Notes on a History of an Education in Word and Image

Buried Alive

I won't delude myself into thinking that anything I write in this blog will be read by much more than a handful of others, much less that it will change things.

However, I do wish to state that I come from a cultural-belief system wherein I was socialized and educated to bury the past and to ignore the present (moment).

And so it here finds me in the present moment writing what I should said and done two decades ago.

Some late-bloomers will gingerly and tentatively sprout a new bud even in dead winter.


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Marsha Weidner Haufler is a scholar whose conduct and behavior I am quite familiar with (and have chronicled in another posting).

Her protege at the University of Kansas when I was studying there in the Department of Art History assaulted not just me but at least one other fellow student.  He was provided immunity and protection her.

I was assaulted at the home of a famous Chinese art collector, C.C. Wang, at his home in Manhattan while viewing his collection of ancient Chinese paintings on a field trip organized by my professor the late Chu-tsing Li.  I was shoved violently away from a hanging handscroll and then subjected to verbal abused by An-yi Pan.  I believe the year was either 1991 or 1992.

As in the past with so many other things, I disassociated and attempted repeatedly to bury it--half-dead, half-alive--barely suppressing my own shame and disbelief, believing that I could and should bury it alive.

Stupidly and cowardly, I never connected that particular painful memory with what transpired months later when a fellow graduate student recounted an even more appalling incident--she was still outraged many days after--concerning this very same Anyi Pan. Still in a state of self-elected "trance," I refused to ask questions about what specifically happened to her.  Did he slap her, push her against a wall, or was it much worse?

Ms. Zhou and a number of other graduate students went to the department of art history and repeatedly attempted to make their quite vivid concerns known about the behavior of this student.

If I could go back in time, I would  share with the others that I, too, had been assaulted as well by this individual.  In today's climate where accounts of campus rape are surfacing, where victims are coming forth to tell their stories, our stories may be listened to seriously.  And universities must be held accountable for illegal or unethical conduct that occurs under their stewardship.

One convinces oneself into thinking one can bury the memory for good but the only thing that one really buries is oneself.  A self-burial, if you will.

Today, Anyi Pan is a tenured professor of art history at Cornell University.