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Number 7 Summer 2007
Shansi’s 2 nd
Century
Senior Editor Lenny Krull Hirschberger • Profiles Editor Judy Manwell Moore • Short Profiles Editor Paul Brockmann
Editor, continued on page 2
From the Editor
We approach our Centennial year with unreserved anticipation and excitement. Look in these pages for a report on this spring’s OCAlum/ Shansi sponsored trip to China including a visit to the site of our beginnings – the old Ming Hsien buildings lying within the present Shanxi Agricultural University campus in Taigu. Shanxi Agricultural University is slated to celebrate its Centennial on August 26, 2007. Carl and Deb will be there as will Shansi Board Chair, Anuradha Needham and Trustee Tim Liang and his wife Ping. Former Taigu Fellow currently residing in Beijing, Lee Ambrozy, also hopes to be there.
We have also included an outline of the extraordinary Shansi Centennial events scheduled for graduation weekend May 23-25 2008.
In this issue we hear from Bill Speidel , (Taiwan ’57- 59, ’67-73) who was also accompanying lecturer on the China trip; Zoe Sherinian , (India, ’85-87) Oberlin Shansi Trustee Elizabeth Osborn Sunindyo, (Indonesia, ’93-
- and Kitty Barnhouse Purgason, (Korea ’75-77, Shanxi ’80-82).
We have gratefully received a positive response to our call for a new Connections editor to commence following the Centennial issue. Any other
Bill Speidel, advocate: language, the secret of insight
Taiwan 1957-59; 1967-
An early fascination with
language…
For Bill Speidel – long time Shansi
participant, meticulous observer of
Chinese-American relations, first
Director of the Peace Corps in China
–it all began, and it continues, with
language. One of his earliest memories
is of his familiar, comfortable dad
suddenly entering another world
where Bill could not follow, as the
elder Speidel talked animatedly in
Korean with a student waiter from
Korea at a restaurant near their
Charlottesville, Virginia home. Bill
had been born in country towards the end of his father’s stint as English teacher 1930-36. Art objects
and home movies evoked this place that seemed part of his heritage, if not of the language that made
everyday life move along in Charlottesville, that defined “what boys did.” Somewhere in the back of
Bill’s mind glimmered another world, and his “expander” father signaled that one could reach for it.
He dug into Latin and Spanish in high school, then French at Oberlin…he never forgot the thrill of
hearing a Quebecois boy ask, “Ou demeurez-vous?” and being able to answer.
….and where that led…
As a young adult he studied not words but rocks, majoring in geology at Oberlin, with a junior year
at St. Andrew’s in Scotland. But by the end of senior year he knew a lifetime analyzing the chemical
composition of crystals was not for him, so on a whim he applied to Shansi. Or more than just a
whim. His dad was clearly deeply gratified. Accepted, he then broke it to Shansi trustees that by now
he knew he planned on taking a wife along. Elena Rasch was duly “checked out” at tea with Florence
Fitch, Shansi Board Chair. She passed muster, and Bill and Elena Speidel arrived in Taiwan in 1957
to teach English for two years at Tunghai University. Both threw themselves into the life of the very
new campus on a bare windswept hillside studded with airy, low classroom buildings and dorms. It
can’t have been easy – the newly-minted marriage, the very different culture, the language. But they
made it look that way to the rest of us – unflappably open, generous and hospitable.
Bill remembers being “blown away” by the intensive summer course in Chinese, which we took at
Yale before going. There we learned about the “radicals” which are the keys to grasping Chinese
characters. On scene in Taiwan, he found himself collecting characters as he might once have fossil
specimens, rewarded by store signs and bus labels that to him yielded up their secrets (while the rest
of us remained content to ask passers-by where to get the bus). By departure time in 1959 he had
command of 2000 characters and counting. He was hooked for life.
Speidel, continued on page 2
The Speidel Family gathered for a photo in 1973 while serving as Senior Reps in Taiwan. Pictured (L to R) are Lisa, Bill, Kiki, Elena, Joe and Robyn.
members of the Shansi family interested in writing or serving this publication, please contact Deb Cocco (Deborah.Cocco@oberlin. edu) or the Lenny Krull Hirschberger editor (windmill@worldpath.net.)
