Feature: Mandarin, Marxism and Poker: My (Journalism) Education at MSU

A writer for The Wall Street Journal, formerly with The New York Times, fondly recounts how MSU propelled him into bigtime journalism.

            By dusk on the evening of June 3, 1989, armored divisions of the Peoples’ Liberation Army had moved into the western outskirts of Beijing, and elsewhere, and were awaiting orders to move on Tiananmen, the vast square at the heart of the Chinese capital.  I was making my way along the back side of the Great Hall of the People amid angry, defiant citizens who had courageously thrown their support to students who had camped out for weeks in Tiananmen, agitating for democracy. A showdown was at hand and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

            In the hair-raising hours that followed, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Chinese citizens were killed by soldiers moving to roust the students and impose order.  Soldiers were killed by citizen mobs, too.  Beijing became a very scary place to work, and it stayed that way for days and weeks.  At its scariest, as I bicycled here and there, trying to avoid the often random shooting, I asked myself a familiar question:  Why am I here?

            The obvious answer: I was a foreign correspondent, and this is what we do.  We witness and report.  I had been writing about bloodshed in Asia for two decades off and on, starting in 1969 with the Vietnam War as a 26-year-old reporter for The New York Times.  I’d covered the 1971 war between India and Pakistan that created Bangladesh, chronicled guerrilla wars and insurgencies from the Philippines to Sri Lanka, and written about the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both in 1979.  As war reporters, we tried to get close enough to get the story but not close enough to “buy the farm”—an old military euphemism for getting killed.  The idea was to get to serious stories without crossing into what we called “deep serious”—usually a place where bullets were flying too close for comfort.

            But here I was, once again, in “deep serious.” I had done this enough, I thought. I’m getting too old for this.  What possessed me, way back when, to get into this kind of work?

            Michigan State University did, I thought. This was all MSU’s fault. If MSU had not been so big and diverse, I would have never studied Chinese, gotten interested in Vietnam, or thought much about the rest of Asia.

            Size mattered for other reasons at MSU.  But I didn’t fully understand those reasons when I was there.

            I grew up on a 60-acre farm in Gratiot County.  I took the No. 6 yellow  bus, after morning chores, to school in the village of Ashley (pop. 300) three miles away.  My 4^th-grade class had 13 students.  When I was 12, my family gave up the farm and moved to Shiawassee County, where I attended school in Corunna. Only one language, Spanish, was taught.  I didn’t take it but I should have—not to learn Spanish as much as to learn how to study a language.  My 1961 graduating class had 73 students.

            At East Lansing that autumn, I went into a kind of size shock.  My freshman class had 6,281 students—the newest arrivals at a university with a student population of 42,000. I remember attending orientation lectures about how not to feel lost and inconsequential in this vast sea. That was around the time I became a number: 327041.

            I knew at the time that I was attending a big school.  But, hey, the Big Ten schools around us were just as big, or bigger.

            In 1991, a quarter century after MSU sent the Class of 1966—my eventual graduating class—into the world, we were invited back for a reunion on Homecoming Weekend.  Come home, read a letter from the MSU Alumni Association, catch up with fellow classmates and renew old friendships.  That made me think about just how few classmates I knew when I was in school, and how fewer of them I’d actually kept up with over the years since.

            As it turned out, I couldn’t attend the reunion. So I wrote a facetious—and, I hoped, funny—letter to a classmate who lived in East Lansing and was attending, asking him to give “my warm personal regards” to each of the 4,670 graduates in our class.

            My perspective on MSU’s size began to change when I got my first job, as a glorified copyboy at the Evening Star in Washington, DC, for $96 a week. That was only $36 more than I had been earning at the State News!  The Evening Star was a big city paper.  But, heck, the State News was the second largest morning daily newspaper in the state of Michigan!  It was a student newspaper, but it operated much more like a real newspaper than college papers at other schools. It was more like real-world journalism than campus journalism.

            It could afford to pay me $60 a week and send me to Jackson, Mississippi, for two weeks in 1964, to cover hearings conducted by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about the denial of voting rights to African-Americans in that state. The commission's chairman was MSU president John Hannah.  The next summer I wangled a summer internship with the commission in Washington and spent my spare time job-hunting. The summer after that, I started work at the Star.

            I met a girl who worked for the Washington Post.  She’d gone to Bryn Mawr.

            “How many students went there?” I asked.

            “About 1,600,” she said.

            “Sixteen hundred!” I exclaimed. “Do you realize my school had more teachers than your school had students?”

            As a reporter for The New York Times (1967-1982) and The Wall Street Journal (1982 to present), I was surrounded by graduates of Ivy League schools and other exclusive, and relatively small, colleges and universities.  What these schools seemed to have in common, I gathered from their graduates, was that they were very hard to get into and almost impossible to drop out of.  They were very protective of their students, very sheltering.  At MSU, we railed against in loco parentis.  But we had a lot of freedom to make choices, good and bad.  And at MSU, the choices were vast.  MSU was relatively easy to get into: It gave Michigan kids with C- averages a chance in those days.  But if they didn’t make good on their chance, they were gone.  Freshmen dropped out like flies.  You could choose to buckle down and study, or party, or play pocket billiards in the dorm all day.

            Michigan State, I began to realize, was much more like the real world than a lot of these small elite schools. It forced me to make decisions. In its enormity and diversity it offered up seemingly endless choices. If I had to pick my single most important lesson, it would be how to make choices.

            The first choice I had to make was whether to attend MSU or go elsewhere. I didn’t even apply to another school—very foolish in hindsight.  I chose MSU for money and glory.  Leonard Falcone offered to pay me and my trombone to take a front row slot in the Spartan Marching Band!  Decision over.  The band scholarship and a couple of other scholarships meant I could afford MSU, at least for awhile. And if I ran out of money to live on campus, I could always move back home and commute 30 miles back and forth (which I did, dropping out to work in a factory, pump gas, and renew my interest in the virtues of higher education).

