ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH DR. CAROLYN RHODES Digital Services Center, Perry Library Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia Part 2: March 27, 2009 by Karen Vaughan   Listen to Interview Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Biblio

Vaughan:  This is Karen Vaughan, and it’s Friday March 27, and I’m here interviewing Carolyn Rhodes for the second part of her interview about ODU history. OK, let’s talk about your Fulbrights.  You received two Fulbrights – one in Romania and one in China.  Can you talk about those?

Rhodes:  Yes.  For both Fulbrights, I had a partner who went with me, traveled with me – Ernest Rhodes.  We’d married in 1969 and we made trips to Europe, really repeatedly during the 70s.  Some of our favorite places to go were where Ernie wanted to explore as he had a scholarly focus on the Shakespearean stage, which of course was England, but we visited ancient theatres in Greece, Rome, and Avignon – and they were all in the background of stage life and lead up towards his work on Renaissance stages which featured the Rose and the Globe theatre in London.  We saw them too.

When he retired in 1980 and was free to go with me – we didn’t have to find two jobs overseas -I applied to teach under the Fulbright program.  That’s a government-supported exchange of faculty between other countries and the United States.  It’s formally known as the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, so the papers I have from there often say CIES.  But all the Fulbrighters call it Fulbright.  We went to Romania for the academic year 1982-83.  I taught at a four-centuries-old university in the town of Cluj-Napoca.  That university was named Babes-Bolyai University after two professors from the 16th century.  Classes in English were treated as part of the Department of Germanic Languages, which was a bit humbling and a bit amusing because I guess that pattern was set up in the 18th or 19th century and remained there even after English became one of the most desired languages of the students the way the world is now.

Politically, the country was run by a communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.  We were assigned to a three-room apartment in a workers’ compound -- one halfway size of a room and the others very tiny.  We had colleagues…  Maybe I should tell you a little bit about [the apartment].  It was a 3rd or 4th floor walkup with pictures of Ceausescu in the halls and statements we couldn’t read that were political. And it did have a bathroom, but there we’d use the tub to do the laundry.  Wonderful scenery out the windows of other people’s lives in small houses.  The kitchen was closet-sized and there were no closets anywhere.  No, there was a place where you could put dishes. 

Our colleagues were very much aware of Securitate, the secret police, and some of them worked for it.  Everything was monitored.  We worried about the lights in the ceiling for fear they had microphones in them.  We knew from Fulbright orientation that we shouldn’t discuss international politics and certainly not local Communist politics.

Romanian students spoke English very well.  They had been selected and tracked to specialize in the language for years before they got to the university.  I taught American writers, from Franklin to Crevecoeur and I planned Frost to Bellow, but I had to leave out Bellow because he had been blacklisted very recently for some implied criticism about Romania in his novel The Dean’s December [1982].

The textbooks available didn’t include many women writers – the great standards, you know.  And yet fiction always dramatizes human tensions, and so in the class we talked about gender roles somewhat.  The students were glad to have foreign teachers.  They wanted to know a lot about life in the USA.  Most of our Romanian faculty colleagues either welcomed us or ignored us—I suppose those who were suspicious of Capitalists – or would be harmed by associating with us.  Some of them wanted our help because they were translating novels from English and also a lot of scientific, or rather more closer to instruction manuals, how to do it stuff for non-humanities.   We needed their help too, very much more often, because we had to cope with challenges like exchanging money, buying train tickets, grocery shopping, most anything around town.  There were basic foods and necessities that were rationed.  It was like going back to World War II for me or even back to the 30s.  Many things were just not available:  cooking oil, meat, eggs, coffee, tea, and toilet paper.  We could go down to Bucharest where the embassy was and buy some very nice soft paper napkins that were made in China.  There was a lot of exchange with the other communist countries, China, Russia, and so forth.  Oddly, Kent cigarettes had become the standard currency on a flourishing Black Market.  We could help our Romanian friends and colleagues by ordering Kent cigarettes through the Embassy and then letting them have them.  If you didn’t have a cigarette [package to trade], you couldn’t get a clean needle in a hospital.

