Carisy Forest….

The Manchus were operating as a hinge on the “Bulge” at the Rocherather Baracken crossroads. The Manchus fought for eighteen hours against overwhelming odds, destroying seventeen German tanks, and repulsing a key drive in the German thrust. This stand enabled two battalions of the 38’h Infantry Regiment to escape encirclement, and coupled with similar stands by other allied units, caused the German counteroffensive to falter, thereby providing time to regroup and defeat this last great German effort.

After Allied lines had been re-established in January 1945, the Manchu Regiment once again spearheaded a drive through the Siegfried Line to begin a dash across Germany. The Rhine River was crossed on 21 March 1945. The Manchu Regiment then continued its drive across Germany and into Czechoslovakia to the outskirts of Pilsen where it was engaged in combat until the last days of the war. The Manchu Regiment remained in that sector on occupation duty until July 1945, when it embarked for the United States with many decorations, including three Presidential Citations….

[Korea:] Manchu troops were the first element of the Indianhead Division to touch Korean soil when they arrived at the Korean port city of Pusan on 31 July 1950. The Manchus were immediately placed on line in defense of the Pusan Perimeter and it received its baptism of fire in the battle of the Naktong Bulge. Later they broke out from that defensive position, and began the attack Northward, when they assaulted and seized Cloverleaf and Obong-Ni Ridge on 1 August 1950….

The Manchu Regiment participated in the breakout from the Pusan perimeter and began the advance north with the rest of the Eighth Army towards the Yalu River. The soldiers thought that the war would be over and that they would be home for Christmas as they neared the end of their push northward. Those beliefs were crushed on 25 November 1950 though, when several Red Chinese Armies attacked the Eighth Army in the vicinity of the Chongehon River…. On 30 November 1950, the majority of the Manchu Regiment began to run the “Gauntlet” to Kunu-Ri with the rest of the 2nd Infantry Division. The 1st Battalion remained with the 23d Infantry Regiment to fight a rear guard action to cover the withdrawal of the rest of the 2nd Division….

After running the gauntlet to Kunu-Ri, the remnants of the Regiment were withdrawn to an area south of the Korean capital of Seoul to refit. Manchus then spent the month of December 1950 on the monumental task of reorganizing, re-equipping, re-supplying and training, while patrolling the roads east of Seoul to Hongchon, Hoengsong and Wonju….

On 18 September 1951 the Regiment was ordered to attack the ridge lines southwest of Heartbreak Ridge in an attempt to relieve pressure on the 23rd Infantry Regiment, which was attacking up the east-west spur of the ridge. After heavy fighting the Manchus secured their objective on 23 September. The North Koreans did not relinquish Heartbreak Ridge and in late September the Manchus were ordered to attack the west-side of the Mundung-Ni Valley in a final attempt to capture the ridge. The attack was successful and Heartbreak Ridge fell on 13 October 1951….

The Regiment earned an additional Presidential Unit Citation for its gallant service in Hongchon, and the Manchus received streamers for the following campaigns while serving in Korea: UN Defensive, UN Offensive, CCF Intervention, First UN Counteroffensive, CCF Spring Offensive, UN Summer-Fall Offensive, Second Korean Winter, Korea Summer-Fall 1952, Third Korean Winter, Korea Summer 1953….

[Vietnam:] April 29th [1966] saw the battalion disembark the ship General Walker at Vung Tau, Vietnam. The Manchus got a taste of what was to come almost immediately. Within hours of their arrival they found themselves under fire as their convoy made its way to the 25th Division base camp at Cu Chi. The next day, a little more than 24 hours after arriving in country, Alpha company engaged the enemy in a firefight – setting the tone of regular contact that would characterize the Manchu experience for the next four and a half years….

