East Asian Studies

Picking concentrations is often most successful through the process of elimination. Hist 10a is as ancient as the gray-haired profs who run the department. You’re afraid of heights, so William James Hall and anthropology are out (wimp). “Complex Fourier Analysis?” Nice try, Linguistics. Decision-making causes migraines and impairs all sense of judgment, so you head to the Kong, have a scorpion bowl, and surmise Seoul might be a good place to live (those OCS emails about teaching SAT’s in South Korea will finally have some purpose!). Now you think your calling is to devote yourself to studying East Asia. Ni-hao and Konnichiwa. Take a seat next to the idiot who’s here because he enjoys watching Sailor Moon and wants to write his thesis on why possessing a tamagotchi and liking szechuan chicken gives him the right to stake his claim as an EAS scholar.

Lucky for you, despite the bevy of unavoidable but surmountable requirements, the East Asian Studies department is a pretty kick-ass place to spend three years if you are genuinely interested in anything related to Asia. History, Literature, Linguistics, Econ, Anthro, Religion, Sociology, or VES—EAS has a place for you. In fact, you can fulfill non-language and non-tutorial classes without ever taking a class in the department.

Every single person in the EAS “office”—a yellow house hidden on Kirkland Place—knows your name. Seriously. After declaring, you hand-pick an advisor. While your economics-concentrating roommate gets some bumbling grad student who went to Idaho State, you can choose absolutely anyone, regardless of their University professorship, how many books they’ve authored, or academic rock-star status. You can even request two professors to be available for weekly check-ins, junior paper advising, or default company at your House faculty dinner. And there is at least one all-you-can-eat sushi party every semester. Add some sake-bombs and you may as well be concentrating at Shilla.

While overzealous but endearing department chair Michael Puett will tell you as many times as there are people in China that sophomore tutorial will change your life, sophomore tutorial, as Confucius says, eff-ing blows. Survive this and you deserve a library named after you. That Widener guy didn’t even survive the Titanic and look what he got (and by the way, have fun looking for all your books in D-east or 5-west, complete opposite ends of the library). There is no way out of the class but you’ll be “rewarded” with a junior tutorial that’s individualized and caters to your specific interests.

While some professors seem like they’ve just returned from their 10-year field assignment in a Xi’an rice paddy, others like Peter Bol are among Harvard’s most knowledgeable, accessible and enthusiastic faculty. Bol and Mark Elliot warrant praise for playing Madonna in Hist A-13, “China: Traditions and Transformations,” a class all concentrators are encouraged to take (despite trying unsuccessfully to teach 6,000 years of history in 14 weeks). Ex-Dean of the Faculty Bill Kirby is teaching a new class this spring and, based on previous guest lecture appearances, Hist A-74, “Contemporary China,” is likely to be a winner.

In the end, EAS’s individualized approach overshadows the painful sophomore tutorial—plus, its always nice to secretly understand Kong waiters’ trash talk.