Oral History Interview with Madeleine Zelin

Takayasu: Today is March 25th, 2021. This is Sach Takayasu of the Columbia University Oral History Master of Arts program. I am honored to interview Professor Madeleine Zelin today for the oral history project of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Professor Zelin, do I have your consent to record your interview today?

 

Zelin: Yes, you do.

 

Takayasu: Thank you. Could you please say your full name with spelling?

 

Zelin: Madeleine, M A D E L E I N E. Zelin, Z as in zebra. E L I, N as in Nancy.

 

Takayasu: Great. Today's interview is being conducted not in person, but remotely using Zoom. I am calling in from New York City. Professor Zelin, could you please tell us where you are?

 

Zelin: I am also in New York City, not too far from where I should be in my office.

 

Takayasu: Great. I would like to start out with an introduction of Professor Zelin because we may not be able to cover all the amazing accomplishments she has.

 

Takayasu: Professor Madeleine [H.] Zelin is the Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies at Columbia University. Professor Zelin joined the Weatherhead Asian Institute as a faculty member in 1979. She teaches modern Chinese history, as well as Chinese legal and economic history and courses on legal history and the history of industrial revolutions.

Professor Zelin served as a director for the Institute first in 1992–1993 academic year and then over six academic years, starting from the fall semester of 1995 through the summer semester of 2001. She served again as an acting director in the fall semester of 2017.

Professor Zelin is the winner of the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for the academic year 2019–2020. In that same period, Dr. Zelin delivered the 2019 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures, for which she delivered three lectures on the emergence of modern company law in China.

Her book, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Enterprise in Early Modern China, was praised with numerous awards, including the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Alan Sharlin Memorial Book Award of the Social Science History Association. Professor Zelin has also authored The Magistrate's Tael, translated Mao Dun's Rainbow, and coauthored many works.

For her significant contribution to the study of China's business, culture and legal practice, Columbia University honor her by hosting a conference in 2014. Scholars gathered from around the world to celebrate this event, titled “Beyond Modernity: Understanding Change in China.”

Professor Zelin has served as a trustee of the Business History Conference, where she is a longstanding member of the editorial board of its journal, Enterprise & Society. And, she is the founding board member of the International Society for Chinese Law and History.

Professor Zelin received her Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University and her PhD from University of California at Berkeley.

She is married, has two sons and a grandchild. Professor Zelin is also an avid flutist.

Thank you, Professor Zelin, for taking the time today.

 

Zelin: Thank you.

 

Takayasu: You have been with the Weatherhead [East Asian Institute] both as a faculty and the director. Before we get into your first stint as a director, could you share with us what it was like to be in Weatherhead leading up to that point?

 

Zelin: I came in 1979. And as a young, not yet tenured faculty member, most of my colleagues at the Institute were men, some of them considerably older than I was. Most of them were interested in problems that one could group together under the rubric of foreign policy, politics, international and international comparative politics and so on.

I came into the Institute as the modern Chinese historian at Columbia, but actually was primarily interested in the18th century at that time. So, it was very interesting standing up for the importance of language and history and culture and so on in trying to interpret the contemporary world, which is what most of the people around me were primarily interested in.

 

Takayasu: You were one of the few women and up until 1992, there were no women director. In fact, you were the first one. So how did this come to be?

 

Zelin: I think in the usual way. They needed someone who is going to take on all the work of being the director and they took a vote among the faculty and asked me to do it. Actually, I started out replacing Andy [Andrew J.] Nathan when he went on leave. So, I guess at that point, they didn't contemplate having me for as many years as they did. But they must have been happy with the way I did things during that year. And then when Professor Nathan's term was over, they asked me to continue on in my own right. So that's how it came about.

 

Takayasu: When you heard that you were up for this role, how did that make you feel?

 

Zelin: I was not happy, actually [laughs]. Because to be honest, I had a young child and I already had tenure and I was already, I think at that point, a full professor. I really wondered how I'd be able to juggle all of the responsibilities that are entailed in running the Institute, which even during the time that I was there, it was becoming more and more active and more and more arenas of scholarship and international outreach and domestic outreach and so on and so forth. So if I remember correctly, I said, “No, thank you.” And then they came back and said, "Please, please, please." And then I did it. And I always I loved it. It was really wonderful.

 

Takayasu: I will definitely ask you about what was challenging, but what did you love about it?

 

Zelin: What did I love about it? A lot of things. First of all, I loved the opportunity to really work hard. And it necessitated working hard at that time within the university to make sure that non-Western, non-US, non-European, ways of being in the world, whether historically or contemporarily became really important aspect of the university's work.

 

This isn't to say that there weren't other people who felt the same way. But it certainly became the case that in the 1990s, through my own work and the work of a number of other Institute directors at that time, we really were able to make a big push to try and make sure that the university was thinking more and more about the ways in which the international and particularly places like India, Africa—I worked with the African Institute to help them get their Title VI grant from the US government—and Latin America, to make sure that those aspects of human experience really were very much at the forefront of what was going on in the university. And the irony is, of course, today, I don't think students would believe that you had to work for that. But it certainly was the case that you had to work for it then. And I was delighted to have the chance to work with a number of institute directors who were really wonderful, dynamic people. And so that was one part of it.

Another part was that I got a bigger office [laughs]. Director's office is very big. I remember my son coming in and thinking like, Oh, you must be very important now because you have a sofa and chairs and [laughs] a coffee table as well as a poky little place where you do your own work. And at that time, I had actually one of the smallest offices in the Institute. So, I was really glad to have that big space because it also became a place where a lot of conversations took place.

It was the beginning of a really robust exchange between the United States academic institutions and many institutions abroad, and particularly Chinese institutions. In the years after 1989, we began to get back into a more regularized process of exchange. At some point, we had so many visitors coming that you really wished that they didn't come so frequently. But it was really nice because you got to meet people from all different academic arenas and also people from the diplomatic community. Being director, you were invited to the Council on Foreign Relations and you were invited to meet with people in the consular staff within New York. It was really wonderful. Actually, if I remember correctly, it was also during that time that I became very involved with The National Committee on US-China Relations [Inc.] and served on their board for three years. So that again was an even greater expansion of my horizons that I wouldn't have had as just a professor of history, getting to meet a lot of people in the business world who were interested in China and again, also being able to work with people from different disciplines throughout the country in trying to have an impact on US-China policy and also on exchange and educating people outside of academia.

 

Takayasu: I cannot wait to cover your directorship from 1995 to 2001 when you really expanded the collaboration. But staying on the first directorship for the moment.

 

Zelin: Well, these things did not all happen during the first from ‘92 to ‘93 [laughter]. I'm really talking more expansively what happened throughout that time.

 

Takayasu: So this sounded like a lot of work. How did you manage with a small child?

 

Zelin: How did I manage? Well, it's funny. I mean, I was very lucky. There is a kind of. I mean, the other side of it and it's not a secret, is that I was already divorced by 1990. My ex at that time had lived in England, so it was not quite but sort of like being a single parent. And I'm very empathetic towards my female colleagues who are now trying to juggle all the responsibilities of being a woman in academia or indeed in any field. Even when their husbands are there, they're not necessarily providing the kind of help that's always needed to be able to pursue your career in the way that you would want.

I have to say, I was very lucky in two respects. On the one hand, I had a spectacular, amazing son. I have two sons, but my other son didn't come into my life until 12 years after the first, and he is the biological child of my present husband. He's also a wonderful child [laughs]. But I wasn't starting my career when I had him. I started my career by having my first son. And he was just always, like any kid, he was a pain in the neck a lot of the time [laughs]. But he was wonderfully curious. He would go with me to dinners when I was meeting with important people. And he would be my arm candy [laughs]. And he worked very hard. I didn't have to always be yelling at him.