Our foreign colleagues – teachers assigned from other countries -- weren’t very many, and they were generally distant to us.  There was a grumpy Englishman who detested the way that students preferred to speak with American accents rather than to – accents and slang – rather than to use him as a model.  Then there was also a visiting linguist.  She was from Finland, and she taught a language that was akin to Finnish, Albanian maybe, and both of those languages are way off the edge.   She was charming, and we kept in touch with her.  Four years later, when we left China on a round-the-world trip coming back the other way, we took the Trans-Siberian railroad and we got to Helsinki and Minna showed us around and welcomed us.  

In Eastern Europe, and later in China as well, the students weren’t so different from ones I’ve taught here.  There were those eager to learn and even dedicated, you know, all gung-ho.  And some were lazy, and some were just pretty much plodding along, calculating their grades. They weren’t very interested in searching for insights.   And, besides, in both those countries, the students had been indoctrinated, well, no, they had been educated you might say, for the whole of their school careers, which by the time I got to them was 13-14-15 years, to give fixed answers.  It was a problem with students thinking they’d answered an exam if they could memorize ahead of time.  And so it was very hard to get them to have opinions and argue about them.  So, those students that I had a sense that they were only there for their grades, they would even interrupt their classmates’ discussions to ask “will this be on the test?” which I’d heard at home too.

Romanian people and their ways of managing things -- you know, beliefs and customs and local habits – were just fascinating.  We had picnics some weekends out in the countryside beside trout streams and eating some of the native fats and things.  We got to know a few colleagues who were generous to drive us out for ventures, because they had strictly-rationed gasoline, so it was quite a gift.  My work was temporary, and so I had no committee duties and not much paperwork.  No one questioned how things were done there, and so there was no caucus or anything like that.  Romanians we knew didn’t resist authority openly.  About the most we would hear was questioning the system’s inefficiency but particularly by jokes.  They would make jokes about even the traits of Ceausescu, whom they called the Big Cheese, and his wife, who was much hated. 

At Peking University in Beijing, China, that was 86-87, some basic ways of doing things were similar to those in Romania.  The university gave us housing in a small furnished apartment that was set aside for foreign lecturers.  We ate in dining halls provided for faculty.  And, we found most students were eager for their classes and very competent – they were ready – competent in speaking, well, more in writing, but often in speaking too, in English.  They’d been tracked for four to six years before they got to the university.  More of them expected to become translators rather than teachers.  The translators are needed in China for tourists, which of course they were trying to encourage; and for the Army, which had massive groups of translators – very big army – I gave a lecture at one of their schools; and businesses.  There was a kind of surge of what they called joint venture businesses starting up in China.  Of course they needed all kinds of translators because the experts would come from Sweden or America or other places, set up a venture, and they needed constant interaction.  

We had more advantages there in the People’s Republic of China than we had in Romania.  Partly because, I don’t know if you could exactly say they were richer, but they really wanted their foreign lecturers to be happy.  The English department and the students also wanted me to teach Women’s Studies, and that was quite different.  I had colleagues who asked for my advice – women usually -- about developing feminist groups and organizations.  Not caucuses, but study groups, resembling the kind of things we had here.  We met and we liked visiting professors there, who came from many other countries, and there were more of them and it was easier because we were all housed in the same building.  We were called foreign experts, and if your little set of rooms was on the right side of the building, you looked over a beautiful lake that had lotuses and things, and we were on that side.  The other side overlooked the dining halls.