On February 22, 1968 the Manchus closed the base at Katum which had served as the large forward base for the 1st BDE near the Cambodian border. After a day at Tay Ninh to prepare, the Manchus moved out to Cu Chi and eventually arrived north of Tan Son Nhut on February 25. The mission was to find and destroy rocket sites that had been used to fire on Tan Son Nhut Air Base since the Tet Offensive began nearly a month earlier. At 9:00 a.m. on March 2, 1968, the Manchus walked into what was to become one of the worst single encounter loss of life incidents in the history of the Vietnam war. Forty nine members of Charlie company were killed and 24 wounded in an ambush by a large communist force on Route 248 north and east of Tan Son Nhut near the small village of Quoi Xuan. In addition, C company suffered 24 wounded while D company suffered casualties in the fighting to reach Charlie company. Manchu Alpha, Bravo, and Delta continued operations in this area and took many more casualties until finally leaving on March 11, 1968. Rocket sites had been destroyed, and a formidable communist force had been weakened, if not destroyed. But, it had come at a great cost to the Manchus and particularly the courageous men of Charlie Company….

In the four years and six months of Service in Vietnam with the 25th Division, the 4th Battalion of the Manchus received two Presidential Citations and added 12 campaign streamers to the Regimental Colors for Combat Operations in the Republic of South Vietnam. It is estimated that 450 4th Battalion Manchus were killed in the Vietnam War. Three Manchus were posthumous recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor….

[Cold War:] On August 2, 1972 the 4th Battalion was relieved from assignment to the 25th Infantry Division and was reassigned to Alaska with the 172nd Infantry [where morale was maintained by daily repetitions of the unit motto: “Keep Up the Fire!”]….

In 1976 the 1st Manchus were deployed into the DMZ to provide security for a focus of the infamous tree-cutting incident. This incident occurred when two U.S. soldiers were killed by the North Koreans when they were attempting to trim a tree which hindered observation of the North Korean border.

Surprisingly enough, the Manchus were one of the oldest infantry regiments in the U.S. Army, first commissioned in 1798. It fought in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Little Big Horn campaigns, Cuba, the Philippines, and during the Boxer Rebellion in Peking, where it was awarded the honorary title of “Manchus” and its motto, “Keep Up The Fire.”

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by | 23 January 2004 · 8:25 pm

Tonga Favors China, But Not the Chinese

Head Heeb has an interesting post on “Tonga’s ambivalent relationship with China, one that favors the Chinese government but not the Chinese people. Overseas Chinese make up about three percent of Tonga’s population.”

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by | 23 January 2004 · 8:16 pm

A Language Freak Wandering in Siberia

If you feel the need to follow an ever farther outlier, check out this blog by pf, a language freak wandering through Siberia on his own.

Oddly, Russia is the only country I’ve been in where you can’t find manaiacal Australian tourists scurrying out wherever you step. In Europe, you can’t find a town so small but it’s got an Australian (or, if you’ll pardon the expression, a New Zealander) in it, or having just left it, or on the way to it. Here, though, I haven’t met a single antipodean, curiously. Though a couple Indian billionaires in April stayed in the hotel I stayed at in Suntar. I was called upon to verify their English, which I pronounced to be competent, but clearly not that of a native speaker. All marvelled at my deductive powers, for indeed, the Indians had been born in India, and not, as appearances might lead to believe, in any other country.

Americans do occur up here, though. There’s one, I don’t know if I mentioned him, who lived on Kamchatka for a year in high school, and now is studying Japanese (Japanese!) at Yakut State U. (Yakut State!) for a year. There was another who came to a village near Suntar, I wasn’t clear on which, and stayed for two years, or maybe three, hung around the local museum a lot, and then went home, where she turned into a doctor of anthropology. Everybody still remembers her, and, shaking their heads, say, “We’ve lived with this museum all our lives, and she comes here, looks at it for a couple years, writes some stuff down, and gets a doctorate!” She married a local, and took him home with her, where he now makes Sakha (Yakut) jewelry in North Carolina. I’m sure you can track him down, there’s probably not many Sakha (Yakut) jewellers in North Carolina. He’s got his own wall, with pictures of him, and a special cabinet for pictures of his brothers, local jewellers, and a picture of his father, touchingly hung next to a photocopy of his death certificate.

Hat tip: languagehat

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by | 23 January 2004 · 11:08 am

South Korea and the Vietnam-era Mindset

A Vietnam-era mindset still influences many Americans, perhaps especially longtime leftists. The same is true in South Korea. But the Vietnam era meant rather different things to South Koreans than it did to Americans.