And I would also have the added advantage of living in a building at Columbia. And I don't know if all of the faculty housing is this wonderful, but it just happened to be a building that had several other children around my son's age who became like a little Rat Pack. And if you needed some time, they would go stay at the other person's house and vice versa. And so we were all very helpful with each other and taking care of our kids. So I was very fortunate.

But we didn't have maternity leave in those days. We didn't have and to be honest, I don't know for sure what people do have now, but we didn't have any kinds of subsidized child care. I think the FSA [Flexible Spending Account] didn't even come into existence until much, much later when my son was older and I didn't need to hire childcare. So it wasn't easy, but I was blessed in many respects to be able to do it. Was there another aspect to that question?

 

Takayasu: It's a lovely story about your son and how wonderful he was. And maybe it would be just lovely to take us through, like, that one day I was just about to leave and then this happened and all that kind of—.

 

Zelin: I have to say, there's no stories about me. I was just a mother. It was the kids who are incredible. I have to say [laughs] it was funny because there was there's one faculty member whose kid was very, very close with my son. And then another person who was on the staff whose son also was very close to my son. They used to just run from apartment to apartment. They actually asked me at one point whether we couldn't just build like a tunnel from one apartment to the other because it would just be much easier if they didn't have to go outside and put their shoes on. So it was really wonderful. And the staff, the doorman, always looked out for our kids and the elevator guys. In those days we actually had manual elevators. I have to say it was a real community in this particular building, which I won't name. But I think it was a blessing.

 

Takayasu: You mentioned your son being very impressed with your office. Was it common for children to be in the Institute?

 

Zelin: It wasn't uncommon. By the 1990s—I don't remember when Eugenia Lean showed up what year it was—but some of these staff women had kids and we always had great parties. We always invited everybody's children and graduate students' children and so on. So it's a very warm and kind of homey place, I think, at the East Asian Institute. And I certainly hope that part of that is because I was director for the ‘90s and then after that, you're not going to change the culture. It was already sort of deeply embedded in it. They didn't hang out there all the time, but they came by quite often. I know that most of my colleagues have met certainly my older son and I know other people's kids. I remember when people, whether it was faculty or members of the staff when they had babies, I used to make little things for that. I used to knit them a blanket or needlepoint, a picture or something like that. Now I have arthritis, so [laughs] I can't do it so much. But yes, there was that kind of, where we would have Secret Santa exchanges at Christmas. I think a lot of that also had to do with the wonderful executive directors that we had over the years, all of whom, as far as I can remember, except for one, were women. So it wasn't exactly a non-female place. But in terms of faculty, it took a while until we started to get more and more female faculty. And now there's a nice mix.

 

Takayasu: Does it help to have that mix?

 

Zelin: It certainly does. You spend a large part of your time in the office. And I think that women tend to interact with each other in ways that perhaps male colleagues don't. You talk about your kids. You worry about your parents and things like that. And some of our male faculty also are very warm and do get engaged in conversations like that, but I find that the women tend to hang out more together. In fact, the other day, we had [laughs] a staff and faculty hang out in the dog park in Morningside Park because we haven't seen each other in a year. And it was so, so nice. I'm looking forward to that again. Not necessarily the dog part [laughter]. There were some big dogs that kept jumping on us [laughs]. Anyway.

 

Takayasu: So one of the things that fascinated me about your directorship is it's not like you were able to step away from being a faculty. You still had to do your teaching obligation.

 

Zelin: Yes, in those days, you got one course off for the work that you did as a director. I think now you get two courses off. But in those days, it was one. And you still had to do your other teaching, which I wouldn't have wanted to give up. Having one-off made it doable. But I have certain courses that I teach every year for the undergraduate program in particular. And I have a very large cohort of PhD and MBA students. The MA students came a little later, but that was one of the things that actually evolved during my directorship.

 

But PhD students were always extremely important to the work that we do at the Institute. And I think we provided for the PhD students who study East Asia at Columbia, something that they don't necessarily get in other places because of the programing that we do, the efforts that we make to bring students together from different fields, which again, was one of the things that we can talk about that we were able to do in the last years of my directorship, or at least set up in the last years of my directorship because of the Weatherhead endowment that we received. The opportunities for workshops, the opportunities for socializing. We have a number of different student groups that we run. And the ways in which we try to enrich the opportunities of students in the PhD programs across the arts and sciences who are interested in East Asia.

 

So I wouldn't have wanted to give that up. And in fact, during the years that I was director and then during the following decade—I think I've been at Columbia now for four of those decades—and during that time, I've sponsored, supervised, mentored, whatever word you want to use, 40 students that are really my own students and many more who were students of other people who I was also privileged to work with. So that aspect of it, I wouldn't have wanted to give up at all.

 

Takayasu: Why didn't you want to give up the PhD students?

 

Zelin: Why? Because they're so smart. You learn so much from them. I can't tell you how many times thinking about issues that I'm interested in, I've had a conversation with the student, or was working with them on their dissertation or, just having them in class and they'll say something and, Wow, I got to pursue that. So that's one aspect. I think that's true of all faculty. I think the undergraduates do that, too. But they aren't as committed to the profession as the PhD students are, and so they're not necessarily thinking in the same ways that we are, but they are pretty amazing.  

But also because you don't lose touch with what's happening now. I remember when I was a grad student at Berkeley—I won't mention his name—but I was sitting in the library of the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley, which was also a wonderful place, and happened to get into a conversation with a professor, not from Columbia, not from Berkeley, but from somewhere else who was, I think, 20 or 30 years older than me and he was towards the end of his career and I asked him—. I was studying for my PhD exams, which are the thing that scares all PhD students, because you've to show that you have a command of your field and you feel like you never have enough time to read it all and then you're going to read it and you're going to forget it. It's really one of those sort of traumas that people go through [laughs], which I think are actually quite useful because they show you at the end, how much you really do know and how poised and articulate you can be. But also because it's sort of like a mini example of what we do every day in talking to people about the things we study. So anyway, I was talking to this guy and I asked him how he keeps up on the literature because I remember when I first studied for my PhD exams, I think I had a list for China that maybe was five pages long. Now the list would be close to 50 pages long. So much has been written. China has become such a rich field over the last few decades. And he said, “Oh, after I got my job, I stopped reading” [laughs] and I thought, Oh, my God, how could you say that? I find that my students and their pursuit of their own particular projects is one of the main things that keeps me in tune with what new stuff is coming out because you just can't possibly keep up with all of it. And what interests them necessarily interests me. But one of the things I have to do is make sure that they don't lose sight of the stuff that was written a long time ago, which is really great. And so I always try when I'm teaching to throw in some things that you might call the classics, but you can’t neglect the new stuff either. So it's always a challenge. But having those students around is really one of the things that keep you, I wouldn't necessarily claim being really sharp, but it just it keeps you in the mix. And I really appreciate that.

 

Takayasu: It's not just appreciation, but the way you are able to enable the pursuit of their interest in a tangible way, whether it's creating the Tibet program or securing funding to enable fellows to go to the countries and study, you've done so much in your directorship to help these students pursue all their interests. And along the way, like you said, it helped the Institute. It seems to broaden their scope, particularly during your directorship. What you mentioned about earlier times when the Institute was focused on economy and politics and you were able to really bring in the humanities. Could you get into that a little bit, please?

 

Zelin: There's a humble side of me that doesn't want to say "I." I think it's always important that the person who's directing something is committed to something new or pushing things further than they had been before. But you never do it alone. And I certainly think that during the ‘90s, when I was director, I was very interested—. The Institute, as probably other people have discussed, is not an academic department. It's a research and programmatic institute. We do not have our own faculty. The faculty all come from departments around the university, really around the university. So that includes the business school and it includes the law school, the school of Social Work. More recently we've been very lucky to have people that work specifically on Asia come into the institute of architecture. It's everywhere.

