By Michael Gotz
A young activist Michael Gotz in the 1970s.
The 1974 conference on Modern Chinese literature held in Dedham, MA was a seminal event. It brought together scholars from Western countries, but also from behind the “iron curtain.”
As a graduate student at UC Berkeley concentrating on contemporary (communist) Chinese literature there was no way I could wrangle an invite even though I couldn’t imagine missing it. Fortunately, the organizers put up a “workshop” as a run-up to the conference. Some other grad students, mostly from Harvard, and I did have the opportunity to attend that event.
I was overwhelmed by the array of scholars there, people whose work I had read, prominent in the field. It was exhilarating. I got to thinking, was there some kind of way that we could all communicate going forward? At the time, there was not.
Memory fades after all these years, so I cannot remember how I got invited to a lunch at Ezra Vogel’s house. Again, I was in awe of the luminaries present at the meal. If you know how academia works you’ll know that as a lowly grad student I was advised to keep my mouth shut and just listen. Well, I was also a 30 year old husband and father, a mature person, so I was disinclined to take that advice.
I continued to wonder, with such a great beginning how can we communicate after the conference. This issue bubbled up from my sub-conscious and flew right out of my mouth. “Why don’t we have a newsletter or something like that?” I figured with all these prominent scholars there someone might take the suggestion up.
Shocker! Ezra threw it back to me, saying “you do it.” Who me, a humble student? You have got to be kidding. How about I get you $500 in seed money, he said. I must say, that was one of the proudest moments in my life. Also scary. Could I do it?
If you look at the first few issues of the newsletter you will see how tentative I was, there being some content but not much. Simply, I didn’t know what to do, how to proceed. After passing my oral exams and beginning my dissertation under Cyril Birch, I began to find a little more confidence.
So, that is how the Modern Chinese Literature Newsletter began. Now, how I gave it up.
On September 9, 1976. Mao Zedong died. Yet I never thought it would end communism, and especially communist literature, my specialization. Of course, history bears out that it did. The 1979-1980 academic year I filled in for Prof. Perry Link at UCLA, somewhat half-heartedly, because I knew I would be leaving the field afterward. Why? First, I was married with 2 children, living in Los Angeles among my close relatives. My wife had a job she loved. I just couldn’t see my way clear to move us to a university job in a new location.
Importantly, communist literature was anathema to many departments, where, if I got hired, I would be required to teach the classic novels and May 4th writers, which was not my field. I could see that communism and communist literature were over in China and would not return, making my work fairly irrelevant.
So I decided to leave the field to chart a course for a new career. But what of the Newsletter? Fortunately, Prof. Howard Goldblatt, a colleague whom I did not really know, stepped up to take on the project. He earned my trust, and we even dared to dream that it would become a journal one day.
I lost touch with the Chinese literature field and the Newsletter after that, but I am overjoyed to see that the Newsletter still exists, albeit in a different form, as MCLC.