武汉市馆的开幕式上，陈传夫突然低声说， 黄老师走了。 培训的事就在眼前， 各位领导还在讲话， 我却忍不住走出了报告厅。徐鸿和我在厦门黄老生日那天想打电话祝寿，可是很晚都没人接电话。刚到武汉就听到噩耗，走廊里魏主任看出了我的异常，我说只是需要安静地怀念一下我的老师。
我高考那年是黄老师代表武大到北京招生的。受〈女大学生宿舍〉的影响一心想上武大，第一志愿新闻系，第二才是图书馆系。高考成绩比我想像的高出不少，满以为这辈子会当上记者，不料到了武汉， 出席的是图书馆的迎新会。 黄老师找到我， 说是他看到我的成绩，主动把我录取到图书馆专业。新闻系刚成立，无法与图书馆系相提并论。我当时实在不能理解这一生就如此注定了。现在想来，黄老师的决策和教诲至关重要。遗憾的是我不能参加他的葬礼，但是我回来了，是反馈培育过我的导师和我度过4年青春岁月的城市。 黄老师，您的话都应验了。 我以身为您的学生为荣，我知道您也为我骄傲!
The longest stay in Chicago was 10 months in 1997, and this trip was counted by hours. The taxi receipt shows 6:56 pm of Sept. 1st. I beat the heavy traffic and had time to change into a dress and snap a shot of the sunset from my room. The dinner meeting was fun and relaxing. First time meeting Paul and Barbara, very suprised by Jiaxun joining U. of Chicago. I like his sincere and confucian smile.
Had a quick morning walk near our hotel Club Quarters, and saw how tall its tower is from the opposite side of the river. No time for breakfast. The hotel’s business centre has coffee, and Shuyong brought us treats. The meeting is important to have my questions answered and bond us as a team. Weird! Very first failed check-in online with United, better leave for the airport earlier.
Shared a taxi with Dr. Cheng, who invited my writings to his series. We had a non-stop talk and the ride seemed to be short! Checked in at the front counter without a seat number on the boarding pass?! We two picked a central location for the last meal in Chicago and chatted more before we waved good-bye. I didn’t realize that I had to walk that far to reach my gate, packed and ready for boarding! I questioned if I could still use my e-ticket seat since it’s not printed to my boarding pass. The busy lady looked up right away, said: Where were you? I called you so many times and now it’s all full, you can’t get onto this flight!
Ha! that’s why, all the weird things happened to me! I told the lady that I promised my kids to have dinner together at home and please help me to keep my promise. She put me on the direct flight instead of transferring in Seattle, first class with future travel credits. Didn’t mean to irritate others at the counter, I told the lady: It must be my lucky day, having yummy lunch with my friend, first-class home and dinner with my family. I ran passing 20 more gates to catch my new flight. I had no room for the 1st-class food, but did have different drinks to celebrate the successful trip and the meeting of TGAG. Waking up from a nap, we were already above Mount Baker.
Although thinking globally almost every day through out the last two years, I’ve only worked locally. As a bunch of new programs calling my name, I really like to take a part in them–presenting at Area Studies International Conference at Xiamen U. , attending the workshop in Taiwan by the NCL. Now this TGAG project picked me and makes the trip tightly scheduled together with generous funding outside of UBC. I could sense the trouble and extra work of the TGAG by choosing a Canadian. Can’t wait to meet and get to know them in Chicago.
Received many congrats from colleagues since the TGAG news was exposed in the HR Bulletin. Glad to know that I might hang out with several UBC folks in Asia if my schedule allows. Besides revisiting the potential projects with Peking U and NLC, I’d love to meet the librarians at the Xiamen Children’s Library. We stayed in touch for so many years, but never met in person. The annual reports, thank you letters and drawings from the little readers always light up my holiday seasons. Love to volunteer in person during this trip even just for a few hours . Better to conact the Foundation now.
I couldn’t participate in the TS workshop on the 31st due to this China-North America Library Conference new project meeting. We met at the Tropics Bar in the Ali’i Tower at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. The dicussion was focused on the East Asian or Chinese rare books. It’s interesting to learn the uncertainty of LC and all sorts of digitizations going on at each library. Anchi is not only pretty, confident but also bright and flexible, who brought everyone of us into the discussion. What’s the relationship between the two national libraries? Almost all the large East Asian libraries are digitizing the rarebooks, will there be a platform or one-stop searching for our users?
Anchi wrapped up the meeting on time. Michael and I rushed to the exhibition hall at the Convention Centre, where I saw lots of UBC profs. I caught Xu Shu from Shanghai Library and we quickly exchanged our ideas where we had to keep others waiting. This year’s exhibit had a reduced scale, but still nice to see the demos, new publications and databases. Above all, I saw Michael’s digitization project result, some sample images and rare titles were quite eye-catching. It’s very nice of him sharing his latest experience digitizing the rare collection at UW with support form the NCL.
East View’s evening program was fun, and hard to believe I won the prize for guessing IPO as the top search word in CNKI. We had to skip the party time because we had more evening meetings scheduled.
Walking along the beach then into the Hilton Village and Ballroom, I saw a whole lot more attendees on March 30th. This is the first time when Chinese, Japanese and Korean librarians meet for common interest instead of having separate committee meetings. The new format worked out nicely, but we could still cut some speakers out due to their emptiness.
The SCSL dinner and the Second General Meeting, also called 神仙会。The meeting lasted too long, so I brievely talked about our rare collections, my experience of studying Pang Collection and the challenges we are facing in terms of preservation and digitization. I enjoyed the afternoon and evening meetings because I spent some quality time with my mentors, Haihui, Wu Ge, Xu Hong, etc. and I met with new friends–Wang Jun, Li Yan and his funny assistant.
回来UBC已经是开学后的第三周了，忙得一塌糊涂，没有时间整理和报告我的北京之行。今天又有同事怪罪，甚至要求我的博克应该适当加上中文。
这次是应国图之邀，参加其海外中国学文献研究中心的挂牌仪式，百年庆典和研讨会，首次由国图安排北京的一切，包括友谊宾馆的住宿。国图让我有焕然一新的感觉，上上下下都精明强干，既有条理又有效率。
还是从我落地入关说起吧。由于晚点，我们入关时，整个机场略显空当，执勤人员也面带疲惫。检查我入关手续的年轻人非常英俊和礼貌，“晚点这莫久，辛苦啦”审视完护照和密密麻麻的签证戳，他又问：“经常回来吗？”“一年至少一次”“欢迎你更经常回来！”
I registered for the Symposium first thing on Sept 8th, picked up the package and boarded the shuttle to the new building of NLC, where I learned a great deal from the presenters.
The best part of the meeting is to hear what Chinese scholars are saying about overseas Chinese studies. Prof. Tang Yijie’s keynote speech was quite impressive. He criticized nationalism and self-centered Chinese studies.
James Cheng introduced the top Chinese collections in North America and Guoqing presented all the research projects by Chinese studies librarians in the States. I was happy meeting with colleagues from LC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korean, Singapore, and etc. I have learned a great deal from European colleagues.
It’s the life-time experience. I feel lucky being there and I’m grateful to those people who made this trip possible.
Just thanked my friends for the ride to YVR and then saw the notice about my flight’s delay. Seven hours! Kids were happy seeing me back home so soon. Had to email Beijing right away.
When I received the reply from the National Library of China (NLC), I was so moved and relieved. I was picked up from the Beijing airport by NLC staff around mid-night Beijing time. Mr. Yin even helped me with my luggage and hotel check-in. He had to start working at 6:30 am.
A few hours later, I dressed up and started meeting with all the overseas attendees of the NLC cenntenial celebration.
Our delegation boarded the bus on time for October 17th visits. The Film Archive has just started various projects as the world has growing interest in Chinese films. The National Film Archive Database is one of them. I enjoyed the tour of the compact stack and the digital processing lab. I asked for a list of the reference books published by the library, that I hope to buy in the near future. Mr. Zhao, the head of the library said that we could order movie posters as well.Apabi’s content has been shown in Seattle the Summer Institute, and its price model has been changed and sounded like more flexible. I would like to use recent reference requests to test out the databases. Several of us had headache; the conference room was too hot and dry. Starbucks coffee helped us to survive the day, but Stephen was obviously quiet and sick.
The most exciting visit of the day was to see how the books were sorted and processed in the suburban clearing house. CIBTC provides shelf-ready books to many libraries in the world. The scale and the speed shocked us. Wang Tong introduced the head, who looked like in early 20’s, and her staff looks even younger. They work like crazy and completely ignored us as visitors. No wonder China is growing so fast. Wang Tong brought a projector to the resturant to show us her new online order system, which had been improved according to our comments in July.