For one thing, many South Koreans mapped their images of a divided Vietnam onto a divided Korea, and vice versa. This shows up very starkly in a novel like The Shadow of Arms, by Hwang Suk-Young, whose English translation by Chun Kyung-Ja was published by the Cornell University East Asia Program in 1994. I had the chance to write a review of the book for the journal Korean Studies in 1996.

At one point during a huge antiwar rally in San Francisco that I attended while on a weekend pass from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey in 1969, a speaker standing beneath the flag of North Vietnam began attaching conditions to his hitherto well-received calls for peace. But almost as soon as his “We demand peace” turned to “We will accept no peace until …” the more-alert members of the crowd began to chant “Peace now! Peace now!” More and more people took up the cry until they drowned out the rest of the speech. For the speaker, peace was a step on the road to partisan victory. For the crowd, it was an end in itself. The crowd won that round but, in typical fashion, the partisan peaceniks were better represented among the organizers, while the naive peaceniks were far more numerous among the organized.

Although utterly cynical about the enterprise (and especially the entrepreneurs) of war, The Shadow of Arms is not exactly an antiwar novel. It is written more in the spirit of that partisan peace activist beneath the North Vietnamese flag in San Francisco. Set almost entirely amidst the logistics-and-supply cornucopia behind the lines rather than in the more intense violence of the free-fire zones, it presents the war as essentially a struggle between self-sacrificing patriots (supported by the communist North Vietnamese) and self-indulgent profiteers (supported by the capitalist Americans). This focus on the wartime black market in South Vietnam may well reflect Hwang Suk-Young’s own experience in the 2nd ROK Marine Brigade, which was deployed to Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. But it also appears to reflect his vision of Cold War South Korea, whose greedy and corrupt military leaders presumably abandoned the goals of reunification and independence for personal profit. By implication, North Korea is the preserve of self-sacrificing patriots still wedded to nationalist, rather than capitalist, goals.

This novel thus evokes the shared fate of Korea and Vietnam. It does not explore the motives (other than profit) for South Korean participation in the war, nor the reactions of individual Koreans to the experience. There is no hint, for instance, of the kind of introspection found in Ahn Junghyo’s [war novel] White Badge, where the protagonist is reminded of his own childhood picking through the garbage of the American soldiers when he sees Vietnamese kids sifting through the rubbish of the Korean troops. Nevertheless, Hwang’s novel is an engrossing tale of individuals caught up in blackmarket plunder within a command economy during the chaos of war. (Although Hwang appears to consider such plunder typical of capitalist economies, I suspect–having spent a year in Romania under Ceausescu–that it is typical of any economy in which an elite has monopoly control of crucial resources, whether that elite meets in corporate boardrooms or in people’s palaces.)

For many Koreans, their participation on the American side during the Vietnam War was quadruply shameful. Not only did they fight on the losing side, but they fought to preserve a divided country, they fought for capitalism, and they fought in a mercenary capacity. Many others, of course, were eager to combat communism and to repay a debt to a vital ally.

The mercenary issue is particularly nettlesome. It’s a toxic label. But it’s hard to deny that, to a certain extent, the Vietnam War provided the same kind of stimulus to South Korea’s postwar economy that the the Korean War did to Japan’s earlier postwar economy (and European wars did to the U.S. economy even earlier). That’s why the same review also considered a related book, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: The Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War, by Robert M. Blackburn (McFarland, 1994).

The mercenary nature of foreign involvement in the war is the central theme of Robert M. Blackburn’s fascinating nonfiction account of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to beg or buy international support for South Vietnam under “The Free World Assistance Program” (commonly labeled “More Flags”), which began in 1964. Blackburn, like Hwang, is a Vietnam War veteran who “had the good fortune to fight alongside, though never with, some units of the ROK Marines, and was never bothered by what label they wore” (155). He is careful to distinguish the soldiers who fight wars from the politicians who make wars, observing that any stigma attached to the word mercenary belongs to the leaders, not to the soldiers.

