Students

Associate Professor Mary Chapman won the 2006 Yasuo Sakakibara Prize from the American Studies Association for an essay on writer Sui Sin Far, believed to be the first Eurasian to publish in Canada and the United States.

The paper is part of a book-in-progress on American suffrage literature, and examines Far’s work during the Progressive Era, a period of reform from the 1890s through the 1920s that saw many Americans push for social justice, general equality, and public safety.

Separated from her two-year-old son for nearly a year, a Chinese mother sacrifices everything to get him back. After spending her life’s savings to hire a lawyer, the woman is reunited with her child. But he no longer remembers her, or their native tongue.

She can’t believe that the government would take away her child in what she thought would be “the land of the free.”

The story — entitled “In the Land of the Free” — was published in 1912 in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, a popular short story collection by Sui Sin Far, pen name of British-born writer Edith Maude Eaton (1865 – 1914).

The story collection reflects the struggles and joys in the daily lives of Chinese families in North America. Far, who lived in Montreal and later moved to San Francisco and Seattle, depicts the anguish of Chinese immigrants, and the suffering inflicted by discriminatory immigration laws.

Associate Professor Mary Chapman, who teaches in the Department of English, recently won the 2006 Yasuo Sakakibara Prize from the American Studies Association for an essay she wrote on the pioneering writer.

Chartered in 1951, the American Studies Association has more than 5,000 members, including teachers and other professionals, concerned with American culture.

Prof. Chapman’s paper is part of a book-in-progress on American suffrage literature, and examines Far’s work during the Progressive Era, a period of reform from the 1890s through the 1920s that saw many Americans push for social justice, general equality, and public safety.

Among other things, the progressive movement called for the humane treatment of mentally ill people, worked for the organization of unions, and gave citizen women in the United States the right to vote by 1920.

Prof. Chapman probes into Far’s awareness of the shortcomings of the Progressive Era and the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from fundamental rights.

“At the very same time that they were advocating greater access to government, and votes for women, they excluded the Chinese from immigrating,” Prof. Chapman says.

Born to a Chinese mother and a British father, Far began her career at The Montreal Star and wrote one of the first public statements in opposition to the Chinese Head Tax in Canada. She wrote numerous articles and stories, which appeared mainly in American newspapers and magazines.

Prof. Chapman has found new material through what she calls intense digging in Far’s life. After searching for works not included in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” she has found articles showcasing the writer’s interest in China’s efforts to change outdated laws.

The enfranchisement of women in a Chinese province in 1912, while progressives in the U.S. were still campaigning for women’s right to vote, exposed the limits of American efforts to reform, says Prof. Chapman.

“So all of a sudden, this culture, which even the most progressive-minded Americans had perceived as inferior and backward, had given their votes to women,” she says.

“Far was very supportive of the Chinese reform movement which had, as one of its goals, the enfranchisement of Chinese women,” she adds. “She took great delight in showing how liberated Chinese women were.”

Prof. Chapman believes it was clear to Far that the progressive movement had an exclusive agenda. The writer’s “In the Land of the Free” pinpoints just that.

The story simultaneously captures the humanity of Chinese people while demonstrating the human costs of racist laws. A young boy’s inability to recognize his mother and the loss of his native language at the story’s end signals the costs of cultural assimilation.

“There were so many racist policies that coincided with the progressive movement. So I think Sui Sin Far was a very canny judge of that,” Prof. Chapman says.

As the first Eurasian to publish in Canada and the United States, Far’s writing in prominent magazines such as Good Housekeeping and New England Magazine gave Americans of Chinese ancestry and women a literary voice, notes Prof. Chapman.

“What I’m finding really interesting about her is that she is broadly concerned with questions of mixed race, hybrid cultures, and other races in the broader continental context,” she says.

“Her focus, and her topics go way beyond her interest in the Asian American community, which is what she is well known for.”

The story of a white stenographer in Seattle who, on her wedding day, discovers that her husband has fathered an Alaskan child sheds light on Far’s curiosity, suggests Prof. Chapman.

“Her interest in hybridity goes far beyond the Asian American experience,” she adds.

Prof. Chapman’s current project on American suffrage literature and interest in how women find voices in historical contexts that do not allow them to speak has brought to light the writer’s unique position.

“I was finding that so many of my chapters were focused on white women from the northeast,” she adds, “so I was so happy to find Sui Sin Far’s stories, which offered a very different perspective.”

Prof. Chapman hopes to publish a second collection of Far’s writings to move the writer away from a position that is strictly pro-Chinese, or anti-Progressive.

“There are big gaps in her publication history and I think that most people have just focused on this book that appeared, but the fact is she was an active journalist for at least 15 years,” Prof. Chapman says.

By Michelle Keong, an English and Classical Studies major. She is in the Arts co-op program.

One of Canada’s most celebrated pianists, Coop is head of the keyboard division at the School of Music, where her work earned her the laurels of Distinguished University Scholar in 2003 and, more recently, the 2007 Killam Teaching Prize, which recognizes UBC’s best teachers.

Professor Margery Fee completed her PhD on Canadian literary history at a time when the topic was not as popular as it is today. “People just laughed and said, ‘You want to do a thesis on Canadian literature? Is there any?” Fee says of her years as a graduate student. Since then, Canadian literature has become a legitimate area of study, and Fee has remained committed to giving students “subject matter that they are interested in.”

Professor Ira Nadel says one of the trickiest parts about writing a person’s biography is deciding where to start. “Do you begin with the birth, the grandparents?” he asks.

Professor Ira Nadel, who teaches in the Dept. of English, says one of the trickiest parts about writing a person’s biography is deciding where to start. “Do you begin with the birth, the grandparents?” he asks from his orderly office in the Buchanan Tower, where he works as both biographer and English professor.

