Sid: A Great Scholar and True Friend
The academic world knows Professor Sidney W. Mintz as a great
scholar, but to those who know him personally he is a true friend. He treats
friends, old and young, with respect and warm. Indeed, when he gave me a copy
of his Sweetness and Power, he graciously wrote, “For Chee Beng, with
regards and respect, Sid, 25 viii 98”. I was 28 years younger, yet he had
always treated me as equal, or at least I felt so. Those words reflect more
about him, the quality of a humble great scholar. We (including Jackie his
wife) became good friends since 1998 when he came to the Anthropology
Department of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) as a visiting scholar
for a semester. We corresponded regularly. Sometimes he would reply on the same
day with a long letter, and I must confess and now I regret a lot that often I
did not reply sooner.
We wrote freely about many things, academic and non-academic and
also about life. In one letter he surprised me by mentioning about us standing
at a balcony of the Humanities Building of the New Asia College at CUHK, when I
talked about the Taoist naturalness of nature. We looked at the beautiful trees
whose leaves were turning yellow and I said something about life was like the
leaves eventually turning yellow and dropping to the ground; it was so natural.
It was a casual remark and so I was surprised that years later he referred to
this conversation. As a way of remembering him, I should like to share some
portions of his letter in his final two years about his view of life and the
certainty of departure
On 16 November 2014, he wrote：
Yeah, my birthday’s
tomorrow. And if someone had told me when I was little, or then adolescent, or
then adult, or even while getting old that I was going to live to be 92, I
would have burst out laughing. It still seems rather ridiculous, to be so old
and still to be enjoying food, good company -- even giving a lecture is still
fun! I feel very very lucky — this was our fiftieth anniversary, and we still
enjoy each other’s company.
Enjoying food, enjoying good company and enjoying giving lectures,
this is the ideal of our life as a scholar. And of course Sid had the good
company of Jackie as his better half.
The letter of 19 July 2015 is fairly long and I reproduce a large
part here as it tells of his view of life and eventual death, and even about
the contemporary American society. And the first part of this letter is so
poetic as if we are reading William Wordsworth：
Time goes more swiftly, the
older one gets, or so it seems to me. Weeks melt into a beginning on Monday, a
middle around Wednesday, and an end around Sunday; months flow by in a
ceaseless stream, even though each day’s newspaper tells one that 24 more hours
have passed. The seasons march by in their unending march, though one’s
feelings about them grow more emphatic. I used to love the change of seasons.
Now I simply hate winter and love summer, finding the rest of the year either
as times for enduring or anticipating.
My 93rd birthday is looming
in November, but I just had my 92nd! How could that be? My mind does not seem
appreciably weaker, but my ability to pursue a task to its end has waned. My
body is of course growing feebler, but I now exercise just about every day, so
even that decay seems a little retarded. Except for my confidence in the
inevitability of my death sometime soon, I cannot put a finger on the date, not
even approximately.
I know it may come at any
minute, perhaps the next minute — no, I guess I survived that much longer at
least — but I have no intimations of the end. My heart failure last December
left a damaged valve that will not restore itself; the aortic muscle in
question sometimes does do so, and mine will not, my doctor tells me. But since
I feel all right and have no serious pain, I have no desire to
escape to the next stage, and I continue greatly to enjoy being alive.
As you can imagine, race,
inequality, immigration, and the 2016 elections are in the news, and the
American people are wallowing in the pleasures of hate, guilt and sanctimony. I
think that, in spite of some serious deficiencies, Obama has been an extremely
good president. If we were not a nation crippled by our past, we could have
helped him to be an even better president.
I continue to write — or
anyway to think about writing — but seem to be paralyzed right now. I expect my
problem to clear up, and then I’ll have more to report.
Alas, we won’t get to hear from Sid anymore, but we can find
comfort to know that our great scholar and friend had enjoyed life, enjoyed
good company and enjoyed being a teacher, and that he had returned to nature.
Recipe
I hesitate to provide this recipe that I created, but those who
want to cook for one or two persons without too much hustle may find this
useful. Making a delicious cod dish takes considerable effort, and I
experimented with this simple way of cooking. Sometimes when I cook for myself
or for myself and my wife, I steam a slice of cod together with cooking rice in
an automatic rice pot. When the rice is about three-quarter cooked, that is,
when the water is about drying up but still visible, place the slice of cod on
top of the rice, also put a few leaves of basils on top of the cod. Add some
slices of tomato and cover the lid. When the rice is cooked, one will find some
fish oil in it, and this is good for those who need omega three. Take out the
cod and put it on a plate, and decorate it with the cooked tomato slices. I
like vinegar, and so I make a simple sauce for the dip: some vinegar, some cut
chili, some palm sugar. I use the well-known Jiangxi black vinegar, but one can
also use balsamic vinegar. The sauce can be made in many ways according to
one’s taste, including using soy sauce. If the slice of cod is too thick (like
two inches thick), one has to put the cod onto the cooking rice earlier,
otherwise the inner part may not be fully cooked. Anyway the not so-cooked part
can be saved as ingredient to make delicious rice noodle in soup for the next
meal.
