We read.

For two months we read an array of articles from the Georgia Historical Quarterly, on various topics in Georgia history from the Civil War to the early 1970s. During this time, we were each seeking to become well-read in our respective areas of interest, often guided through the sources by our professor, Dr. David Parker. Then around the end of September, we stopped meeting to discuss articles and hypothetical topics and started using that class time to scour the archives, the library, and the research databases we’d used to much less extent in previous classes: we had to come up with a thesis and flesh it out into a contextual and well-argued history thesis by Dec. 7.

No pressure.

Young J. Allen in his early twenties; he mentions in a letter to his aunt and uncle (who raised him) that he stopped shaving his beard at the outset of the American Civil War. It is apparent that he never picked up the habit again. (Photos courtesy MARBL, Emory.)

I had arrived in this class at the eleventh hour, signing up about two weeks before the start of fall semester– and without one last prerequisite class I needed. And in fact it was quite surprising to some of my history major friends that I would end up in a Georgia History senior seminar after spending college studying Asia. But several weeks earlier, in mid-July, Dr. Parker and I had found a way to combine these two seemingly unrelated regions: Young John Allen.

Young J. Allen (yes, Young is his first name, not a kindly prefix) graduated from Emory College when it was just a newly-founded school in Oxford, Georgia, and spent his life as a Methodist missionary in Shanghai, China. He left the United States in Dec. 1859 and remained in the Far East until his death there in 1907. His manuscript collection as well as a large library of his own books reside at Emory University in Atlanta, deeming Allen the subject of a day’s trek over to the archives at their Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). What started as a fun mini-project for my summer class (which I also took with Dr. Parker) would have to become my senior thesis topic; when else was I going to find a subject that would so perfectly blend documents in Georgia and three years’ worth of my knowledge about Chinese culture, language, politics, and religion? Plus, I was raised Methodist, so I would get to know a little more about that history to boot.

What I would discover was much more than the life, failures, and triumphs of Young J. Allen and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in China, but simply how enthralling it is to pour over documents that he poured over more than a century earlier. Call me a dork, or a call me a historian, but it felt utterly like touching history. Thankfully, he had somewhat legible handwriting, so I read what I could of his hand-written letters, journals, sermons, and notes for the books he wrote. It felt romantic in the way it seems when you read The Historian and follow a generation of historians across Cold War Europe in search of Vlad Tepes (the prince who inspired tales of Dracula) but also monotonous in the way that you feel work must inevitably be. The result is a happy medium, a wholly rewarding experience and with any luck, worthwhile when you sit down to write.

What did I find?

Allen would spend his life devoted to not only evangelism but the added social goals of education, journalism, writing, and translating.

I found a man inspired by God, baffled by Confucius, and bound to pragmatism. The state of the young Methodist mission was sad when he arrived, and much as he tried to expand it, the American Civil War stole any hope of support or funding from abroad. Allen and his fellow missionary J. W. Lambuth spent nearly a decade working odd jobs to keep themselves afloat. Their families were present in Shanghai too; in fact, Allen had six children with his wife Mary Houston Allen, but only three survived past toddlerhood. By the time funding returned in any sense, Allen had made his own revelation about Chinese society. The non-receptive citizens he’d been preaching to had been anything but successful; but the young men he taught while working at a government school seemed just the type, the upper class families, who may have more influence in a hierarchical Confucian society. Maybe, he decided, reaching these people first and educating them in western subjects (including but not exclusively Christianity) could later influence more people through the top-down formation of their citizenship. These people would not only receive the accompanying western education that Allen considered paramount, but might have more success at reaching the laypeople with whom he’d become so disenchanted.

Allen spent the rest of his life working to varying degrees in education in Shanghai. The Anglo-Chinese College, Shanghai would eventually merge with two others to become Suzhou University in 1901, which had been one of his life’s goals. He would also play his hand in journalism and publishing, using his Wan-kuo kung-pao magazine to propel a combination of world and national news, essays on religion, and attacks on Confucian lifestyle. He contributed many translations of tomes on politics and religion, including The Relations Between East and West that was popular among his colleagues and governmental gentry. He wrote several books of his own as well, including one that you can find on Google Books today (by the way, it’s in Chinese!). While he did not abandon his evangelistic goals, he expanded those initial plans by adding his social missions to his ambitious strategy to win converts. He wound up somewhere in between fully accepting Confucian society and fully condemning it, and allowed students to learn about Christianity in a non-pressured way. At the end of the day, he saw both mental and spiritual parts of man to be significant.

My thesis touches on this and other aspects of what made Allen a combination of the two worlds of missionary work that grew out of that late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as Americans and other missionaries encountered reluctant natives in the field; a strong camp of traditional strictly evangelical missionaries would go forth alongside the newer social progress proponents. It wound up being around 8000 words (thirty pages double-spaced). I had an embarrassing number of library books checked out from mine and other university libraries across Georgia.

It was an incredible exercise in being a historian. Almost every person in my ten-student class ended up spending at least a few days in an archive somewhere in Georgia, from Emory to Koinonia Farm and in between. What any of these theses will become in the future remains to be seen, but I think we all felt like historians during those months. I am one of the only living experts on Young J. Allen, and I think that’s pretty darn cool.

The assignment (for my World Since 1945 class) is to research an event of international political significance that has taken place between 1945 and 1999. Approaching it at a specific angle– versus just attempting to do “the Vietnam War”– we need to examine three primary sources relating to that event. So basically, I need three sources coming from the time period that the event occurred, analized and compared in 5 pages. I’ve not done much yet in my career in history with primary sources, and that is essentially the bread-and-butter of an historian’s job. Examining the documents (journals, letters, government documents, etc.) that remain from history give us the real insight. It is when the analysis comes in that books and essays are created, giving us the perspectives we may have on history. You have historians to thank for compiling and tidying much of the history you know.

