This one's for you, Ms. C

So it's the day before the exam. I was attending a lecture given by a prominent expert on Chinese nationalism and taking notes on my laptop when an e-mail popped up from the alumni office of my high school. It turns out that my old history teacher, Ms. C., just passed away. Professor Mentorman may have been the master at whose feet I labored in college, but Ms. C. was the gatekeeper who set me upon the path long before I even thought of studying political science.

At my high school, History 333 was a rite of passage for every student, the third and final trimester of a year-long sequence in American history that every junior (and the occasional straggling senior) was required to take. What made History 333 loom so large in the minds of students was "THE Three Thirty-Three", a research paper around which the whole course was structured. From my first day of school as a freshman I had heard tales of the dreaded 333, a project that put students in the library for days on end, poring over books, and the writing...20 pages, sometimes more! Looking back on it I laugh considering that a 30-page research paper is now par for the course as a grad student and even tomorrow I will theoretically crank out 20-25 pages of material for the preliminary exam. For an impressionable 16-year old, though, the prospect of the 333 was something to be dreaded.

I still remember the first time I met Ms. C. She was a thin and frail-looking woman with graying hair in her fifties and walked with some difficulty because of a degenerative muscular disease that had crippled her from years back. Despite her frail appearance, though, there was no doubting Ms. C's tough-mindedness and passion for the study and teaching of American history and politics. She taught us all the nitty-gritty details of research that have stuck with me all through college and grad school. I remember her teaching us how to use index cards to catalog notes (a practice that I hated and could see no point to but which ultimately helped me organize my thoughts in the days before EndNote), how to use the microfilm archives and especially how to argue a good research paper. After weeks of poring over books and turning in draft after draft, I finally had my first research paper, 20 pages on cooperation between Chinese partisans and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services during World War II. I was inspired by the exploits of my grandparents, both of whom were attached to an OSS guerilla unit (my grandfather as a soldier and my grandmother as a nurse) and whose commanding officer helped them emigrate from China to the United States.

There were countless times when I dropped into Ms. C's classroom during free periods to discuss the paper with her, and she provided a wealth of knowledge that could have easily landed her as a professor in a liberal arts college (a position that she actually once held before deciding to teach high school students). She was a patient mentor and a friendly critic. It was her class that showed me that research could be addictive--the long nights spent searching for "one more source", the "bingo" moments when I had finally solved a puzzle or found a new question to attack. It was a strange kind of thrill that I experienced five years later when I was writing my undergraduate thesis for Professor Mentorman.

Ms. C revealed within me capabilities that I didn't know I possessed. Back in April when my first article was published, I e-mailed her with the good news and we somehow managed to get into a discussion of comparative nationalisms and China-Japan tensions. I wish that I had kept better contact...I was going to e-mail her after my exam tomorrow and tell her that I was following her path on the Ph.D. Well, I suppose that now she will know without my having to e-mail her.

I never got to tell you in person, Ms. C, but without you I would be in a far different (and probably far less interesting) place from where I am now. Thank you for all you did for me. Tomorrow morning I am going to walk into the office and write my six-hour exam. I'm not nervous anymore; I know I'm going to do well.

This one's for you.