Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Yenching is not just a restaurant at Harvard Square

As a young student, I grew up reading in the Yenching Library, at 2 Divinity Avenue, in Cambridge. Its location on Divinity Avenue perhaps reminding us of the close connection between the early missionary zeal of American internationalists and the study of foreign regions. Yenching was always dusty, but as a college student, it seemed not dustier than usual film that covered the dorms, the dining halls, the ancient Yard itself, even. The reading room itself was quite workaday. A few long tables stretched out. Magazine stands lining the walls, newspapers in challenging scripts collected across them. And then to enter the stacks themselves, one passed through a small door into a back room, and perhaps down the stairs into the basement. The cornerstones of the Asian Studies literature were built here. (Asian Reading Room, Yenching Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts)