Getting to My Fourth Career, Part One
Getting to My Fourth Career, Part One
[N.B. This is the first of four postings describing how I progressed through my life wanting to be a writer and finally becoming one. Guilty as charged about TMI. Call it logorrhea for that is the correct diagnosis. Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) said, “Le bon Dieu est dans le detail.” Whether this is a call to be thoroughly explicit or a reference to Genesis 1:26–27 we will never know. Either way, the reader deluged with specifics can enjoy the bath or stop drowning but ought not criticize the writer for a fault he has acknowledged.]
My bio begins that writing is my fourth career. I decided as a teenager not to start my professional life as a writer. I was editor of my high school literary magazine. I did well in college level writing courses on weekends in high school. I was in those courses because I was identified by a university research program to be verbally gifted. I was confident my writing was good.
My reasons for not wanting to be a writer were the uncertainty of getting established well enough to earn an income and the prospect of receiving many rejection letters compared to the number of acceptance letters. My self-esteem was too fragile for either of those.
Once at university, my fiction professor encouraged me to pursue writing as a career. He offered to submit one of my short stories to a publisher he knew. I turned him down because it was the leading magazine about gay culture. It was 1979, I was 18, and, although I didn’t hide being gay, I didn’t want to be immediately identified as a gay writer. I already had a poem published in a feminist literary journal the year before in which I was the only male contributor.
My alternative was to earn a degree in International Studies. It was, at the time, the only interdisciplinary major at Johns Hopkins. I liked that it required proficiency in two foreign languages and blended history, political science, anthropology, and economics.
My proficiency in German and Spanish extended to literacy in reading novels and journals. I struggled to write or speak those languages. I spent time replicating the correct accent but couldn’t think fast enough to converse. The practice worked. Latin American students have said that my reading Spanish aloud sounds close to native.
Before graduating, I found it difficult to find jobs available for an International Studies major. My first choice was to attend the University of Maryland School of Law. Then the same fears that caused me to decide not to be a writer stopped me. I would be 23 years old and still look like a teenager when I graduated from law school.
I chose instead to pursue a Ph.D. in the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins. Being a political scientist was going to be my career. Comparative Politics was my focus, and within that, my attention turned to political change movements. I learned about every revolution in every country in history. I learned about socialism and communism. I learned about economic development strategies.
I needed to decide on a geographical region to research for my master’s essay and doctoral dissertation. As with my undergraduate degree, I had to show proficiency in two languages. I spent two weeks binging on Spanish and passed a test to demonstrate I knew that language. German wasn’t going to help if I was looking at the developing world. My choice of region would determine what new language I learned.
I was fascinated by the Sahel, that stretch between the Sahara and subtropical Africa that includes Timbuctoo and the Niger River valley. Arabic is the lingua franca due to the widespread adoption of Islam. The other option was China. In 1983, Deng Xiaoping was proposing interesting innovations he called “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” I knew China was going to be a bigger player in the world and the Sahel was likely to remain a backwater.
I took an intensive course in putonghua (standard Chinese) during the summer at Georgetown University, commuting each day from Baltimore. Then, I took the same class stretched over two semesters at Hopkins. I discovered some fluency in speaking a foreign language by being immersed in it during two summers in Tianjin. Speaking in Chinese with someone on a plane once, the person asked me if I learned in Tianjin. I had the erhua accent.
Meanwhile, I wrote my master’s essay on democracy movements in China prior to1949. The big takeaway from that project was seeing how ridiculous it is to expect the Chinese to embrace liberal or social democracy. What developed organically in Europe and the Anglo countries can’t be imposed on any other country. Trying to promote political systems elsewhere requires the transformation of economies to consumerism and decades of political stability.
My doctoral dissertation examined the economic policies adopted in China in 1980–85 that devolved decision-making on contracts with foreign investors to designated cities and new special economic zones. Things were moving fast in 1985–86 because the initial results were stunning. A theory of economic geography indicates self-sustaining development emerges from policies that enhance a city’s ability to integrate its surrounding region. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms did this.
I posited that the long-term result would be that areas of China that did not get the initial or subsequent boosts to economic decision-making would fall behind, creating political resentments. Indeed, while hundreds of millions of people gained from the economic reforms to create a middle class and a fair number of wealthy people, many remained mired in locations untouched by the reforms.
The government acknowledged this disparity in the 2000s but didn’t take much action. The slow response to address the disparity is one reason Uighurs and other minority nationalities far from the developed coast have expressed disapproval of the government. If they aren’t going to be a part of China’s booming economy, perhaps they shouldn’t be part of China.
I defended my dissertation in October 1986. I received a conditional pass because my advisor was dissatisfied with the first chapter. I immediately had a job teaching at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster PA for the Spring 1987 semester. My advisor didn’t approve of me taking the job before I revised that chapter.
I was one of two finalists for the open position where I was teaching. I was told I did not get the job because they needed to hire the Korean American candidate for diversity purposes. Being gay didn’t add to the diversity apparently.
I had two job offers for September 1987. One would make me the entire Political Science Department at a college in Delaware. The other was a one-year contract at Baldwin-Wallace College outside Cleveland. I took the latter, again due to self-esteem issues.
What happened next involves my moving to a second career. One issue was that my advisor was right. Taking teaching positions interfered with my ability to revise that chapter. For those tenacious enough to learn more, see you in my next post.