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Is This 'My' Conference?

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By Sara Davis

Every academic, or academic-in-training, knows what his or her conference is. We may all attend different ones to leverage ourselves into a field in which there appear to be either more jobs, or better parties. Yet in our heart of hearts we all know which is the conference we are "supposed" to go to.

It's the big one, the one referred to by its acronym. The one where people rush around in suits handing out their résumés and throwing around words like "subalternity" and "discourse." The one where half the panels are on things you have never heard of. The one that features a confusingly vast book display. That conference. In my case, it's the Association for Asian Studies, held last month in San Diego -- and I am surprised to admit I had the time of my life.

I am surprised because my first experience of A.A.S. was so traumatic that it is indelibly scarred into my memory, along with the entire miserable first year of graduate school. In 1994 I drove up to Boston for the conference with two other first-year grad students and someone's girlfriend. We got lost somewhere around South Jersey for three hours, always a memorable experience.

When we finally found the conference hotel, I was horrified to discover that I was the only person in the entire building wearing jeans. I also didn't bring enough money for the registration fee. Nonetheless I wrangled a badge out of a reluctant A.A.S. registrar and attended -- in empty, silent rooms -- a few snore-inducing panels with titles like "The Concept of Time as Displayed in the Use of the 'Le' Particle in Hong Lou Meng." I spent the rest of the time in an Irish bar, if I remember correctly.

My overall impression from my first visit to A.A.S. was that I had picked the wrong discipline, I was never going to fit in, and I wasn't sure I wanted to. To make things worse, shortly afterwards, one of my professors announced in front of our entire class that my intended research topic was so far outside of Chinese studies that I might as well be in a different building. When I thought back over the panels I had seen at the meeting, I had to conclude that the guy was probably right.

In my typical haphazard way, I had fallen into graduate school because I believed I had a knack for college writing. I thought it would be easy, and I hadn't enjoyed my brief foray into the theater world in Chicago. When I applied to Penn, incredibly, I didn't even know that it was an Ivy League university, or what that might mean. The question of whether I would have a job when I finished never really crossed my mind.

To the extent that I thought about anything, I assumed that I would breeze through grad school and be offered a cushy tenure-track job on graduation, where I would simply teach until I died, with occasional time off to have plays produced here and there. My friends in Chicago, all down-at-heel painters, musicians, and activists, pretty much thought the same way, and there was a certain amount of talk about my "selling out" to academia. In the process of winding up my old life in the artists' loft, packing my few tattered belongings, and moving to Philadelphia, I never really thought about my decision to pursue a Ph.D. It just seemed better than being a starving writer.

The summer after my second year in grad school, a year marked by more feelings of alienation and some real financial-aid disasters (a summer research grant got arbitrarily cut midway through the summer), the moment of truth arrived. I climbed onto the roof of my apartment building in Philadelphia's Italian Market with a bottle of beer and a pack of cigarettes. Staring up at the stars, I knew I had to make a choice: stick it out, or pack up and move back to Chicago. By the time I had finished the beer, I had decided that I was going to finish the Ph.D. -- if only to prove wrong all the people and forces that seemed to be conspiring to make me leave.

Fast-forward five years -- my, time flies when you're having fun! -- and something has radically changed. My trip to A.A.S. last month was like going to summer camp -- not the kind of summer camp I always went to, where bullies and counselors team up to steal your underwear and make fun of you, but the wonderful summer camps that other people always seemed to go to. This year the conference took place in San Diego, and I stayed in the beautiful Spanish home of a friend of the family. My days were jam-packed with exciting papers and conversations, and the fun of looking at some ordinary human being's badge and realizing he or she was one of your idols: "Good God, is that James Scott?" I pitched my dissertation to three interested editors, and made plans to launch an e-mail list with a friend.

In terms of interviews, one was set up beforehand, and I am still hoping against hope that something will come of it. The second came out of the handful of forlorn ads posted in the empty, barn-like placement office (which begs a question to the muckety-mucks of A.A.S.: Why stage the biggest conference of the profession at the end of the job season?). The position sounded ideal for me, until it turned out in the interview that they were looking to fill an endowed chair. That was the sum of my job search at A.A.S.

But the socializing! My nights were filled with carousing and Mexican food. And I was able to catch up with old buddies: a fellow survivor of a language program in China, four anthropologists who work in the same region I do, a bunch of former fellow grad students now scattered across the globe, and surprise of surprises, that professor who told me I would never make it in the discipline. (He has since moved on to a position elsewhere.)

On the last night of the conference, the University of San Diego threw a reception in an aquarium, which provided the unparalleled entertainment of watching tenured professors fight each other for pieces of broccoli and pita bread. With a huddle of Chinese scholars I stared in awe at a mysterious black-lit display of jellyfish. We all agreed that watching translucent red jellyfish billow and swim in the darkness was one of the high points of the conference.

Yet the real highlight of the conference for me, jellyfish aside, was the growing sense of belonging to an intellectual community for the first time. My panel was scheduled for Sunday morning, meaning that we had a tiny audience, but also meaning that I had four days to attend other panels, ingest other ideas, fret and fuss over questions I might be asked, and to let my own ideas grow and percolate. I took copious notes on "subalternity" and "discourse," learned loads, and returned home with a long list of books I am dying to read. In sum, A.A.S. was one of the most intellectually inspiring experiences of my year.

What has changed? Perhaps the field of Chinese studies has opened up a little bit; I certainly hope so. For many years this was, to be blunt, an inwardly focused and cliquish discipline. Because many scholars felt that China is unique, they often failed to interact with other disciplines, even other Asianists.

A new generation of leaders in the field, combined with events in the wider political world, are changing that forever. What's more, A.A.S. now makes a much more concerted effort to acknowledge and even welcome its graduate students, so there is some hope that future first-years won't feel as left out as I did in 1994.

Perhaps I have matured a little, myself. My moment of truth six years ago made me commit to being in graduate school, and made me realize how much I wanted to have a Ph.D. I was finally able to set aside the dysfunctional garbage about "selling out." With that decision behind me, I could remove (some of) the chip on my shoulder, and begin to honestly learn about my discipline.

Whatever it is that has changed, this time the conference gave me what I so badly needed back then, something it seems you can get only with time and persistence in Chinese studies: a sense of being an active member of a group of young scholars who are all working on related issues. These are smart, creative thinkers, and nice people -- real colleagues.

In fact, while I went to A.A.S. pretty much resolved to give up on academia and start looking elsewhere for work, instead I hit moment of truth No. 2 on the plane home from San Diego. I determined to stick it out on the job market for one more year. I still have no idea where the rent will come from. At least some things haven't changed since 1994.