Coming from the East and marrying someone from the West, I find the combination of cultural backgrounds beneficial in understanding the way that culture and science interact. This combination, however, also serves as fertile ground for misunderstandings. When we find ourselves in a ‘spirited discussion’ about how it is we know what we think we know—what philosophers would call epistemology—it most often arises from our two very different cultural frames of reference. One recent reminder I had of this involved a spicy tofu dish. For Chinese, good health is understood in terms of balance. My grandmother, who taught me to cook, emphasized that all foods have their own ‘natures,’ some are ‘hot’ and others ‘cold.’ A balance of these promotes good health. When my husband had a cold recently, I made his favorite dish, Maputofu, but left out the spices because a ‘hot’ food would tip the balance in favor of the illness. After the first bite, he looked up with an expression normally reserved for one of my favorite Julia Roberts movies. “Good, a little light maybe, but good,” he said as he grabbed a tissue for his runny nose. Even with a cold, given the choice, he would eat spicy tofu.

We long ago developed the ability to hold contradictory cultural ‘truths’ on topics as diverse as medicine and food. We jokingly claimed we were a ‘post-modern’ couple because anything we eventually agreed upon was culturally contested. We did not buy the post-modernist mantra that ‘all knowledge is local,’ but, suggesting at least that ‘all politics are local,’ neither could we live together by one cultural construction of reality and the power it would give the winner. So, often we live by a ‘suspension of disbelief.’ He will take the herbal medicines I offer and visit the acupuncturist when his back hurts. I will take the calcium supplements he offers and exercise my frozen shoulder. Occasionally we ‘contest’ these cultural ‘truths,’ but mostly we live in the shared truth that we want to be together. It is, however, one thing to separate the science of spice and medicine from its cultural context to make a bad back better and to prevent osteoporosis, and a very different and potentially dangerous act to make public policy out of this kind of outlook.

I remember a little about this first hand. In 1957, Chairman Mao Zedong decided China would become a leading industrial power. To accomplish this, he ordered the construction of steel plants across the nation, and forced rural and a few urban populations into collectivized production brigades. This was the period of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960). The social policy targets were ridiculously high given the agricultural technology and level of industrialization. Still, people built backyard blast furnaces for iron and steel and everyone was trying to find metal, from nails and copper buttons, to doorbells and doorknockers. The adults were supposed to melt down scrap metal to make useful items such as tools and utensils. In practice, however, the high state targets forced us to melt down useful items including tools and utensils to produce contaminated masses of iron too brittle to be useful. Backyard blast furnaces and other nonagricultural projects led to massive famine. Conservative estimates say at least 16.5 million people died in the experiment.

The Third Reich provides an earlier example: technological advances were accepted but the science behind them was removed from any humanistic context, to be relocated in a reactionary socio-political and—in its Aryan mythology—pseudo-religious setting. I hoped this kind of thinking was past. In Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, author Meera Nanda warns us that reactionary modernism is still present, and has an unsuspecting ally in the fashionable epistemologies of postmodernism. Her thesis is that contemporary India is leaning toward a version of this outlook in which political nationalism is accompanied by technological advance; but the science that informs it has been stripped of its enlightenment context and relocated within “Vedic Science,” a nationalist version of Hinduism.

Like other reactionary modernists, Neo-Hindu thinkers have created myths claiming that past traditions of learning represent the golden age of science and reason in early India, much as the European Renaissance ushered in the modern age in the West. But where the European Renaissance was informed by rediscovering Greek humanistic traditions, the Neo-Hindu renaissance has rediscovered the most mystical and anti-humanistic elements of the Vedic traditions. This is a powerful mixture where possession of the atomic bomb and the science behind it has been linked to the Bhagavad Gita and its reference to a ‘thousand suns.’ There is even a Vedic alternative to Darwinian evolution that claims humans have devolved from an original unity with pure consciousness. This view is based upon the assumption that modern science is a prisoner of Western cultural and religious biases. Once these are removed, Vedic mythologies become a legitimate source of scientific hypotheses. This outlook, Nanda argues, is justified by postmodern intellectuals who have molded their disillusionment with the modern world into a radical denunciation of modern science. Postmodernist claims that ‘all knowledge is local,’ and that there is no universal rationality to science apart from its ability to serve a particular socio-political and cultural context can justify reactionary movements that control nuclear weapons in non-Western societies as easily as they justify ‘creation science’ here. Nanda’s main point is that postmodernists and others inadvertently give support to reactionary nationalism by claiming that science, no matter where it is practiced, and myth are on equal epistemological footing. Nanda’s lesson is that despite the belief most of us have about science’s potential as a critical approach to all our beliefs and a tool in building a more humane and free society liberated from the superstitions of the past, there is no necessary connection. Although it is difficult to read, Nanda’s forceful book is a wake-up call for everyone interested in the ways in which science and culture interact—as we all should be.

The Center for the Humanities advisory board is currently considering the topic of the interface between the sciences and the humanities. One potential difficulty in factoring dialogues between these two categories of knowledge is that many topics seemingly arising from one discipline are claimed to belong to other, but this difficulty is more an artifact of how human knowledge has been partitioned in the university than a reflection of how science and the humanities interact in real life. As an anthropologist and archaeologist who has studied the remains of this interaction, I am deeply aware of that truth.

