Ping-ti Ho, former professor at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Irvine, and president of the Association for Asian Studies from 1975 to 1976, has written an absorbing autobiography that adds considerably to our knowledge of scholarship and academia in China and America. It is a splendid work, interesting and informative, that should be translated into Western languages and widely read.
A major historian of the examination system in imperial China, Ho is himself the beneficiary of a modern examination system—smaller in scale, to be sure, but perhaps even more competitive. Born in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, in 1917, Ho remembers that as early as the age of nine, he aspired to higher education and study abroad, two of his most eminent kinsmen in Shanghai having gone that route. For college, Ping-ti Ho enrolled at Tsinghua University, which had a reputation for access to education abroad. He sat...
