Asian Languages/Civilizations (Chinese), MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last autumn our branch library received six boxes of donated Chinese books, and because I was the only member of staff who could read them, cataloguing them fell to me. Most were ordinary: cookery books, martial-arts novels, a run of school textbooks from the 1990s. One box, though, held paperbacks printed in Hong Kong and Taipei in traditional characters, alongside mainland reprints of the same titles in simplified form. Placing two editions of a Lao She novel side by side and checking where the texts diverged took me most of a lunch break, and it brought me back to the questions I had worked on as an undergraduate and want to pursue properly at postgraduate level.

I studied Chinese and History, spending my third year in Beijing on a language exchange. My dissertation looked at shop signs and printed advertisements in Tianjin between the 1920s and the 1950s, using digitised newspapers and photographs held in university collections. I wanted to know how far informal abbreviated characters were already in commercial use before the official simplification schemes of the 1950s. The answer was more interesting than I expected: many forms that are now standard appeared regularly in handwritten signage and cheap print, while some reformist simplifications never took hold anywhere I looked. I could only make limited claims from a few hundred images, and my supervisor was right to push me to say exactly what the sample could and could not support. Still, the project taught me to treat script as social history rather than a fixed system, and to read material sources slowly and sceptically.

My reading since graduating has followed from that. John DeFrancis's The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy made me question some assumptions I had absorbed as a learner, particularly the idea that characters are primarily pictographic. I have also been working through Lu Xun's essays in the original, which is slow going, because his arguments about language reform and vernacular writing give a sharper sense of what was at stake for the people who lived through those debates. I keep a notebook of vocabulary and constructions from these readings, and I find that reading early twentieth-century prose is stretching my Chinese in ways that conversation practice no longer does.

At work my role is mostly unglamorous. I staff the community information desk, help people print forms and book computer sessions, and run a fortnightly conversation table for adult learners of English, several of whom are older Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. Explaining English grammar to them in Chinese, and hearing how differently Cantonese speakers read the same characters aloud, has been a practical education in variation that no textbook gave me. At home I help my grandmother, who reads Chinese far better than English, with letters from her bank and the council. Translating official language accurately for someone who is relying on it has made me careful about register and about the gap between a literal rendering and what a sentence actually means for its reader.

I also play the erhu, not well, in a small amateur group that meets in a church hall. It has nothing to do with my academic plans, but learning tunes from older players who often teach by ear rather than notation has given me a lot of patience.

I am applying for an MA because I want the methodological training to turn the curiosity behind my dissertation into sustained research. I would like to develop my classical Chinese, which remains my weakest area, since I cannot properly understand script reform without understanding the written language it reacted against. I would also value guidance in working with archival and digital sources more rigorously than I could as an undergraduate. Longer term, I am interested in doctoral research on literacy and print culture in twentieth-century China, or in work connecting library and archive collections with the communities who can read them. Either way, I want to build on careful habits I have already started to form, and to do so among people who take the history of language as seriously as I do.