Q: Your life has been eventful and very special. Looking back, what do you think the most important turning point was?

A: When I was in university, the War of Resistance Against Japan came along. Like many young people at that time, I went off to war before finishing my studies. Because I studied foreign languages in school, I was sent to the Kunming- Kweilin area to serve as a translator for American and Allied forces there.

In 1944, before Kweilin fell, I was in one of the last groups to be evacuated. We left after completing our duties under the "scorched earth policy" of the time, and the Japanese forces entered the city the next day. On the road back to Kunming, we heard but were not too certain that there were bandits, so everybody opened fire so that we could prevent anyone being hurt--and the result was that I really was hurt.

Danger at the Huang-kuo-shu Waterfall

The whole troop had ten or so vehicles. I was in the last one, and there were 11 people in it. There was some problem and that day our truck was stalled on the road, and fell be hind the column in front. When we were passing by the Huang-kuo- shu Waterfall, I still remember that it was a clear, moonlit night. We were singing as we went, because we were just about to arrive at the area where we would bunk down for the night. I was very happy. Suddenly I heard a shot. The American driver stopped the vehicle, and we were surrounded by ten or so men.

I saw that the situation was not quite right, and told him to hurry up and drive on, and as a result there was a great burst of rifle sounds. Suddenly I felt something pass through my body, and I knew that I had been hit. But I stayed clearheaded, holding on all the way to the camp, where two American doctors gave me a shot of morphine. When I woke up I didn't know where I was. The first thing I saw was a sky full of stars and an unblemished moon, and only then the American medic at my side.

He said to me, "we weren't sure you would wake up." The bullet had passed through the left thigh, and then the lower intestine, and then went into my right elbow, drilling a slanted line right through. I told him I felt very weak. Because I had lost so much blood, my fingernails were white. He immediately gave me plasma to compensate for my blood loss. Thus, the first thing I did when I got to the U.S. was to go donate blood.

After that I stayed in Kweiyang to recuperate. Fortunately, the bullet had passed clean through the lower abdomen without doing any serious damage. It was just summertime, and Kweiyang was very hot, and my wound was very serious, but, by using a bottle of disinfectant given to me by the medic, I had no infection for three months. At that time there was a communication from Kunming, saying they wanted to send me to Burma. But the doctor responded that I couldn't be moved. This may have saved my life a second time, because many died fighting in Burma.

The greatest desire of any human being is to survive. You could say that this experience of living on the edge of life and death was the most important of my life, and even today I remember every detail very clearly.

Taking on all things calmly

Q: Beyond being pulled back from the jaws of death, what other effect did this incident have on your life?

A: Of course the most basic thing was that I didn't have to go to Burma, otherwise I might have died there long ago. Hah--that's really ironic.

That time I was injured made me understand: Many things simply are unpredictable, and there is no way to prepare in advance. I was wounded quite by accident, and survived quite by chance, so it was by chance that I didn't have to go to Burma. Later on I came to America by chance. It's like the saying "an inch is as good as a mile." If any of these things had gone slightly differently, the outcome would have been very different.

This was very much like what I learned later studying history. No matter whether it be a great age or the life of an insignificant person, odd and chance incidents have a decisive impact in all of them. Thus I think that the Chinese idea of "taking all things calmly" is a very good philosophy. I have been in America for nearly half a century, and the time that I have spent in America in this life has far exceeded that in China, but I still feel that I am a Chinese, and hold fast to Chinese philosophy.

Q: But in American society, which stresses competition and the pursuit of individual performance, can this philosophy really be practiced?

A philosophy fit for a Chinese in America

A: Actually I think it is especially helpful for Chinese in the United States. "Taking all things calmly" is not the same as "accepting whatever happens," and has its positive, active meaning.

The U.S. is a society which says that you must fight for what you believe in, so it is impossible to avoid conflicts. Chinese by and large don't like face-to-face confrontation. If they suffer a loss they complain behind the other party's back, and won't go resolve the problem nose-to-nose. Over time, a great sense of injustice accumulates, and one's energy is all wasted on handling one's emotions, and there is no way to try to progress. I have seen too many cases like this.

"Taking all things calmly" means facing your situation with poise, and using the energy that you save to improve things. If you really can't learn the American way of "not backing down if you're in the right," then by calmly facing circumstances at least one can live happier, not always complaining that one is living in a foreign land and not "creating friction and disaffection" in the limited circle of overseas Chinese society.

Q: Just because of this inability to conform to these patterns, though there are many outstanding specialists among Chinese people in the U.S., there are very few who serve as administrators as you do. Many people also see administration as an intimidating job. How have you learned it?

A: There wasn't any study to speak of, just watching others and slowly gearing myself. The national situations of China and the U.S. are different, and when you go to the U.S. you just adapt to the situation here, and don't exclude anything--you just take all things calmly! Here, you must fight for what you believe--that's the only way to win the respect of others. I have groped around and adapted, and it seems that up to now I can still get by.

No meeting with libraries were it not for the war

Q: How did you get to the U.S., and how did you come to have this unbreakable bond with libraries?

A: After my wound healed, I went to Kunming to work for more than a year. At that time we had some air force personnel who were going to the U.S. for training, and they needed a translator, and I went for the exam. After passing, and undergoing training, I went to the U.S. in the spring of 1945. Four months later, Japan surrendered.

We stayed in training until the summer of the following year. At that time the government adopted measures for scholarships for students who had served in the military to resume their studies. You could also get a scholarship to stay in the U.S. and go on for advanced study. About half of the roughly 100 translators opted to go back, and the other half applies to school in the States. Together with five friends we got into the University of Washington, beginning as sophomores. Can you imagine? We took a train from Texas, where we were training, to Seattle.

Sadly, China fell into civil war, and the situation deteriorated into chaos, and our scholarships halted. Thus part time work became a "required course." If there was money to be made, anywhere was OK--restaurants, orchards, factories . . . . And because of my part-time work, I came across another opportunity.

At that time the University of Washington wanted to set up an East Asia Library, and they were looking for students to work part-time writing up file cards. I worked there 20 hours a week, even more than being in class. You could make US$75, enough for room and board. I naturally went all out for this "mother and father of food and clothes," and gradually became more interested in library work.

So after graduating from university--as a history major--I earned an MA in Library Science, and formally moved in this direction. Just at the time I finished, the Hoover Institution at Stanford was setting up a Chinese language section, so I went to work there, and began a "protracted struggle." I stayed 14 years, leaving only in 1965 to take the job as the director at Harvard-Yenching.

A lot of help from a scholarly back ground

Q: When you were at Stanford, you earned a Ph.D. in History. Has this academic preparation been of help to you in managing a library?

A: Of very great help. The libraries I have run--both the Stanford library and now the Harvard-Yenching--are both research libraries. They differ from other libraries in specially serving the academic community. So besides management ability, they also take interest and experience in research in order to understand the needs of the "customers."

In fact, not only the director, but all the important staff of a research library need to have an understanding of academic work. Take purchasin for example. You need to have a grasp of the trends in politics, economics, sociology, indeed every area, and know which topics have the potential for development, and which scholar's work is worth paying attention to. You could say Harvard Yenching really has a lock on this, because Harvard's East Asia research is very strong, and the research directions and suggestions of the professors can provide excellent reference. We also "dig up" clues from East Asian scholars who come to visit us.

Library work has its nit-picking side, but also its exciting and farsighted side, because besides satisfying today's scholars, we must anticipate tomorrow's needs. I study the history of Republican China myself, and deeply understand that the closer one gets to modern or contemporary history, the harder it gets to latch on to data. Besides some materials which have not been released to the public, this is because contemporary history is still moving and changing. That's different from, say, Ming or Sung history, where there is already a basic structure, and everybody knows which references are the most important and most indispensable.

Set your sights high

On the third floor of our library is the "rare book room." Inside are stored ancient books, each one of them precious. We take the same care when selecting modern books--hoping to choose superior volumes that will in the future become "rare books."

Those who do the work of collecting materials need to set their sights high. We want to preserve the foundations for understanding our era for both a day and posterity. Also, there are many objects which, if not collected today, will be unavailable in the future.

Let me take an example. There are some marginal, fragmented things, such as the more than 1,000 pamphlets circulated in Tienanmen Square during the 1989 democracy movement period that we have gathered, or posters and handbills from Taiwan's elections. Because these things are hard to catalogue, ordinary libraries do not take them, but in fact they have great research value.

Further, America's libraries currently have an urgent need--to collect "non-written" materials, including audio and video tapes, photographs, documentaries, and so on. Data recorded in these ways have never gotten the same degree of emphasis as written materials. But with technical progress in audio-visual techniques and the spread of its use, these have already become too important to ignore.

Fundamentally, I run the library from the point of view of the researchers. In fact, I have directly used my own library to do scholarly work and have really felt what it feels like to be the user.

Q: And how does that feel?

Financing is the biggest headache

A: The stacks and the basic services are all OK. The biggest weakness is that automation is too low. To borrow a book you still have to fill out a card, not like in Harvard's other libraries where they already use a light pen to sweep record the loan.

