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How Special Collections archival holdings tell the story of our time
Father-son papers dramatize 20th-century China turmoil

By Hope Green

Christopher Rand never was one to be fenced in. Raised in Salisbury, Conn., he was the son of two independent-minded souls: William Blanchard Rand, a handsome, hard-drinking, polo-playing gentleman farmer who lost most of his inheritance in the Depression, and Ellen Emmet Rand, one of the nation's foremost portrait artists of her time. His mother was able to support the family by painting prominent Yankees, commuting to her studio in New York City.

Peter Rand

Christopher spent much of his childhood exploring the hilly countryside of Connecticut's rural Litchfield County, and listening agape as hunters and fishermen regaled him with adventure stories.

"Always a loner" is how his son Peter Rand, a College of Communication preceptor, describes his father in the preface to his 1995 book China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution. The book is based partly on research materials that are now stored in BU's Department of Special Collections, where, BU archivists say, the father and son have provided a trove of research fodder for novelists and historians.

In China Hands, Rand tells how his father was a misfit in boarding school and at Yale, and wanderlust prevented him from settling comfortably into suburban life. In 1943, he eagerly left his reporting job at the San Francisco Chronicle to become a China correspondent for the U.S. Office of War Information. By then he had a wife and four children, including Peter, who was born in 1942.

"It was as though my father once and for all wanted to burst out of his own history," writes Rand, "in order to expand into a much greater life."
After the war, his father became a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, reporting on the Chinese civil war and the 1949 Communist revolution, led by Mao Tse-tung. Subsequently he spent two decades as a roving foreign correspondent for the New Yorker, often traveling on foot to document indigenous peoples on several continents, and at one point living with lepers in the Belgian Congo.

The New Yorker published some of his articles about far-flung places and peoples as a series; these later were compiled into book form. In one book, he also made a cultural study of Cambridge, Mass., examining the connections that were formed during the early 1960s between academia and the blossoming Route 128 computer industry.

He donated many artifacts from this phase of his career to Special Collections a few years before committing suicide in 1968.

Absent from the sizable assortment of book manuscripts the noted journalist gave BU were any accounts of his experiences in China. Years later, Rand contributed the materials that filled in the gaps of his father's story.

New Yorker correspondent Christopher Rand took these snapshots in Kazakhstan during the 1950s or 1960s: (clockwise from top left) two men at a meal; a man and two boys inside a tent filled with chests, saddles, quilts, and rugs; a woman weaving; and a Kazakh family. Photos courtesy of Special Collections

Another adventurer
Like his father, Rand also spent time traveling solo in remote places. Beginning at age 20, he lived in East Africa and Ethiopia for three years. "I knew my father had been a great traveler and had grown enormously as a result," he says, "so I was not afraid to do that myself. It was one of the great experiences of my life."

When Rand returned home to New York, he used much of the material from his travels as inspiration for his first novel, Firestorm, published a year after his father's death. In a letter to Rand, novelist Paul Bowles called it "one of the best first novels I've read."

But taking his father's advice, Rand also wrote freelance articles while roaming through Africa, and although he kept writing novels, he also developed an interest in nonfiction.

He set out to write China Hands, he says, as part of an inquiry into what had first lured his father so far from their California home. His project was to chronicle the careers of journalists who lived and worked in China during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Many of these correspondents, among them such luminaries as Edgar Snow, Theodore White, and Harold Isaacs, became passionately devoted to the plight of the Chinese people. Christopher Rand was fairly apolitical, Peter Rand says, but like his fellow scribes was restless, romantic, and generally obsessed with China.

In the course of his research, the younger Rand found in a storage warehouse a stash of letters, clippings of his father's newspaper articles, diaries, and papers and reports relating to his work for the war office -- many of which now reside in the BU archives.

"I got very deeply drawn into a subject my father cared very much about," Rand says, "but interestingly enough had not written about for publication in the New Yorker, and none of it came out in his books, just in occasional pieces."

Christopher Rand chose to entrust his personal papers to BU partly because his daughter Mary attended the school as an undergraduate in the early 1960s, although she did not complete her education here. Howard Gotlieb, director of Special Collections, encouraged Peter Rand to start donating his papers when he was only 27 years old. Although extremely flattered, Rand declined at first. But by 1991, when he and his wife moved to Belmont, Mass., from New York City, he was in the midst of working on China Hands and decided he had enough material of substance to contribute, including drafts, novels, and fictional stories. By then he had taught writing for 15 years at Columbia University, where he also researched modern Chinese history as an associate at the East Asian Institute.

He has edited two books by Chinese writers and is working on a third, The Prison Memory of Dai Quing, about a woman dissident and outspoken journalist. The book recalls the student movement that ended in the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989 and Dai Quing's subsequent imprisonment. He's also putting together another work of nonfiction, the story of a young American man who was arrested and tried by the British at the beginning of World War II while working in the American Embassy in London. In BU's archives he is finding a good deal of material for this book.

"History, journalism, and fiction all intersect at Special Collections," Rand says. "Howard Gotlieb has been very astute at getting the works of journalists and fiction writers all under the same roof."

The Department of Special Collections at Boston University, located in the Mugar Memorial Library, is one of the largest repositories of documents, memorabilia, and books chronicling the lives and careers of important writers, artists, performers, and public figures of the past century. The collection, which was started in 1963, includes archival material and rare books dating back to the 16th century. Contemporary archives now contain private papers and artifacts of 1,700 notable 20th-century figures.

These vast holdings offer a rich portrait of our time -- a living history as revealed through the accomplishments and passions of the century's great thinkers, politicians, and personalities -- as well as provide a rich source of research material for future articles, dissertations, and books of history and scholarship. Individual collections include manuscripts and typescripts in all states and drafts, galleys, notes, notebooks, journals, diaries, scrapbooks, reviews, photographs, and personal and professional correspondence, as well as various editions of published works.

18 January 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations