CAS Newsletter

The past three years have given the practice of wishing others a “Happy and Healthy” New Year additional meaning. What might this connection imply? Ibn al-Quff was a renowned physician and philosopher in the mid-13th century C.E. who observed that health tends to promote happiness (while disease tends to diminish it), and that both require the balancing of internal and external factors; moreover, he viewed each not as a “thing” but rather as a shifting condition along a continuum of possibilities. He envisioned being “healthy” for example, as existing along a continuum with an ideal state of “perfect” health at one extreme and “death” at the other. The farther away from the ideal at any moment, the worse one’s health. Given the transitory nature of human existence, he argued that perfect health (like perfect happiness) is either impossible to attain or a state possible only temporarily in our lives. By situating states of health on a continuum somewhere between near-death and nearly impossible, Ibn al-Quff reminds us that Health is at best partial and provisional – an unstable state that requires constant balancing of forces both internal and external. This view of Health – as an evolving state requiring a constant balancing of forces and as a shifting point along a continuum – can be valuably applied, I believe, to a wide range of human experience. We might well ask this: How healthy is our Nation, our Community, our University? Is it not reasonable to regard hostility across cultures as an unhealthy distance from the ideal of harmony and cooperation?

The Center for Asian Studies is committed to fostering societal health through knowledge, understanding and shared stories. We begin 2022 by initiating a major initiative: THE ASIAN AMERICAN NARRATIVE PROJECT. The project has two related aspects: first, to gather and record the stories of Asian and Asian American students, staff, faculty and alumni about their experience at UTD; second, to document and write the history of the role that Asians and Asian Americans have played in the university’s founding, growth and rise to prominence.

UTD has long been guided by a philosophy of education that emphasizes the interconnectedness of the ways that we human beings seek to make sense of the world and ourselves; and this project seeks to connect health and the humanities. Covid-19, with its evolving variants, has been one of two viral strains disrupting the health of the world during the past few years. The other virus has been an amalgam of ignorance, prejudice and fear. This project reflects the Center’s essential commitment to finding and strengthening interconnectedness across cultures. Our larger goal is to improve the place of our individual and collective health on an imagined continuum. We invite you to consider the possible benefits that this project can bring to UTD and the region by helping create a welcoming environment of mutual understanding and shared questing for wisdom. We invite your participation, support and stories as well. Finally, all of us at the Center for Asian Studies wish you a happy and healthy New Year both now and again when the Year of the Tiger begins on February 1.

On January 9, a conversation was held between Dr. Dennis Kratz and Dr. Da Hsuan Feng with two students, Michelle Liang, a freshman at MIT and Frank Zhou, a senior at Phillips Academy Andover going to Harvard. With an audience of about 60 people, they discussed the concept of education as adventure and the impact of being both American and Chinese on enhancing – or constricting – that quest.

Click here to watch the recording of the event.

The CAS Asian Language Courses for Spring 2022 are now open for registration! We are excited to offer most of our courses in a hybrid (in-person/virtual) format. As mentioned in previous news, there's still time left to enroll! Classes for Session 1 of Spring 2022 start tomorrow on January 22!

*UPDATE: Following UTD’s decision to postpone classes due to COVID, the below schedule has been adjusted with delayed start dates. When you go to register for courses, the dates on the site (Marketplace) may not reflect these changes

Course Schedule | Register Here

Jai earned her BA in Korean Studies and MA in East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Being raised as a Korean American, she was always interested in her Korean heritage, which led to pursuing her studies in Korean language and culture. This interest was further strengthened during her time at Korea University where she studied abroad for a year.

With the continuing popularity of Korean culture and music, the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) was able to start offering Korean classes on campus, which led to Jai's first beginning Korean class during Fall 2020. Jai enjoys teaching Korean and seeing the progress students have during class. She believes studying a language should be fun and enjoyable while learning about the culture behind the language.

The first part of the Anlin Ku Lecture featuring Dr. Yunte Huang has been postponed and will be rescheduled for Fall 2022. Please stay tuned for more updates in the future!

As part of the Anlin Ku Lecture, Dr. Erika Lee from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) will be giving a virtual lecture via Zoom based on her book, "The Making of Asian America" on February 24 at 6:00 PM CST. As the fastest growing group in the United States, Asian Americans are helping to change America. But much of their long history has been forgotten. In a lecture that spans centuries and continents, Lee shows that the long history of Asian Americans offers a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today.

Erika Lee is President-Elect of the Organization of American Historians and a Regents Professor, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. The granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, Lee was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and testified before Congress in its historic hearings on anti-Asian discrimination and violence. She is the author of four award-winning books including The Making of Asian America (2015) and America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in America (2019), which won the American Book Award and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, as well as other honors. Named to many best books lists and identified as an essential book illuminating the Trump era and the 2020 elections, it was recently re-published with a new epilogue on xenophobia and racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Making of Asian America was also recently republished with a new postscript about the latest campaigns against Asian Americans. Lee directs three major digital humanities projects: Immigrant Stories, #ImmigrationSyllabus, and Immigrants in COVID America and also regularly appears in the media, including featured appearances in the PBS film series “Asian Americans,” the History Channel’s “America: The Promised Land,” and interviews with CNN, PBS NewsHour, National Public Radio, the BBC, the New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, and many podcasts. Her opinion pieces have been published in the Washington Post, Time, the New York Daily News, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.

Registration information to follow.

Among the studies that focus on the challenge of cross-cultural understanding, here are two exceptionally valuable accounts of the ways that Asian and “Western” worldviews differ…or might differ…leading to questions about new worldviews and ways of thinking that might emerge from the convergence of cultures over time.

As East and West become more and more entwined, we also continue to baffle one another. What’s more important—self-sacrifice or self-definition? Do we ultimately answer to something larger than ourselves—a family, a religion, a troop? Or is our mantra “To thine own self be true”?

Gish Jen, drawing on a trove of personal accounts and cutting-edge research, shows how our worldviews are shaped by what cultural psychologists call “independent” and “interdependent” models of selfhood. Coloring what we perceive, remember, do, make, and tell, imbuing everything from our ideas about copying to our conceptions of human rights, these models help explain why the United States produced Apple while China created Alibaba—and what that might mean for our shared future. As engaging as it is fascinating, The Girl at the Baggage Claim is a book that profoundly transforms our understanding of ourselves and our time.

-Penguin Random House

“This is a short book with a sweeping thesis. In essence, the thesis of The Geography of Thought is that many important cognitive processes dominant in East Asian (i.e., Chinese, Japanese and Korean) cultures are substantially different from those processes in Western (i.e., American and European) cultures."

-Charles Haywood

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