#202 - Edgar A. Porter (Emeritus Professor, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University)

It isn’t the number of years you have been around in a place that gives you the best chance of good fortune; it is the number of times you find chances to meet interesting people. On a long enough timeline, people do not come and go, but their light dims and brightens as opportunities come along, and I was reminded of this when I spoke with Edgar Porter about his new book “From Calvin to Mao and beyond: A memoir.” Professor Porter, or “Ed,” as he now allows me to call him, arrived at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University from The University of Hawai’i in March 2006, at the same time I did, but from a very different career trajectory. He had been head-hunted to be a Vice President of the university and Director of the Language Center; I was arriving having just escaped from four and a half years of being a lowly language school jobber trying my first foray into university teaching. 

Six months prior to this auspicious meeting, I was on the verge of leaving Japan entirely to pursue other opportunities in the UK - Ritsumeikan APU was my final shot at a career in Japan. This memory resurfaced during our conversation in the interview when Ed said:

[39:33] When one ages and when one is curious, you do begin to see patterns that you didn’t see, you didn’t understand, or you didn’t think about while the patterns were being developed

By age 26, when we first met, I had barely had any time with which to age and observe the passing of time. However, in “From Calvin to Mao and beyond,” Edgar Porter has the memories and the advantage of other experiences through which to judge the importance of these memories in the formation of his worldview.

Edgar Porter’s book is not a life story per se but a record of having seen the world through eyes that have also seen so much else. As he says early in the interview:

[02:40] I was always encouraging my students to get out and interview their grandparents, their parents in the realm of creating oral history. I had finished at APU and had moved back to the states and wound up for some time back in Nashville, Tennessee, where I grew up, just right outside Nashville, and when I got back there, a lot of this personal history came flooding back that I had, through all of my journeys through life, had sort of put away for a while.

Your experiences are your own, but the way you process them changes with the depth of the experiential filter that is being applied to them: what you see today is processed through your life experiences, but the way you remember your experiences is also filtered through what you have experienced since that memory.

A narrative device he uses is to have his wife’s life story in China be told concurrently with his own in Tennessee, allowing the reader to see how his view of the world was shaped by his experiences and hers by her own; when he talks about his understanding of justice, the life parallels and differences become stark and memorable. One of the early times in his wife’s life that brought her face-to-face with the realities of the Cultural Revolution was being moved to live in a rural area of China away from her parents:

(11:44) She lived with her parents for some time, but not all, not much. And then, of course, there's the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which is the huge event in her life. So she actually went off for eight years to the Chinese countryside on the Russian border between the ages of 15 and 23 to work on a farm with what they call educated young people. I was sitting in the U.S. thinking, reading about the Cultural Revolution, and really impressed at how they were, how the movement was at least in theory to raise the level of the workers and the peasants, and to make sure that the capitalists and the feudalists didn't come back in power. 

These moments in the retelling remind us that in our own lives there are people out there right now we have never met who will have a life-changing effect on us, and they are developing their own stories while you live yours.

There are moments when listening, one can feel the memories appear so clearly in Ed Porter’s retelling, and these are often moments of great historical importance as well as being valued memories:

(41:29) There were moments that I knew that were important, but I hadn't realized how important. For example, when I was a senior in high school, Vanderbilt University, which was in Nashville, I lived south of Nashville, sponsored a symposium. This is 1967, and two of the speakers at this symposium, 1967, were Dr. Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael. Two of the, of course, iconic figures, Dr. King especially now, but Stokely Carmichael at the time was actually competing with King about whether how militant to become, and I went to that. And in retrospect, I realized I'm the only white high school student from my hometown that went to that. Now, why did I do that? Why did I? Why was I brought there?

Listening to these stories, it is clear that Ed Porter has been on a journey while writing the memoir, remembering and reliving moments in order to judge their effect on him now in relation to their effect on him then.

The whole interview has moments that will make you stop and reflect on where you are in your life, where you are in your journey through ideology that will inevitably guide your decisions, and allow you to see that you have a story worth telling, if only to yourself. To quote the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards". Edgar Porter’s memoir fluidly moves through moments and memories, analyzing how each is a step taken. Go on -  have a listen.