 

The only place I think we don't have a really full member is maybe the Department of Surgery at the medical school [laughs]. But I don't think there's such a thing as East Asian surgery department. But anyway, let me just gather the thoughts where I was going. Oh, so my department, when I first came here, I'm in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department, and I also had what you might call a no-cost appointment in the history department. In other words, my salary comes out of East Asia. But I've always been a full member of the history department as well. And, it's funny because at Columbia, history is considered a social science. I think if I was more accurate, I would say that when I first came to the Institute, it was social science-oriented, not necessarily just diplomacy and politics and economics, but it was social science-oriented. And people who are in the humanities—largely people who are in East Asian languages and cultures or perhaps in art history, because we have anthropologists and so on in their social science—they did not feel as much a part of the mandate of the Institute.

And I think that's partly because of the way the Institute was founded.

 

Both the East Asian Institute and the Harriman Institute were founded right after World War II, and they really were oriented towards policy in this new global environment that was emerging in the postwar world. So one of the things that I felt was really important, as I said, from a pedagogical point of view, I really believe that if you're going to study political science, if you're going to study the economy, you've got to understand the society. But you can do it in a very contemporary way. How did we get there, and those big questions of why one place seems to do things differently than another. You can't just use some social science theory without really understanding context. While I don't like to think about what I do as just a utilitarian project of providing context for social scientists, I think that there's something really intellectually important about being able to understand literature and the arts and the history and the culture and everything else that makes up a society both in its time and in contemporary times.

 

But that wasn't going on so much within the Institute, and I thought that was too bad.

So I did work very hard to make that happen. It happened a little bit in that we had something called the East Asian Institute Certificate. Students who wanted to expand their understanding because they were getting the poli-sci in their poli-sci degree, could take a certificate and take some other courses to fill out that the requirements of the certificate. And one of those requirements was history, even then, before I came. In fact, that's one of the reasons why Eugenia Lean and I teach a very unusual course, which doesn't come up in other historical fields as much as probably we would like it to, whereas, you might get a one semester course on premodern someplace. In the China field, there was a one-semester ancient China course, a one-semester, early modern course, and then a one-semester modern China course. I used to teach the early modern and modern in two semesters. And then when Eugenia came, I gave her the 20th century part of it, because she does more 20th century than I did at the time. I do more 20th century now. And it was the sequence that most students who are doing the certificate might take. And at that time, the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) was also much more oriented towards regional studies. It was much more focused on providing students across a wide range of career aspirations with an understanding not only of theories of international relations and conflict resolution and finance and all of that which they are more focused on now, but to have students focus on particular regions. So we used to get large numbers of students in that school taking that two-semester sequence. I would say a third of my students were from SIPA and a third of my students were undergraduates, and a third of my students would be PhD Students who were not China students. So the Japan person in politics might take that course. So it was a different course than I'm teaching now, because now almost everybody is an undergraduate or masters student.

When I was director, it became clear that the people who were PhD students were taking so many classes and a lot of specifically discipline-oriented classes that they really were not engaging in the region in the way that the certificate had originally envisioned. The certificate had language requirements and it had remoteness requirements, you had to take other parts of the world in all of this. So at the time, Mark Von Hagen, who was the head of the Harriman Institute and sadly has left us—he's really left us now: he's died—and I got together with some of the other directors. But really at first the two of us pushed for the establishment of a standalone master's program that would be run out of the institutes. And that's the origin of our Masters in Regional Studies East Asia program. And now I think every institute has one.

And it's been very successful. It's been successful in part because it served a constituency, the constituency we hoped it would serve of people who either as undergraduates hadn't taken enough classes to really go immediately into a PhD program that dealt with East Asia. Maybe that school didn't have the languages and the courses, but also people coming from the diplomatic corps, especially in Southeast Asia. We had a lot of interest from Indonesia and from Singapore in particular, where they weren't getting programmatic education in China studies or in East Asian studies that they might have for a variety of reasons. Now, again, it's not so much the case. Singapore has these wonderful Asian studies programs that they didn't have at that time; in Indonesia, I think does as well. So, we have had all kinds of people. We had a guy who was a filmmaker and wanted to do film that had to do with Asia and didn't have a big background. So he came.

So we started this master's program and the master's program built on what we had always envisioned as what you needed to have a well-rounded introduction at the graduate level to East Asian studies, and it's still around. Some of those students go on to PhD programs and some of them go off to do other things. So that was another thing we did during that period when I was director.

You had said something that I want to clarify about fundraising. I did do fundraising [laughs]. I did some fundraising on my own. I did some fundraising in collaboration with colleagues. Being a director of an institute means you do fundraising because these institutes, for the most part—and there are a number of them in the university—we're not created out of the university's own funds. They came out of faculty devotion to a certain kind of vision of an educational and wider outreach process. Our Institute, and I'm probably going to get this wrong, but initially, I believe it had Ford Foundation funds and it also had funding from other foundations over the years.

Now, of course, we are blessed with the Weatherhead Foundation's funding, which was secured just in the last year or so when I was finishing up my last full term as director. And that allowed us to really expand the kinds of things that we did, offering postdocs, offering certain kinds of summer money for students of East Asia so that they could go abroad and do preliminary research during their years when they weren't quite at the stage of doing their dissertation so that when they got to the dissertation phase, they would really be ready. They know what was there. They know the archives. They know who their contacts were and also building community among the students.

So we started something called the Weatherhead Fellows Program, which we always award these fellowships to students who are from a variety of departments because we want to bring together students who wouldn't necessarily meet each other or when they're in the silos of their own academic departments and other things too. An undergraduate program, programs that enabled us to reach out to professionals and others in the city who are interested in East Asia, and so it's—. I won't mention all of it.

But I never did that; all of these things were done with other people. Some of the fellowships that I raised were because people came to me with ideas and I said, Well, I think what we ought to do is a fellowship. How does that sound to you [laughs]? And Why a fellowship and so on. And that's really the way it’s done. Anybody who thinks that, you just go knocking on doors and people say, Oh, I didn't know about you. Yes, I'd like to give you some money [laughs]. Very often it’s what you've done before that makes people think of you when they have a desire to give money. And then you have to have ideas. I know that my subsequent colleagues who became directors after me continued to do that. And we wouldn't be as vibrant and dynamic a place as we are.

 

Takayasu: That’s great. Thank you for sharing that. I actually would like to hear a little bit more about an example of a time when somebody brought you the idea.

 

Zelin: I’d be happy to. Sadly, I can’t remember the name of the gentleman who came to me. I only remember the person he wanted to memorialize and I don't remember exactly what year it was, but I was director. I remember very clearly, sitting in that big office [laughter] and this very lovely man came in and he said that he had worked in Asia and he had a certain amount of money and his wife had been a student of my predecessor, C. Martin Wilbur. And she, becoming a PhD under Professor Wilbur had meant so much to her and she had died very young. And so he came and said, “What can I do to memorialize her?”

So one of the things that I think is, the university really does try to provide the best that it can afford to support its graduate students, but it's never enough. And in East Asia field, well, in all fields, in the arts and sciences now. This is not the case when I first started. When I first started, every year, students had to apply for and pray that they got fellowships. So, you could be in your third year and suddenly not get fellowship support. That's just, it was true everywhere. And then at some point, the university and other peer universities began to put together packages where students now get five years of funding. If you study East Asia, five years is usually not enough. You've got languages, classical and modern, you've got more than one language, you've got to go into the field. The archives are not always so welcoming. You've got to really ingratiate yourself and wait until they decide to let you see the thing that you know they have and will make you able to unpack the mystery that you're trying to solve in your dissertation. So most students take at least six or seven years. They have to really scramble for that sixth or seventh year of funding. And I remember when I was on the visiting committee of the Harvard Asia Center. And I remember, we would interview students and they would say, “I'm in my 10th year.” Why? Because they're adjuncting like crazy, just trying to keep it together, to be able to finish their dissertations. And it's not just Harvard. It's everywhere.

