By Barbara D. Kiernan, M.A.'90

When Philip Howe '69 heard what his daughter, Sarah Howe '07, was proposing to do last summer, the Grayslake, Ill., resident gulped. "Honestly? My first reaction was, "who's paying for this?'" he confesses with a laugh. The "this" was a month in China doing research with Dr. Danke Li, associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, and two other students.

"Back in my day, a very small number of students studied abroad," says the former student government president who is now a federal administrative judge. "I was concerned about how my fair-haired, Anglo-Irish daughter would be received in a Communist country."

As it turns out ... very well. With funding in place through an ASIANetwork Freeman Student-Faculty Fellows grant received by Dr. Li, Sarah was poised for an incredible opportunity. Seniors Kate Molteni and Lauren Howard, each of whom had already spent a semester in Beijing, completed the trio about to join Dr. Li on a trip to Chongqing, where Dr. Li has been doing extensive research on the experience of women during China's eight-year war against Japan (1937-1945).

Back from a summer doing research in China are (l-r): Kate Molteni '05, Sarah Howe '07, history professor Dr. Danke Li, and Lauren Howard '05.

The summer project would involve interviewing and filming 15 local women who experienced that war, and doing library research to document historical records. A native of Chongqing, Dr. Li used her many contacts - family and friends alike - to gain entrée to these women's lives and homes. "I wanted the students to have access to ordinary Chinese people," explains Dr. Li, "and be able to penetrate the society from top to bottom."

One morning, for example, they filmed a woman whose upper-class younger life had been relatively untouched by the war. Currently, she was living in a luxury apartment complete with pool and marble-floored lobby. That same afternoon, they interviewed a retired textile factory worker whose apartment at the end of an alley was right next to a smelly public toilet. During the war, that woman had experienced starvation and the loss of a small child.

"We saw parts of China rarely visited by Westerners," says Howe, noting that, "no matter what kind of home we went to, they welcomed us with tea and watermelon." With Howe behind the camera, Molteni and Howard, who speak Chinese, posed a series of introductory questions. Dr. Li then guided the exploration of these women's often-painful memories of the Sino-Japanese War. Years earlier, Dr. Li had learned in a chance conversation that her mother, Qing, had lived through the bombardment of Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Nationalists, which sustained more damage than London did in World War II. Thus began a decade of research.

"Within existing scholarship, there has been no voice for the Nationalist women," Dr. Li says, noting that their antiwar activities included mobilizing grassroots activities, making clothing and shoes for soldiers, and working in factories. When the Chinese Communists emerged as victors, she says, they promoted a public memory that focused on Communist women's heroism and voluntary sacrifice. "On the contrary, private memories, as demonstrated by the oral interviews we conducted, placed the emphasis more on death, suffering, and forced sacrifice, revealing another side of reality," says Dr. Li.

"Even though I didn't speak Chinese," says Howe, "I could feel it when the women were recounting painful memories. One woman's little boy had died in her arms during the bombing." Dr. Li and her students returned to their hotel rooms and did the painstaking work of transcription: two to three hours pausing and rewinding as Dr. Li translated and Molteni and Howard typed. "It was a great way to learn by listening," says Molteni, "and Dr. Li made sure we understood it!"

"Academically," says Howe, "I was able to observe the way professors and experts go about researching and making contacts with others in their field ... and as clichéd as it sounds, the experience brought history alive for me." So, hopes Dr. Li, will the publication of her forthcoming book, Women at War.