I could go on and on about these adventures.  We got to know students who kept volunteering to take us shopping and things like that.  It was fun.  And, colleagues and taxi drivers, but I think I’d rather tell you a little about what went on in my classrooms.  From Romania, I like to recall one course, the one that gave me the most satisfaction, the most freedom to make my own variations on standard readings.  I was able to introduce living writers to these fresh readers, and I wanted to lure them to think about the skills and depths that American readers find in these people, unlike the American writers that they already knew.  The most read American writer in Romania was Jack London, because of his political agreement with communism.  So I ordered multiple copies of books to add to the books on hand, which were great standard writers.  My course title was "Scene and Symbol in American Writers."  I began it with classics written by Hawthorne, Cather and Steinbeck – pretty much the agreed best of their novels.  Beyond the basic things you teach with novels --plot, character, and theme--I put a lot of emphasis on comparing the ways that these authors, among each other and the later ones, could interweave settings and symbols to get the power that they wanted in their fiction.

The second half of the course, which was another five weeks, my students had to read the new stuff.  I assigned Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle along with short stories that would be new to them – writers I admired like Joyce Carol Oates.  Everything they read could turn up in traditional American classes and be analyzed in standard ways. In fact, I used the standard ways before I went on to my special emphasis.  What we did, though, with Vonnegut was notice in his anti-war novel – I would call it anti-violence generally, but illustrated through World War II -- he uses startling techniques.  Slaughterhouse Five has been dismissed sometimes as just Science Fiction, but obviously I thought otherwise.  Olsen's novella was refreshing for me to design and teach, and it was absorbing for the students too, they said.  [Click to one-page syllabus]

My students in China were livelier than those in Romania, and they felt free to express more opinions in class and ask more probing questions, except for the ones who only wanted to feedback some standard opinion they could check off.  Before we went to China we heard the cliché about the communist Chinese people being crowds of little blue ants dressed like Chairman Mao and thinking not much outside the Little Red Book.  But that wasn’t true, not at all. Typically they were individualists and curious questioners and so very bright -- that was guaranteed because at the school where we taught, Beijing University, they had been selected from, nationwide, countrywide tests and so they had not just great intelligence, but studiousness to work up for those examinations. Where did they get their other charming traits? I don’t know.  I sure enjoyed them.

For most courses, I focused on my responsibility to recreate American style assignments. My Chinese students, quite a few of them, hoped to go to graduate school in the United States. Anything they could learn about how we operate here was going to be useful to them. They wanted a head start. So for survey courses, at the sophomore-junior-senior level, I was supplied with textbooks, either the same ones we use here, or similar.  And I assigned readings as I would here.  There was an extra though.  When I applied for my Fulbright appointment, I made a list of classes I had taught on women writers and specialties, like women’s autobiography, and I listed my feminist activities. Those credits on my resume, I found out later, they helped the committee in the English Department to decide to select me as a visiting professor.  One leading woman there was a feminist.

I structured my special course there, "American Women Writers," with many selections from the new Norton Anthology of the Literature of Women 1985. The class used Vol. II -- it covered the 20th century. So my Chinese students were the first to read the department's newly acquired set of copies, and for all I know the first in China.

Often, many times, I was called on to give talks about the women's movement in America, on my campus, on lots of other campuses in Beijing and around the country. All Fulbrighters are expected to get invitations to other cities to lecture in your specialties. When the audiences were small enough for me to dialog back and forth with them, and when my subject let me do feminism, I sometimes started off by asking them whether they understood certain terms that reflect or explain, lead into, feminist ideas. I wrote as many as 25 terms on the blackboard -- very few handouts in China, you usually have a blackboard; paper was short, but not as bad as in Romania. Very few in my audience, students or faculty, had ever heard of some of the ones I brought up.  For example, backlash, crone, double day, gender, homophobia, parenting, networking, queen bee, reproductive rights, separate spheres, sexism, and women’s liberation. And they enjoyed some satiric slogans, that is catch phrases, from the women’s movement that I mentioned, too.  “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” That probably startled them and amused them the most. [Click to full page of terms.]