            My major: no preference. I had vague ideas, but I gradually came to think that MSU would help me make the decision. It didn’t take long to realize that among all those teachers at MSU were some who were brilliantly inspirational and others who were the opposite.  One assistant professor had such a thick accent I couldn’t understand his lectures. I dropped his course in the first week. Others induced sleep. I decided to find out who the very best teachers were at MSU and, regardless of the subject, enroll in their courses, if possible.

            This was, I have to say, an inspired choice. I was rarely bored. I took a hodgepodge of courses all over the university.  But they weren’t all good choices. One quarter, I enrolled in a short story course in which we were asked, at first meeting, to write a paper analyzing a story.  The professor came to class two days later with copies of two of our papers—the best and the worst in the class. He handed out copies of each.  Mine was the worst.  I dropped the course and reconsidered my literary aspirations.

            My interest in Vietnam began at MSU.  In my senior year, I was the campus stringer for Time magazine and the Detroit Free Press—after resigning from the State News the previous year in a censorship row (and, thus, throwing away a free trip to the Rose Bowl).  An MSU professor named Wesley Fishel was running a program to help the Saigon government under Ngo Dinh Diem and his sister-in-law, Madame Nhu.  MSU was also training South Vietnam’s national police (later known to me in Saigon as “white mice” because of their white uniforms).  Anti-war sentiment in the U.S. was growing.  I wrote lots of stories about the MSU-Saigon relationship.  An upstart magazine in San Francisco called Ramparts put Madame Nhu on its cover wearing an MSU cheerleader sweater.  I wrote more stories, made a lot of money, and learned a lot about Vietnam.

            Three years later, I was a reporter with the New York Times.  When the foreign editor asked me to go to Vietnam, I jumped at the chance.  I’d covered the Vietnam story at MSU and at anti-war demonstrations in Washington.  And I didn’t want to miss out on the most important story of my generation.

            But back to choice-making at MSU.  By choosing no preference (the non-major) and picking good teachers instead of subjects, I gradually found myself in a fix.  With an odd assortment of credits in geology, chemistry, Marxism, Civil War history, labor economics, Progressive Era history and so on, all over the lot, what could I possibly earn a degree in?  I pored over degree requirements in my junior year and found a program liberal enough to accommodate this smorgasbord:  journalism.  I would have to take core journalism courses and a foreign language.

            I resolved to take an “easy” language.  My friend, John Kornblum (see p. 10, Winter 1998), ’64, told me German fit the bill. (This was easy for him to say—he ended up as U.S. Ambassador to Germany.)  I enrolled in German 101, not realizing that many classmates had already studied German in high school.  Our professor wasn’t so stupid.  He knew lots of students had enrolled in German 101 for five easy credits.  His remedy: speed up the class.  After a week of German at warp speed, I was completely lost, dropped the cours, and regretted not having studied Spanish in high school.

            The only way to solve my language requirement, I decided, was to choose a language none (or very few) of my classmates had taken in high school.  I enrolled in Mandarin 101.  It worked.  We were all on the same footing.  My interest in China blossomed.  My recitation instructor, a very cute graduate student from Taiwan, revealed the secret of making non-sticky fried rice (let it dry out overnight)—and thereby fueled an interest in cooking Asian foods.  

            MSU, in this way, propelled me into places and situations I couldn't have imagined back on the farm.  And in one particular instance, you might describe the experience as comparable to a double-edged sword (or five). 

            When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, I got to Kabul in time to watch the festivities along with other western reporters.  We'd drive north and find the Russian Army en route to the capitol.  A few bullets in the snow in front of us were all it took to reverse our course.

            Soon, we were all arrested and confined to the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel, passports confiscated, an armored personnel carrier parked in the hotel driveway.  With nothing to do but wait for expulsion, we did the sensible thing—we played poker (yet another skill picked up at MSU).  I won big time.

            The good news was that I raked in huge pots of cash. The bad news was that the cash was the local currency, the Afghani, which was depreciating at a rate of at least 25 percent per day.  I ended up with a suitcase full of money that was worthless outside Afghanistan.  Desperate, I arranged through intermediaries to buy five old British Army Wilkinson swords from an antique arms dealer I knew in the local bizarre.  The next day, we were expelled.   On the plane out, swords wrapped in burlap and checked as baggage, I was feeling quite proud of myself.  At the Delhi airport, Indian customs officers discovered the swords and promptly confiscated them.

Author’s Bio: Jim Sterba, ’66, has been a foreign correspondent and writer for more than three decades.  He joined The New York Times a year after graduation, serving as associate director of its Washington Bureau.  In 1969 he moved to Saigon and covered the Vietnam war and other major stories throughout Asia.  After a stint in the U.S., he returned to Asia in 1979 to cover the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and, in China, the demise of "Democracy Wall" and the trial of the so-called “Gang of Four.”  In 1982, Jim joined The Wall Street Journal as a reporter and editor focusing mainly on China and the Far East.  He also writes about the outdoors, wildlife, the environment, and human-animal conflicts.  Several of his stories are included in a new collection of the Journal’s front page animal stories, Herd On The Street (January 2004).

      Born in Detroit, Jim grew up in rural Michigan.  He received a Distinguished Alumni award from MSU in 1970.  He currently lives in New York.  His latest book, Frankie’s Place, A Love Story, a touching and often hilarious memoir about his relationship with wife Frances FitzGerald, a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer, has been named one of the best nonfiction books of 2003 by Publisher’s Weekly, the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times.  The paperback edition comes out in June.