I first met Chip in 2007, when I had just moved to Colorado with my husband, Matthias, and we had begun working in the Chinese program at CU Boulder. At the time, Chip took some of our graduate seminars, and we soon became friends. Chip helped us feel at home in Boulder and shaped our Colorado experience right from the beginning. Many of our now favorite places were Chip's and Monika's recommendations.
I had actually become aware of Chip's standing in Chinese medicine when we were still living in Germany. Barbara Kirschbaum, a TCM practitioner in Hamburg, had recommended Chip when she learnt that we would be moving to Boulder soon. Curiously enough, on that same day an email from Chip arrived: he had seen our names in CU's course catalog and asked if he could take Matthias's seminar in the fall. We like to believe that fate worked hard to bring us together... If I had not known that Chip was a distinguished practitioner and scholar of Chinese medical history in his own right, I would certainly never have discovered that by having him as a student. Quick-witted and gentle, curious and funny, he blended in genially with every group of graduate students (and became friends with quite a few of them over the years). He never drew attention to his many accomplishments, even as he made our discussions so much richer by contributing his mature knowledge and varied perspectives.
Two years into our friendship, Chip and I started working on a project together, dedicated to the letters written by a sick man in fourth-century Southern China. This man, Wang Xizhi, was admired for his handwriting at a time when calligraphy had become the highest art form in Chinese culture, which meant that even his everyday letters were preserved. Among these are more than a hundred in which Wang described his ill health: his fatigue, insomnia, belly aches, diarrhea, cold damage, and pain. Although these letters form the earliest sizable corpus of personal health reports in Chinese literature, they had not yet been explored properly.
When Chip and I embarked on this academic journey in the summer of 2009, we did not expect that it would take us eight years to complete. The territory turned out to be largely uncharted and often enough humbling, but it made for an eye-opening trip. The article we finally published in T'oung Pao in 2017 is the outcome of a truly collaborative process, in which I profited enormously from Chip's wide learning and vast experience in all matters concerning Chinese medicine. Apart from that, I also feel that thinking with Chip over all those years has shaped my process in ways that I probably cannot yet fully fathom.
I had never written anything together with a colleague in this interdisciplinary way before and I was not really sure how this would go. Would I want to go on a "Chip fast" soon? Chip had early on warned me, jokingly, that this might happen one day. But after eight years of working with him I can only say that there was not a single time when I felt burdened or restricted by our collaboration. On the contrary, I thoroughly enjoyed the time we spent together, and this extends to our meetings just for fun, whether for dinner at our house or up in the mountains, often also with Monika.
Chip and I met once a month or so, usually in my studio, to read, translate, and interpret Wang Xizhi's letters together. Chip approached these texts with his usual wit and lively intelligence, with great seriousness, tenacity, and a truly inquisitive mind. He honored their voice across a distance of sixteen-hundred years, in the same way as he honored the pain and suffering of his patients. Chip was not interested in easy answers or a quick publication or showing off his impressive knowledge of Chinese medical history. Rather he was interested in fathoming these letters fully, in making sense of the symptoms and the curious treatments that Wang Xizhi described, and in getting a realistic view of these letters' place in fourth-century Chinese medical culture.
Looking back on these eight years of working with Chip––of thinking together, writing together, revising together––I feel deep gratitude for this journey with him, and I mourn the loss of a fellow traveler who was exceptionally good to think with. Am I ready for this long "Chip fast" now? I am not sure. I had been looking forward to our next project, to more dinners and bottles of wine, to much more time together.
We met for the last time this fall, for a magic sunlit hour up in the mountains. Chip talked about his late discovery of calligraphy, his experiments with drip calligraphy, and his practice of water calligraphy in the wilderness. The photo he shared from the Wind River Range in Wyoming shows the traces his brush left on a rock beside a creek. The light and evanescent characters written in water on stone––I like to read them as a metaphor for Chip's life: beautiful in their place and ready for transmutation.
November 17 & 18, 2018
Link to Chip's obituary on the blog of Engaging Vitality
