ARC Plus: How did we get here?

Pete's journey to Chinese proficiency, and some words of encouragement

Dear ARC friends,

We’re committed to helping you take your Chinese reading skills from good to great. Whether you're an ambitious intermediate-level learner, or a proud 中國通, we believe you’ll find something useful in our weekly newsletters. And if you subscribe to ARC Plus, we’re confident that you’ll see real, practical gains in both your listening and reading abilities, with weekly dialogues, scripts, and a mini-podcast.

At ARC, we’ve always kept the focus on our carefully chosen excerpts and explanations. But some readers may be wondering, what makes us tick? How did a couple of guys like John and Pete end up sharing their passion for Chinese with thousands of readers around the world?

A mother outside Chengdu asked Pete for a photo with her baby, 2005.

John will explain his journey in the coming days. Pete’s story really begins in high school. Here it is:

I was fortunate to attend a good, public high school where I could study both French and Latin. My Latin teacher, Magistra Elthea Sadlon, sparked my intense curiosity about other cultures and worldviews. With her enthusiasm, her mastery of the subject, and her kindness toward students, she was an early role model who showed me the power of great teaching. Without her example, I wouldn’t be doing this today.

While the Romance languages are very different from 中文, my experience learning Latin gave me some tools that continue to be helpful in my study of Chinese.

First, I learned the power of steady, incremental gains. Before we can read Ovid and Virgil, we need to know our “agricola, agricolæ, agricolæ, agricolam, agricolā,” et cetera. As learners, we are often frustrated when the really cool literature that motivated us to study a language seems out of reach. When will we ever get there?

The answer is that serious learning takes time and practice. Learning a bit each day, with plenty of repetition, is more effective than cramming for ten hours, feeling overwhelmed, and giving up in (understandable) frustration. My studies of Latin and of Chinese have been steady and consistent. ARC is the same: we try not to overload you each week. It’s like that old saying: How do you eat a tofu elephant? One bite at a time.

I also learned the power of breaking words into their components. Latin is full of prefixes, suffixes, and stem words: ante-, post-, contra-, -ification, and so on. The first time you hear it, a word like “ventriloquist” can be hard to remember. But it gets easier when you learn that people used to believe that a “ventriloquist” was a “stomach” (ventr-) “talker” (loqu-). 🤓

In our notes and explanations on ARC, we try to help you with this same technique. It works with the radicals of individual words: 艸 / 艹 as the grass radical, suggesting that the word is plant related, or ⺝ as the flesh radical, suggesting that the word involves meat, muscle, or flesh. It also works with compounds: an owl, 猫头鹰, is a “cat-headed eagle,” while a tomato, 西红柿 is a “Western persimmon.” Knowing these components helps us to learn and retain new vocabulary, which is why we point them out in the notes. The mini-podcasts in ARC Plus also help to unpack and explain complex or unfamiliar terms.

Most importantly, I learned the value of celebrating small victories. It’s very easy to beat ourselves up because we’re not as fluent or as confident as we think we should be. That’s stinkin’ thinkin’. Chinese is an exceptionally challenging language for non-native speakers. And it’s not just us saying so! The US State Department considers Chinese a Category IV “Super-hard language” (their words). I can still remember my pride the first time I conjugated the future perfect of ambulare, the first time I wrote 饕餮 from memory, and the first time I could understand an article in 读者, a kind of Chinese Reader’s Digest.

We hope that each time you can get the gist of an ARC selection, even if you don’t understand every single word, you’ll take a moment to congratulate yourself. We can do hard things! Keep it up and eventually you’ll be reading newspapers, singing along with Faye Wong 王菲 at karaoke, and maybe trying some Li Bai or Lu Xun. Who knows, you may even feel inspired to write and recite a modern Tang poem!

After graduating high school, I studied Chinese for several years at the University at Albany in New York State. Why the transition from Mediterranean to Pacific? At the time, I was keen to work in national security, and Chinese seemed like a good bet. But as I continued to travel, study, and grow, I found myself increasingly drawn to the history and literature of China. In 2005, my last year at college, I was an exchange student at the 文化交流学院 of Fudan University 复旦大学 in Shanghai, China. You could get a dozen mangos for about 10 RMB at a shop down the street from the dorm. It was glorious.

From 2006-2010, I lived and worked in China. The first year, I was an English teacher at the Nanjing Foreign Languages School (南外). Then, I returned to my beloved Shanghai to work as a translator. I worked for an e-fax company (don’t ask), some sketchy entrepreneurs, and some huge multinationals.

In 2008, I was hired as the in-house translator for ChinesePod, where I met John Pasden, my friend and colleague to this day. I had admired John’s blog Sinosplice and was delighted to have the chance to work with him on such a cool language learning platform. In addition to translating all lesson content and moderating the discussion boards, I also created and hosted Poems with Pete. Each week I discussed a classic poem, usually from the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). We did some Du Fu 杜甫, a little bit of Meng Haoran 孟浩然, and my favorite poet in any language, Li Shangyin 李商隱. We dug into the historical context, the poetic allusions, and the relationships among the pieces. It was a blast.

