This post is one of those entries that aren’t about skillful victories and encouraging successes, but of lost sieges and disappointing failures. When formulating the scope and planning the content of this blog, I decided that I will include the difficulties and share the negative experiences of my research process in order to make it more honest and truthful to the negative parts often omitted in research accounts. Of course, it’s by no means about depression or the kind, on the contrary! After I admitted my fiasco at the archives, I turned to old newspapers in the library as an alternative solution and eventually made my Changchun-stay useful.
In case you don’t want to read the whole story, this is the bottomline: contact the archives in advance asking about the availability of the documents you need. Currently, not only they’re going through a digitization process which obviously serves as the perfect excuse for any request they want to deny, but their staff I have encountered seem to perceive their role much more as gatekeepers rather than service personnel assisting researchers in their projects. I didn’t contact them in advance because it was a last minute decision to make a snap-trip before the national holidays. I also have to be honest, that even if I did so and they told me there’s nothing there for me, I would have still gone there to check it for myself. I know, sounds stubborn, but because of the arbitrariness of the system learned from experience, only if I actually went there I could feel that I have really tried everything.
The Morning
On Monday 8:35 am, Changchun city was long awake, the sun rose three hours ago and I was pretty sure that the good Jilin people didn’t wait for much longer either. After an hour of commute taking the bus and two lines of light rail (轻轨) to the People’s Square (人民广场) I was finally standing in front of the Jilin Provincial Archives Bureau (吉林省档案局), a tall building covered with 1990s brownish tile-panels and its gate guarded by the familiar stone lions (石狮). I entered and put my backpack dutifully on the conveyor belt for security screening and greeted the guards with a smile and a “Ni hao!” – trying to find the balance between being pleasantly cheerful and sufficiently humble at the same time. As I was filling out the basic registration form for visitors (外来客人接待回执单) a small crowd of observers gathered around me, amused by the laowai who’s writing his name, affiliation and purpose of visit with Chinese characters. They were curious to know what’s my research about and one of them even surprised me to know about NYU Shanghai, New York University’s affiliation in China. I took this as a promising start and felt that perhaps I didn’t come to a place as parochial as many have warned me before.
The building of the Jilin Provincial Archives Bureau (吉林省档案局) in Changchun, Jilin