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Forty-one Years in “the Field”: a Backward Glance* by DAVID CHANDLER The Chinese phrase hendao yiqian means “a long time ago”: a literal translation reads “a long way in front of me” which suggests a very different sense of the direction one faces to look at the past from the one we are accustomed to.” John Bryan Starr, Understanding China, p. 40 Coming Aboard The quotation I have used as a heading often came to mind as I was preparing this chapter and looking back at the “long way in front of me” that constitutes my career as an historian of Southeast Asia. I started the process in October 1966, when I enrolled as a graduate student at Yale to earn an MA in Southeast Asian Studies. Two months before I enrolled, I had resigned from the US Foreign Service which I had joined in 1958. My Foreign Service career led me circuitously to New Haven via Phnom Penh and Washington, DC. In 1959, I had volunteered for Khmer language training, largely on the grounds that Cambodia seemed exotic. In October 1960 I was posted to Phnom Penh and worked in the US Embassy for the next two years—a memorable and pleasing period of my life that gave me much of what Henry James has called my “writer’s capital” although I did not know this at the time.1 Two years working in Bogotà and Cali, Colombia, where I was posted next, were disappointing but what turned out to be my final job in the Foreign Service was very rewarding indeed. In May 1965 I was assigned to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in Washington, DC to run the orientation courses for junior and midranking government officials assigned to posts in Southeast Asia. The job included arranging for visiting lecturers. Most of them were US government officials, but I also came into contact with academic 13 * I am grateful to Susan Chandler, John Legge, Julian Millie and Jean Gelman Taylor for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1 See my essay “Coming to Cambodia” in Anne Hansen and Judy Ledgerwood (eds.) At the Edge of the Forest: Essays in Honor of David Chandler, Ithaca, NY 2007. luminaries in the emerging field of Southeast Asian studies who later became my friends—people like Ben Anderson, George Kahin, John Smail and David Steinberg—and I came into the charismatic orbit of Harry Benda, then a professor of Southeast Asian history at Yale and a seasoned performer at FSI. When Harry (as he insisted that I call him) heard that I was impatient with the way my career was going, he urged me to resign and to enrol at Yale, adding prophetically that if I wanted to study the history of Indo-China, as I did, I would be sure to profit from attending the lectures of Paul Mus, the eminent professor of “the Civilizations of Asia” at the Collège de France who had taught for a semester each year in New Haven since 1950. Mus’s seminars, which I have written about elsewhere, were mesmerizing encounters with an inspiring, wonderfully furnished mind. They showed me how wide and deep the field of “Southeast Asian studies” could be, as he moved serenely across disciplinary, temporal and geographical boundaries.2 Harry’s courses on modern Southeast Asian history passionately laid out commonalities and contrasts in the region, stressing the anti-colonial struggle, while Jonathan Spence’s graduate seminar on modern Chinese history, taken in the first year that he offered it, was the most rewarding course I took as a graduate student. I also profited from a year-long seminar with John Whitmore on early Southeast Asian history, which exposed me to the work of Oliver Wolters and the colonial era savants who had laid the groundwork for this field of study. In 1966, the colonial era in Southeast Asia was still vivid to Benda and Mus, who had spent part of it, respectively, in the Netherlands East Indies and French Indochina. When World War II broke out, Mus was already a renowned academic, while Benda, seventeen years younger and a Czech citizen, was working as a clerk for a Czech company, Bata Shoes, in Batavia. Their memories of World War II and their enthusiasm for Southeast Asian struggles for independence cropped up often in their teaching. Mus had parachuted into Vietnam as a Gaullist agent in February l945, and escaped from Hanoi on foot a month...

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