When that same question surfaced as Nadel was preparing to draft Leonard Cohen’s biography, Various Positions (Random House Canada: 1996), he found a unique way to frame a recurring emblem in the poet’s life — his search for a father. That is how Nadel settled upon the idea of beginning his account with something that the nine-year-old Cohen did the morning his father Nathan was to be buried in Montreal in 1943. “On the day of the funeral, he went up to his father’s room, found a bow-tie, cut it open, wrote his first poem, stuck it inside the bow-tie, and buried it in the back yard,” relates Nadel, whose biography, now in its second edition, has become one of the definitive accounts of Cohen’s life. “Now if that isn’t both a dramatic and revealing moment about his relationship to what he thought art might be able to do — poetry in particular — and his relationship to his father, I don’t know what is.”

To Nadel — who has spent years researching and teaching how narrative shapes in storytelling — that moment became a skeleton key for understanding Cohen’s life. It unlocked answers to relationships he formed with certain powerful male figures in his life, including Louis Dudek, an early professor at McGill University, poet Irving Layton, and Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, his Zen teacher.

Nadel’s uncanny ability to uncover patterns in the lives of others — including in his accounts of celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard and playwright-director David Mamet — has guided much of his academic career. It’s also earned him numerous awards: he’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a UBC Distinguished University Scholar and recipient of the 1996 Medal for Canadian Biography.

Yet his work encompasses more than the biographical genre; he’s also very interested in Victorian literature, and believes being deeply immersed in a subject is the source to being a great teacher. “I think someone must be engaged in their field. They have to be active. And by that I mean they are writing and they are researching and writing.”

Not to mention resorting to remarkable methods to get students forging new connections with the material at hand, which is something Nadel is known to do. He remembers the time he taught a course called “The Body in Literature,” which focused how the human body had been represented in a selection of English texts. “Coincidentally, I had a friend at the med school who was a professor of anatomy,” recalled Nadel, who arranged for interested students to observe a computerized dissection. “And we watched it — male body, female body, every angle, every part of the human body: dissected. Fantastic.” Then, students were toured through the museum of anatomy normally reserved for medical students. “Here you had body parts in formaldehyde, and it was astonishing,” he recalls. “When we finished and we met again — I don’t know how many days later — we approached the material differently.”

In addition to books on the art of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and a biography of American novelist Leon Uris, Nadel is wrote an article entitled Count Me In: Comedy in Dracula.

Dracula, he says, may also figure in an upcoming course he’s designing right now called “Beverages and Books.” So is a course on “Modernisms.”

“I don’t sit still,” he admits. “That’s one of my secrets.”

By Bryan Zandberg (BA ’06), a former editor with The Ubyssey.

“Fast education is a lot like fast food,” Professor Allen Sens of Political Science analogizes. “You get it quickly, it didn’t taste like much, but it’ll do for now.”

Professor Allen Sens has spent his professional life chewing over the kind of big-world problems his students want to fix.

“Anyone can criticize,” says Sens, adopting the same dramatic, bass tone that makes him a favourite in the classroom. “You just get a soapbox, go down to Stanley Park, stand up, and start screaming. It’s a lot harder to say what you’d actually do to effect positive change.”

Sens believes a pinhole lens is inadequate for big-picture issues like global warming, sustainability, genetically modified foods, and AIDS. That’s why he is troubled that most first-year students are directed like fish into one of two streams, Arts or Science, and spend the next four, or five years narrowing in on one specific focus, never to turn back. “We can’t have a society that’s going to be capable of solving these problems without having this understanding of both the scientific basis for the problems and the social and humanities perspectives of the problems as well.”

Fusing the physical life sciences dimensions of something like climate change together with political and social aspects is the inspiration behind the Terry Project, which Sens co-coordinates with David Ng, director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory in the Michael Smith Labs. Terry brings renowned public speakers like Stephen Lewis to UBC and also publishes creative writing, mainly from undergraduates, on terry.ubc.ca, the project’s website.

This year, Sens and Ng unveiled a cross-disciplinary course they’ve been shaping, called “Global Issues in the Arts and Sciences.” “Our intent is to get students thinking in an interdisciplinary way, across Arts and Science, very early in their careers,” Sens explains. The professor has earned wide appreciation for his efforts, winning the 2003 Killam Teaching prize from fellow-faculty, plus two Just Dessert Awards, given on behalf of students by the Alma Mater Society.

Besides teaching in the Department of Political Science and being chair of the International Relations Program, Sens is probably best known for teaching “Introduction to Global Politics,” a must-take course that fills up quickly every time it is offered. “Let’s face it, content changes all the time, especially in international relations,” says Sens, referring to his own experience as a student. His PhD thesis on the possibility of a global nuclear war triggered in Europe changed “over the course of virtually an evening,” when the Cold War ended.

With this in mind, he tries to provide students with tools for lifelong learning so they can tackle those issues that frequently change in shape and size. “One of the things that troubles me about what I’ve seen particularly in recent undergraduates is they’re all in a great big rush. It’s as if our society has already imprinted onto them this image of where they need to be at a certain point in their lives, and what you need to have in order to advance, or be successful,” Sens says. “It may be more of a path to ulcers and premature graying.”

He advocates the five-year degree, and encourages students to submit their ideas to undergraduate journals, and get involved in policy debates and student governance — in other words, to allow time for thought, reflection, and analysis before graduating.

According to Sens, unless we slow down and think beyond our own personal areas of interest, we will not be equipped to address the global issues we face.

“Fast education is a lot like fast food,” he analogizes. “You get it quickly, it didn’t taste like much, but it’ll do for now. I’m a promoter of slow food and slow education. Savor it, develop the flavours, try new things, experiment.”

By Josephine Anderson, an English major at UBC.