Keith Nathaniel Knapp

I grew up in a suburb of New York City with little to no contact with Asian culture. In school I struggled with foreign language learning. Upon taking interest in the Chinese characters I saw one day in an episode of the Prince Valiant comic strip, my mother told me, "You can't even pass French or Spanish, how can you ever learn Chinese?"

Despite that inauspicious start, in college I studied Mandarin and spent my senior year (1982-83) in Nanjing, China. At that time, China was just beginning to recover from the Cultural Revolution: there were hardly any tall buildings; everyone was equally poor; and people's clothing only came in three colors: gray, blue, and green. Bicycles were everywhere and only Communist officials and taxi-cab drivers rode in cars. It was during that year that China's fascinating history captured my interest.

Since Nanjing was southern China's capital during the Period of Disunion (AD 220-589), an era in which steppe peoples controlled northern China and many Chinese had retreated to the malarial and sparsely colonized area south of the Yangze River, I developed a keen interest in this segment of time. I then went to U.C. Berkeley to receive both my M.A. and Ph.D. in East Asian history. While there, especially after living in Yokohama, Japan, for a year, I also became proficient in Japanese.

In 1995, I began teaching at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina -- a school that could not be more different than Berkeley. I was a "damn Yankee" -- one who not only came to the South but who stayed. At that time, our college had no Chinese language classes; I was discouraged from teaching a class on premodern China for fear that it would attract no one. I spent a considerable amount of energy and time telling my students and college about the importance of China and the overwhelming necessity to study its culture and languages. Now sixteen years later, China's significance on the world stage is self-evident. Our college now offers two years of Mandarin Chinese and my pre-modern China course quickly fills up to capacity. I am still a "damn Yankee," but I now head our History Department.

The generosity of the Citadel Foundation has allowed me to visit East Asia nearly every year. I have traveled throughout China -- there are only four provinces in which I haven't set foot. What brings me back each year is my vivid interest in how ordinary medieval Chinese viewed their world and lived their lives. This fascination with everyday life has led me to study East Asian archaeology and participate in archaeological excavations in northern China and Mongolia.

Thinking back to my first visit in 1982, the China of today is nearly unrecognizable: there are now more skyscrapers in China than America; cars not bicycles dominate the streets; people in cities eat, dress, and live well. What has not changed, though, is the extraordinary friendliness of Chinese and their tremendous pride in their storied past.