In this way, Christianity would realize, rather than destroy, China’s distinct identity. At this time Chang was convinced that spreading Christianity throughout Chinese society could remedy many of the fundamental problems with which China was wrestling, including widespread egoism and an inadequate sense of social community.43
This question of how best to achieve a reasonable balance between a culture’s unique characteristics and cultural influences from without was to become a continual theme of Chang’s writing. Chang addressed this subject in the contexts of religion, ethics, social life, politics, science, technology, theater, and art more generally. He engaged with the issue at an early stage, as can be seen from the essays that he published in student newspapers during his time in the United States. In an early article titled “China’s Desire to Retain the Best in Her Own Tradition” and published in 1914, Chang identified the great challenge facing China as one of how to steer between the Scylla of narrow-minded self-sufficiency, and the Charybdis of superficial copying of other traditions and neglect of that in Chinese traditions which deserved preservation.
When describing this kind of hasty cultural emulation, Chang was fond of using the metaphor of bad digestion that resulted from trying to ingest as much as possible of a foreign diet.44 This metaphor was to recur repeatedly in later life when he reflected on and criticized different cultural influences. Japan’s use of technology and science, for example, seemed to Chang a sign of how cultural imports from the West could become degenerate. Chang argued that Japan’s rapid but superficial absorption of modern technology and science could well be described as a nightmare caused by bad digestion, especially with reference to the use of technology in the military sphere. Chang and others in his generational cohort maintained an attitude about the West that was sometimes characterized by an ambivalence toward what was culturally indigenous vis-à-vis what would need to be imported.
As well as being highly active in Christian student groups at Clark University, Chang was also the head of the debate club at the university. This club took home victories in various competitions on the American university circuit and provided Chang with valuable training in rhetorical and argumentative techniques, skills that he would later put to good use in his career, particularly in various UN contexts. According to his son Stanley, Chang was very proud of his argumentative prowess. Stanley relates that his father knew the best way to prepare for a highly charged debate. Having thoroughly prepared himself on a particular subject, read up on and made an inventory of possible arguments and counterarguments, and, finally, participated in the debate itself, he would move quickly to studying a new subject area. Chang was ever impatient to satisfy his boundless curiosity for unresearched fields.
Chang often took great pains to identify conceptual distinctions and clarifying principles, regardless of the subject he was occupied with. Whether writing confessional articles, scientific papers, essays on poetry, theater, or art, or political opinions, Chang sought, usually successfully, to adhere to his ideals of clarity, simplicity, thoroughness, and cogency. According to Stanley, he brought this same attitude and basic strategy to an array of projects. Be it for an academic article, a political opinion, an artistic project, or a hobby (such as his record collecting), Chang attacked issues as if he were writing a doctoral dissertation. His colleague on the UN Commission on Human Rights, the Canadian law professor John P. Humphrey, recorded the following observation about Chang’s interest in music and record collecting in his diary entry for 1 November 1950: “I took P.C. Chang for lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Great Neck. He talked about music and the theatre; says he now has a collection of about a hundred long-playing records chosen as a result of study over nearly three years.”45 Stanley Chang also remarked upon his father’s record collecting and love of music:
He collected LPs in a way that resembled a systematic study of music appreciation in general. His collection contained everything from Gregorian chants to twentieth-century music. It seemed to me that the more unlistenable the music, the more he wanted to listen to it. He started with Beethoven’s Fifth and worked his way back in time to just before Bach and then forwards again up to the strangeness of twelve tone. When he played his records, I usually locked myself in my room. He wasn’t looking for particular composers but rather investigating different musical forms. He bought his records mainly at Sam Goody’s in New York City. Being a regular customer he obtained special treatment. He could buy any record and return it if he did not wish to keep it. Sometimes we sat together and listened to the records he had brought home.
Chang’s time at Clark University was evidently very important for him. During these years he sought to immerse himself in Western cultural traditions and developed interests that he was to sustain for the rest of his life—with the exception of his religious involvement, which dwindled thereafter. Chang graduated from Clark University with a bachelor of arts in 1913, three years after matriculating. He then moved to New York, where he continued his studies at Columbia University, where he took two master’s degrees, one in comparative literature and one in pedagogy, in 1915. Columbia was well known for its large Chinese student groups, and it would later on be closely connected to the China Institute, which was founded 1926 in New York City. Several distinguished Chinese graduate students at Columbia such as Wellington Koo and T. V. Soong would later on make successful careers in the Chinese Foreign Office.46
Chang’s Theatrical Interests
During his time as a student in New York, Chang’s interest in theater became increasingly manifest, including in his writing of articles for various student newspapers.47 These articles show Chang as eager to criticize what he felt were common misunderstandings about Chinese themes and characteristics in Western plays about China. In a 1914 article titled “Chinese Themes on the Stage—A Comment on ‘Mr. Wu,’” Chang wrote:
If we believe that struggle of the human will is the central support of the structure of the drama, as it is, then perhaps, there is no other country where this struggle in the political and social realm is so marked and inevitable as in China today. She is undergoing a great transition … and dramas of all descriptions are being acted out in real life every day. That this is a ready and prolific field for dramatic themes, every student of the history of the drama can easily discern. But it is a sad fact that so far, on the western stage, these legitimate and truly dramatic stories have scarcely been touched.48
Chang emphasized that there needed to be more plays that did not reiterate common misconceptions about the Chinese people and prejudice about their characteristics, such as deviousness in business (a theme of the play Mr. Wu). Chang cited Aristotle’s dictum that “a work of art must be full of beauty, agreeable, desirable, and morally worthy.” According to Chang, no prejudice, however cleverly dramatized, could ever form the substance of a work of art, “for it is neither beautiful, nor agreeable, nor desirable—the present war ought to convince us of this. And certainly not morally worthy if we believe in any Golden rule other than the Golden rule that the only Golden rule is that there is no Golden rule” (Chang apologized for the reiteration!).49 Chang here touched upon issues that would later form the focus of the “Orientalism debate” initiated by the Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said in his famous book Orientalism (1978), which examines misperceptions and misrepresentations of Asia by the Europeans, particularly European scholars.
In his early years in New York, Chang also wrote plays—The Intruder, The Man in Grey, and The Awakening—that reflected topical political and social problems in China, where some of these problems had been caused by the conflicts with Japan and the deep divisions in the country.50 All three plays were subsequently staged at the Nankai School in both Chinese and English. The Intruder was also performed in New York in 1915. The Awakening proved very popular in China, where it was the first English-language play to premiere before a Chinese audience. Since Chang’s political involvement often overlapped with his artistic endeavors, the plots of his plays warrant brief summaries here.
The Intruder takes as its theme the significance of social virtues, such as family togetherness, diligence, courage, and the importance of contributing to the common good. The play centers upon the threat posed to a family by greedy creditors in a hardening social atmosphere. The family has fallen into debt because several of the sons have borrowed money from an unscrupulous creditor,