12
Monday, November 27, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
'Twas the Month Before Christmas and all through the store . . .
Christmas Tree Specials and Values Galore!!!
SAVINGS UP TO 30%
For Men:
Cotton Crewneck Sweaters regularly $45 Now $33.75
Leather Coats regularly from $245 Now $189
Wool Cardigan Sweaters regularly $65 Now $48.75
For Women:
841 Mass.
Southwest Design Leather Belts regularly $28. Now $22.40
Cotton Sweaters values to $84 Now $58.50
100% Wool Pants
values to $90
Now $63
Open Until
8 P.M.
Every Evening
Continued from p. 1
undergraduate at Gettsyburg College in 1970. She did not do so because of any language program the college offered, but because by doing so, she could take her senior year off camp, thereby escaping the small, rural Pennsylvania campus where she had become bored.
Japanese
"I didn't want to just transfer, but I wanted to get out of there," she said. "I sort of concocted or exaggerated my interest in Asian studies in order to get off campus."
Childs said she applied to study in Princeton's language program during 1971-72.
"I said, I don't mind studying a foreign language if I could go to Princeton," she said.
Childs asked her adviser whether Chinese or Japanese would be easier to study at Princeton. She said her adviser, who had not studied Japanese, said that Chinese had been difficult for him and that Japanese stood a fair chance of being easier to learn.
After Childs left Princeton in 1972 with a B.A. cum laurea in history from Gettysburg, she found a job teaching English to Japanese executives at a Tokyo language school.
"It was awful," she said. A slight cultural misunderstanding made teaching difficult for the American teachers because they thought that students were controversial topics would stimulate conversation among the Japanese.
"The Japanese didn't do it," she said, because it was not culturally proper for them to stand out by expressing strong opinions.
Childs soon left the language school and ended up as a counselor at a 4-H club exchange camp in the mountains, where she helped look after schoolchildren, she said.
In 1974, Childs returned to her native New York, where she worked for two different firms operated by a Japanese businessman. She said the companies were not managed well, and employees constantly wondered whether they would receive their next paychecks. It was this period that led Childs to yen for a return to the academic world.
"I didn't like the stress," she said. After earning an M.A. in Japanese from Columbia University in 1978, Childs was recruited by the University of Pennsylvania, where she received a teaching fellowship and began her doctoral work in Japanese.
Her time at Pennsylvania was academically rich but financially trying. She said she lived on the edge of the slums of Philadelphia and worked to earn the money she needed.
German department," she said. "I never bought a car; I had a bicycle. I never had a stereo."
"I painted houses with a guy in the
But then came the Japan Foundation grant that enabled her to travel to Kyoto in 1980, where she rented a house at the foot of Mount Hiei, just "a stone's throw from an imperial villa." For the next two years, she spent her time consuming medieval Japanese texts in the library of Kyoto University.
Her interest in medieval stories of religious awakening had begun while she was doing her master's thesis, and her doctoral adviser encouraged her to pursue that interest, she said.
"It all came together very happily, but it was really an accident," Childs said. "Really, life is full of unexcited accidents based on accidental punctures."
One of the central concepts of medieval Japanese literature is the Buddhist idea of "mujoo," or transience, she said. She has memorized a love poem dealing with this concept:
"Hajime yori /Au wakae to /Kikinagara /akatsuki shirade /Hito o koiker," which means, "From the beginning / I knew that to love is to part / But oblivious to the coming dawn / I loved."
Childs left Kyoto and returned to the United States in 1982, where she "spent the next seven months burning the midnight oil," she said, writing all of the research she had done into a dissertation.
When she finished her doctoral work and was awarded a doctorate in Japanese from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, she thought that her years of work would get her a teaching position at a prestigious university on one of the coasts.
"That was a rude awakening," Childs said. "When I went on the job market, I discovered that all the people from Harvard and Yale and Princeton were getting all the jobs... I ended up with my best prospect being Southern Illinois University — Carbondale."
Which was a little farther west than Kyoto.
"When I saw the cowboy hats in the airport at St. Louis, I said, 'Where am it?' " she said.
Childs taught several Japanese language and Asian course courses at Southern Illinois from 1983 to 1986.
"I was the only Japanologist on campus. I got spread really thin," she said.
Besides being disappointed by the lack of colleagues in her field, she said, she was bothered by the fact that the university offered only a minor in Japanese. Those problems,
in addition to what Childs, a self-proclaimed feminist, said were sexist attitudes and actions by one of the school's administrators, led her to seek work at another institution.
Childs said that she became interested in KU when she saw an advertisement in an academic newsletter for a position here. Shortly after that, she said, she met Andrew Taubaki, KU chairman of East Asian languages and cultures, at a conference. She said she liked the program and the people at KU, and friends had told her that Lawrence was a good community, so she decided to come here.
"I had already transcended my bias as far as living in the Midwest," Childs said.
Now that she has settled into her role as part of the University community, she hopes to make Lawrence her home, she said.
"I like it. I like it a lot. I like the trees; I like no parking problems," Childs said. "I like the pace; I like walking to work. I like the crime rate being low — you know, I lived in New York City. I like being here. But I wouldn't have expected to like being here."
Back in the classroom, one of Childs' students is working through a translation of a Japanese sentence into English. The student speaks, slowly, as though she is not entirely sure of her translation. When she is finished, she looks up from her book.
"Banzai?" Childs says, punching the air with her fist in celebration.
the air with her list. She
Childs said one lesson she hoped
her students would learn was that
pursuing their natural interests
would lead them to happiness and
success, although it might not take
them there by a clearly marked and
pre-planned route.
"In my experience, it wasn't a grand vision and a master plan. I came out as a professor because of a variety of chance encounters. . . But what I like to tell students is that they should study things that they like, because then they'll probably be good at it, and they're good at it then opportunity if you are without having necessarily planned them," Childs said. "It's wiser in a way to be willing to see what evolves rather than set your heart on a plan that may not be realized."
That is not to say that Childs does not have plans. She said her long-term ambitions were to get a second book published and to help build a KU doctoral program in Japanese
As for short-term plans, she said,
she has two.
"To get tenure," she said, laughing. "And paint my house."
SENIORS DON'T MISS THE LAST CHANCE TO IMMORTALIZE YOURSELF IN THE
1990 JAYHAWKER YEARBOOK
Yearbook picture make-ups will be taken on a first-come, first-serve basis between Nov. 27 and Dec.8 at these times:
Monday & Thursday: 11:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m. and 4:00 pm.-8:00 p.m.
Tuesday & Wednesday: 9:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m and 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Friday: 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
$3 sitting fee will be waived with purchase of yearbook