So I said, “Yes, I think you could memorialize her with a fellowship.” And he did. And that fellowship fund has grown over the years. So now every year, at least one, sometimes two, depending on how the market went, students get a Julie How Fellowship to finish their dissertations. And believe me, it's really nice. I mean, to have your dear wife's name on something that's really helping other students. I just love that story.

That one I really love. But we have a C. Martin Wilbur Fellowship that was raised by former students of Professor Wilbur. Andy Nathan and I formed the committee that got people together to donate money for that. And there are other things like that. So we're always on the lookout. I found that the most difficult part of being a director because it's hard to ask people for money. And, it's not always a good time for people to give money. But we do so many good things for students. We don't raise the money for us, for just frivolous things. And we've been very successful. So I'm very happy.

 

Takayasu: When you're raising the funds, have you experienced any situations where you thought this type of value proposition may resonate with a potential sponsor and yet they were looking for something completely different and you both ended up like, Oh, that works, or no? I'm just curious.

 

Zelin: I can't really think of any situations like that. There certainly had been many people that, for example, we often work with the development office. And, they may say, “Well, I think there's a prospect. Would you talk to this person?”  You can do it [laughs] year after year after year and the person never gives. So [laughs], I would not want to be a development officer. Must be very, very hard because you're always presenting pretty great ideas. And most of them come out of  the grassroots. Development officers don't come up with things out of their heads. They depend on us to tell them what we need. And donors don't always want to give that kind of thing. So, I can't think of any instances that that just popped into my head.

 

Takayasu: Well, we have to ask you more about the Weatherhead because that is such a major change in the East Asian Institute.  Under your directorship, it became Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

 

Zelin: Right.

 

Takayasu: And it seemed like it really enabled the possibility of a lot of programs that may not have been available before then. Would you like to share some stories?

 

Zelin: Well, look, I will say that it was interesting. My last—I can't remember, my last year—my penultimate year as director when we were working on trying to show the Weatherhead board and indeed Al [Albert] Weatherhead [III], who was still alive, and his wife, Celia what it would mean to have their name on the Institute. It actually was a very energizing process because everybody got together. There are a lot of different kinds of corners of the Institute. There was a group that was interested in expanding our geographic scope so we can go back and talk about the whole Tibet thing, which kind of went one too fast. But there were people like Roberta Martin, who the entire time I've been here, has just been so devoted to the education of people who aren't at Columbia, particularly K–12 students and also people at colleges where there wasn't a great bounty of courses that you could take on East Asia. And so you had to figure out how do you get East Asia into the curriculum, even if you don't have a professor who works on East Asia. And we had people who were interested in being able to have more collaborative research or programs where a number of faculty would get together and do programs that brought people in from the outside and all kinds of—. And then there were the people who had been working, certainly since I was here, on trying to find a place for Southeast Asia at Columbia. And it's interesting because when I first arrived, there was one professor in the history department who worked on Southeast Asia. And by the time the Vietnam War ended, people just weren't focusing on Southeast Asia anymore. Even at Cornell, where I had been a student and where Southeast Asia was “it.” The best people, the most interesting people were working on Southeast Asia and they had the best parties and gavilan on music. After the Vietnam War, the funding—probably that was coming partly from the government because they wanted more people who understood Southeast Asia—it just dried up.

[Phone rings] I don't know how to unplug that phone [laughs], so anyway. There were people working on trying to develop Southeast Asian studies at Columbia. Since it is a kind of liminal place, nobody else was doing what needed to be done, so we decided to do it. I'm not saying I decided to do it. It was going on long before me. But we had funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. We had a monthly seminar that brought in people from all over. I think people don't really understand that universities are not closed places. So much goes on at the university that brings in people from outside the university. And a lot of those people were people in business, people in government, and other fields in the nonprofit world., We had support from Ford Foundation but ultimately, I think their interests moved in other directions. So that was another thing that we wanted to be able to strengthen with the Weatherhead money.

And then ultimately, we were able to really clinch the effort after I was gone with the endowment that was left to us by a dear colleague of ours who had been in the Institute for all the time that I was there and probably decades before I was there: Dorothy Borg. She left money to the Institute when she passed and some of her students added to it or some of the people who had worked with her—she wasn't a full faculty member.

We now have Southeast Asian studies. This is a good example of the way things happen. We raise some money. We were able to create a chair that dealt with US, East Asia. We found somebody, actually the second person to hold that chair, who actually worked on Vietnam and is now a very welcomed member of the Institute, Hang, Lien-Hang [T.] Nguyen.

And then, I had been supporting the Vietnamese language through something else that I did, which I'll explain in a second. And then, we went to the university, said, “Look, we've already started to have a critical mass. There's interest.” And they came through and let East Asian languages and cultures hire someone in Vietnamese literature. He's kind of a luminary guy. I think of him as kind of historian, in literature. He's sort of everywhere. So we put together a program and entertained them [laughs]. I remember it felt like a week. It was probably only a couple of days, but really did try to showcase what we had as aspirations for the Institute. And I think it was even more than convincing them, it was a good exercise for us, because almost all of the things that we had worked on, eventually we were able to put into place. And some of the things that went even beyond what we could afford with the Weatherhead funding, we've been able to expand also. Andrew Nathan and I worked with a colleague of ours who, again, was not a full faculty member, but had been an economist who had been very prominent in the field of economics in China and then came here after the war: [Nian-Tzu] NT Wang.

[INTERRUPTION]

 

Takayasu: So would you like to pick up on your thoughts about Southeast Asia?

 

Zelin: Right.  I can't exactly remember where I left off [laughs], but these were the various projects that we had thought more deeply about and calculated how we would go forward with them. And we were able to do a lot of them with the funding that we got. And, of course, as long as the stock market stays good, we will be able to do more. We're very fortunate in that regard.

But, it does remind one, and I'm sure other people that you've interviewed have talked about this as well, that the way that academic institutions in the United States operate, they operate on many different levels. There's government support. There's the university's own endowment support. There's fundraising within the university going all the way down to institutes like ours or departments for specific things. And then there are foundations. So the Weatherheads had a foundation. They did well in business and they had a foundation and they had a very deep commitment to international. I don't know if Carol Gluck has talked about this at all, but they wanted to honor the brother of Al [Albert J] Weatherhead [III]. And the Institute is named after him. He had actually studied Japan at Columbia. So this is one way in which there was a connection.

But sometimes there isn't a connection. Sometimes it's just a matter of the circulation of ideas and people within a community of people who know about a particular subject. So the way in which we came to have Tibetan studies at Columbia—and this is what I can totally take credit for and I'm very happy about it—is that sometime in the ‘90s, when I was director, I had first one and then another student whose approach to modern China was very much engaged with areas on the borders of what we think of as China proper, and particularly parts of China where there were large populations of Tibetan-speaking people. And the first of those students actually learned all of his Tibetan somewhere else. He had come to us from Hawaii, from the University of Hawaii, and ultimately went off and joined the State Department and served in China and only finished his dissertation later. But I always knew he would finish it.

And I think if it had been just him, maybe I wouldn't have gotten so involved. But then another student came who also wanted to explore the ways in which he could bring Tibetan studies and Chinese studies together. And I was always happy to be a guide for them, but I wasn't an expert in all the things that they needed to be experts in. And many of us began to feel that the areas that now have been brought under the governance of China that are on the border, that became in one way or another, part of a larger framework for thinking about Chinese participation in its region during the Qing dynasty—which is what I was originally working on— we really weren't doing enough about that. There was a move within the field of Chinese history that was really concerned with understanding what was Manchu about the last dynasty, but that still didn't do what we were talking about in terms of these other areas.

We were very fortunate because one of my colleagues, Robert [A.F.] Thurman, in the Department of Religion, was actually a disciple of the Dalai Lama and he ran something called Tibet House in the city.  Between the commitment that I was able to bring to the table and his teaching on Tibetan religion and his support for classical Tibetan and my use of Title VI funds to teach modern Tibetan, we were able to convince The [Henry] Luce Foundation that we really could mount a program that looked at modern Tibet, not, this sort of mythical Shangri-La Tibet, but modern Tibet as a place like other places in the world. And it's been wonderful. And the Luce Foundation did support it. We were able to hire someone who was trained as a historian of Tibet at Harvard. He's now here, Gray Tuttle. And we now have also a postdoc in Tibetan studies and a bunch of students in the PhD program who studied Tibet. And they are getting jobs. You know, a lot of people said to us, Where are they going to get jobs? And I said, “They will. They will get jobs.” And one of our students is just hired at UC Berkeley. We have another one at Mount Holyoke, I believe it is, and Carnegie Mellon—is that where you went [laughs]? So yes,  it's been really good. OK, so that's fundraising [laughs].

 

Takayasu: Thank you so much for sharing that because that's such an inspirational story of how you—.

 

Zelin: Oh, I left one thing out. I really shouldn't. One of the other catalysts was the fact that one day when I was director, a man came to my office and he said, “I've been invited.” I can't remember who he was invited by to be a visiting scholar at the Institute. We have, of course, a number of visiting scholars and also a number of visiting professionals every year who use their time at Columbia to enhance their own education post-school. And his particular interest was in Tibet. He had been a journalist in Britain and had done a lot of work on contemporary Tibet. And so having him there, [Robert] Robbie Barnett, really made a big difference because he knew a lot of people. He was able to raise small amounts of money to keep some of the early stages of the program going and then helped with the formulation of what eventually became the Luce [Foundation] grant.

 

I should say one other thing and this is something that I did before and after being director. In fact, I was asked to do it, I think it was pretty much after I got tenure in the late ‘80s. I became the director of our National Resource Center, East Asian National Resource Center at Columbia. This is something that still happens and indeed we still have a grant. We had a grant since these national resource centers were founded by the United States government under the Department of Education. This was something that I really felt a great deal of commitment to and put in some effort into expanding how we were using these funds and what our goals were in terms of an overall national project and I did it. It's interesting. A lot of places they'll have a director do it for one year and then the next year somebody else does it or they'll have somebody do it for one cycle and then they change directors. But I did it for 30 years. I actually quit after 30 years [laughs] because somebody is going to have to know how to do this. God forbid I shouldn't be here [laughs]. It's a program that I think people don't appreciate the degree to which it has helped expand the ability of American institutions to educate people about non-Western, non-U.S. places.

 

 It's a program that you can think of in two parts. A university can apply for either fellowship to teach certain languages. I think it was originally thought of as strategic languages. Now we talk about them more as lesser-taught languages. And certainly early on, Chinese and Japanese, and Korean were lesser-taught languages. Now many, many places have them. And also to do programmatic things related to those languages and cultures. You could apply for a fellowship grant or you could apply for a complete package where you did both programing and fellowships. The fellowships now are called Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships, FLAS. And we have continuously gotten funding for and given FLAS since the program started, I believe in 1960. I wasn't here then [laughs]. It has made it possible for students to do language study, academic year language study abroad. Also back in the days when students did not have fellowship packages, it was extremely important for people to be able to actually even do their academic work. Now a lot of the funding that we get is enabling students to do master's work in these areas so that they can get their language and other things up to speed so they can go off and do PhDs.

And while I was there, we worked to expand it, so we also give fellowships to undergraduates. The program also includes summer money. So a lot of the people who are able to do an intensive language course in the summer and speed up that process so they can get out of here [laughs] in less than a hundred years were are able to do so by getting one of these fellowships. And, it's competitive. It's an incentive. And I think it's great. And I hope the government continues to do it.

It's always under threat because there's always someone who in Congress who says, Why do we need this kind of thing? But it's a really important program. And it doesn't just go to a place like Columbia, but it goes to many other places as well. In fact, a lot of our peers don't get them anymore because they stopped caring as much as I think we do to make sure that our program stays strong and that we can really fulfill all the requirements that are necessary in order to get this.

 

The other side of it—and the side that's also extremely useful and I think people don't always know enough about is that it's helped us, what we might call, filling gaps in the curriculum. Particularly in the early years, I remember I would use these funds to hire adjuncts in fields that we weren't yet able to get the university to fund. Then after a few years, the university would see, “Hey, people really want this. This is really important. It's serving a really interesting and important pedagogical purpose.” And then we were able to use it as leverage to get university funding. So we did this with more advanced Korean language classes. We did it with the earliest modern Tibetan classes, which then we started getting Columbia funding for. We did it with Vietnamese, which we then got Columbia funding for. And we also were able to use funds to help language programs themselves develop more up-to-date and more targeted teaching materials.

 

If I remember correctly, I think Media Chinese originally was funded in part by buying stuff out of this. Now, it's really hard to read Chinese— the social media [laughs]. We have a class where they really get into the nitty-gritty of how to get into that aspect of what's a really important source of understanding what's going on in China. And we've also used it for developing new textbooks and other things like that. There are pretty strict rules. For example, if you're taking language, you can't just take language. You also have to take a course on the substance of the place, whether it's a poli-sci course or a culture course, a literature course, a history course. There's also an understanding that you want to create someone who really understands the place and not just has a utilitarian skill that they can go off and do contract negotiations in Chinese or something like that, which is also very important. I remember sitting in airports and when I first started traveling to China and watch—. A lot of contract negotiations went on in airports [laughs]. And I would listen. And the American side had nobody of their own who would be able to understand Chinese. I'm sure this happened in airports in Japan and in other parts of Asia, too. The Chinese provide their own translator. And I'm listening and I'm thinking, Guys, they're taking you [laughs], you don't know what they're saying.

So I think it's really important that business have people speak various languages and government. And it's happening. You do see more and more people today who have a very wide linguistic range. I think the Title VI program, which covers the entire world, except I don't think it funds languages that they figure everybody gets like Spanish and French in school. Everybody, I mean, every school in America when I was growing up either took French or Spanish. So I think it's not that, although it might include Spanish, Russian, Uzbek. Just all kinds of languages.

 

Takayasu: Wow. You just mentioned about the importance of, for example, business people knowing the language, and also you've mentioned how it is important to really understand cultures beyond just China and Japan, but really get to the border. It's very obvious that you really pushed the boundaries with Tibet and also very inclusive with Mongolia and all these other countries. One of the other things that you mentioned is Roberta Martin's efforts. And this was really critical in ensuring that people have an understanding of East Asia before they get to college or even during college. So could you tell us a little bit more about that?

 

Zelin: Absolutely. Are you going to interview Roberta? Robin—we call her Robin.

 

Takayasu: I hope so.

 

Zelin: I speak for her a little bit and I probably don't know the new thing she's coming up with now. I used to be very familiar with everything she did because we would always put a segment of her budget. And I have to say she was a very good fundraiser. So that segment became smaller proportionally as time went on into the Title VI grant, because one of the things that the government wanted us to do was outreach and particularly K–12. And Robin's earlier work was both in workshops and the development of materials for K– 12 teachers. I think I remember at one point, they would inject and they used that word, inject [laughs] Asia into the curriculum at third grade and ninth grade. I was this kid in New York state schools and I know we really did not learn a whole lot about Asia. But that was a very long time ago. I think it's gotten a lot better. I guess ninth grade is when they do the first sort of round of world history. So maybe you'd get two weeks on East Asia if you were lucky. Then ultimately, Robin developed a whole network of people that she collaborated with throughout the country, were working on providing that kind of material. It's now part of something that's a very important part of the East Asian Institute Web presence, which is Asia for Educators. And then I think we've even gone one step over and we call it Asia for Educators falls under something else, which is a broader rubric, which includes some other kinds of outreach-related things.

