The Council on East Asian Studies presents:
Kang-i Sun Chang, Malcolm G. Chace ’56 Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University: “Journey through the White Terror”.
In her lecture Journey through the White Terror (also the title of her memoir), Prof. Kang-I Sun Chang will tell the story of the “White Terror,” which refers to the rule of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in Taiwan during the decade following their 1949 withdrawal from mainland China. During this time, the Nationalist government implemented a policy of “better to kill ten thousand by mistake than to set one free by oversight,” and as a result, many innocent civilians such as Chang’s father became victims of ferocious searches and persecutions. At the time of her father’s arrest, Chang was not quite 6 years old; when her father returned home, she was almost 16. Having witnessed the injustice of her father’s imprisonment, and the freedom her family later enjoyed in America, Prof. Chang felt compelled to tell the story. She will also share her thoughts on her life at Yale.
Kang-i Sun Chang, the inaugural Malcolm G. Chace ’56 Professor of East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale University, is a scholar of classical Chinese literature with interest in comparative studies of poetry, literary criticism, gender studies, and cultural theory / aesthetics. She has been teaching at Yale since 1982.