July 5, 2005

Dear Colleague,

Writing China cost me my job at UW-Madison in 1964. I came for an interview. Glenn T. Trewartha, then the most powerful figure in the department, asked me about my research interests. I sketched my aspirations toward developing a humanistic geography, but I also said that before I embarked on that enterprise full throttle, I would like to nod first to my ancestors by writing a book on China--a regional geography that will depart from the usual format by following the physical-human bond throughout the narrative. In old-fashioned regional geographies, I said in all innocence to Trewartha, physical geography is introduced at the beginning and then pretty much left to the side. I say "in all innocence," for I have quite forgotten that Trewartha himself had written a very successful regional text on Japan in precisely that old format. There was a long pause. Trewartha looked out of the window and said mildly, "Mr. Tuan, won't you like to go for a walk by the lake in this fine weather?" I realized there and then that I had flunked the interview and that I wasn't going to get an offer. And I didn't. I walked around that damned lake (so to speak) for some twenty years before a new set of gods in Science Hall invited me in.

Upon my return from the trip to China, I dusted off my little book and peeked inside. Well, it is not as embarrassing as I thought it might be. The virtue of allowing physical geography be an active player throughout the book remains a virtue, one--by the way--that is easily sustained, for how can one leave out the floods, droughts, and earthquakes even in contemporary China? What I admire about the Chinese is their ability to disregard evidence. In the teeth of recurrent violence in nature (on a scale unknown to Europeans), they see--or rather, they make themselves see--universal harmony. Another merit of the book is that it has a chapter on architecture, parks, and gardens--harmonies created to compensate for their singular absence in nature.

As for weaknesses in the book, they are many, but perhaps the most egregious is my prophesy at the end. The concluding paragraph makes a comment on Treaty port cities (particularly Shanghai), and it goes like this:

"By the mid-1950s, the rich, seething life that foreigners used to associate with the port cities of pre-Communist China has been transformed, it would seem, into the orderly pulsations of comrades in their earnest cycles of work, study, and play. This, at least, is the ideal picture of the new urban style, but among official circles there remains the persistent fear that the gaudy hues of the past--now painted over with 'democratic' monochrome--may yet re-emerge."

Well, how can I be more wrong? The government remains Communist, but its ideology no longer favors earnest monochrome. Far from fearing the re-emergence of the "gaudy hues" of capitalism, the government vigorously promotes them. Few cities in the world today match the extravagant plumage of Shanghai. This raises the larger question: Why is social science so incapable of prediction? No one predicted such seismic changes in American society as the rise of the Left in the 1960s, or the equally dramatic rise of the Right in the 1990s. No one predicted the downfall of the Berlin wall and the breakup of the Evil Empire. China appears to have turned into an economic superpower overnight. What next? You be the prophet!

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu