Each year, The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers offer fellowships to individuals whose work will benefit from access to the research collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Recently, The Cullman Center announced it is accepting applications for the 2017-18 fellowship.

The Cullman Center’s Selection Committee awards up to 15 fellowships a year to outstanding scholars and writers—academics, independent scholars, journalists and creative writers.  One such recipient of the fellowship in 2010-2011 was Michael Meyer, an Assistant Professor with the University of Pittsburgh Department of English and author of the acclaimed nonfiction books The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, and In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland the Transformation of Rural China, written after his year as a Cullman Center Scholar. The book discusses his time in the childhood village of his wife, Frances, in the northeastern China region and explores its history of foreign presence.

Meyer divides his time between Pittsburgh and Singapore. I interviewed Meyer early one morning, which was 12 hours later in Singapore.  I was immensely enjoying our Skype conversation and was wrapping up our interview when I saw my phone screen suddenly switch from  recording mode to a blank screen and a message that my previously fully charged phone was now critically low on battery life. My breathing froze, and I hoped that the interview was still on the phone.  I thanked Meyer for his time, and then checked my phone. Due to the vagaries of technology, the interview was lost.  

A few days later I summoned up the courage to email Meyer and explain my dilemma. He graciously answered my questions again via email.  Here he discusses his experiences as a Cullman Center Scholar and its impact on his work.  

What brought you to Manchuria in the first place?

Carelessness—as a struggling freelancer in the late '90s, I agreed to write a guidebook chapter on the region before ever visiting. But it became my favourite region, both for its landscape and its history, which are unlike what people usually imagine when they think of China. Plus, my wife is from there. Writing this book turned out—unexpectedly—to be a sort of guidebook for our son to read one day, a map of his roots.

What was the difference in terms of access to research resources in Beijing (the subject of his first book) and Manchuria?

It was the difference between a full and empty swimming pool. Remember how Raymond Chandler wrote that there is nothing as empty as an empty swimming pool? Beijing did not have the book that I wanted to read, which is how I knew it was time to write one, but it did have imperial and municipal archives, daily newspapers, television and radio documentaries, novels and poems, and travelogues from people who had lived there across the centuries, dating back, if we are to believe him, to Marco Polo's 13th-century travels.

The rural northeast had none of this, at least at hand. The village where I lived is named Wasteland, and while it looked nothing like one, to a researcher the name could feel appropriate. There were no histories of the village; tax and census records, as in villages across China, were burned as fuel. China may have 5,000 years of recorded history, but in the countryside history stretched back only as far as a person's memory. History was what he or she had lived. The one historical marker for miles in every direction read simply: "Wasteland: In 1956 it became a village." But its history stretched back centuries earlier, and it sat at the crossroads where empires clashed.

What are your thoughts about the NYPL resources you had access to as a Cullman Center Scholar?

I spent a year living on the rice farm, and then a year in residence at the Cullman Center, and then a year back on the farm. So my library experience was sandwiched by two rice harvests. It was the meat in my bowl, in other words.

In the NYPL I found all of the context I was looking for. On Wasteland and its surroundings, I and the incomparable NYPL librarians found United States Army maps, Chinese-language People's Daily articles, League of Nations reports, Japanese-produced propaganda pamphlets, and rare accounts of British and American explorers who were among the first Westerners to pole down Manchuria's shallow rivers or traverse its forests, once so thick they choked the sunlight and sheltered tigers and bandits, waiting to pounce. Two accounts especially struck me, which I highlighted in the book.

One was the diary of a Scottish Presbyterian nurse who left home for the first time to work in a mission hospital near Wasteland in the 1920s. The other was a privately-published memorial to the region's first U.S. Counsel, who accidentally shot himself his first winter at post. Both of these migrants—from vastly different backgrounds—fell in love with the land, and both died there. I felt a kinship with their letters, and also a warning from them.

​What were some of the highlights of your experience?

Working alongside the fabulously supportive Cullman Center staff, especially Jean Strouse and Marie d'Origny was inspiring, especially after being isolated in China.

I am from Minnesota, and grew up playing hockey, so in winter months my day began with a walk from home on West 65th and then an hour's skate around the rink at Bryant Park, and then upstairs for hot coffee and a new stack of materials to read in a warm office. Bliss!

I often stayed and worked after-hours, which meant exiting via the library's basement, as the main doors were closed. The hallways down there are wide and coated shoulder-high in white ceramic tile. One evening I turned into the corridor and heard, wafting unseen, the unmistakable singing voice of Elvis Costello. Not a recording: Elvis himself. He was warming-up for an appearance upstairs.

On the same note, Keith Richards used the Cullman Center as his dressing room for his library talk about his autobiography, in which he wrote that had he not become a rock star, he wanted to be a librarian. He looked very much the part of old Mr. Richards when he walked into the Center, and after the kohl was applied to his eyes and bandana tied on, he emerged from the Center as Keef, the rock star.

---

Applications for the Cullman Center Fellowships will be accepted through September 30, 2016.