When news of the death of China historian Jonathan Spence reached me yesterday, I immediately thought of the acknowledgements section of his massive 1990 book The Search for Modern China.
It ends with what is to me a most memorable word of thanks:
This book was written, in just about equal parts, either in Yale's Cross Campus Library, or in Naples Pizza on Wall Street, New Haven. I would like to thank the entire staffs of those two admirable establishments for providing two complementary worlds in which to mull over, and then to pen, this record of the past four hundred years of China's history.
I visited Naples Pizza on a visit to Yale about twenty years ago and wondered where Professor Spence might have worked on his book. I imagine him sitting in a booth (though I can't remember if they had booths) "mull[ing] over" notes and documents as he literally "pen[ned]" his manuscript. For me, as for any writer or would-be writer, this image is both familiar and inspirational. Since reading that book in 1990, I have worked in a lot of eating establishments when writing my dissertation or other articles, though I have been neither as productive as Spence nor as faithful to one restaurant as he was.
I wonder, too, what the staff of Naples Pizza thought of his thanks. It would be interesting to see in one of Spence's obits a quote from someone who worked there when he was frequenting the restaurant. Unfortunately, like Professor Spence, Naples Pizza (later known as Wall Street Pizza) is no longer with us.
[Update, 1/14/23: Just saw this on Twitter--it adds some good detail to what I wrote, like the facts that Spence wrote the book on legal pads and that the Naples restaurant staff called him "Johnny."]
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