Wednesday, September 04, 2019
Yale Law '90: Pauline A. Chen
On Wednesdays, I am profiling the remarkable members of my law school class. In fact, I did not realize how remarkable they are until I started profiling them! This week I profile author Pauline Chen.
Back in law school, Pauline Chen was hard to miss. She had raced through Harvard, and was unusually young for our class. We were assigned to the same small group (a set of 16 students assigned to the same classes), so I came to respect her intellect quickly. She was remarkably well-read, a brilliant and witty conversationalist, and a good friend to many of us. On at least one occasion, she cut my hair in the hallway, and did a pretty good job (I have a long history of low-bid haircuts).
After law school, she went in a different and better direction than many of us: off to Princeton to get a Ph.D. in Chinese literature. Her dissertation focused on Tang-era poets. She then began her life as a professor, and she taught literature at the University of Minnesota and then Oberlin. While settling into the town of Oberlin, she began to focus on writing after fighting off cancer. Her first book was a novel for young readers titled Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas.
Next, she turned to something for adults: A re-imagining of a classic Chinese tale known as the Dream of the Red Chamber. The story is beloved in China, and she was taking on a lot to mold the story in her own way, emphasizing the issues of sex and class to raise new questions. It was a success. Her book, The Red Chamber, was published by Knopf, recommended by the Chicago Tribune, discussed on NPR, and was translated into French, Italian, Dutch, and Polish.
In an interview about the book, Pauline said something I have been thinking about for a while: "I did not understand that the experiences which made me nervous and uncomfortable, which I was quick to bury, also made me creative." That is a hard truth.
There is something to what Pauline has done that I find really striking; creating great art, making recorded music that matters, or writing an important book (which she has done) is perhaps as close as we can come to immortality. After we are gone, those things remain, down through generations, after our descendants lose track of who we were. Sometimes, I wander into a used bookstore and find an old, old volume. Often, I buy it. The person who wrote it talks to me, tells me a story. I hold their thoughts in my hands and savor them, and miss them when I am done. They are there. I am grateful for them.
Pauline always seemed like she would do something remarkable, and she has.