For my topic, I have chosen the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that Mao Tse-tung began in communist China in the 1960′s. His confidence that tradition and intellectuals would ruin the socialist society was so strong, thousands died in the wake of their attempted obliteration. This is when the Red Guard came to be, and images  still linger of young children in their Maoist uniforms patrolling their country for “revisionists” who posed a threat to the state.

From this period of Chinese history I will draw several primary sources and narrow it down to the three that best bring varying viewpoints to the table. My initial research returned several works of compiled documents from the state and Mao, a compilation of first-person accounts of the response of Chinese villagers and peasants, and several works from reporters and diplomats from abroad who experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand while there. I will be going through these sources and others, and hopefully narrowing it all down to my main three points of view on the singular movement. From there, I will look at the Cultural Revolution as an entity and use those three viewpoints to analyze it; vise-versa, I will use the context of the Cultural Revolution to analyze what is said in the documents I choose.

Sitting at the start, this seems like both a daunting and exhilarating project. But at the same time, this is an essential part of doing research– looking at primary sources. And I couldn’t ask for more flexibility in the topic, nor for a better topic. China is, after all, full of intrigue for a foreigner. So, I must get started.

The issue has been my hesitation to write something about my life, that, to me, seems ordinary.

Recently though, I started reading my friend Stacey’s blog. She is chronicling her year studying Mandarin Chinese in Beijing, and her stories of everyday life and building her own little world in the Chinese capital are entertaining and hopeful. Stacey was my roommate for one of the two months I spent there (2007), and so some of her irritations and joys I completely understand. Others, I hope to experience for myself one day. Her writing is also a huge collection of her thoughts on her life, and I realize that I can do that right here, about my life in Kennesaw, Georgia.

Today, for instance, I went stroller shopping with my roommate Brandie and her boyfriend Kyle. They are expecting a baby at the end of July, and with every passing day, I learn more about pregnancy and what grows out of it. I see Brandie, and while inside she is nurturing a baby, outside, I see her growing into a lovely adult. Her and Kyle are facing realities I have never had to face, and while not always easy, they have embraced the challenge. There are so many things to learn about babies, which up until this point have been things I dismissed for a “later” period in life. From conversations I have had with her recently, Brandie sees her pregnancy as a very spiritual experience, changing her perspective in far more ways than just the reality of no loner worrying about herself. And while not planned, she has pretty incredible circumstances, a lot of support, and an amazing partner for the journey. It was so great learning about the strollers with them today, and seeing them walk it around the house.

This is just one change that accompanies the new year, a year which, in only a few months, has already been another huge step further into life. I see wonderful things unfolding before my eyes. So much makes me think, makes me thankful, and keeps me smiling every day. So  many things inspire me. Writing it all down is essential.

Friedman explains his theory in terms of ten “flatteners,” or pivotal occurrences which have given the world the appearance and opportunities it has today. I have been exploring this book throughout my time in China, and have been blown away by the things I have learned. Even as a young person in such a fast-paced, quickly changing world, there are forces at work behind closed doors that I never dreamed of. I buy products from Wal-Mart, am a slave to my iPod and laptop computer. I use the internet for everything from research to networking with friends to shopping, and expect instant results and all the information that relates to whatever I’m looking for. I grocery shop expecting to see the same assortment of vegetables and fruits year-round and call 24-hour-a-day service centers and have technology repaired within days of the initial malfunction.

Within all this, I understand that there have been great advances in the service, quality, price, and availability of all this; however, I had no idea the fundamental innovations and trends that the last two decades have held in making my life the way it is. Starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall (therefore creating a relatively unified sort of direction of the world—no longer split by two major polarities and their opposing economic systems) and the implementation of Windows as means to run PCs, Friedman tracks the progression of our world into one of open-sourcing, outsourcing, offshoring, supply-chaining, insourcing, and in-forming—all greatly allowed by the laying of fiber-optic cable across the world and the extreme growth and development of the Internet and technology powerful enough to handle all this.

“Flattener #6” is offshoring, specifically the immense impact China’s manufacturing and production had had on the world and how businesses run, make money, and maintain themselves. China’s role is raising the stakes across the board, in business and trade, in education, and in technology, making the world a more competitive place.

Right now, I see a China that is definitely developing, an odd paradox that contrasts glossy, western-influenced shopping centers, high rises, and new cars against piles of rubble, slums, and squeaky rickshaws and bicycles. Comparing this to my native land, it would be easy for me to dismiss this massive nation as simply developing, to think that hopefully one day it will set its feet firm on the international playing field.

Even after learning in classes and through the media about all the places China is headed, seeing firsthand how much of its current situation is provincial, impoverished and undeveloped could make the uneducated eye skeptical. That is why augmenting my trip with The World is Flat has been so enriching. On several occasions I have been so amazed by what I’ve learned—things that exist and take place in my world every single of which I had no idea—that I have exclaimed out loud, in excitement and revelation. Those who have been around me know how often I mention something I’ve read in Friedman’s book, how often his name comes up. It is all particularly pertinent to those of us on this trip, as we are the ones who will be bridging the relations between our own nation and the huge global power we are visiting and observing.

I recommend the book to anyone interested in global current events or business. This might sound boring, but don’t be afraid of the book’s size (469 pages) or its classification as current events—I assure you the way Friedman presents his theories is interesting and exciting. He explains things in terms that the average person can understand, appreciate, and delight in.

The World is Flat has extremely enhanced my experience in China, and will make me more observant and aware upon my return to the United States.