From the Regions
There were memorable Shansi gatherings out there in the hustings this spring. Steve Bloom , (India, ’84-86) and his wife Elsie Kappler hosted a well-attended potluck at their home in Washington, DC. Shansi Executive Director Carl Jacobson and former rep attendees are identified under the photograph. Don Farley, (Chengdu and Taigu ’48-51) and Martha hosted a gathering at their Chicago home in March. Charles Hayford, (OC Dept of History ’71-78) currently visiting scholar in history at Northwestern University, presented a short program on challenges of cultural relativism, entitled, “Do Chinese Firemen Wear Red Suspenders?” Among the attendees there were Alexa Hand , (Taiwan’76-78) Charlotte Briggs, (Japan’86-88) Caroline Bailey (Japan ’77-79) and Greg Meyer (India ’94-96). And on the occasion of the Association of Asian Studies conference in Boston, also in March, nearly a dozen alums and former Shansi reps gathered for happy hour hosted by Shansi, and dinner following at a local Indian restaurant. Former reps at that gathering included Anne Richmond (India ’83-85) Tim Henrich (Japan ’96-98) Zoe Sherinian (India ’85-87) Tanya Lee (China’94-96) Jennifer Feeley (China ’98-
- David Wank (China ’80-82) and Lenny Krull Hirschberger (Taiwan ’54-56).
E-mail Addresses for people in this issue zsherinian@ou.edu katherine.purgason@biola.edu wmspeidel@aol.com erspeidel@aol.com esunindyo@yahoo.com
Editor, continued from page 1
Giving up fossils for living words
Back at Oberlin for the then-obligatory year on campus, he embraced that addiction
to collecting characters, with much encouragement from history professor and
one-time “Shansi Rep” Ells Carlson (China 1939-43). He resolutely veered away
from rocks and into “soft sciences.” Profiting from the dread of “Red China” with
a Defense Department grant, he entered Yale’s brand-new program in Chinese
history. He thrived on the rigorous course of study that was out to prove itself, and
continued to amass language. Meanwhile Elena brought home her own adventures
with the worlds circumscribed by the words we use. She supported them by working
on English definitions for what would become the 1,000-page Dictionary of Spoken
Chinese. She was struck sometimes by the way the Chinese authors seemed to bring
archaic meanings from a bygone world; they had been away from home so very long,
talking to only each other about China, the Chinese.
Going back
The Shansi Board eventually lured the Speidels back to Tunghai as “Senior Reps,”
1967-73. These were tumultuous years for their home country. Vietnam years. Bill
recalls the demand by Taiwan Foreign Affairs Police that he “throttle” the Reps
and other young Western teachers who started an anti-war demonstration on an
American military compound. Bill has a way of listening respectfully and then,
as though examining a fossil specimen whose mysteries elude him, shrugging
regretfully. Shrugging before impenetrable reality. “There is nothing I can do.” We
don’t know that his response enhanced Chinese understanding of the limits of one
American’s control over the actions of other Americans. But it would, if nothing else,
help prepare Bill for the years 1993-99, when as first Director of the Peace Corps
in China, he and Elena and an intrepid group of volunteer English teachers lived in
western China under the unrelenting surveillance of another “Foreign Affairs Police.”
That, however, is a story for another time. Bill hopes to work on his memoirs.
An English teachers’ Sunday discussion group started by the Speidels was a great
success at Tunghai. Bill recalls exploring the nuances of English idioms and other
topics; as they had in the 1950s, the Speidels made their home a center of good food,
good talk and much (perhaps irreverent) laughter.
And now they were raising young children. They would have four, three born in
Taiwan. Since, as Americans, we are lucky enough to know we can go home when
and if we choose, the Speidels took care that the children knew their roots, exposing
them both to Chinese school and to Elena’s home schooling of the American sort.