However, Blackburn offers a more subtle analysis of the status of mercenaries. He notes that individual soldiers may choose to fight for a foreign country for reasons other than simply pay, although the pay itself defines their status as mercenaries. Soldiers-of-fortune may fight for the thrill of it. Others enlist because they believe in the cause they are being paid to fight for. Much the same can be said for entire military units, or even for nations that inject their own troops into foreign wars. “In the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, for example, Franco’s Moroccan battalions fought only for pay, while the opposing members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought for a cause. Both units, however, … shared the common status of mercenaries” (146).

Australia and New Zealand sent military units to Vietnam at their own expense (and therefore not as mercenaries) and for their own reasons. In fact their support for South Vietnam began before Johnson’s More Flags program. Both countries had helped fight communist insurgencies in the Malay Peninsula, and both were alarmed by what Sukarno and his Communist Party allies were doing in Indonesia. Each apparently considered it in its own national interest to help assure the survival of a capitalist South Vietnam. South Korea had at least as much national interest in the survival of South Vietnam as those two countries did. But it also had a “debt of honor” (46) to repay to the allies who helped assure its own survival little more than a decade earlier.

Other countries contributed varying amounts to South Vietnam, from Morocco’s “10,000 cans of sardines worth $2,000” to Japan’s “$55 million worth of economic assistance from a World War II reparations agreement” (141). Most contributed medical supplies and equipment. Costa Rica (actually the Costa Rican Sugar Growers Association) sent an ambulance (143), and South Korea’s first military unit to arrive was a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) [emphasis added] (159). However, of all the More Flags allies, South Korea committed the most troops (50,000 out of the 65,000 in 1968 [158]), suffered the most casualties (4,407 out of the 5,241 killed [xiii]), and reaped the greatest economic benefits in return. Blackburn (64-65) estimates that South Korean soldiers received about $1 billion just in pay, allowances, and benefits alone in 1967-73. A ROK private with a base pay of $1.60 a month could earn $1.00-$1.25 for each day’s service in Vietnam. Still, each ROK soldier cost the U.S. only about half as much as a comparable American soldier.

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by | 22 January 2004 · 8:40 pm

A White Nigerian?

“Where are you from?” I ask, directly, for this is what I have learned to do in North Carolina whenever I hear someone from West Africa. She answers, “We live in Cary,” once a town outside Raleigh but now a tidy upscale suburb.

But this isn’t what I mean. “No,” I correct her. “Where are you from originally?” And she sturdies herself. “I am from Africa,” only it’s more like Ah-free-ka, with the emphasis on the Ah and the ree vibrating on her tongue. Still she doesn’t take me seriously. “No.” I venture, more sternly this time, “what country?” And now she says, relaxing, “I am from Nigeria.” She draws it out: Nigh-jyyy-rria.

Tears come to my eyes and then my body warms, as if I have had a transfusion. “I know,” I tell her, I was born in Ogbomosho.” Every Nigerian knows Ogbomosho, in Yoruba land.

“Ah,” she replies quietly, as if this is a mystery, and we stand for a moment in recognition of a kinship impossible to speak. She is from Ibadan, just down the road from my original home. Her name is Joanna. Finally her husband approaches, for he is in no hurry at all; he wears one of those West African print shirts with the embroidered necks and sleeves to the elbows, and you can see his stomach protruding slightly. “Johnny,” she calls out, “this woman is a Nigerian.” I am as happy as the child was moments earlier.

So few people know me. I am white. I have blonde hair and blue eyes. I teach American literature in the English department of North Carolina State University. No one in my neighborhood would imagine that I grew up in Africa. For years, even I forgot where I am from. So I am thankful for Joanna’s discernment. In Nigerian thinking, anyone born in Nigeria is Nigerian. She may be a bad Nigerian or a lost Nigerian, but she is still a Nigerian.

SOURCE: Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life, by Elaine Neil Orr (U. Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 2-3.