Looking back on our two faraway teaching years, I remember lots of good times, best of times, really--not the best of creature comforts and not always clear--I mean what people did was hard to decipher, and the way they thought. But it was fascinating when people and events made us aware of otherness — Ursula LeGuin calls that “the strangeness of the stranger” and then that was also mixed with warmth that we felt when we were able to be connected and sympathetic, which goodness knows we were about the levels of living.

After we settled back in Norfolk we could compare, and certainly contrast, there and here, for stresses, for pleasures.  And I think comparisons like that help you have really fresh views of familiar things you usually take for granted, sometimes illuminations.

Vaughan:  How did these experiences then impact you and your teaching once you returned?

Rhodes:  Well, I think these particular spreads of time probably impacted my thinking more than my teaching.  We had the chance to live through such interesting episodes.  It would take me a book to tell you about all of them.  Experiences that help any teacher to highlight or explore passages in assigned readings are going to come up, even though the readings might not deal with foreign countries.  For instance, novels involve personalities and politics and anything really, like philosophy or history—any discipline.  You’d be surprised how you tend to share your experience when you don’t digress too much because you have material to cover.  But when you come back, it changes your teaching a little and let’s hope, the cliché, travel is broadening.

But, speaking of politics, I recall an afterthought that absorbed us about these societies when we were returning. We felt it very strongly after we left Romania.  We were happy to be home.  What I was particularly looking forward to was the relief of open talk, not having to be cautious about our conversations or seeming to be close to some colleague who didn’t want you to show that you were close.  Of course there are better creature comforts here, too.  Discomforts there didn’t just affect food—you know there wasn’t enough of the eggs, coffee, and all kinds of staples, or you had to arrange for them.  But our rooms were terribly cold, at home, teaching and in the offices, on the train; winter was pretty hard.  The sidewalks were all broken up– rubble I kept falling on–I still have one scar from falls.  And, mostly back here we could relax about what to say, not be careful.  So I wondered if I would--I think I relax all the time about what to say--so, coming back, I thought maybe it was going to be so great, and I’ll be so greatful for democracy that I’ll never question anything again, like university rules, national policies. I don’t know how long those feelings lasted -- maybe six weeks.  What I told an interviewer at the time, a few months later -- actually in January of 1974—‘84 and we came back in September ‘83 – who asked me about being glad to be back, I had to explain that the great things about life in America aren’t automatic—we have to attend to them.  Going elsewhere makes you more aware of that.  I said,

"Our being better off is merely materialistic if we don't exercise self-education through open discussion and the power of persuasion or protest.  We don't deserve a society like this if we don't do our homework and take part."  [Click here for full News Release and for Courier article about Romania experience.]

I know it’s kind of preachy, but more so in very recent years; remember all we let slip when we didn’t pay enough attention. 

Vaughan:  Now, how was it that you went to China in 1989 with a group of scholars?

