Joan A. Kleinman Travel & Language Grant: David Chen (2023)
The Joan Andrea Kleinman Travel and Language Grant is made in memory of Joan A. Kleinman, a scholar of Chinese language and literature and co-researcher with Dr. Arthur Kleinman of projects in medical anthropology. Joan Andrea Kleinman was committed to language as the basis for cultural and international studies and developed Chinese fluency only after her initial graduate studies in French. The goal of this grant is to promote language acquisition for use in the service of global health research. The language acquisition aspect of the summer research project may involve formal coursework or informal tutoring.
One or two annual awards are made to support summer field research and language learning outside of the United States in East Asia: China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. This grant supports research on the broadest aspects of health, illness and social suffering. David Chen was a 2023 award recipient of the Joan Andrea Kleinman Travel and Language Grant. His project was titled "Looking for Palliative Care at Friendship and Love Hospital.” Chen's recent statement about his project and experience is below.
Beyond the financial support that has enabled my field research, to conduct a project in the spirit of Joan Andrea Kleinman's legacy is to hold in heart the ways in which she saw language as art. Language is more than a "gateway" to another culture or mode of life. It is a work(ing) of art that remembers ways in which human ineffability continually finds expression. In learning language that is foreign to your own is to engage in multiple universes of expression. In this multiverse you can conceive a wondrous miracle: that somehow you find connection, a through-line of meaning, an undercurrent of familiarity on the surface of otherness. This travel grant set the intention for me to constantly think about language on top of my research into health. This intention surfaced in ordinary moments—during a car ride asking my aunt her favorite chengyu, noting down words that have iconographic poetry (i.e. below in the field notes, the word 婴), writing basic poems using only characters I learned in a particular day—these all contributed to an immersion in language as art and colored my perception of words around me. For this color, I am grateful for the spirit of this grant and the person it memorializes.
tongli - empathy
cancer
death leaves behind experts, death experts? Expertise none of us want and all of us get.
Sometimes, we don't have the luxury to persuade ourselves we matter. Someone else...Meiying!
婴儿 - the word for baby, the character for mother with two characters meaning treasure on its back. My mother told me yesterday she grew up on her father's back. We visited his gravesite last week.
In order for death to be made a reasonable antagonist to the technologies of man, our only hope is to reduce our idea of it, for death itself remains forever ineffable while life clings on in our veins.
Meal log poem:
Breakfast - two hard boiled eggs that my grandmother insisted on peeling for me before I left for the hospital
Lunch - Meiying took me to a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop. She knows I love Yangquan noodles. Ate too much. Took a nap in the office.
Dinner - Mom made some cucumber salad and some buns for dinner. Drank tea before sleeping.
Special thanks to David for sharing a piece of his experience.