ABSTRACT
For my entire academic life I have been interested in constructions of “Chineseness” and “Otherness”—perhaps because I am an “Other” who studies “China.” What I have learned over time, something that, in retrospect, should have come as no surprise, is that these categories are remarkably fluid. But in my years as a graduate student in the late 1960s and early 1970s they remained largely unproblematical. So were a host of other broad categories, such as “culture,” “tradition” and “mod-ernization,” even though, unbeknownst to me at the time, they were highly contested in most academic circles. I do not blame my teachers in graduate school for any failure to encourage reflection about these terms; I came late to the China field (my ambition was to be a professional baseball player, which might have come to pass if my senior year had been a good one at the plate and if graduate school had not become an attractive alternative to military service in Vietnam), and so my teachers spent much of their time tutoring me in Classical Chinese, teaching me the fundamentals of historical research, and showing me how to appear intelligent and well-prepared in the gladiatorial events they called seminars.
