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Prof. Stephen Udry Prof. Stephen Udry Centrique Magazine’s Victoria Stockinger ’23 recently interviewed Professor Stephen Udry about what it was like growing up near New York City then traveling to Taiwan and China before becoming an Asian studies professor here at Carthage. Read the interview below.

Victoria: What’s your favorite language or a language you admire?

Prof. Udry: I love listening to French. That’s what I first started studying, but I did not do very well in it throughout middle school, high school, and even during college, embarrassingly. But always in the back of my mind was the strong desire to relearn French because it’s such a beautiful language. I really like the way it sounds. I also love Chinese because it’s a super fun language. I love reading and writing it, but mostly I like speaking Chinese because it’s a lot of fun. I get pure pleasure out of that.

Victoria: Because of how it’s structured, or?

Prof. Udry: I think it’s something more basic than that — It always catches people by surprise when they start speaking Chinese with me or hear me start speaking Chinese. As a blond-haired, old white guy, it’s something a little bit different. So I think that shock factor is always a little bit of fun too. But outside of that, I love the tones. Even though they’re very difficult to learn and get used to, once you get it, it just makes it a very different kind of language, the way you use it to do different kinds of things.

Victoria: Do you find yourself thinking in Chinese?

Prof. Udry: I can’t say I do that very much these days. But certainly when I was living in Taiwan. When my Chinese was — during grad school — at its best, absolutely. You can’t carry on high-level conversations about Manchu shamanism if every word, every sentence, is being translated. But then, of course, we grew up with English. It’s incredibly complex as well. Keeping track of all the grammatical terms and things like that have always been difficult but important, especially as a teacher.

Victoria: What did you go to undergrad for?

Prof. Udry: I actually majored in religion. I went to undergrad thinking that I was going to do psychology. I think half of the people in the world do that. They think, “Oh, this is great. I can help people solve their problems.” But then I started taking psychology courses, and they were very different from what I had expected and wanted. Religion has always fascinated me. The power of religion over people and the harm that religion could cause, which, of course, there’s a lot of good in it too, just led me to want to learn more about it. And then, it was through studying religion where I got drawn into Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism. And that’s the kind of stuff that just fascinated me.

Victoria: How did you go from the broad spectrum of religion to the very short time period of Chinese history?

Prof. Udry: When I started studying Buddhism and Daoism, then even Confucianism, all of these were so important to China. [In the 80’s,] the leader of China had come to the United States and gone to a rodeo down in Texas, and they were bringing pandas over. Businesses were starting to move into China, and there was a lot more cultural exchange going on, which was all very new. I became attracted to Chinese culture, history, religion, and language.

At that time, I knew that if I studied Chinese language, I would have a number of paths open to me. After I graduated from college, I worked as a very bad waiter for one summer, but I earned enough money to buy a plane ticket to go to Taiwan, where I could study Chinese. But why Taiwan, not China? This was 1985. Had I lived in China, I would have had to live in a foreign students dormitory, a government minder, and any Chinese friends I made would have been hassled and harassed by those government minders. It probably would have worked out okay and been fine, but going to Taiwan would have been much more free. So, I went to Taiwan.

Victoria: How did you start learning the Chinese language and about all these aspects of Chinese culture and what it would be like to travel there? Was it mostly self study?

Prof. Udry: I studied Chinese for one summer between my junior and senior year at college. I just stayed on campus and did a summer semester studying Chinese. It was hard, but it was so much fun. Then I continued to study second year Chinese during my senior year.

Victoria: So you just followed your interests and things that you learned about and paid attention to the cultural climate?

Prof. Udry: I absolutely did. Career and cultural climate and the world’s situation. You couldn’t miss it because it was such a huge change with China opening. It was something different. Just like you guys can’t miss the war in Ukraine. You also can’t miss the now “threat” that China represents to the United States. Most people don’t pay too much attention to that stuff, but still, it’s hard to avoid that. And so it was similar at that time.

Victoria: What do you think your younger self would think, seeing where your path has taken you?