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by | 22 January 2004 · 8:39 pm

To Keep Nigeria One Is a Task That Must Be Done

On August 16 [1966], my father’s birthday, the Biafrans reached the Ofusu River Bridge which marks the border with the Western region, our region. On my birthday, August 19, the Biafrans were continuing to advance. All around, the savannahs were quiet; there was a lull in the rains. The air was as dry as a stone. Around that beautiful dining room table, I had a birthday party with our little compound clan. I was thirteen and my mother made a white cake with yellow icing and on it she placed a ceramic Siamese cat as a decoration. I wore a dress pink as a carnation. My birthday gift appeared in a small box, a birthstone ring–peridot–in an oval setting, rather plain really, like my face. I didn’t like it. I was disappointed. My mother explained that we were in a war and it was not a good time to buy record players when we were so uncertain of our immediate future. She said this to me in our living room after the party and I stared at the philodendron as she spoke, determined not to look at her or signal the least agreement. She could speak if she liked; I would not listen.

The Yoruba had finally got off the fence and appeared to be aligned with the North in its mission to keep Nigeria unified. This was a blow to the Igbos. On the radio you could hear the refrain, To Keep Nigeria One Is a Task That Must Be Done.

The next day, August 20, the Biafrans attacked Ore, putting them within 130 miles of Lagos and about 90 miles from Oshogbo where I was unhappily viewing my new ring in its box, for I would not wear it. If they reached either Ibadan or Lagos, the Federation of Nigeria would fall like a bulleted elephant. But just as Gowon was about to flee, the British and Americans intervened. Who knows what happened in Ore. We never knew. But the war turned around. Perhaps today there is an old woman in Ore who was there that day, who saw what happened when the Biafrans stopped and then backtracked. Her eyes may hold the secret.

SOURCE: Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life, by Elaine Neil Orr (U. Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 238-239.

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by | 21 January 2004 · 9:35 pm

Tana Toraja: From Ethnogenesis to Ethnotourism

A hundred years ago, the Toraja people did not exist. “Toraja” was merely a derogatory term applied by the Bugis and Makassarese living in the lowlands of the southwest peninsula of Sulawesi (then called Celebes) to any of the many different peoples living in the mountainous regions of the peninsula and central Sulawesi. Today, Tana Toraja (Toraja Land) is an administrative district in the province of South Sulawesi, the people living there comprise one of the four official suku bangsa (ethnic groups) of the peninsula, and the Toraja are celebrated (at least amongst anthropologists, tourists, and television crews) for their fantastic architecture and elaborate funerals. People who have been born in the area of Tana Toraja now call themselves Toraja, bringing this identity with them in their migrations throughout Indonesia and the rest of the world.

So begins a fascinating paper entitled From “You, Toradja” to “We Toraja”: Ethnicity in the Making, in which an anthropology graduate student, Jaida n’ha Sandra, attempts “to trace how a pejorative turned into a people.” The extended quotes below are from the same article. (Read the whole thing.)

Before the arrival of the Dutch, the Muslims in the lowlands had regarded the politically fragmented highlanders as a major source of slaves, as well as coffee and other highland products.

The Dutch had been a colonial presence on Sulawesi since the seventeenth century but had mainly ignored the inaccessible and agriculturally unproductive mountain areas. In the late nineteenth century, however, they became increasingly worried about the growing Islamic influence in Sulawesi. The animist highlanders were viewed as a pool of potential Christians; the company mandate was to convert as many as possible, thereby aligning the highlands with the Dutch should lowland Muslims get too obstreperous.

Starting in 1906, the Dutch influenced the formation of Toraja in four main ways. First, they abolished slavery, bringing peace and relative safety to the area. Second, they introduced Christianity, which would later be adopted as a defense against lowland Islamic fundamentalism. Third, they furthered the cash economy by demanding taxes. And, finally, they drew a line around the Sa’dan area and named it Tana Toraja.

Tana Toraja, like Bali, has since become one of the most intensely anthropologized places on earth. The Toraja are famous for their huge, boat-shaped rice barns and their famously elaborate and gory funeral celebrations, featuring animal sacrifices and often a sizable contingent of foreign funeral tourists. Ethnic identity, however, remains a contentious issue.

