Memories

In 2000, Prof. Tai, the RSEA Chair at the time, reflected on the first 50 years of RSEA for the Summer 2000 edition of the HEAS newsletter, Asia Notes.

Only two students, Ralph Anderson and Ellsworth Carlson, graduated in the first RSEA class of 1947. The following year, twelve students, including Conrad Brandt, Marius Jansen, Rhoads Murphey and Benjamin I. Schwartz, received their A.M. degrees in Regional Studies-East Asia. My own class of ’72 had 19 members; this year, 26 students received A.M. degrees from RSEA.

Established in the wake of World War II, the RSEA program formed part of Harvard’s push to open a new field of studies: area studies in general, and East Asian studies in particular. Today, East Asian studies flourish at many institutions, but Harvard’s RSEA program continues to be the most successful, attracting students from a wide range of backgrounds and with quite different career plans. Among the program’s alumni, Fox Butterfield ’64, Richard Bernstein ’70, Thomas Matthews ’71, Carroll Bogert ’86, and Susan Lawrence ’89 have all carved successful careers in journalism. Kato Koichi ’67 is a leading figure in Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. Mario Pini ’69 is in the Italian diplomatic service. My classmate, Douglas Paal, served on the National Security Council under President Bush and is currently the President of the Asia Pacific Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Sarasin Viraphol ’71 left a highly successful career in the Thai diplomatic service for the business world and today is the Vice-President of the CP Group, Asia’s largest multinational conglomerate. General Karl Eikenberry, the current U.S. military attache in Beijing, graduated from Harvard with an RSEA degree in 1981.

When I was contemplating graduate studies, I was advised by my professor, a former junior faculty member at Harvard, to apply to RSEA: “It’s a sort of Berlin tunnel into Ph.D. programs,” he told me. The Berlin Wall is gone, and so is the usefulness of the Berlin tunnel as a metaphor, but RSEA continues to prepare students for entry into Ph.D. programs at Harvard and elsewhere. Despite its reputation – which it shares with other area studies programs – for focusing on contemporary issues and the social sciences, it has trained many professors in the humanities. At Harvard, for example, there are more RSEA alumni in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Tu Wei-ming ’63, Leo Lee ’64, Yori Oda ’68, and David McCann ’71) than in the Government Department (Rod MacFarquhar ’55 and Iain Johnston ’85).

Students who entered RSEA in the late 1940s and the 1950s and those who entered since the late 1970s have in common something that my class did not have: personal and extensive exposure to East Asia. The early classes gained that exposure through military service; the more recent classes are made up of students who have had the opportunity to travel in East Asia, and even live there for extended periods of time. I was an RSEA student when Richard Nixon went to China. I remember the enormous excitement that visit generated, but it would be several years before Americans could take advantage of the new rapprochement between the U.S. and the P.R.C. to study in China. Students now are also better prepared linguistically than were those in my own class, thanks to the undergraduate programs in East Asian studies which have opened since I was in college.

The scholarly interests of RSEA students over the years reflect five decades of tumultuous change in East Asia: the onset of the Cold War, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the establishment of the P.R.C., the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the transition in China and later Vietnam to a market economy, Tiananmen Square, the Asian financial crisis. During the fifty years of RSEA’s existence, Japan went from being a defeated, occupied country to an economic superpower. Taiwan and Hong Kong, once studied for clues to “traditional” China, have become exemplars of Chinese modernity. The Vietnam War ended, and Vietnam became unified. Mao died. With the entry of McDonald’s into East Asian societies and the global spread of karaoke bars, Pokemon, and pop music, students have switched their focus from peasant revolutions to middle class consumerism. The growing influence of postmodernism in the academy, the new interest in diasporas and transnationalism, all can be found in the Master’s theses produced by RSEA students. And yet, the program is flexible enough also to accommodate students whose interests lie in the military technology of the Warring States period (Anthony Barbieri-Low ’97), the spread of Buddhism in China (Daniel Norcross ’99), Korean music (Jocelyn Clark ’96), Heian poetry (Vyjayanthi Ratnam ’98), Sung dynasty widows (Tanya Selvaratnam ’96) or 18th century Vietnamese literature (Vinh Nguyen ’94).

It is this ability to accommodate diverse career plans and academic interests that has allowed RSEA to thrive through the onset of the Cold War and its aftermath, through the era of decolonization and the establishment of new nation-states to the present period of globalization, sub- and trans­nationalism. It is also what will continue to bring into the RSEA program such an exciting mix of students over the next fifty years.

RSEA Chair Prof. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (AM ’72), RSEA Chair 2000

Tai, Hue-Tam Ho (2000), Asia Notes:  The official Newsletter of the Harvard East Asia Society, Volume 4, Number 1, Summer 2000.