One way and another all four absorbed the Chinese language; second daughter Kiki
picked up Bill’s fascination with it, and now teaches at Swarthmore.
Now, from Charlottesville, looking back
Bill remembers a sense that Chinese friends, whether longing for Mainland homes
or chafing under Kuomintang occupation of Taiwan, possessed a deep resignation
to the flow of history quite alien to Americans. Dominated for a while by the brash
young USA, needing to absorb enough English to get there for study of technology,
they would yet prevail. And so it may be. Bill is intrigued to find newly-comfortable
members of the middle class now free to sink themselves into ancient arts
- calligraphy, poetry - reclaiming some of humanity’s most sublime expressions of
spirit in words.
Bill sees that an organization like Shansi can open us, “us” and “them,” not only to
the mysteries of “the other’s” language, but to that gut sense of the world which both
informs a language and is determined by it. Without such openings, one remains like
the bewildered little boy Bill Speidel as his dad and a young Korean left him behind.
They did leave Bill with glimmers from another world, which draw him on.
Judy Moore, Taiwan 1956-
Speidel, continued from page 1
Former Fellows gathered at the home of Steven Bloom and Elsie Kappler. Pictured seated (L to R) are Bill Speidel, Heather Banks, Anne Elder, and John Elder. Standing (L to R) are Steven Bloom, Amon Killeen, Paul Lall, Paul Lewis, Nancy Spelman, Doug Spelman, Victoria Der, Diana D’Agostino, Leslie Kennedy Elder, Margaret Spearman, and John Elder.
upper caste Christian leadership and practices. Protestant Christian music has been dominated by Western missionary hymn traditions and upper caste classical Indian Karnatak music. Appavoo has sought to create and transmit a liberating theology and liturgy by using indigenous Dalit folk music, village culture, agricultural metaphors, the parai drumming with its syncopated rhythms, and elements of Dalit religions and politics, all of which were traditionally dismissed by upper castes as “degraded”. This subject has possessed and inspired Zoe’s research and activism ever since her first exposure.
Professionally, on the move…
Recently, she has completed her book entitled Songs of Dalit Transformation: Tamil Folk Music as Liberation Theology and participated in a panel on the music of Indian religious and social minorities at the ‘07 Asian Studies Association conference in Boston. Along with former rep Tanya Lee, she has organized the October ’07 Asian Music and Dance Symposium at Oberlin, and in April ’08 will participate in the Shansi Centennial Symposium with a session on missionary musical encounters. She is currently Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Oklahoma School of Music where she just received tenure.
Zoe was selected to write a piece for the profiles segment of the Shansi Centennial book One Hundred Years in the Life of Shansi coming out in
- No one else could write her story so compellingly, and so we present it here, Zoe Sherinian’s Shansi story in her own words.
Lenny Krull Hirschberger, Taiwan 1954-
One World: Intersecting Lives
By Dr. Zoe Carey Sherinian
Perched next to a pile of books on my office shelf that includes Moon’s Growing Up Untouchable in India , Devasahayam’s Frontiers of Dalit Theology , and Raj and Dempsey’s Popular Christianity in India sits a yellowing certificate in a thick clear plastic picture frame. In beautiful calligraphy it reads “As an Oberlin Shansi Representative …we present this token of our trust…With it go our hopes for your happiness and our confidence that you and your new Asian friends will find that you have much to share from your different experiences and cultural backgrounds.” I was never one to properly hang photos and degrees, but this simple plastic frame with the yellowing, hand lettered page has always found a place on my desk. Its promise of shared experience of difference has become a mutual life-story and the coming full circle of several other stories; the primary link in this circle is Oberlin Shansi. My Shansi experience in India from 1985-1987 brought me into a relationship with the Madurai Christian community, a network of individuals and institutions that has not only changed my life, but directed my career and passions towards researching the historical process of indigenizing Tamil Christian music and the contemporary struggle to create a musical theology for Dalits (formerly called untouchables) from their own folk cultural resources. The mission history of Shansi and the Christian identity of the Indian colleges with which Shansi is associated is something many reps simply accept. It was not until I began to research the history