The nobility … were satisfied with their power and status under the old system. Lower class Toraja have been less conservative, taking advantage of the egalitarian mores of Christianity, the opportunities presented by education and the cash economy, and the political implications of ethnic identity to contest the authority of the nobility…. Christianity has been increasingly popular as an avenue towards modernity and gaining a transnational identity….

In the 1940s, few Toraja had ever left their village and almost none had left the Indonesian archipelago. By 1978, however, sixty percent of the population was spending extended periods outside Tana Toraja. Many never come back except for the occasional family funeral. Toraja have eagerly pursued education and now work outside Tana Toraja as government officials, professors, medical professionals, and lawyers. At the same time, they have never been above manual labor and so also work in mining and lumber operations on far-flung islands as well as in furniture and clothing manufacture closer to home.

Out-migration has led simultaneously to a greater identification with the Toraja suku (ethnicity) while at the same time facilitated alterations in that identity. On the one hand, Toraja abroad go to great lengths to retain links with family. They follow all the funerals and attendant gossip….

At the same time, there are complaints that the rituals are no longer authentic or “true”. Fewer Toraja can reach a consensus on what aspects of funeral ceremonies are fixed and what can be reinterpreted. There is no longer a shared expectation and experience of ritual. As ritual defines Toraja to the outside world, it is also changing to accommodate outsiders tastes. Some students from Toraja consider having tourists at funerals a travesty and feel tourists should be treated only to staged shows of songs, chants, dances, even sacrifices that are not part of any meaningful ritual. Others feel that removing the ritual practices from the ritual, doing it at inappropriate times or in inappropriate places, is the travesty. The ceremonies should be whole or abandoned, not carved into bits for tourists’ eyes. Discussion groups, seminars, and arguments abound as Toraja try to sort out how they can abide by Church authority and please the tourists while maintaining some meaning in their traditions….

For the sake of tourism, Toraja have also begun to reinvent themselves… They respond to lowland stereotypes of themselves as crude, backwards, non-religious ex-slaves by characterizing themselves as pork-eaters, pacifists, honest, delicate, quick-witted, hard working, and thrifty. At the same time, they discuss at length their own foolishness in racking up huge debts and then wasting wealth on funeral ceremonies….

Meanwhile, the nobility make use of visiting anthropologists to play out family rivalries. Adams reports how she was recruited as a pet anthropologist by one family who asked her to “write a book about the real Torajan identity and history.” What this really meant was a history of that particular family. She came to realize, only later, that she was a pawn in an ancient game. She writes:

[A] rival aristocratic family from another Torajan district visited our village and my Torajan hosts introduced me as “their anthropologist” …. To this, the visitors responded that they, too, had an anthropologist live with them and write about them. After these guests departed, my Torajan family disparaged the other anthropologist’s understanding of Torajan culture and proclaimed that my “book” would be “much bigger and better.”

One of the most famous books on the Toraja, of course, is Nigel Barley’s Not a Hazardous Sport, quoted immediately below.

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by | 20 January 2004 · 10:04 pm

Not a Hazardous Sport

‘Anthropology is not a hazardous sport.’ I had always suspected that this was so but it was comforting to have it confirmed in black and white by a reputable insurance company of enduring probity. They, after all, should know such things.

The declaration was the end result of an extended correspondence conducted more in the spirit of detached concern than serious enquiry. I had insured my health for a two-month period field-trip and been unwise enough to read the small print. I was not covered for nuclear attack or nationalization by a foreign government. Even more alarming, I was covered for up to twelve months if hijacked. Free-fall parachute jumping was specificially forbidden together with ‘all other hazardous sports’. But it was now official: ‘Anthropology is not a hazardous sport.’

The equipment laid out on the bed seemed to contest the assertion. I had water-purifying tablets, remedies against two sorts of malaria, athlete’s foot, suppurating ulcers and eyelids, amoebic dysentery, hay fever, sunburn, infestation by lice and ticks, seasickness and compulsive vomiting. Only much, much later would I realize that I had forgotten the aspirins.

It was to be a stern rather than an easy trip, a last pitting of a visibly sagging frame against severe geography where everything would probably have to be carried up mountains and across ravines, a last act of physical optimism before admitting that urban life and middle age had ravaged me beyond recall.

