Many of the faculty involved in East Asian studies have firsthand experience. For example:
Linda Patrik, director of the East Asian Studies program, began to get a sense of Asia when she was in high school, when her brother married a woman who did classical Indian dance. Patrik started taking judo and karate, and in graduate school at Northwestern University she added yoga and meditation and was a teaching assistant for a course in Asian philosophy. Union saw the Asian philosophy experience on her resume and asked her to teach it during her first semester at the College. Since then, she has taken National Endowment for the Humanities seminars on Hindu logic and on Zen and Japanese philosophy, and she has spent one month each summer during the past four years at an institute of Tibetan philosophy.
Ted Gilman, director of the Freeman Grant Project in East Asian Studies, is a specialist in Japanese politics, has published a book on the subject (No Miracles Here: Fighting Urban Decline in Japan and the US), and has lived and taught in Japan. He also served as Union's coordinator for the Vietnam Term Abroad program and visited Vietnam for the first time last winter. “I can't wait to go back,” he says. “Vietnam is on the front lines of globalization-it's in a high-growth region, with a huge population of almost ninety million. The U.S. has done very little to help others than lifting the travel embargo in 1994. For Americans, Vietnam was a country stuck in time, but in fact it's doing very well, especially in the south, because there's a large overseas Vietnamese community-refugees are going back not so much to live there as to set up businesses and invest.”
Joyce Madancy, associate professor of history, lived in Japan until she was six, since her father was a civilian working for the Army Corps of Engineers there. She speaks and writes Chinese (Mandarin), and specializes in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese history. She's been to China five times to do research on opium suppression, and the last time she went, in 1999, the trip had a special bonus: “I brought back my daughter.” Madancy was placed with a child in the city where she was conducting research, “so I got to know her before we took her home. The foster family was very nice-I was able to visit several times a week. She learned to crawl in the airport on the way home, and she hasn't stopped moving since.”