Q: That's exactly the way many people feel. Besides the hassle of filling out the card, the data for many books has still not been fed into the computer, so one can't do computer searches. And for the data that has been put in, for the Chinese books, they are still entered in English using old romanization, so students from Taiwan, which uses its own phonetic symbols, and the mainland, which uses modern Pinyin spellings, both have to work at it before they can guess how an entry is spelled. A more ideal way would be to handle these books with a Chinese language system, which can use any type of entry system for users to choose from with the screen showing the Chinese characters.

A: This is the direction we want to move in. But automation takes time on the one hand and money on the other. Our holdings are great, and the time and money required are even greater. Even if we are talking only about Chinese and Japanese books, we mobilized all of the catalogue personnel, and it still took four years to compile the 72 large volumes listing all the collection.

Because East Asian libraries collect works from various East Asian nations, computerization is more complex and difficult than for ordinary libraries which just carry Western language material. It would require a huge project to enter all the data into the computer. Our short-term goal is to first get the borrowing process automated. Just this process requires that each and every book have a label the computer can read, which takes a great deal of money.

In fact, everything is pretty much ready in terms of the internal management of Harvard-Yenching. Our biggest challenge in our work is finding the money.

A "victim" of East Asian prosperity

Q: In America, it's very common for the director of private university libraries to solicit funds from outside. You have served as Harvard- Yenching director for 27 years, so you must be used to it by now.

A: No. Financing has become a serious problem only in the last ten years. One reason is the rising cost of books and labor. When you mention it, we are "victims" of East Asian economic accomplishments. Because the currencies of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea have all appreciated against the U.S. dollar, book prices have risen correspondingly. Japanese books are especially expensive.

Another reason is the broadening of the scope of operations, for example making microfilm, promoting computerization, the broadening of collecting to include audio-visual materials, and so on. In order to meet the opening up in these areas, the budget for purchasing books has fallen dramatically at many libraries. Add this to the high cost of books, and the fact that book-buying budgets were low to start with, and you could say that it's robbing from Paul to pay Peter.

Q: Although that's the case, many university East Asian libraries have been run exceeding well in the past few years, and have begun pursuing the old master Harvard-Yenching. For example, Berkeley and Stanford both issued Chinese and Japanese catalogues before Harvard-Yenching. In terms of automation, Michigan's book borrowing system is already automated. How will Harvard- Yenching--the oldest and largest--cope with this competition?

There will never be another Harvard- Yenching

A: There is too much work. Especially for materials which you have to cross half the world to collect, there is just too much that should be done, and no one library has the ability to do it all. Thus the focus now is not competition, but cooperation.

We cooperate with Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and other schools in buying books, dividing up regions, with each school being in charge of its "region of responsibility." Because books from Japan are most expensive, cooperation on Japanese materials began first. This was rather successful, so it is being broadened to Chinese language items.

Of course, our cooperation merely demands that each library do its utmost toward its region of responsibility, but does not limit it in collecting materials from other areas. What must be stressed now is not the fear of others taking away the work you want to do yourself, but how to cooperate in such things as collective purchases and inter-library loans to provide users with the best possible services. A library's position can never be taken away. There are some things that only the Library of Congress has, some things that only Harvard Yenching has. . . collecting materials takes time and one could never create another Harvard- Yenching overnight!

[Picture Caption]

(photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)

In the spring of 1945, the young officer Eugene Wu arrived at an airbase in Texas for training in order to serve as a translator. This trip changed his entire life.

In 1960, Eugene Wu visited Taiwan and had his picture taken with Hu Shih, then director of the Academia Sinica.

The Harvard-Yenching Library has the finest collection of Asian materials of any library in the West, and there is a constant stream of visitors. Recently Lin Yang-kang, the president of the Judicial Yuan, also took time out from a recent trip to the States to visit the facility.

Harvard-Yenching collects materials from China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The greatest number of these are Chinese, accounting for more than half of holdings. (photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)

The map of the world engraved at the entrance to the Harvard-Yenching Library is meant to suggest the spreading of information about East Asia to all the world. This has also been the mission of Eugene Wu's life. (photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)

In the spring of 1945, the young officer Eugene Wu arrived at an airbase in Texas for training in order to serve as a translator. This trip changed his entire life.

In 1960, Eugene Wu visited Taiwan and had his picture taken with Hu Shih, then director of the Academia Sinica.

The Harvard-Yenching Library has the finest collection of Asian materials of any library in the West, and there is a constant stream of visitors. Recently Lin Yang-kang, the president of the Judicial Yuan, also took time out from a recent trip to the States to visit the facility.

Harvard-Yenching collects materials from China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The greatest number of these are Chinese, accounting for more than half of holdings. （photo by Cheng Yuan-ching）

The map of the world engraved at the entrance to the Harvard-Yenching Library is meant to suggest the spreading of information about East Asia to all the world. This has also been the mission of Eugene Wu's life. （photo by Cheng Yuan-ching）