Yi-Fu Tuan Dear Colleague

November 2, 2004

Dear Colleague,

I read from and talked about my last two books on October 28, courtesy of Mr. Chris Caldwell of Borders. I want to thank him and Borders, and I want to thank those who came, a few geography students and several old friends. Their support on this occasion is especially appreciated, for this sort of self-advertisement will not happen again. I have simply run my course. It has been a good and long run, thanks to luck and, again, thanks to the support of students and friends.

Yi-Fu Tuan at Borders Oct 28, 2004 On October 28, I did a couple of things I am rather proud of, and I would like to tell you what these are. They occurred at the very beginning and at the very end of the talk. At the very beginning, I said to the audience that I was going to read excerpts from Dear Colleague, which is made up of my thoughts and experiences over a period of thirty years. I said: "I hope you will find some of these suggestive and entertaining." But, then, quite out of the blue I was inspired to add, "But suppose you don't. Suppose you find them banal and tedious, your being here should still be worthwhile for you. Why? Because it will force you to ponder deeply about human mediocrity and inconsequentiality. You can say to yourself, ' Here is an old guy who has benefitted from all the educational perks of life. And yet, look what he comes up with at the end of the run! Isn't it pathetic?' " I am saying that my poor offerings should stimulate an alert mind to think hard as much as, if not more than, if I had been brilliant.

At the end of the talk, I tried to give the gist of the conclusion of Place, Art, and Self by saying: if I had never left China, I would have acquired a strong sense of self, but it would have been a stunted sense, and it would have been a self little different from the selves I grew up with. But I did not stay in one place. I moved and lived in different places. Did these moves bring about an enrichment of the sort of person I am? Not necessarily, no more than the books I read and the music I listened to because experts considered them "great." The new experiences only counted when I felt a strong personal affinity for them; for example, my first exposure to the film Gone With the Wind (age 13), to Beethoven's Ninth (age 15), to Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov (age 18), and to the bleak Arizona desert (age 21). These experiences, I soon realized, were as much a part of me as the layer laid down in early childhood, which, to this day, makes me yearn for congee when sick and pot stickers when well. But isn't a self made up of such odd experiences and encounters a fragmented one? Well, I don't know how I appear to you, but I don't feel the least bit fragmented. To the contrary, I feel, personality wise, as well hung together as if I had never left China. How can that be?

The evening of October 28 at Borders is memorable for me. But on my deathbed I am unlikely to dwell on it as I may well dwell on something that happened a day earlier, on October 27. That day I had lunch with my friend, Jared, at the Edgewater Hotel. It was a pleasant occasion. We said goodbye at the hotel. I stepped out and crossed the driveway to climb the steps that led to Langdon Street when I heard a voice shouting, "Sir! Sir!" I turned around and saw a man in a parked car. He poked his head out of the window, waved at me, and said, "Sir, your shoelaces are undone." What's the matter with me? Is it because I live alone? Unexpected consideration from a total stranger, which (by the way) occurs more frequently than one might think, makes me melt in gratitude and may bring me to the brink of tears.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu