Making the
Exotic
Familiar
Patricia Thornton, associate
professor of political science, strives to bring home the political and social struggles of East Asian cultures
By Christine Palm
Photograph: Nick Lacy
Patricia Thornton’s work has taken her to such far-flung places as
Taiwan, Beijing, Seattle, Cambridge, and Juneau, Alaska. But these
days, the fruits of her political passion more often manifest
themselves along Trinity’s Long Walk.
It’s there that students in her “Government and Politics of
Contemporary China” class stage mock protests, fly the colors of
the Cultural Revolution, excoriate—or support—the Communist Party,
and lobby for the freedom of an imprisoned peasant. Thornton,
associate professor of political science, finds iconoclastic ways
to bring home the political and social struggles of East Asian
cultures. At the beginning of the year, she gives each student a
dossier with a full Chinese identity—name, class, and life
circumstance. Some are assigned identities as pig thieves; others
are powerful autocrats or members of the bourgeoisie. They are
given topographical maps of their region, so they can enact land
reform policies knowledgably. Thornton gives them daily e-mail
updates that announce such manufactured news items as the death of
a child, a flooded farm, or a family member’s arrest for
insurrection. Each student must “stay in character” for the first
semester, as a way of truly identifying with a formerly remote
citizenry. Thornton has even been known to run onto the football
field during practice to “arrest” a student athlete for removing
his red party armband.
East Asia, a half-imagined place
“Like most young Americans, the students here have a series of
remote and exotic images in their minds about East Asian
cultures,” Thornton says. “I begin to change that through a
multimedia approach. For example, we often listen to Chinese music
and watch Japanese films.” From there, she moves on to historical
manifestos and other written, documented sources “so there is less
of a sense of East Asia as a half-imagined place. The idea is to
get students to understand in a personal way the complex fabric of
the different ways poverty and revolution affect everyday people.
The role-playing often raises intense emotions, and through it,
the students learn how cycles of violence become
self-perpetuating.”
Thornton appreciates the fairly long leash given her by the
College administration, and she is aware that some of her tactics
are unorthodox. “I really wanted to be in a liberal arts
environment and Trinity is a different kind of liberal arts
institution,” she says. “I always learn from the students—teaching
them gives me a whole new perspective on the implications of the
systems I’ve studied.”
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“Like most young Americans, the students here have a series of remote and exotic
images in their minds about East Asian cultures,” Thornton says. “I begin to
change that through a multimedia approach. For example, we often listen to
Chinese music and watch Japanese films.”
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Chinese Educational Mission formed in Hartford
While Thornton’s teaching methods might raise a few eyebrows—and
certainly capture the attention of students in a palpable way—her
own research focuses on a quieter figure in Chinese history. Yung
Wing was a 19th-century scholar and missionary who established the
first formal educational exchange program for Chinese to study in
America. It was called the Chinese Educational Mission (CEM),
formed in Hartford in 1872. Through a happy accident, Thornton
became instrumental in a television documentary that was recently
made on Yung.
While on a three-year faculty research grant in Hong Kong some
years ago, Thornton met an influential Mainland Chinese journalist
named Qian Gang. When she learned of Qian’s interest in Yung Wing
and his Hartford connection, she offered Trinity’s resources to
Qian and his colleague, journalist Hu Jingcao.
“Trinity’s involvement with this project is the result of a
stroke of serendipitous good fortune, and I was just overjoyed
that this particular opportunity fell into my lap,” Thornton says.
“The College was immediately receptive to the idea of our hosting
the journalist filmmakers, and the results are amazing. Film
footage for the five-part documentary includes shots of various
locations on the Trinity campus, including the interior of the
Chapel, and excerpts of interviews with Associate Professor of
History Susan Pennybacker and me. Trinity College is also
gratefully acknowledged at the end of each episode. Having just
finished watching the beautifully made third episode of this Ken
Burns-style documentary on the CCTV Web site, I am moved and
humbled to think that such a vast undertaking—viewed recently by a
breathtaking 250 million people in the People’s Republic of
China—had its roots in a casual conversation in a library in Hong
Kong.”
After earning her B.A. in political science in 1985 from
Swarthmore, Thornton went on to earn her M.A. in political science
in 1990 from the University of Washington in Seattle and her Ph.D.
in political science from the University of California at Berkeley
in 1997. She has been an instructor of Chinese language and guest
lecturer at the University of Alaska, Southeast; a visiting
scholar at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica in
Taipei, Taiwan; and a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences in Beijing.
Thornton has been a New Century Scholar, J. William Fulbright
Foundation in 2003-04; director of Asian Programs, Trinity
College; an affiliate in research at Harvard University’s Fairbank
Center for East Asian Research; a research assistant in the
Department of Political Science at the University of California,
Berkeley; and acting director, East Asian Studies Program and
International Programs, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana. She
has a forthcoming book, Disciplining the State: Political
Corruption, State-making and Local Resistance in Modern China
(Harvard University East Asia Monograph Series, 2004). She is also
the author of numerous articles on Chinese political culture,
including “Framing Dissent in Contemporary China: Irony, Ambiguity
and Metonymy,” which appeared in 2002 in The China Quarterly 171,
and she authored several chapters in seminal texts, including “The
New Cybersects: Resistance and Repression in the Reform era,”
which is forthcoming in Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden’s Chinese
Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (second edition) (London
and New York: Routledge).
(Editor’s Note: Both Qian and Hu wrote essays
about their experiences filming the documentary. They are
available on the CCTV Web site (in Chinese) at http://www.cctv.com/geography/special/C12107/01/index.shtml.
Thornton says DVDs of the series (in both Chinese and English)
will be available soon for faculty, students, and staff to view.
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