 

But the other side of it was that she worked with faculty to first develop what were handbooks for teaching world history with Asia in it, literature with Asia in it, and so on. It's such a long time ago that several of the people that she collaborated with—she was a young woman and they were older scholars—have passed on already. Ainslie [T.] Embree, for example, was one of her collaborators in this. Carol Gluck worked with her, I know, on some of these. And they are still very important in giving teachers guidance, as What are the issues that we ought to be interested in? Where can I go for documents to show students? Because so much of education today, we want the students to see the original thing and then analyze it, not just consume some kind of pre-formulated analysis in the schools. They digitalized all of that material. So now that's all part of the larger corpus that's available for free to educators.

 

And then they started to do—it’s like she followed the trends of technology. Then she started to do videos and interactive kinds of websites where you could find the link if you're interested in the economy or your interest in this. And one of the projects that I participated in had to do with what she called, I think, was The Splendors of the Qing dynasty. And I did one segment and it's no video [laughs]. And [Kenneth] Ken Pomeranz did something on the Great Divergence. But the thing that I find most amazing of these projects—and I urge anybody who reads this transcript to take a look, I hope it's still there—was a project that she did with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taking several Chinese painted scrolls, the documented imperial tours taken by the Kangxi emperor in the late 17th century and the Qianlong emperor in the mid 18th century. Now we take it for granted, but in those days, it was really remarkable that they were able to digitalize it in ways so that if you blew it up, it didn't lose its clarity. And so you could take these scrolls—that if you had looked at them in the museum, you would have just walked by—and blow it up and see the detail. I still use it in my classes because it shows the marketplace in Suzhou. You can see the shop signs. And you can see what they're selling. And this is all done contemporaneously. We don't have photographs of the 17th and 18th centuries, but we have these beautiful scrolls. I think one of them was loaned or digitalized for us by the Palace Museum in Taiwan. And then there were two scrolls that were [unclear]. It's a remarkable tool for teaching. And I would think for little kids, it would be great for my kids, my students who are in their late teens and early 20s. They love it as well.

Then she started doing workshops for teachers and she was collaborating with people all over the country. So there would be workshops for teachers in different states. A lot of this stuff, she didn't do just alone. She was very good at building collaboratives.

And then they started doing study tours. So they actually took teachers to Vietnam, to China, to Japan, to Korea, which I think for the teachers just must have been an incredible opportunity. I believe a lot of that work was funded by the Freeman Foundation. The teachers didn't have to pay for—I don't think they had to pay for the trips and or if they did, it was a very small amount. And to be able to go back to your students and then, really bring what you learned and not just, “I read this in a book and I'm going to spit it back at you” is really important.

Which reminds me of something I have to say. I've been here for 40 years, so obviously I'm not going to be here forever.

But I will say one of the things that are so remarkable is and every time I think about it, it's it just shocks me. When I first came here in 1979, I had never been to mainland China. I had been to Taiwan. I lived in Taiwan for three and a half years. And I've been to Japan. Soon afterward, of course, it was possible to go to China, but you couldn't really do anything serious in terms of work. And then within a very short time, we were able to do work in the archives, but it was a very limited number of people who could do it. It was through the organization called the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the PRC. It was sort of a government-to-government thing. And then by the end of the 1980s, you didn't really need that. You could have a direct invitation from an institution in China. So our ability to really, understand and work with Chinese, it wasn't the same, I think, with people who studied Japan or studied Korea, although I think it's equally important that they get to go when they get to really engage with the people who are doing the kind of work that they're doing and bring those people here. I have to say, I feel very, very lucky to have been in the field at a time like this when everything opened up. And I only hope that it stays open because I think it was a great thing for us and it was a great thing for my Chinese colleagues. And, the number of Chinese students we've had over the years. When we had our first Chinese students, it was like we had no idea what they had actually learned [laughs]. But now we're getting students who are so smart and they've done fieldwork that our students don't even get to do till their second or third year. So it's a wonderful opportunity for interaction and exchange. And I hope it really strengthens over the years because it's something that I think all of us at the Institute have worked very hard for.

Which is not to say that I didn't have a great experience in Taiwan, which I did and did my whole first book there.

 

Takayasu: Could you share a story about that?

 

Zelin: A story about Taiwan?

 

Takayasu: Yes. And how you wrote your award-winning book.

 

Zelin: That was my first book, it was award-winning, too, but it wasn't as many awards [laughs]. But the second book was really the more—. The ability to go to Zigong and actually do research there on the margins of Zigong was like so incredible. The first book, there really wouldn't have been any place to go except the palace, which I did eventually get to go to. And I got some material that I couldn't have gotten in Taiwan. The nationalist government took boxes of palace archives. When they moved their government to Nanjing in late 1920, they moved material from the palace for good reason. The government situation was so unstable. And even then a lot of stuff was lost. And then I believe they moved it to Chongqing when the Japanese invaded. And then they moved it back to Nanjing. And when they moved to Taiwan after the Civil War, they took a lot of that stuff with them. So there's an archive in Taiwan which has a fair amount of direct correspondence between officials and the emperor, the what are known as the "vermillion rescripts and the [palace] memorials" that they're written on. And that was the main body of material that I used in my first book, which makes sense because it was on government fiscal reform. But the second one was really fantastic to be able to go to the place where this industrial development had actually taken place in the 18th and 19th century and then use their archive and write about it.

 

Takayasu: So how did you get interested in Chinese history?

 

Zelin: Yes, that's the million-dollar question. I think I told you when we first talked that I went to Cornell as an undergraduate in the agriculture school because it was a state school and I was going to study biochemistry. So that was a great way to do it. And by my sophomore year, I realized that I didn't want to do biochemistry. I think college was the first hint that I had, that if you love history, it can actually be a profession. I just didn't know that. Why would kids know that [laughs]? I was very fortunate because I had chosen a place that had a great program on China. Not as strong a program on Japan. And I don't think it had anything on Korea. It had a great program on Southeast Asia. And so a lot of my coursework was language and work on China and Southeast Asia and then everything else in the world that's fascinating to an undergraduate, including a lot of science. And the question is why? Why did I decide to do China, why didn't I just—. And I don't know for sure. My mother always thought that it was because she was reading The Good Earth while she was pregnant with me [laughs]. And I absolutely don't think that was the case [laughs]. And I have to say, my parents were a little worried because it was the 1960s and it seemed like an odd thing for your child to do, to be a historian of China. You couldn't go there in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. But I've always been interested in understanding how people—it sounds funny, but my interest in history is trying to understand how people—when confronted with similar kinds of problems in different parts of the world with different contexts, different cultures and so on, how they solve those problems and whether it's how they organize themselves as governments or how they deal with—.

Right now, I'm working on a book on the organization of business and kind of interplay between Chinese customary practices and the enormous pressures of Western legal methodologies like the corporation. China just seemed like a huge place that was doing amazing things for such a long time. That would be a good case study, and it's turned out to be a good case study over the years, no matter what it is I'm interested in, it's a good case study.

 

Takayasu: Well, that's really wonderful and we are really happy that you chose the field.  You end up unlike somebody else that you've encountered earlier in your career, you kept on expanding your horizons. So it was not just talking about Tibet and Mongolia. And that's just lovely.

 

Zelin: I mean, I made no claim to be an expert on Tibet or Mongolia or any place else, but China. I think I know a bit about China. It's hard to keep up with it all. Being a historian is an interesting problem, because most people out in the world are interested in contemporary issues. I rarely get someone to come up to me and say, So what about that Yongzheng emperor [laughs]?