After about a year, I went back to the USA to pursue a graduate degree in public administration. At that time, I wanted to set up an urban farming nonprofit to promote sustainable, compassionate food production. But my heart was still with Chinese. After finishing my degree in 2012, I studied at National Taiwan University 台大 for a year. Taipei was (and is) phenomenal: hot springs and cool people. Now I wanted to put my language skills to work as a professional historian.

Chinese New Year in Taipei with the family of my Auntie Wang and Uncle Shih, 2013

In 2014, I started grad school in modern Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego. I wanted to ask big, weird questions, and to help other people to understand the complexity, diversity, and richness of Chinese history. My dissertation, which I am turning into a book, asks how the lives of bovines (cattle, yaks, water buffalo) were affected by the economic, social, and technological changes in China during the mid-20th century. One way to think about this is to ask, “Would you rather be an ox in Hunan province in 1940, or in 1960? Why?”

How on earth could a historian hope to say anything about this? What evidence could you even look at? From 2015-2017 I did a great deal of archival research: newspaper microfilms in Hong Kong, handwritten documents in Nanjing, old slaughterhouse schematics in Taipei, Party directives and farmers’ handbooks in the archives and libraries of Shanghai, veterinary reports at the United Nations archives in Manhattan, and countless published compilations of telegrams, government proclamations, and more. My Chinese colleagues also generously shared many useful documents that they’d collected in trips to rural archives that I couldn’t visit.

Sadly, many of these materials are now inaccessible to scholars. I sincerely hope that language learning tools like ARC can help to dissolve some of the fear and hostility of our current global climate. Yes, I dealt with a few unhelpful bureaucrats and professors who shall remain nameless. But overwhelmingly, Chinese people were extremely supportive of my hard-hitting, good-faith effort to help uncover a neglected part of the past. How did tens of millions of intelligent, social animals like cattle experience decades of military conflict and scientific innovation? How are the material and emotional lives of humans and animals interwoven? What might we gain by trying to understand people who are very different from us, and yet also remarkably similar? Language proficiency seems like an important part of the way forward.

After grad school, I completed an An Wang postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese studies. Because this was 2020, I didn’t actually move to Cambridge. Everything seemed so unstable. My Harvard colleagues were generous and supportive via Zoom and email, helping me to advance my research during a scary and stressful time.

With friends and colleagues at Tongwei station, Gansu Province, 2019

In 2021, I moved to Ann Arbor as a postdoc at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Since 2023, I’ve been teaching courses at UM including “Modern China in the World,” “Mapping Rivers in Modern China,” “Twenty-five Ways China Changed the World,” and “Sports and Games of Asia.” I love teaching and writing because I want to help others to discover the vitality, durability, and awesomeness of China’s history, culture, and language.

That’s my story in a nutshell. In future posts, we can talk about how learning Chinese is like running a marathon, or practicing Bach for solo violin, or learning how to make tasty vegan mapo doufu 麻婆豆腐. I love to do all those things, and I’m a big believer in drawing connections among different types of learning.

Tibet, 2005

What did I learn from all this?

1. Life isn’t a straight line. In the words of the late, great Gil Scott-Heron, “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone / You can always turn around.” Through all the twists and turns, Chinese was one of my most reliable companions. You may be considering a life transition. Being comfortable in another language, especially one as hard as Chinese, can truly open doors. John and I have lived this reality.

2. Celebrate small victories. Maybe you don’t have imposter syndrome, self-loathing, and all the other neuroses that have also been my traveling companions through life. I truly hope you don’t. Whatever your flavor of mental health, I hope you can take some well-deserved satisfaction from each little success, especially if you tend to be hard on yourself. Learned a new Chinese word? High five! You were able to follow along with ARC Plus mini-podcast after listening a few times and reviewing the vocabulary? Do your happy dance. We really hope that learning Chinese will be a challenging but joyful journey, at whatever speed and intensity works for you.

3. Curiosity is the best motivator (at least for me). We try to provide a range of useful, but also weird and wonderful, readings and audio resources for you every week. Even if some of them don’t light your fire, we hope that something will catch your eye and draw you in deeper. Language learning is no place for woulda, coulda, shoulda. Instead, let’s focus on “How cool is that!? I want to know more!”

If you’d like to join John and me and readers around the world on a Long March Joyful Journey to Chinese proficiency, consider subscribing to ARC Plus today. In addition to monthly and annual membership plans, we also offer a group discount. And if you know a Chinese learner who could use a powerful and fun tool for Mandarin proficiency, consider a gift subscription.

Thank you for reading this post, and for being an ARC subscriber. As I used to say at the end of my ChinesePod lessons, “Keep reading, and I’ll catch you on the flip side.”