An Uncarved Block

Despite the expense and my gratefulness at being able to go to college at all, I look back on the years I spent at Luther as rather painful. A more empty and open 17-year-old you could seldom hope to find. I was being asked to give up my place in a close family and become an individual, the particular person I was meant to become. The process was long, slow, not without rewards, but not easy either.

To begin with, I got a major in Latin, simply because my mother had! Three years were spent desperately trying to intuit vocabulary, declensions, tenses and masculine and feminine endings, in the bright and expectant face of Dr. Orlando Qualley. A master teacher who had taught both my mother and father and had been with the school almost fifty years, his intensity, but also his kindness, inspired us to learn. Nevertheless, the tension, occasionally the terror, of sitting directly below him as he tried to pull the answers out of our blank faces was a memorable feature of college. My attempts at translation fared not much better.

My real love was, and still is, literature and the deep culture, history and philosophy which lie beneath it. Many fine literature, history and philosophy professors intrigued my mind at college. But several things made study difficult. One was the pressure to finish quickly. I had seven younger brothers and sisters, all of whom wanted higher education as well. I completed my B.A. in three years, graduating by the time I was 20, only a bit less callow than I had been when I entered! I would love to have taken more time to read thoroughly and enjoy what I read, but that didn’t begin to happen until after I got out of school.

The times were tumultuous, though in our northeastern Iowa milieu we mostly heard it in the distance. I entered school a couple of months before John F. Kennedy was killed. No matter how you cut it, the processes of desegregation, of American imperialism in other countries and of questioning most of our institutions were divisive and anguished in the Sixties. Despite this ferment, I wanted nothing more than to become a typical well-educated Luther lass, a helpmate to some worthy man whom I would presumably meet at college, as my mother had.

Though I remained near the top of my classes, I learned pretty quickly I was no scholar. In classes with students who would go on to graduate school in English and philosophy, I watched their faces and how they interacted, without being able to pay any attention to the bright play of their analytic minds. I was selected for the only creative writing class, taught by a man who published under the name of Brad Steiger. I enjoyed it but I didn’t see how it would help with the pressing problem of making a living. I got a teaching credential, which might.

It could have worked out, except that I was not to become what my background led me to expect. In no other way can I explain how my subsequent adventures took me to Europe, to the West Coast, where I have resided since 1969, and into Asia as far as Chengdu, a three-day’s train journey into southwest China.

The last summer I studied at Luther College, I roomed with the widow of a remarkable Chinese missionary, N. Astrup Larsen. The Larsens had spent the years 1913 through 1927 in China, a time of famine and political turmoil. According to Peter Scholl in “The Conversion of Missionaries in China: The Case of N. Astrup Larsen,” ASIANetwork Exchange, Vol. XV, No. 3, Spring 2008, after Larsen’s years in China, he “became a prominent advocate for ecumenism and the greater involvement of his church in social and economic issues.”

I am sorry to say I had no ability at the time to ask the lively Mrs. Larsen useful questions about the life in China which must have made her, as it did her husband, an “internationalist.” But it was during this final summer, for various reasons, that I began to feel I was getting my bearings. My own bearings, that is.

My personal journey to the West was, strangely, a stabilizing factor. The experiential knowledge favored by Asian philosophers over analysis turned out to be the Way I was seeking. According to Deng Ming Dao, “different schools have different methods, but all of them agree that the body and mind are part of a continuous whole … the body is the gateway to the profound.” Since first enthralled by Arthur Waley’s translations of Chinese poetry in high school, I have read a great deal of world literature. In English translation, I admit. I am still no scholar.