I was fortunate to study Chinese with Huang laoshi back in the late 1960s, and I still remember very well those individual sessions on Hillhouse Avenue. I would come to class with a text and Parker would explain the parts I could not make out, writing characters on pieces of paper that seemed to have many doors leading in different directions, only a few of which lodged in my mind. The gap between the beginning or even intermediate student of classical Chinese (wenyan) and an accomplished literatus and poet such as Parker was so great that I often thought that it could never be closed. Of course I was right, it could not, but Parker was never fazed, he just kept on sharing his insights, often moral and natural as well as technical and academic. I remember one session in which we read and discussed an article on all of the many names that have been given over the ages to the polity we call, all so simply, "China," and the impact of that article has shaped my entire intellectual life in the field of Chinese history.
In a recent session with six Chinese colleagues from many disciplines here at the University at Buffalo on the question of "what does it mean to be Chinese," I began my short presentation with some of the terms that had figured in that article. After I completed my dissertation on a late Qing official and turned my attention to a late Ming literatus (whose historicity turned out to be highly problematic) I remember sharing one of my articles with Parker and his delight at some of the resonances with earlier history I thought I had discovered in the late Ming materials.
I remember joining James Lee, one of Parker's prize students and one of my own, and visiting Parker and Mrs. Huang in California some years ago and finding the same quiet and amiable humaneness that I had remembered in the more formal classroom of decades earlier. I remember the Huangs' more recent visit to Buffalo when they were visiting old friends but remembered that i was here and their calling me and having me to dinner (when my wife Alison was on one of her many trips looking after human rights in Africa).
In short, I have many vivid memories of my relations with Parker, all of them pleasant and uplifting. I will never forget him and will continue to try to live up to the pedagogical legacy he left behind. Another true junzi has left this world in body but he will live on forever in spirit among his family, friends, and students.
With great respect and affection,
Roger Des Forges
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