This is our last issue until September 2004. We wish all our readers a peaceful summer.

Jian Leng, Assistant Director
The Center for the Humanities

In the late 1980s, after I quit my corporate job and stayed home to care for my two infant sons, I picked up writing again—a short story here, an essay there, whatever I could steal from an unpredictable and fragmented schedule. Just at that time, I was asked to help edit a community-based Chinese publication. Inaugurated in the late 1970s, this variety monthly was staffed completely by volunteers. Being a literary snob, I did not at first take the job very seriously. To me, it was no more than a do-good ‘community service’ project. But little did I know that this journal, unsophisticated as it was, would turn out to be instrumental not only in the formation of the current St. Louis Chinese Writers’ Association, but also would launch vibrant and long-lasting writing careers for some of the people involved. Several members of the group—Shulan Li, Jian-Wen Huang, and Huey-Shen Shieh—first started writing seriously while contributing to this journal.

The journal also served as a ready forum for veteran writers to have their Chinese writings published. At the time, Chinese resources being so limited in Midwest, getting a piece of Chinese writing published could be daunting and time-consuming. Before the age of internet and e-mail, it always involved slow international mailing because the only publication opportunities were on the other side of the ocean. So for Mimi Chou Huang, a well-published writer of children’s literature and feature writings in Taiwan before coming to St. Louis, the journal was a vital means for her to continue writing. For a person like me whose last short story was published more than ten years ago, the journal also provided a timely structure and support for my return to creative writing. Flipping through the pieces I have written for the journal, I realize that several of those I still like would not have appeared had it not been for the journal.

More importantly, the journal was a natural binding force for this group of individuals who had shared interests in writing and literature and who could readily commiserate with each other for having to write in the heartland of a country with cultures and languages so different from the ones in which they were born and raised. Even when the journal eventually folded for lack of funds, the friendships remained, and the group has persisted as an informal community.

Six years ago, when Shulan Li and Connie Fu decided to form a St. Louis Chapter of the North American Chinese Writers’ Association—a Taiwan-based global network for Chinese writers all over the world—there was a pre-existing group, and membership expanded to include new-comers from mainland China. The organizational meeting was held at the Bristol restaurant in West County. There I met Qiu Xiaolong for the first time and a much treasured friendship ensued. Xiaolong, a poet and translator from Shanghai, not yet widely published in this country, was teaching and translating at the time. From that point on, we witnessed the explosion of his writing career in this country, and shared the joy, pride, and amazement of his Cinderella-like story. One of the most memorable moments in this group’s history was when Xiaolong told us that his first novel, Death of a Red Heroine, had been accepted for publication: disbelief and happiness written all over his face, and pride on ours. Now supported solely by his writing, he is that rare phenomenon of a writer who finds success writing in his second language.

Since the establishment of our organizational affiliation, more members joined and our activities became more organized. Two issues of a Chinese literary journal, Confluence, were published, featuring writings by members and other overseas Chinese authors. A bi-weekly literary section is being put out in the St. Louis Chinese Journal, a Chinese newspaper published weekly. We also meet regularly to talk about our own writings or to discuss selected literary works. This year the group started the process of incorporation as a non-profit organization in Missouri. Our vision is to publish a bilingual literary journal, featuring translations as well as original Chinese and English writings.

I myself have been writing intermittently throughout these years when writing had to play second fiddle to my duties as a mother. Thanks to this group of friends who have become increasingly important in my life, I have never completely dropped writing. But in the last few years, I found it harder and harder to write in Chinese, not only because the language is no longer a living thing in my life, but also because my readings are now exclusively in English. I have caught myself going through a ‘translation’ process more and more whenever I write in Chinese. My writing projects are now mostly constructed in English and I am thinking more in English than in Chinese. Paradoxically, my mother tongue has become strangely ‘artificial’ and ‘contrived’ in my current linguistic existence. It was during a book translation project for a publisher in Taiwan that I truly realized how my written Chinese has deteriorated to a dysfunctional level: a typical immigrant’s story. Once I ceased lamenting the loss, I decided to embrace the inevitable and start writing in English. First, I was exhilarated by the freedom and the newness of writing in a different language. But when the daily wrestling with words became routine, I realized that a second language would be forever like a pair of plastic gloves, preventing ultimate deftness, this ‘limitation’ being part of the cost exacted for my newly acquired identity.

But even after this switch of writing language, support from the Chinese writers’ group is still vital to me. Although I do not always present my writings to them, I find their company stimulating and nourishing. Other than the writerly camaraderie valued by any writing group, the bonding within this group runs even deeper. Ambivalent feelings of choosing between two homelands, two cultures, two languages, and the constant tension between embracing our own heritage and resisting being pigeonholed into a narrow ethnic role are the common undercurrents in our psyches, although they are manifest in very different forms in the diverse choices members within this small group have made with regard to their writing languages and their identities as writers. Ultimately, it is more the fluidity of identity and the understanding of it that is the true source of this support we afford each other as fellow writers who experience the singular duality first hand.

Leslie Su Cheng, writer, is a member of St. Louis Chinese Writers’ Association.