[KS] Gari Ledyard

[Bruce Cumings]

I was very sorry to hear that Gari had passed away.  He was my teacher and a good friend. I took second and fourth year Korean from him, and then did a reading course preparatory to doing my dissertation.  He was a kind and gentle person, and remarkably erudite. If I asked him about a certain Chinese character, he would go to the blackboard, sketch it in beautiful calligraphy, and then explain its pronunciation in modern Korean, Middle Korean, what it meant today and what it meant 500 years ago. He had been trained by Peter Boodberg  at Berkeley, and along with Moss Roberts of NYU (another friend of mine),  they were among the last to get such a deep immersion in the study of East Asian languages.  One of my most embarrassing moments with him was when we were studying a particular Korean text, and a big cockroach crawled out of my book bag and ran up the wall of his office.  He just laughed and said all Columbia apartments— mine and his-- harbor roaches.

Gari was also interested in sheltering me from several faculty at Columbia who were out to get graduate student members of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars.  Gari was sympathetic  to the goals of CCAS,  but told me frankly he could not join the group because he  probably would be denied tenure.  During my dissertation defense one of those professors tried to trash my dissertation, while Gari  wanted to recommend it for an award. Even today I have trouble understanding the rage and insecurity that the politics of the 1960s brought out in some of the faculty. But Gari  was understanding and supportive, secure in his own self, through that difficult period.

Bruce Cumings
University of Chicago