On August 24, 2009, while traveling on an airplane to New Haven CT to start my PhD study at Yale, I was reading a copy of the Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry (vol. 4). Looking outside the window, I wrote down four words on the first page of the journal 凍雲如雪. I had never imagined that fifteen years later I would join the East Asian Studies department at McGill and coordinate the very Hsiang Lectures series.

This September 2024, I had the pleasure of hosting my longtime friend, Dr. Nicholas Williams of Arizona State University, for the 2024 Hsiang Lecture on Chinese Poetry. In his lecture, Dr. Williams examined the Classics of Poetry (詩經), challenging the traditional interpretation of certain love poems as political allegories.

Dr. Williams and I met at Beijing Normal University in 2003, when I was an undergraduate student and he was a visiting student from the U.S. We enjoyed a shared love for classical Chinese poetry, especially those from the Han and Six Dynasties 漢魏六朝. We chatted about pursuing PhD studies on Chinese literature in the U.S. Over the years, our paths have crossed in various places, including New York City, Hong Kong, and numerous AAS conferences, where he regularly participates as the editor of the renowned journal Tang Studies. Now, two decades later, we were fortunate to continue our conversation on Chinese poetry in Montreal.

It is only appropriate to record such as rare reunion with poetry, and I think of two:

No.1 杜甫 “贈衛八處士”：
人生不相見，動如參與商。
今夕復何夕，共此燈燭光。。。。

No. 2 黃庭堅 “寄黃幾復”:
我居北海君南海，寄雁傳書謝不能。
桃李春風一杯酒，江湖夜雨十年燈。。。。

I hope the Hsiang Lectures will continue to foster poetic conversations and connections, across decades, across oceans.