Letter from the Editors, Vol. 2 No. 1

Dear Reader,

We are excited to bring you this second volume of The Hundred River Review, NYU Shanghai’s journal of excellent student writing. Our university calls students to “Make the World Your Major,” to seek out encounters with those around us and with the city in which we live. Of course, all writing is an encounter of author and text, of writer and idea; all encounters are rife with the negotiation of language, culture, power, and place. Reading the five essays in this year’s journal, we see our students creating their own encounters through engagement with important texts and complicated questions. The contents of these pages are a testament to students’ curiosity, to their pursuit of intellectual encounters.

Haitian Ma’s essay questions the presumption that individual encounters are the engine that drives cosmopolitanism. Madison E. Pelletier dives deep into the ethically fraught encounters between Western medical researchers and participants in placebo trials in the Global South. Cindy Wang examines the world of the live house, where interaction between musicians and their fans shape China’s image on the global stage. Bai Xiao turns her analytical eye to Ezra Pound’s long and passionate engagement with China, especially with the philosophy of Confucius. Finally, Claire Ren, through the lens of Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace, considers how one encounter between a government and its people has become a source of political othering.

We believe that the work showcased here is a model of what first-year and sophomore students can accomplish in the Writing as Inquiry (I & II) and Perspectives on the Humanities core courses. We hope you that you find these essays enlightening and that they enrich your own writing and learning.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Tomscha and Sophia Gant, The Hundred River Review Editorial Board