Meeting old friends

From left: Jun Liu, me, Diane Belcher, and Diane's daughter Claire

I was at the TESOL Convention in Boston in late March and had dinner with two old friends. I have known Dian since the late 1980s. At that time, she was teaching at Ohio State University and I was just finishing my PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and starting
to teach at the University of South Alabama. We began a correspondence due to our interest in second language writing. Diane and I edited Academic Writing in a Second Language in 1994. The book is still selling and is now considered a classic in the discipline.

We also served together in the Test of Written English (TWE) Committee under the auspices of the TOEFL test. TWE meetings were held in various cities throughout the country and we continued to see each other at these meetings, and also at the annual TESOL meetings.

In 1995, I left the USA for Hong Kong. Diane later became an Editor of the English for Specific Purposes journal. In the past few years, she has visited Hong Kong on a number of occasions, sometimes staying with us in Sai Kung. Diane now the coeditor of TESOL Quarterly and teaches at Georgia State University.

Jun Liu is Diane's protege. Originally from China, he completed a PhD from Ohio State University. I recruited him for a position at the Chinese University's English Language Teaching Unit in 1996 but Jun was unable to take-up the position due to personal reasons. When I was setting-up the Caucus of Nonnative Speaker English Teachers (within the TESOL organization) in the late 1990s, Jun was my right hand man, ably coordinating the organizational activities in the USA. Jun became the second Chair of the Caucus and made history by becoming the first nonnative speaker of English to be elected President of TESOL, the world's largest international organization of English teachers. I encouraged him to apply for the Chair position of the English Department at the HK Polytechnic University and he was offered the position. Again, he was unable to accept it, but took-up the Chair position of the English Department at the University of Arizona. Jun is probably the first academic born in China to head an English Department in the USA.

I would travel all the way from Hong Kong to TESOL Conventions in the USA mainly to meet old friends. With retirement coming in July, this year's may have been my last Convention. Both Diane and Jun will be visiting Hong Kong on and off, and instead of in the USA, I'll continue to see them in Hong Kong.

Chung Chi Graduation Photo Day

At the Chinese University, I am affiliated to Chung Chi College, one of the four original Colleges. Each year, junior students hold a farewell ceremony for graduating Seniors, a festive occasion that is tinged with sorrow at the parting to come. The day ends with the Seniors posing for a group photo at the Chung Chi chapel. With my own retirement within sight, this was my own last Photo Day.


The chapel grounds with the Ma On Shan hills in the background.


Graduates milling around the chapel grounds.


The group photo. Although six English professors are affiliated to Chung Chi, only Tim Weiss turned-up, besides myself.

Near the Chung Chi pond, where students from each academic department had set-up stalls.

The book is out

The book I've been working on since Fall 2008 was released by Routledge at the TESOL Convention in Boston last month. The book sold out, probably because the publisher had brought only a few copies to the convention!

Excerpts from the book could be read at
http://www.routledgelanguages.com/books/Nonnative-Speaker-English-Teachers-isbn9780415876322

Reading "Out of Mao's Shadow"

Perhaps my favorite Chinese writer is Ha Jin, who authored Waiting and The Crazed, both thinly veiled accounts of life in China disguised as fiction. Ha Jin is a Professor of English at an American university and has won numerous awards for his writing. His unusual style, which I will not degrade as Chinglish, makes his acceptance by English readers even more remarkable. His books are not allowed in China, so I take a few copies when I travel there to be given to eager English professors who are yearning for Ha Jin's books.

I also enjoy Peter Hessler's writings on China. Peter went to China as a Peace Corp volunteer to teach English at a teacher training college near Chengdu, learned fluent Chinese, and chronicled his life, the lives of his students. and of elderly Chinese scholars both in and out of China. Probably his best book is the first, River Town, which is mainly about his life and the lives of his students, but the second, Oracle Bones, proves him to be an accomplished investigative reporter as well, able to trace leads across continents and unearth stories and discover long forgotten personalities. Peter writes to The New Yorker as well and his byline is a sure sign of an absorbing tale. I hope to read his new book Country Driving while visiting the States later this month.

A vast amount of literature in English flows out from China and from expatriate Chinese authors, and, at the most, I would merely flip thru these books at airport bookstores on the way somewhere. For Chinese New Year, I traveled to Sri Lanka, and, at the Hong Kong airport, bought Out of Mao's Shadow on a whim. I had spotted the book at various bookstores but not knowing the author and no longer trusting the back cover blurbs, hadn't even bothered to flip it open. But the chapter titles and the photos were irresistible.

The book turned out to be an unforgettable read. The author, Philip Pan, who was the Washington Post Beijing Bureau chief from 2000 to 2007, is a master story teller. He chronicles the lives of dissidents, those individuals who courageously stood up to the vast, repressive regime that is China. Philip traveled extensively to meet with and interview these people, and his accounts are detailed and meticulous. Perhaps no story touched me more than that of Lin Zhao, a stubborn, headstrong students at Peking University (Beida), who was imprisoned for decades for resisting the Ant-Rightist Campaign and other violations of the Communist Party, who wrote lengthy essays using her own blood, and who was finally executed in a Shanghai prison. My brief description does no justice to the heroic life of Lin Zhao. As I read her story in tranquil "Pondside" over the Chinese New Year holidays, I had to pause a number of times because the story was too painful and emotionally overwhelming for continuous reading. I have copied her photo below. It shows a young woman who sacrificed her affluent lifestyle for communism only to be betrayed by the party.




Lin Zhao's story is narrated through the work of Hu Jie, an independent researcher, documentary movie maker, and dissident, who spent years of his life and his savings tracking down Zhao's friends and contemporaries in order to record her story. Hu later produced Though I am Gone, the award winning movie about one of the first victims of the Cultural Revolution.


Lin Zhao

Other chapters in Out of Mao's Shadow describe a cemetery in Chengdu for victims of the Cultural Revolution; the persecution of the authors of An Investigation of China's Peasantry; the story of Jiang Yanyong, the doctor who exposed the AIDS cover-up; the tribulations of Chen Yizhong, the trailblazing former editor of the Southern Metropolis Daily, and the harassment of the the blind activist Chen Guancheng.