JarJar Nixon's Blues Kitchen

Visited today the elegeant Asian Reading Room in the Library of Congress. It was all wood and leather-bound volumes and the few researchers poring over documents were wrapped in monastic quiet and sobriety. It felt like I was an extra in a scene from "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." While waiting to meet the specialist in Vietnamese reference works I opened a copy of John King Fairbank's last book, a wide-ranging book on China published the year of his death in 1990. Skimming the first chapter brought me back 22 years to my first semester at George Washington University's grad school, when I read Fairbanks' classic work on modern China's response to the West. I still have etched in the grad school compartment of my brain the sudden shock of having to read thousands of pages a week in Professor Bill Johnson's Chinese History seminar and in being urged to think criticially about the works I supposedly had mastered. I would try to memorize all the historic details, and then Prof. Johnson would open the seminar with a question such as, "That book was written about the 19th century, but what was he really saying about our times?" and everything I had prepared to say would just melt away into incoherence. I probably learned more about big picture thinking and practiced skepticism than in any other class I have ever had; if i had to point to one essential course that I could not remove from my my feeble mental toolkit, that would be it. I am sure that the Asian Reading Room of the LoC has taken many other visitors away to a similar portal in their minds.