of the American Madura mission, Lady Doak College’s mission sponsor, for my dissertation that I realized my personal relationship to this history and the larger intersections between my family, Oberlin College, and Shansi. My relationship with Shansi and my scholarship on Dalit Christian music represents a link to the Armenian branch of my family that was helped by missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (the same society that was in Madurai) in Turkey before and during the genocide of two million Armenians by the Turks in 1916. Three little girls who survived, my grandmother among them, arrived in 1920 at Ellis Island knowing no English except the song “Jesus Loves Me.” Whether these Armenian immigrants understood what they were singing or not, they believe it helped them get by the American health inspectors when one sister had conjunctivitis. Indeed, Mary Louise Partridge, one of the Oberlin missionaries who died in the Boxer Rebellion and is memorialized on the Shansi Arch, was the older sister to the American Board missionary Ernest C. Partridge (OC 1891?) who helped my great uncle John Minassian, a student at the American Teacher’s College in Sivas, during the genocide by the Turks (See John Minassian 1986: 12, 17, 238). As I focused my graduate scholarship on Dalits in India and the reclaiming of their folk music as a means to reform Protestant liturgy and theology in the Church of South India, a cry to contribute to social justice through my academic work rang loudly; justice for the Armenians whose genocide is still not recognized by Turkey, for the untouchable Christians who are still oppressed within the church and by the greater society, and for my own communities of women and those of alternative sexual and gender orientations that are an essential part of my identity and life’s meaning. In my experience, Shansi is made of people with a passion for justice and helping others. I am grateful for the inspiration that so many in this family have given me. It was a relationship with a returned Shansi rep that inspired me to apply for Shansi. It was the mentorship of my Professor and Shansi board member Rod Knight that sparked my interests in Indian music. The passion for Tamil in former reps Nedumaran, David Buck, Jim Lindholm and Sam Sudhanandha helped me attain the literary skills to understand the beauty of this language and culture. My first lesson from Nedumaran ,“Tamil Varha” (Tamil lives), sparked my pro-Dravidian consciousness. It was a new kind of intimate friendship possible with lecturers at Lady Doak College that sustained my two years there. My sisterhood with my Dalit Christian cook, Mary, gave me the skills in spoken Tamil and the glimpse beyond the privileged walls of LDC that drove my interest to study the intersections of caste, class, and gender in Tamil music. The mentorship of Dr. Joe Elder, first rep to India, helped me return to Madurai to do research. The community of the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary, a cousin institution of LDC and American College, nurtured and directed my dissertation topic towards Dalits and their theology through music. The model of former reps historian Dennis Hudson and theologian Charley Ryerson showed me the way to analyze in writing the complexities of this community. It was the Dalit theologian and composer Rev. James Theophilus Appavoo who so generously provided his life and music for me to understand and write One World, continued on page 5
Zoe, continued from page 3
Oberlin College Alum/Oberlin Shansi April ’07 Trip to China
It was that brochure! That’s what they said. The beautiful brochure describing the Oberlin College Alum/Shansi sponsored April ’07 trip to China, with China specialist Bill Speidel , Taiwan, ’57-59, as accompanying lecturer, was too inviting to turn down. And no one was disappointed!
Tightly scheduled, expertly guided, luxuriously accommodated and fed, the group bonded as they went, excited by the historic and modern sights of a China bursting with modernity and energy and anxious to please its guests. Oberlin Alumni Director Laura Gobbi was hugely helpful and a delightful travel companion. From the more candid of the guides one could learn or conclude something of what was not advertised aloud. But there was also candor about controversial issues, like the mile-long Three Gorges Dam project which will ultimately displace 1.3 million people, mainly farmers.
Certainly high points in the itinerary, which included Beijing, Xian, Taiyuan and Taigu, Lijiang, Kunming, Chongqing and Yichang, the Yangtze River Cruise, and Shanghai, were visits to the two Shansi partner universities: Shanxi Agricultural University in Taigu, and Yunnan University in Kunming.