Prof. Udry: Prior to college? Totally confused. I grew up on the North Shore of Long Island, in a small, well-off community, where most of the kids’ parents were homemakers. Parents, most of them, were stockbrokers or somewhere working in Wall Street. It was a 99.9% white high school. There was one Asian woman. And then, one of my best friends, his mother was Japanese, and his father was Dutch. That’s it. There were no black students. But my parents had always brought us into New York City a lot, and I loved New York City. I loved the diversity, I loved everything that was going on.

But, honestly, soccer was the most important thing in my life at that point of time. So I chose the best academic institution with the highest level soccer that could be. That just so happened to be Columbia University in New York City. Once I was living in New York, with such diversity around me at Columbia University, it was just fantastic.

Victoria: How did you go from living in New York, to then living abroad, to then— Carthage?

Prof. Udry: Taiwan was great. Going from New York to Taiwan wasn’t easy. Taipei is a big city, huge city, bigger than New York. So making that move to Taipei was hard. It was definitely hard, leaving everything I knew behind. And you really leave everything behind, because this is the 80s. You couldn’t even make phone calls. The first year that I lived in Taiwan, the only way that I could call home was to go to the post office and book a time to make an international call. Now, it’s much easier.

I lived in Taiwan for three and a half — four years, really. Studied Chinese, learned English, traveled around Asia, and just lived my life. It was awesome. I had a place. Well, when I first went over there, I didn’t. I did couch-surf for a little while. [I found a] network that all worked out fine. I had a place to stay for three nights when I landed in Taiwan. After that, I knew I could go to a hostel. I knew I could go to a youth activity center, or a hotel. Worst case scenario, something like that. But I had a place to stay with the business associates of a friend from my college. They were in the shoe business, and Taiwan at that time was making all your Nikes and Adidas and things like that.

But, on my plane trip over there, I met three Americans who were returning to Taiwan after having just spent a summer back in America. At that time, it was a 16-hour flight with an 8-hour layover in Seoul. So, got to know them. After the three days of living with the business associates, I immediately moved in with one of them for a little while until I found an apartment.

There was this guy from California. A big red-haired dude. He was leaving, I was arriving. I got his apartment, his English teaching jobs, his motorcycle, his motorcycle helmet. Just sort of replaced him. And then, when I left, same thing happened. I gave my apartment, my motorcycle, my motorcycle helmet—different ones, obviously—to an American who had just arrived.

When I was in Taiwan, I taught English, I studied Chinese, and then I worked for a shipping company for a while. Didn’t like that. I played for the soccer team that the shipping company sponsored. Then came back to the US and worked for three years doing business that was awful. I just found out that it definitely was not for me. I then applied for a master’s because I had thought I wanted to go into the Foreign Service. I talked to a lot more people after I was in the master’s program and figured I didn’t want to spend a year stamping passports in Peru. I really wanted to be in Asia, specifically China. There was no way, as a low level, foreign service person, that you could do that. I went back to school for my master’s in international affairs. That’s where I figured out that I really loved China and wanted to learn more about it, and the best way to understand China is through history. You can’t understand modern China without understanding what they’ve gone through. I was attracted to it. After two years getting my master’s, I went to grad school for my PhD.

Victoria: And then where did you go?

Prof. Udry: Here.

Victoria: So you’ve never lived in China?

Prof. Udry: I have. I lived in China for two years doing my dissertation research. Before that, I spent about half a year living in China but constantly going back and forth on business trips. I lived in Beijing for a year and a half, and in the northeast, in Changchun City, for six months.

So my dissertation wasn’t done. It was my trial year on the market. But Carthage gave me a job. So I hurried up and finished my dissertation and ended up in Wisconsin. I’d heard of Wisconsin before, but trust me, that’s the most that can be said about it. When you live on the east coast, or even the west coast, you don’t think a lot about Wisconsin. It’s not really in your consciousness.

So I just ended up here. It was a very hard adjustment. It’s so flat here compared to the Pacific Northwest—which is not flat, and is just stunningly beautiful in terms of its mountains and its ocean. Coming here was hard. It was the hardest on my wife. When we first arrived here 20 years ago, we drove through downtown Kenosha. It took us maybe 2 minutes to drive through it, and my wife was like: “What? Really, we’re living here?” So, it was hard

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