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In this interview, Charles Laughlin talks with Zhang Fang about his graduate studies with C.T. Hsia and David Der-wei Wang; his research on reportage literature; desire and politics in Red Classics; and Chinese Studies as a discipline in the United States. The original interview was published in Cultural Studies (Wenhua yanjiu ~X-ffî%) no. 4 (2016): 75-84.
Zhang Fang: Greetings, Professor Laughlin! Thank you for meeting me here in Yanjiao, Hebei, outside of Beijing.
Charles Laughlin: In the past few years I've stayed in Yanjiao just about every time I've come to China, and I see something new every time. To me, Yanjiao is a "gate-way city"; a place where special things happen. Here you can see people from all over China from all social strata, and in a short time experience China's rapid pace of development unfolding before your eyes. You could say it's a microcosm of contemporary Chinese society.
An Education Across East and West
ZF: Can you talk a bit about how your relationship to China started, and how you got into Sinology?
CL: Before I went to college, I was already interested in Asian culture. When I was about fourteen years old, I met someone from my church who was learning martial arts. He knew a lot about Buddhism and Daoism, and he eventually became a professor of East Asian philosophy himself. At his recommendation, I read an English translation of the Dao de jing (D.C. Lau's Penguin edition of the Tao Te Ching), even scrawling immature moral observations in the margins. In 1970s America, people knew a lot more about Japan than about China, so Chinese culture to me was a big mystery. That was during the Cultural Revolution, and so once in a while we could see some images coming out of China, such as the portraits of Chairman Mao, throngs of people wearing blue and green cotton jackets waving the Little Red Books, and so on. These images were a stark contrast with the received idea of China as an ancient civilization with a deep philosophical and literary heritage, and the contrast made me very curious.
I entered college and, after some uncertainty about what to major in, I tried out East Asian Studies. I began to learn...