And so I always felt and I felt it very, very intensely when I was director, that I was expected to know everything that anybody knew about the historical period. And that would start like, three thousand years ago. But I make no claim to really understanding, two thousand years ago. But also, then you also are expected to know everything that's going on now. So, I would be in forums and people would want me to tell them everything that there was to know about the socialist economy. Or would China become a democracy or why did the Chinese government do what it did when it did X? And [laughs] my first honest answer was not simply that I don't study, but I don't think most people really know. It takes a long time to sort out the various contexts and contingencies and who the players are and so on and so forth. And keep up with all of that is very, very hard.

 

And now it's really fascinating because, we get students coming to study the history of the PRC [People’s Republic of China]. In 1979, you wouldn't have people thinking that there was a history of the PRC. But of course, it's been a while and we do need to understand that history. And we're understanding it in very different ways than the political scientists who were analyzing the PRC in real time, the ways in which they analyzed it. In the period when I first came to Columbia when nobody could go to China, it was really a process of what we would call Kremlinology. They would look at the Chinese newspaper, and see who's standing next to Mao [Zedong], who's in the background, whose picture was taken out of the picture, who's going to be dumped. It was all about that kind of high-level leadership.

And now, I have a student who's working on tourism in the early PRC, and as a business issue and also as a question of, how does a socialist state deal with tourism? I had a student who worked on the introduction of modern statistics in the PRC. I had a student who's—. I won't go into every one of them [laughs], but no, I don't love those two more than I love the others. I just happened to think of you first [laughs]. But it is really a different world. And it's really amazingly interesting.

And we're using different kinds of sources now. When I first went., if you got into an archive, you are so blessed. Most of the archives were official government units, so a lot of the material that I used for my first book were county-level archives and central-government archives. Now we're using materials that are collected from the people on the street [laughs] and merchant archives that people have in their homes. We have a student who—she's not my personal student— but she's studying Chinese medical missionaries to Egypt. That's another thing. And then another student is studying the development of local-level cancer treatment in China to understand the development of Chinese medicine.

And I think that's one of the things that—. We've not only expanded the way that we're thinking about—. I think it's a matter of China, for us. Chinese people have been interested in themselves for a long time [laughs]. But I think it's for us finally getting to a point where we're interested in China in the way we're interested in ourselves. It's not the same kinds of questions, the same kinds of problems. And we ourselves are becoming more and more interested in the ways in which ideas and peoples move across boundaries, and we're seeing it in our students as well. So that's very exciting.

 

Takayasu: It's really exciting for me to hear how much thrill you get from all these things that the students bring back to you. You're enabling them, but, they bring things back to you. And I wanted to read this, that was on the Weatherhead [East Asian Institute] website. They had a description of your mentoring activities. It's like,  “Dr. Zelin has mentored generations of undergraduates, MARSEA students, and PhD students.” And one of the things that they point to is this 2014 conference, “Beyond Modernity, Understanding Changes in China.” I understand that this was organized by your former students and colleagues. I just think that's such a lovely tribute. If you would like to talk a little bit about that, that would be wonderful.

 

Zelin: It was timed around my 65th birthday [laughs]. And I don't know, maybe young people think you don't do anything after you're 65 [laughs]. But no, it was really great. I've tried to keep in touch with a lot of my students. It's not easy. There are a lot of them. And a few of them,  I don't know what they're doing now. But I do—. They're members of the profession now. I read their books. A lot of them still ask me to write recommendations for them when they want fellowship support. And I was very touched that they did that. It was wonderful. I was surprised at how many people came from different generations of students. It wasn't just the more recent ones. And a few colleagues from outside the university also were able to come. I wouldn't say that I'm the only person. A lot of people have had these things done for them. I'm preparing to go to a retirement symposium for a colleague at Yale, if we ever get rid of COVID [-19]. Otherwise, I'll be doing it online. But it is something that I won't forget. It's very, very dear to me. One of the students who is involved in organizing it is from Italy. And when my son got married in Italy, we all met her in Florence and had dinner with her. So, I mean. Yes. It's really nice.

 

Takayasu: And obviously, you didn't stop at 65  because that was in 2014. And then I understand that in 2019–2020 you got the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. I just want to make sure that people who read this transcript understands that it is very rare. It's recognizing the excellence of faculty as teachers and mentors of both undergraduate and graduate students within and outside of the classroom setting. So congratulations on that.

 

Zelin: That was really nice. That was really nice.

 

Takayasu: How did that feel to receive that?

 

Zelin: Felt great! [Laughs] What can I say? I mean, it felt great. And it was a really nice year because that was also the same year that I was asked to do the Schoff [Memorial] Lectures. And so, I really was wondering whether they thought I was retiring [laughs], giving me all these wonderful opportunities, but no, I'm not. And I have no feeling to do that any time really soon.

 

Takayasu: Through the interview, you've mentioned many times about people, the connection, physically going to those countries and forming relationship and how important that is. And then you just mentioned about your colleague who's retiring and hopefully, COVID is gone. How has COVID affected you and the Institute?

 

Zelin: I have to say that it's really the staff that has kept the Institute sort of vibrantly in our faces because we're not there. And yet all kinds of stuff is going on. And in fact, I think some things that we never could—. I mean, look, we're not having the students all sitting around making a mess in the conference room on Friday afternoon in in the language tables or stuff like that. But being on Zoom has enabled the range of people that can participate in workshops and lectures and things like that in a very interesting way. And there's a part of me that kind of wishes—I mean, I really don't want this thing to go on—but I kind of wish that we could find a way to harness that and keep that part of it. Because, I've been invited to give talks at two different legal history workshops where I don't want to have to travel to there and to there. Some people love to travel all the time. I don't actually happen to like going on airplanes all that much. So, the fact that I picked China as a place to study [laughs], everybody thinks, Oh, yeah, you love traveling. No, they don't know I don't love traveling. But you can go to these things anyway and sit in your study and then when the day is over, play your flute. So that aspect of it has been it has been really interesting. And we've been getting bigger crowds for seminars.

But I've really missed the people because I think if anything, I probably have the reputation as the person who spends the most time in my office of any faculty member. A lot of faculty, I never could understand. They're working hard. They're just working at home. And I always thought they must have better homes than I do because I want to be in my office. But I also I like the feeling of the people around me. I like to wander down the hall and pop my head in and say hello to this one or that one. And we haven't been able to do that.

And the teaching has been quite interesting.  Everybody's been going through the same thing, but when they first closed down in March, it was very hard because I had personally had the flu in January. I subsequently was convinced I must have had COVID, but I don't think I did because I had no antibodies. But in those days, they didn't have the test yet. So I was very sick and I missed the first couple of classes. And actually, one of our former students, took over my class for the first two sessions. And then my mother died. So I missed the next session. So I missed three sessions. And then I went back to class and I met all these kids and then we closed down and so everything was online. And I think there was just this very—.  I was teaching two seminars, which was good, because I subsequently taught a large lecture course and that's not as easy online. But I had two seminars with just enough people that I could fit them all on the screen at the same time. And everybody was hyper-engaged because there was nothing else they could do [laughs] except go to school online. And they were working hard and really, putting a lot into the weekly assignments and seemed so interested that I actually had a great time that semester. But I really felt bad that I couldn't see them.

And then I came back in the fall and I opted to teach one of these “intensive.” 20 years from now, people will say, What did they do that for? They said, we want to teach these. We want to have some intensive, six-week intensive classes where you take all the material that you should have taught in a semester and squash it into six weeks and teach it from May to the middle of June. Mess up the whole scheduling of everything else by starting school early. And so anyway, so I taught. All I did was teach one lecture course last fall and I completely changed it to make it COVID-friendly. I don't know if it really worked. I think it worked. I mean, I hope it worked. But just to try. And because I had 50 students in the class and it's hard to keep people interacting. So using breakout rooms, having more discussion sections, putting outlines of every lecture before I gave them, which I never would have done, only because I never know really entirely what I'm going to say. Something always comes up and you add and—. But I wanted them not to lose track, just looking at this moving mouth.

