More than a Few Memories

Xiaomei Chen

Returning to The Ohio State University for the 2025 annual AAS conference last March was a bittersweet experience. I reunited with beloved colleagues and friends who had nurtured me from the start of my academic journey as an assistant professor of Chinese and Comparative Studies in 1989; after I transitioned to UC Davis in 2002, they have remained life-long friends. The year 1989 marked a “Great Leap Forward” for our Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures: the university hired six tenure-track assistant professors in a single year—three in Chinese studies and three in Japanese studies. Even before arriving at OSU, I was thrilled to learn that Kirk A. Denton and I had been hired together in the same field of modern Chinese literature—a rare and possibly unprecedented move in the institutional history of East Asian studies in the U.S.

It was sobering to realize that, of the six faculty members hired in that landmark year, only one remains on the OSU faculty today. Some have retired or moved to other institutions; some hired before and after us have passed away. Yet the department has preserved its distinction as the first U.S. institution to award a Ph.D. in Chinese, beginning in 1969. As Professor Marjorie Chan has noted, OSU established a Division of East Asian Languages and Literatures in 1962, offering BA degrees in Chinese and Japanese. An MA program in Chinese literature followed in 1967, and the division became a formal department in 1970.

This legacy continued with the sponsorship of the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), which Kirk edited from 1999 to 2021. The journal not only chronicled but also catalyzed the transformation of the field. Over twenty-two years, MCLC captured new scholarly waves: film studies, cultural studies, gender and women’s studies, media and performance studies, and Taiwan and Hong Kong studies. It also documented the development of individual scholars, many of whom published their early work in MCLC and later had their books reviewed in its pages.

Kirk also founded the “MCLC Resource Center,” which became a vital hub for scholars worldwide. Its online bibliography spans 22 subfields/genres/topics, and its archive of over 300 book reviews, published by MCLC, provides a vivid map of how the field has evolved. Thanks to Kirk’s foresight, the journal and its digital extensions were seamlessly integrated, with abstracts available online and subsequently direct links to essays via JSTOR. The site’s “General References/Resources” section features 56 curated links to essential databases, teaching tools, and scholarly materials. His daily email blog, listing calls for papers, conferences, new publication, cultural news, and ads for new academic positions, reaches thousands of scholars and students around the world.

Kirk’s editorial dedication was nothing short of legendary. I can still picture him biking across campus at the end of a long workday, determined to track down a single missing reference from a manuscript, all because he wasn’t certain the citation was completely accurate—this, on the eve of the issue going to print. Such a gesture wasn’t unusual for Kirk. It reflected the deep reservoir of research acumen, quiet vigilance, and an extraordinary patience and attention to detail that he brought to editing every single essay published since OSU took over the journal in 1999.

I remember a conversation with Kirk about the formatting style—specifically, the wide margins used to print notes and illustrations. That distinctive layout, both functional and elegant, has remained a hallmark of MCLC. At the time, I was a bit concerned about the cost of hiring a local professional designer who had done an excellent job preserving that format, though at a steep price. Kirk, ever focused on the journal’s long-term vision, reassured me that cost should never outweigh the goal of producing a first-rate publication—one that would make a lasting mark on the field and captivate the reader with both substance and design.

MCLC has certainly done that—and so much more. The journal has also published several exceptional special issues: Reportage and its Contemporary Variations (2019), Chinese Literature as World Literature (2018), The Dis/appearance of the Political Mass (2013), Discourses of Disease (2011), Comic Visions of Modern China (2008), and so on. I suspect many of these special issues were the result of collaboration that originated from academic conferences and workshops. This certainly was my memorable experience with the special issue on Visual Culture and Memory in Modern China (2000), which was the result of two-part symposium with the same title at OSU from October 15-16, 1999, in conjunction with the exhibition Picturing Power: Posters from the Cultural Revolution, originally organized at Indiana University by Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Harriet Evans.

During those intense yet exhilarating days, I forged close friendships with OSU’s China faculty—especially Julia F. Andrews, whose leadership in fostering interdepartmental collaboration was both visionary and generous. Julia warmly embraced my suggestion to her that we organize Picturing Power at OSU and I marveled to see how the exhibition came to fruition. Working with the enthusiastic director of the Hopkins Hall Gallery and Corridor, we saw the original posters on loan from the collection of the Center for the Study of Democracy at University of Westminster, London, densely hung in the central gallery, while the installation created a vivid environment in the corridor with supplementary images. Poster reprints I had discovered in the storage room of my department, perhaps left behind by some former colleagues who had traveled to China in the early years, were matted and hung, while pamphlets, Mao badges, and other ephemera from the period were grouped in cases. Julia’s art history graduate students composed sharply written labels that identified the artists and conveyed the political message with clarity and impact. Due to the tight exhibition schedule at the gallery, we worked through the night installing and decorating the entire space.

