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Reflections on Life, Faith, and Culture

Modern and Classical Languages releases new content on department happenings, stories, and recommendations each month.

Click through our archive below, including recent faculty publications and a special feature from our Provost, Dr. Karen Lee!

Culture Stock - Reflections on Life, Faith, and Culture


I am a fourth-generation Taiwanese Presbyterian, born and raised in greater Boston. My great-grandmother was a convert of Canadian medical missionaries in the 1880s on the island of Formosa, now the nation of Taiwan. As the story goes in my family, my great-grandmother also served as the first Presbyterian woman elder in Taiwan. Her church was located in northern Taiwan by the Tamshui River which runs to the sea. I am the namesake of her daughter, my beloved grandmother, whose name included the Chinese character, “hui” or “hwei.” My parents added flower radicals to this character, which created the special “hwei” in my middle name. In Mandarin Chinese, my name is An-hwei, or “peace fragrant-orchid.” Coincidentally, the “hwei” of my grandmother’s name is also the first character in the Chinese name of Wheaton College.

I spent some of my girlhood summers in Taipei, where many relatives still live, and rode the train throughout Taiwan. One of my favorite places to visit was the beautiful marble gorge in Hualien, called the Taroko Gorge, where I’d gather smooth marble pebbles and put them in my pocket to take home to New England. While in Taiwan, I’d also pick up fragments of the colorful Taiwanese dialect, full of jokes and the rhythms of joyful laughter at family festivities. Over the clatter of teacups and porcelain bowls, I loved eating xiaolongbao dumplings at the first small Din Tai Fung restaurant. It was long before this little dumpling shop became known as the famous Din Tai Fung with locations in Singapore, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, and throughout the world.

Because of my family heritage, global language studies holds a special place in my heart. I spoke Mandarin Chinese with my parents at home and dutifully attended Chinese school on weekends. I embarked on doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where Chinese served as one of my foreign languages to satisfy a proficiency requirement. The language exam, one of the toughest I ever had to complete, required a translation of Chinese literary criticism. To this day, I am so grateful that I was permitted to use a dictionary!
 
I’m delighted to share two poems, “On the Beauty of Insignificance 渺小的美麗,” which I wrote when I lived in southern California. I wrote the original in English, then translated it into Chinese. Although the poems were written in this chronological sequence, I think of them as “sisters” or “twins” who exist side by side. They are parallel texts, almost a double set of originals, rather than a translation and an original. They were first published in Poetry Sky, a bilingual Chinese-English literary journal edited and published by the poet, Yidan Han, who lives in New Hampshire.  When I wrote these poems, I was reflecting upon a winter heat wave and its effect upon the rose blossoms, which often bloom from June through January in southern California.

渺小的美麗

教給我們貧困的美感。
從皮棉陷阱絨布，

山東絲綢在臉上，
翅薩馬拉斯上出風，

拐杖鑽黃蜂誰下蛋
在玫瑰花。

是的，玫瑰手杖
活著但垂死的同時

在熱浪，
半奇蹟。

ON THE BEAUTY OF INSIGNIFICANCE

Teach us the beauty of paltriness.
Flannel from a lint trap,

shantung silk on the face,
winged samaras on the wind,

a cane-boring wasp who lays eggs
in the roses.

Yes, rose-canes
alive yet dying at the same time

in the heat wave,
             a half-wonder.

 

Andrew Burlingame, M.A.

  • Burlingame, Andrew R. 2020. “New Evidence for Ugaritic and Hittite Onomastics and Prosopography at the End of the Late Bronze Age.” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 110/2: 196-211.
  • Loney, Alexander C. “Home.” In The Cambridge Guide to Homer, edited by Corrine Pache, 133–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
  • -----. “Type Scene.” In The Cambridge Guide to Homer, edited by Corrine Pache, 213–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Litong Chen, Ph.D.

Alexander Loney, Ph.D.

  • Loney, Alexander C. “Home.” In The Cambridge Guide to Homer, edited by Corrine Pache, 133–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
  • -----. “Type Scene.” In The Cambridge Guide to Homer, edited by Corrine Pache, 213–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Néstor Quiroa, Ph.D.

  • Quiroa, Néstor I. Review of The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán, by David L. Haskell, Journal of Anthropological Research 76, no.1(March 2020):103-104, https://doi.org/10.1086/706966.
  • Quiroa, Néstor I. Review of Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America, edited by David Tavárez, Latin American Antiquity 30, no 3 (August 2019): 659-66, https://doi.org/10.1017/laq.2019.56.