Meeting Paul Fang
by Jing Liu ~ March 12th, 2010. Filed under: Events.Paul looks much younger than I thought, and looks alot like his Grandpa, Mr. Pang Jingtang, a typical Shandong big man. As a lawyer in Vancouver, he speaks fluent English, not Chinese. The way he talks about his family and the donnation sounds very humble. Paul told me a very different story of how the Pang’s Collection was donated to the Library. After his Mom, Ms. Pang Yi, an UBC graduate, passed away in 2000, he made many phone calls to UBC. Dr. Cheung told him that he went all the way to Martha.
We talked about his Grandma, Ms. Yang Baolin, who was an active political woman in Taiwan. I told Paul that I was viewing her video clip before we started the event. I also shared a good news with him, as my Chinese colleague, Ms. Gu Min, has just located some rare books with Pang’s seals in Shandong Provincial Library, which matches the information from the Heze Gazetteers. Paul’s eyes sparkled as he speaks “so my grandpa donated the rest of his books to the library”. Yes, at least those left in Shandong, and they are still there after all the wars and the Cultural Revolution. Unlike his grandma, Paul’s mom was a private person, who may visited her father twice in the 1970’s.
The title list of Pang Jingtang Collection to UBC may not mean much to him, so he questioned about the collection’s research value and insisted to have them digitized and shared on the web asap. I only started looking into them a month ago, there are still lots of questions and evaluation needs to be done, but I did give him the numbers of unique, rare and very rare according to the criteria in China. Paul is fascinated and told me about his mother’s scroll collection and other documents, which he will bring to a later dinner.
