I passed my qualifying exam

Dear reader,

This letter is one big rambling victory lap – indulge me.

Earlier this morning I took my qualifying exams in a small classroom in the Humanities Quadrangle in New Haven. My examiners - three professors in my chosen subfields of Modern Chinese Literature, Asian American Literature, and Asian American History – took turns asking me questions for thirty minutes each, for ninety minutes total.

The mid-point of PhD programs varies across department and across universities, but here at Yale's department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, that mid-point is the dreaded QE, qualifying exams, quals, comps, what have you. We read between forty to sixty books for each subfield, which amounts to something like one hundred and fifty texts total. These are called our "lists." I started reading for quals in August. "Reading for quals" has taken over my life since. How are you doing, people ask me. Oh, I'm reading for quals. It has become my dominant personality trait. Today we assembled around a conference table. My DGS started a timer. My examiners started asking questions. Near the sixty minute mark I started feeling dizzy. I forgot to eat breakfast and I kept seeing black clouds in the corners of my vision. Ninety minutes is a long time to be answering questions. They sent me out of the room to deliberate. I went to sit in the courtyard. My DGS came back out. Congratulations, said my committee. We took a polaroid. I felt another wave of dizziness, and made it home before I passed out. Now here I am, processing the fact that is over and I am done.

A hundred and fifty texts is a lot! I did have a panic attack sitting outside a café in Edinburgh last summer when my first reading list hit my inbox. I don't know if I can do this, I told my fiance; I think I have to drop out. Then I went to Taipei and had more panic attacks. Somehow I calmed down and started to read. One book at a time, one page at a time. Sometime around October I fell into a routine, and it was all manageable, even if it wasn't fun. Then something lovely happened. Quals changed me, she said, like a textbook case of Stockholm Syndrome. But I was stunned to discover that I was enjoying the process. At some point it became less about whether I passed the exam and more about the sheer amount of stuff I was cramming into my head. I was developing a mastery of my field, and this felt wonderful – yes, that was the entire point, that is the entire learning objective of taking quals in the first place. It's not about the test, it's about what the test forces you to become. I just have whole chunks of scholarship sitting in my brain, more than I've ever put there before, and I can access it at any time. Over the fall semester I learned, through sheer necessity, to read faster with better comprehension than I ever have before. I am stunned at my own ability now to just wolf down a monograph. If I could read like this in college, I would never have had to study. By the weekend before the exam I was feeling so good about my preparedness that I said fuck it and went to a Red Sox game (and yes, reviewed my notes in the stands when the Cubs were up to bat). We won 17-0.

Passing my quals marks the end of my coursework years. I started preschool at four. With the exception of two gap years I took off to work and write in 2015 and 2020 (no prizes for guessing what happened in 2020), I have been in school continuously since 2000. That is twenty-two years, the vast majority of my life, almost time enough to go through K-12 and over again. I have taught for many of those years - in college I taught high schoolers, and now in graduate school I teach undergraduates. Still, until now, my dominant practical identity has been a student. I have always loved it – not the assessments or the unworldliness of campus life, but the readings, the seminar discussions, the gift of chewing through difficult ideas with curious people. But one has to grow up. My DGS told me there is no defining moment for when you mature from a student to a scholar/researcher/instructor/peer, but the qualifying exam is a pretty good mark.

And I do feel different. This feeling is incredible. No one has read or knows everything, but I have a clearer view of my fields. I can see above the trees – I know what debates have been played out, what lines of inquiry are new, to whom or where I should turn if I want to chase an idea down a rabbit hole. If an undergraduate asked me anything about Chinese American history or literature from the mid-nineteenth century onward, I might not have an immediate answer – but I could tell them which text would.

All this to say, I feel qualified to be a teacher now, and that feels just great.

Graduate students like to complain about how miserable we are. Still I have chosen to spend my life - at least this part of my life - in academia, and I am high on the discovery that despite everything I really do love it. I just love to know things. I love to stare at something I do not understand, and throw my mind at it until it clicks. I love to feel like I am on a dark spinning plane and bright shiny ideas are in orbit around me. I love to sit in a room with smart people and listen to ideas ricochet around the room, transforming, picking up speed. I love leading discussion sections. I love watching my students grow as thinkers over the semester. I love this work we do.

Today I am just going to walk around New Haven a bit in a daze. I have forgotten how life feels without this sword hanging over me – this constant nagging guilt that I should be studying. My fiance arrives tonight and we'll go on a date. Tomorrow we will walk miles for pancakes, meet our friends for tapas, and hunt down the last famed cheese pizza in New Haven that we haven't yet tried so we can complete our Definitive Ranking of New Haven Apizza. (Sally's ranks first right now, Pepe's at the bottom, Bar fairly high up there, and Brick Oven a dark horse favorite.)

And then?

Well I can't make "studying for quals" my default excuse anymore, so I guess I have to start answering my emails. I have a prospectus to write. Papers to try to publish! I get to try to contribute knowledge to the world now instead of just taking it in.

Most of all I am excited to write. I was making decent progress on a new project set in Taipei, and itching to dive into revisions on Katabasis, but all that ground to a halt in March when the countdown to quals was seared into my eyelids like a Trisolaran curse. I'm both scared and anxious to get dive back into my manuscripts; to get all my rusty, groaning machinery going and spend my days tinkering with words again instead of reading until my eyes hurt. I wonder how my writing will change now that I have all this stuff in my head.  

But before all that, I am going to marry my best friend and welcome all of our favorite people to Boston on the big day and dance until I can't feel my feet.

Love,

Becky

PS. For the curious, here are ten texts I really enjoyed from my list, in no particular order:

1. Moon-Ho Jung, Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Origins of the US Security State

2. Madeline Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority

3. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961

4. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters

5. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity; China, 1900-1937

6. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950

7. Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II

8. Simeon Man, Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Empire

9. Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth Century American Literature

10. Chi-ming Wang, Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America