And the kids were great. And the funniest thing about it was I taught it in the last, well, it's not really the last, slot. It was the 4:10–5:25 slot. So if I'm teaching in in Kent Hall where I usually teach, I've got to get them out of there really fast because someone else is coming in. But there was nobody else coming in. They stayed for half hour, 45 minutes after class. They hung around. They wanted to talk about this and that. It was the best class [laughs]. Husband made dinner and I didn't have to cook [laughs]. It was really nice. Not really 45 minutes, but they certainly often hung around for half an hour. And, I felt like we could get more deeply into things. And that's a class where most of the students don't know much about China at all. It's a core. It's what they call global core. A lot of kids take it because they want to get a global core course in. And it's about China. And yes, it was really wonderful.

But I worked so hard. I gave them so many little writing assignments to make sure they were on track. I was just working on that one course all the time, which is not something I can do again. And I couldn't have done it if I hadn't moved to this crazy thing that I have to do in May, which I'm really worried about, because trying to squash a graduate seminar into just six weeks is going to be hard. So we'll see. But the kids, the students are—I always call them kids. The students are remarkable. They'll figure out how to find the time to do everything that I'm going to ask them to do. And my husband, we're teaching it together. We've done it twice before in normal times. And now we're going to teach it in COVID times.

 

Takayasu: So you mentioned that your husband cooks for you and now he's teaching with you. So I'd love to hear a little bit about the partnership that enables this wonderful professional life that you have.

 

Zelin: Is this the way your other interviews went?

 

Takayasu: No. It's all driven by the narrator. So you're bringing these questions out of me. I have nothing to do with it.

 

Zelin: Well, I will say, I don't really talk about my personal life so much in public. But yes, David is an economist, and he's an economic historian, which makes him a more accessible and I think more grounded-in-reality, kind of economist. And although he works on the United States and I work on China, we've always had a lot of dinner table conversation about teaching. He's at Barnard and I'm at Columbia. So we decided at one time to—because I was working on Chinese economic development and he works on the United States and teaches the history of the US economy—we would teach a course on industrial revolutions. But make it a course where we didn't just look at the usual suspects, Britain, Britain, Britain, Britain, Britain and then Germany and [laughs] then the United States. So we bring in Latin America. We bring in China. And it's really a great course. So we're doing it again.

 

Takayasu: That sounds wonderful. And how does the flute fit into your life? How did you come about playing the flute and what does it mean to you?

 

Zelin: Well, when I was a kid, I wanted to play the flute and I just—. What do kids like about instruments? I probably thought it had a nice sound. And I had braces and they said, You can't play the flute with braces because you know the oratory [phonetic]. I don't know if that's true or not, but so I got to play the clarinet and sold my clarinet as soon as I could [laughs]. I liked the clarinet, but I wasn't in love with it. And when I started graduate school, my first fellowship check at Berkeley, which I have to say was $300 dollars [laughs]. I went out and bought a really crappy nickel-plated flute and played that flute for a long time. Didn't really have time to do much, take lessons or anything. And then when I started teaching at Columbia, I started. No, actually, it was later than that. I think about 20 years ago, I started seriously taking lessons and then I've upgraded my flutes quite a lot. So, yes, I love it. I think it's really important for people to have something outside of their work. And I'm not a great artist and I'm not—. This is something that I really love and I practice. You can see my music stand [in the room].

And I've been taking Zoom lessons for this whole year. I've been taking my lessons with my teacher on Zoom, and let me tell you, it's discouraging. I mean it's great because, I don't have to go anywhere to take my lesson. But it's very hard. You can't really play ensemble on Zoom because of the lag, the sound lag. So when you see these musicians, like there's a million musicians in a box and they're all playing together, somebody has synchronized all of it. It's not the same as just getting together with your teacher and whipping out some duets at the end of a lesson. So I can't wait until we can do that again. NY is a great place because there are so many incredible musicians.

 

Takayasu: Is there a particular genre that you are attracted to?

 

Zelin: I happen to like the Baroque, which my teacher keeps trying to push me out of [laughs]. She wants me to be broad. But I'm not very much into contemporary atonal music or anything like that.

 

Takayasu: Do you perform maybe with some Chinese musicians?

 

Zelin: No, I haven't. It's a Western flute. I don't play Chinese flute. It's a different technique. I tried when I was in Taiwan to play dizi, which is a Chinese flute. I had a dizi and I had a xiao. The xiao is the long one and it was hard because they're made out of bamboo and you have to cover one of the holes with a kind of rice paper that I didn't know how to get that in New York. So I don't know where my flutes are now. They weren't very expensive and probably some young relative has walked off with them [laughs].

 

Takayasu: Well, this has been fascinating. Is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't ask?

 

Zelin: No, except that there's another great musician. A really great musician in the Institute, which we talked about when we had our meeting. And that's Gerry Curtis, who is an incredible pianist. And I hope that you got something from him on his piano. But you had wanted me to tell that one story about when we went to Thailand. This is part of my directorial responsibilities, going off to parts of Asia and meeting with alums and hoping that someday they will perhaps help us expand our abilities to teach about the places that they come from. But also just to keep in touch with alums, which is one of the things that universities do.

So we, Gerry and Hugh [T.] Patrick and Jack [John J.] Bresnan, and I did a trip to Southeast Asia. It was my one and only time in Southeast Asia and largely in Indonesia and Thailand. And just as we arrived, the 1997 Asian financial crisis happened. So we didn't raise any money [laughs], but we had a very wonderful time meeting with old friends and alums and new possible friends and ministers. And it was quite interesting. And when we were in Thailand, we were supposed to have a like a cocktail party or something with a group of alums. And it was a real fiasco. The traffic in Bangkok is terrible. And our driver didn't make the turn he was supposed to make. And if you don't make the turn, as I recall, if you don't make the turn, it's like 20 miles until you can turn and come back. So we were late and people were kind of, I think, a little grumpy. We walked in and there was a big grand piano there. I think it was a grand piano. Gerry might remember it wasn't a grand piano, but there was a piano. And Gerry, who I was good friends with and knew he could play the piano. I said, Why don't you play something, you know, sort of break the ice? And he sat down and he started playing. And he's a great jazz pianist. And then it turned out that one of the alums was a singer.

So she started singing and Gerry is just so good, he said, “What key?” She said, “What?” “What do you want me to play?” No music. “What do you want to play? What key?” And he could transpose in his head and he started playing with her. And then we had a little concert. And it was the best. I mean, it really was unbelievable. Gerry's still, is very much into his music. And I think he's very involved in the jazz scene in Japan, too. Anyway. The little things that happen that you don't expect.

 

Takayasu: Thank you for sharing that.

 

Zelin: That was a very good one.

 

Takayasu: I was just so struck when I prepared for this. And I was reading your letters as a director, how much space and time you spent acknowledging people. There's just so much respect and love for the people and it just permeated throughout the interviews.

 

Zelin: That's what life is about.

 

Takayasu: Well, it's not true with everybody, so.

 

Zelin: The Institute really has been my main home at Columbia. I'm very much a part of the history department. I've been on almost every committee you could possibly be on in the university, including the university tenure committee, which is known as TRAC [Provost’s Tenure Review Advisory Committee]. And which is really interesting because you meet people from the medical school and from every department and so on. And I have my colleagues in East Asian Languages and Cultures.

 

But the Institute has really been my home the whole time. And I can't imagine a day when I don't have an office there and can't go in there and just, sort of hang out and do some translating and speak to people and have students popping in.

 

Takayasu: Thank you very much for your time and for your generosity in sharing all these great stories.