The reception in Taigu was warm and celebrative, with Bill Speidel graciously serving as head and spokesman for Shansi and the entire group. We were also welcomed and joined by our current Fellows Morgan Ramsey-Elliot and Jacob Teter , who without a word of for-warning was asked to extemporaneously translate remarks by one of the University officers, which he did with great cool!
Our hosts were cordial and generous, but it was the endearing 70-year friend of Shansi, Professor Ji Yilun, (See Connections, Spring 2005) who stole the show, with an amazing oral history of the Ming Xian and Oberlin Shansi connection, from his student year 1937 through and beyond the war years, delivered flawlessly and without notes to a rapt Oberlin audience. He then lead us through the campus, identifying all the original school buildings setting amongst the new ones, but still very much in use.
The group was also welcomed at Yunnan University by Foreign Office and University officers who had arranged a tour of the campus including introduction by a staff paleontologist to their extraordinary exhibit of early Cambrian fossils of marine and plant organisms found in West China. Current Fellows Kristina Pfeifer, Lisa Sloane, Shoshannah Bramlett, and Aaron Judd joined us for lunch, sharing their experiences and insider insights. All of our Fellows did credit to us.
Former reps on this trip included lecturer Bill Speidel, Heather Banks (Taiwan ’64-66), and Lenny Hirschberger (Taiwan ’54-56). At the farewell banquet in Shanghai on the last night, we were joined by Lenny’s student Ch’i Hsi Sheng, first graduating Tunghai Class ’59, and recipient of a Shansi post-grad fellowship for study at Oberlin. Hsi Sheng and his wife Liang Siwei, now living in Shanghai, made a special and costly effort to shorten a visit in the U.S. in order to attend this event. Hsi-sheng has been in contact with Bill Speidel over the years, has had an extraordinary life in academia, and will be subject of a future profile in Connections.
And who said something about the next China tour – the Silk Route???
Lenice Krull Hirschberger, Taiwan 1954-
(L to R) Old friends Lenny Krull Hirschberger, Heather Banks, Taiwan ’64-66, Ch’i Hsi Sheng (Shansi Visiting Scholar from Taiwan ’61-62), his wife, Liang Siwei, and Bill Speidel gathered at a special dinner in Shanghai.
One World, continued from page 4
degree in TESOL in hand, recruited to serve as a senior rep. With but one year of Mandarin from Pittsburgh under belt, she dove in, continuing language study under the insistent volunteer tutorship of an animal husbandry grad student She taught, designed curriculum and courses, taught teachers to teach, and smoothed a few hard edges in these tender new relationships with the host institutions in Taigu and Taiyuan. Returning home in ’82, Kitty entered a PhD program in Applied Linguistics TESOL at UCLA, taught at William Carey University in Pasadena, and is now Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Biola University in La Mirada, CA. She has received two Fulbrights, training teachers of English in both Turkey and Turkmenistan. She is married to Lee Purgason, Chief Operating Officer at William Carey, and has two children, a daughter Cara, 20, and a son David, 17. It all began with Shansi, Kitty says, and after two years as a rep, I knew I was hooked, and TESOL was where I wanted to be. Lenny Krull Hirschberger, Taiwan 1954-
about. Finally, it was the opportunity to spend two years in India that molded me to be a scholar of South Asia; one of the essential characteristics that brought my life partner Elyssa Faison (Oberlin ’88) and I together. Indeed, while she was not a Shansi rep, Shansi helped her make the necessary connections with the Japanese Ministry of Education program that took her to Japan. This eventually led her to become a historian of Japan. Shansi has always been a community of well-intentioned risk takers. Whether the reasons that motivated these individuals to go to Asia or to come to Oberlin at their particular time in history were missionary, linguistic, anthropological, musical, or a practical way to start a career, they have all embodied the Oberlin charge to go out in the world--way out in the world for a long period of time--to form deep long lasting relationships with people from whom they learned and to whom they gave of themselves. The Shansi legacy is the Oberlin legacy. I hope in my life and work that I am able to give back, in at least some small way, to the “One World” that Shansi creates.
TESOL, continued from back cover