In one corner stood the new rucksack, gleaming iridescent green like the carapace of a tropical beetle. New boots glowed comfortingly beside it, exuding a promise of dry strength. Cameras had been cleaned and recalibrated. All the minor tasks had been dealt with just as a soldier cleans and oils his rifle before going into battle. Now, in pre-departure gloom, the wits were dulled, the senses muted. It was the moment for sitting on the luggage and feeling empty depression.

SOURCE: Nigel Barley, Not a Hazardous Sport (Henry Holt, 1988).

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by | 20 January 2004 · 9:47 pm

Diary of Angeles Monrayo, 1924-1928

Strike Camp, Middle St., Honolulu, T.H.

June 9, 1924

Dear Diary:

We had our ‘dancing’ 2 night straight–I made $7.00 the other nite and $7.50 last night–gosh, so many Filipino sailors came, last night and the other night, too. I gave Father $13.50. I kept 1.00 for myself. The men tell me for as young as I was, I can follow them easily like fox-trot and waltzes. I’m not even 12 years old yet, but because there are only few girls living here, I guess that’s why they let me. There’s a saxaphone player, too, only he does not play every time we have a dance. I like the music very much if he plays with the guitar and mandolin player, because the music sound so much better, and it makes you want to dance so much more. I can keep on dancing and forget about eating. Yes, Diary, that is how much I love dancing.”

SOURCE: Tomorrow’s Memories: Diary of Angeles Monrayo, 1924-1928 (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2003).

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by | 19 January 2004 · 2:46 pm

China’s Natural Mason-Dixon Line

The rough dividing line between North and South China (at least “China Proper“) is the Yangtze River, officially referred to as the Changjiang (‘Long River’) in Chinese. Unlike the Mason-Dixon line in the U.S., this division in China is the result of natural geological forces, not the result of any artificial human compromise. Like the Mason-Dixon line, however, the boundaries get fuzzier the farther you go west. (See maps; scroll down.)

South of the Yangtze, people depend mostly on rice as their staple, they prefer black tea, and they generally get by without heating their houses during the winter. (The coldest winter I ever spent was in one of those unheated houses in South China. Another foreign family there made the same claim–and they were from Winnipeg, Manitoba!) The old southern capital, Nanjing (‘South Capital’) lies on the south bank of the Yangtze. (See maps and photos; scroll down.)

North of the Yangtze, people grow a variety of hardy staples such as wheat, corn (maize), sorghum, and millet, which they make into pastas, breads, or gruel. They prefer green tea, and they generally do a better job of heating their houses during the winter. (See maps and photos; scroll down.)

In popular stereotype, the North has more than its share of hardheaded ideologues, while the South has more than its share of unprincipled pragmatists. However, the pragmatic leader Zhao Ziyang was a northerner from Henan (although he rose to prominence in Guangdong), while the arch-ideologue Mao Zedong was a southerner from Hunan. The smooth diplomat Zhou Enlai was from Jiangsu, which straddles the Yangtze. (See maps of major provinces.)

If bureaucratic Beijing (‘North Capital’) is the northern archetype, hustling Guangzhou (‘Wide State’) is its southern counterpart. (See map of major cities.) Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangtze, has a reputation for combining both ideological and mercantile hustle. Shanghai literally means ‘rise-up sea’, which may originally have meant ‘the beginning of the sea’ (and the end of the river), but I can’t find any confirmation.

Unfortunately, many Cantonese seem to think that the North starts at the northern border of Guangdong Province–or that you have to speak Cantonese to be a southerner. Several of the teachers at the brand new college we taught at in Zhongshan City, Guangdong, were from Jiangxi Province, which stretches from Guangdong north to the Yangtze. They were frequently dismayed to be identified as beifangren ‘northerners’ when they spoke their southern dialect of the national language (putonghua, or Mandarin) rather than Cantonese. To Cantonese, they were just not southern enough. It was like Georgians calling Virginians–or Mississipians calling Tennesseans–“Yankees”! (Hmm. Come to think of it …)

Recommended Browsing: A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization.

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