Rhodes:  Old Dominion University had some very constructive and enlightening experiences with foreign travel and many teachers here and also at TCC -- Tidewater Community College had a good record of setting up foreign travel grants.  Here at ODU, we had a professor in history named Thomas Burkman whose career had been built around knowing Asia.  He was a high school student who went to Japan for a couple of years on special things.  And ever since then he’d been having various contacts with China and Japan and actually began to talk with a bunch of us, one or two old China hands like me, and other people who wanted to go to China and work up things they like to do – linguists like Janet Bing, for instance.  And, so, we stirred around with his leadership and devised requests from granting agencies and he got funds from corporations, mostly in Japan – Canon for instance.  It shook down to 12 of us going as faculty and a few other accompanying people.  Ten from ODU and two from TCC, and all of us had some special interest in China, and a few of us had been there before and had contacts.  I got to play old China hand.  There was a lot of preparation for this.  For more than two years, we spent some afternoons taking calligraphy and Chinese language courses, just to be familiar with it.  I mean, we could say “thank you” and “nice to meet you” and all that, but most of us didn’t get very deep in.  Still, you’re set.  So, we also each had professional goals in our own field, and we were well prepared to meet those in China.  We had had those semesters on culture and history led by Burkman and other experts he found.  And we had created tentative course designs.  The final point of this was to teach about China when we came back.  And, Burkman’s notion of what we needed to know to teach a given course was a lot – of history and geography and attitudes and one of the things was great scholars discussing how you can’t change China.  You can go there, but they’ll change you, you won’t change them.  So, our tentative course designs were ready by the time that we knew we had the grant and then things came through.  On our tour, we were going exactly to places where it had been arranged ahead by Dr. Burkman and others, like a man in Psychology who had contacts in Hangzhou – Donald Davis, a major scholar of industrial psychology who was in touch with industrial psychologists in China.  All this help went into it.  When I say where we were housed at various universities, the context there had been established so that we could have interactions with people in our fields who were at those universities.  Most of it took translators, and those were graduate students.  The places we spent a few days each were--well they included Beijing, Hangzhou, Xian, Shanghai and a couple of other major cities.  At each university, we did indeed interact the way we hoped to with professors in our own fields and they helped reshape the classes or fill in questions we had, and so we were working on our courses as we went along.  We were also noting current conditions and talking about recent things, current things, in our fields.  In my class which was going to be Chinese Women Writers, I found out about some of the more recent ones.  And got some ideas on other approaches to the subjects and even different interpretations about who influenced whom.  The greatest woman writer in China in the 20th century was professionally called Ding Ling.  She had a name, but she wrote under this other name.  She had had a very tortured [relationship], sometimes pleasant, sometimes expelled relationship with the Maoists.  She of course influenced later writers. 

So we were not—what we were not prepared for was those student protests.  They had begun in April, very vividly, with big character posters. I knew what they were because I had been there before, but it was very insulting to the authorities.  Student protests; and they were demanding a number of freedoms, and more openness.  We had no idea when the grant was written that there was going to be all that turmoil which  we knew by the time we left, which was I think early May, we arrived in Hong Kong, we didn’t’ have scholarly things there, a little cultural background, but then we went to Beijing by about May 10th  or 11th .  We were in Beijing on May 16 when Gorbachev was due to arrive and the students were already demonstrating down in Tiananmen Square.  Later most people felt that they were not put down yet, because the Chinese government just didn’t want Gorbachev and his entourage to see the troubles. That’s a very big issue which we didn’t have to solve.  But all those things that had been intense in April, and that we knew about when we went over in May, they got a lot more seething while we were there.  When our group reached Beijing, as I told you, there was the Gorbachev situation.  We had a colleague, Eleanor Williamson, who was then teaching that semester at Renda, the People’s University, and students there had some connection with leading communists.  They were writing their wills, getting on their bicycles, and going downtown.  So, the protest wasn’t limited to students in general. 

Our scholarly projects went very well--incidentally, when we came back, the interviews were not like my interviews from previous trips.  They were about “what did you see happen?”  So we did get our scholarly progress made, in spite of all those distractions.  One of the aspects of that was for most of the [Chinese] professors, leading people in the disciplines we were working with, they didn’t speak English; few of them spoke English.  So, we had young translators.  These were graduate students in English and very skilled in both languages.  We heard about, little clues, little whispers about student protests all over the country, because these translators were in touch by email with people all over the country.  We got maybe quicker and more solid information by phoning home, because people knew at home what we didn’t know over there.  It was certainly not on Chinese television.  So, for instance, when we came back, the Courier had a bunch of boxed articles about half a dozen of us who were ODU faculty and had things to say about all the turmoil, all the excitement and all the repression.  And that breathtaking news did keep happening as we were traveling around those different campuses.  So, outside of our academic meetings, we were keeping up in our fashion.  We didn’t let the excitement and tensions keep us from our exchanges as scheduled.