One moment that stays with me vividly was watching Kuiyi Shen (then an assistant professor in art history at Ohio University and now professor at University of California at San Deigo) effortlessly recreate a Cultural Revolution-era blackboard newspaper (黑板报)—so authentic in tone and design that it could have come straight from 1972. His piece called upon a local production team to join the campaign against Lin Biao and Confucius, mirroring the real political slogans of the time. Both Kuiyi and I had served on Northeast Army and State Farms (东北兵团和国营农场) in our teenage years, and we had each created countless blackboard newspapers on our separate farms in the “great wilderness.” While I had a knack for quickly writing chalk messages to praise model workers and good deeds, I lacked the artistic flair that Kuiyi, an artist himself, possessed. That night, he conjured a beautifully illustrated blackboard with Maoist artistic style not unlike some of the images in the poster; he did it within an hour or two—bringing history back to life before our eyes. Watching him deftly at work, I thought about the popular slogan of “More, faster, better, and more economical” (多、快、好、省) promoted during the Great Leap Forward and persisting during our years of the Northeast wilderness; it describes well the curating of the exhibition and its cultural ambiance.

Another powerful visual element came from Leah Wang, a professionally trained artist of our generation, who transformed the gallery entrance and windows with hand-painted Cultural Revolution imagery. She recreated the “Red Sea” (红海洋) effect—ubiquitous during that era, when walls, doors, alleyways, and entire city blocks were drenched in Mao’s image and quotations. It’s one of my greatest regrets that I had neither a camera nor a cell phone in 1999 to document the visual force of the exhibition, which featured rare propaganda posters from a distant time and space.

That experience was transformative. It was the moment I rekindled my childhood love for painting and realized how deeply intertwined art history is with literature and culture—inseparable, really. I cherished the walk-through talks we gave to students and faculty on opening day and wished we had more time to linger in that curated memory space, sharing stories with local audiences about what art and life had meant to us, as participants and creators.

Inspired by this collaboration, which resulted in the MCLC special issue, I published elsewhere an essay, “Growing Up with Posters in the Maoist Era,” which I later taught in my modern Chinese literature course. Some students responded enthusiastically to the piece—perhaps because it offered a personal window into a world shaped by propaganda and creativity. Some were even inspired to interview their own parents and reflect on cross-generational memories of political art and culture.

A similarly memorable experience unfolded during the publication of the Special Issue on Hong Shen and the Modern Mediasphere in Republican-Era China (2015), which emerged from the 2013 Hong Shen 洪深 Project at Ohio State University. This project brought together scholarship, performance, and historical recovery, centered around a revival of Hong’s little-known English play The Wedded Husband (为之有室). Originally staged at OSU in 1919—when Hong was a ceramics student navigating the cultural crosscurrents between traditional Chinese heritage and Western artistic perception—the play offered a fascinating glimpse into early transnational performance.

The 2013 revival was produced by Man HE, then a doctoral student at OSU (now Chair of the Department of Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Williams College), and directed by my dear friend Siyuan Liu of the University of British Columbia. Their dynamic student production featured a mixed-gender, mixed-race cast, echoing the global hybridity Hong Shen himself embodied. In addition to a screening of Hong’s film Shanghai: Old and New (新旧上海), the symposium “Hong Shen and the Modern Mediasphere in Republican-Era China” laid the groundwork for the six essays published in the special issue. Together, these contributions illuminated Hong Shen’s enduring influence on Chinese performance culture and positioned his work within a broader mediasphere that transcended national and disciplinary boundaries.

As I reflect on the journal’s trajectory, my thoughts drift further back—fifty years ago, in 1975—when Modern Chinese Literature: A Newsletter was founded by a small circle of scholars. At the time, I was a third-year worker-peasant-soldier student (工农兵学员) in the English Department at Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, studying under the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. My English “texts” were the translated editorials of the People’s Daily and newsletters issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, echoing the PRC’s official stances on UN resolutions.

In 1984, when the newsletter evolved into a full-fledged journal, Modern Chinese Literature, under Howard Goldblatt’s leadership, I had just completed my master’s degree in English and American literature at Brigham Young University and was beginning to teach advanced Chinese language class using materials drawn from “scar literature.” At the time, I barely knew how to navigate the field of modern Chinese literary studies. That same year, Modern Chinese Literature published William Tay’s essay on Wang Meng, his stream-of-consciousness, and the controversy over modernism. Fredric Jameson’s commentary “Literary Innovation and Modes of Production” was also featured—marking the moment, I later realized, that this journal was beginning to shape not only the field but my own scholarly orientation.

When I arrived at OSU as an assistant professor in 1989, Modern Chinese Literature released a special issue on 1980s PRC literature, including pioneering work by Ying-hsiung Chou on Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum Family, and Paul Clark’s essay on the rise of Fifth Generation filmmakers. It initiated the new trend of taking the PRC literature seriously as literature, as culture, and as art, to be followed by numerous essays on the Maoist and post-Maoist period both in MLC and MCLC.

Looking back, I suspect I am not alone in having “grown up”—intellectually and professionally—alongside this journal. It has mirrored the growth of our discipline and served as a living chronicle of our collective intellectual history.

Kirk would likely deflect praise, but I see no better way to honor his spirit than to liken it to the spirit of Lei Feng (雷峰)—a symbol of selflessness, diligence, and unwavering commitment to the greater good. In academia, where public service is often underappreciated, Kirk quietly and persistently built something of lasting value. His humility, work ethic, and quiet leadership recall not only Lei Feng but also Norman Bethune’s (白求恩) spirit of internationalism and professional excellence. After all, Kirk is also a Canadian, just like Dr. Bethune.

For his two decades of labor and vision—steadfast, generous, and impactful—we all owe him an enormous thank-you card.