With the curiosity of a beginner
Imagine exploring your research terrain as a beginner, with all the curiosity, liveliness, and sensory awareness […] of an animal, a child, or just someone young at heart. What catches your eye, or your nose? What delights you? When you look at your project through fresh eyes, what can you see that you couldn’t before? (From #AcWriMoments Day 3)
I still remember what it felt like to ‘find’ the army songs. The singer in me couldn’t help but sight-sing the scores provided in the tomes I found in the library. Or that one time I found the Manchukuo radio program schedule in a scanned copy of the Manson ilbo (the only Korean-language newspaper in Manchukuo after 1937). I imagined the type of person who might have had access to a radio: them turning it on, tuning to the right station, listening to a radio drama or music before bed at night. Those were exciting finds.
I’m getting caught between thinking through this prompt as a student versus as a researcher. My primary texts are so well hidden that a person would have to have a certain base of knowledge first and be extra curious in order to find them. Is that not the way with archival research, thought? I imagine presenting the texts to a student who doesn’t have to go find them, yet does have to read and make sense of them. I imagine my student M, for example, who is interested in humor in literature, reading Imamura Eiji’s ‘The Crossings’ or An Sugil’s ‘Kitchen Girl’ comparing the ways these stories use humor and to what end. That would be a very new experience for her, and I wonder if she would enjoy it.
I wonder what M would learn about Manchuria by doing such a project. I had the fortune of studying about a place where I had lived. When I read something about the big avenues of Changchun in a text, I remembered walking down Renmin dajie or Ziyou dalu (not that they were called by such names in the 1940s). I could still feel the big trees and the June pollen. When the characters in ‘The Crossings’ started on their journey, I could recall the flat terrain and the late summer monsoons. And, oh, the winters! When the soldiers, be they Chinese or Korean, sang about ‘warring in the snow’, I could hear the quiet crunch of a fresh fall underfoot, the drooping branches of the pine trees laden with the white fluff. M wouldn’t have had that first-hand experience. On top of that, she would read those works as ‘Chinese’ by virtue of them being produced in the wider geographical area of China. Would she be able to sense the nuances of the place? And so what if she couldn’t? How important is that for undertaking research of literature from Manchuria/Manchukuo?
By pondering on this prompt, what can I see that I couldn’t see before? Looking at the Manchukuo era from the perspective of humor would be an interesting study. Comparing comics in the newspapers there to newspapers in the south might be informative. Did writers in Manchukuo use humor differently or for a different purpose than other Chinese writers? Well, both of the stories I cited above were actually written by Koreans (even though I have translated them from Chinese translations), so would it be more suitable to compare them to Korean writers? Thinking of other texts I have studied, such as Wai Wen’s Chinese translation of the stage play The Tale of Chunhyang and An Xi’s radio play Zhu Maichen, it’s like there is a boiling point where the humor turns into rage…which makes me wonder if that tactic works because these are scripts instead of prose?
As an addendum to this #AcWriMoments prompt from last year, this year’s initiative Tarot for Scholars, starts very fittingly with the Fool card. I won’t go into the symbolism and meaning of the card (for now), but I will say this: I would be a fool not to take on the research project I described above!