Vaughan:   You stated that the Courier published a collection of statements made by you and the other travelers about the Tiananmen Square incident and other protests in other cities.  I will post that to this interview.  Let’s go back and talk about what impact this other trip to China had on your teaching. [Click here for Courier article]

Rhodes:  The point of that travel, to interact with experts, was so that we could create courses and also to get much wider and deeper understanding of all the backgrounds we’d been studying.  Our courses were, what I call the only deliberate, because everyone wanted to talk to us about what we’d seen when we were thrust into that excitement.  I did do some talking with Chinese professors that I had known before and got their opinions of background selections that I could put in my course pack for the course that I was going to call “Chinese Women Writers” I did call it Chinese Women Writers.  I had a few background materials like the history and some very famous earlier writers, largely male, except for one.  Explaining the cultural framework to my students when they were going to be reading six or seven major Chinese writers all from the 20th century most of them still living and creating not exactly critiques of their society, but vivid pictures of what was tough, what was going on.  The one that came closest to explicit feminism was a novel about a woman eye doctor.  You saw the novels--Chinese novels gave us a picture of the struggles of her life.  You know, she had not a double day, but a triple day, that is a day of doing everything towards running her household and then going to the hospital and doing whatever doctors do that lead up to eye operations, and also being responsible as women were in China. Men didn’t help much for the aged people in the family.  So, she had three lives, and she really cared about her career, but the novel makes you see the strain and stress of a woman’s existence even when she is highly educated and has a responsible position.  So, I would say that that course was very exciting; but on the other hand, that was the year I was going to retire – I didn’t really know it.  My mother was ill and I decided to retire at 65.  And that was the beginning of that year.  So, I taught the course then and it was well received and it was exciting to pack all that stuff in and get a few guests to visit – some of them had been on the trip with me and knew other fields.  But mostly to read books that were in translation.  There were some writers of greater repute who hadn’t been translated into English.  They were interesting.  Some of them were love stories, and all of them cast light on life in China.  I could put my course pack in here, but in a way it impacted my teaching just that one semester since I retired later.  And most of the courses I taught throughout my career were taken up by other people.  This course impacted the university with some bibliographies I worked up on articles about China from feminist perspectives, or about women’s lives in China.  But no one tried to teach that particular course again.  Or use those particular selections of writings.  On the happy side, the whole development of our studies in Asian history, literature, politics, have burgeoned in the years since Dr. Burkman left. [Click here for Syllabus]

Vaughan:  Now, did you have anything to do then because of your China interests in the development of the Asian Studies Department here?

Rhodes:  The beginnings and the kind of contributions that took, international contacts – Dr. Burkman, Thomas Burkman and also he leaned upon anybody at ODU who was doing things in China.  We had not only the people who traveled with us, like Maryann Tetreault who did international politics and every thing about oil in the universe  In fact we all got to go and hear her talk to a big [Chinese] government agency about distribution and production of oil and their future and all that.  Anyway, to get back to Dr. Burkman, after we returned I did have a little involvement in the running of Asian Studies.  But it wasn’t really significant.  Tom Burkman was away for a semester and he had written some more grants, and sometimes I helped a little bit with the construction and paragraphs and writing of them, but not the thinking that went into them.  So for one semester I was interim director of Asian Studies.  But really it was just because I’d had a little experience in administration with Women’s Studies and fun.  He had set up already the people who were going to come and visit and play their Japanese instruments.  I just kept it running and put out the publicity.

Vaughan:  We’ve talked a lot about your teaching experience now, and before we move on to talk about activism and feminism and some of the things you did here on campus, is there anything else you want to mention about your teaching experiences?

Rhodes:  I’ve already dipped into some of the special treats and special efforts in connection with team teaching and interdisciplinary teaching, certainly that all was reflected in my Chinese Women Writers course too.  So I think maybe we can move on.

End of Part 2 -- Part 3