Chancellor Tong! President Mills! Provost Dopico! Vice-Chancellor Lehman! Chairman Chesler! Colleagues! Distinguished Guests! And Friends! Join me in saluting our great students of the Class of 2025! Dear students, on behalf of the whole NYU Shanghai community, from the bottom of my heart I offer you warm congratulations upon your graduation. We are really, really proud of you for reaching this glorious moment.
This year, as I myself prepare to graduate from NYU Shanghai, I have been reflecting on generational difference and on how much we all learn from one another. How do the experiences of each generation affect our approach to life and our attitude towards the generations that precede and follow us? How can we learn from one another across generations, and what changes as we ourselves move from one generation to another?
Today I want to talk about the threads that bind us, in the present, to both the past and the future, and how we can continuously learn from that connection and help others to do the same. These threads pertain to all of us in the multiple contexts in which we all exist. They connect us as members of a family in which we are descended from our ancestors and linked to those who follow. They connect us as a community of learners in which we learn from one another and pass on what we have learned—for instance professors don’t just teach students but also themselves learn from students. They connect us as representatives of a particular culture, or more than one, living as we do in multicultural communities. They connect us as beneficiaries of various kinds of social change who ourselves will set trends for the future. And they connect YOU as members of a graduating class, who follow in the footsteps of eight classes of NYU Shanghai students, and set the pathways for the classes yet to come.
Generations are intertwined like threads in a tapestry that bind us all together, despite the claim that “the lesson of history is that there is no lesson of history.” Those generational threads are spun from the experiences of those who came before us, the threads of the stories, the struggles, and the wisdom of the past, which have been woven with care, sometimes with regret, and always with hope for a future. That future awaits us, like an unfinished tapestry still on the loom for us, here, now, in the present, to weave. It is through our hands, our choices, and our imaginations, that the threads carry us forward. We are here neither to cut ties with the past, nor to cling to the past so tightly that we cannot move on. We are here to carry it onward, reworking, reimagining, repairing where needed — and to stitch our own new bright patterns into the fabric of what is to come.
I would like to reflect briefly on how generational differences show up in different ways, especially in how we understand time and space and how we interact with one another.
When it comes to time and space, you can really see generational differences in how people experience them. This is perfectly expressed in the opening lines of Zhang Ailing’s great Shanghai novel “Half a Lifetime’s Romance” 半生缘 Ban Sheng Yuan, which reads like this:
“Time does fly for the middle aged: a decade whips by in the blink of an eye, a flick of the fingertips. When you’re still young, even three or four years, maybe five, can seem an entire lifetime.”
Perhaps you agree with that or perhaps you do not or perhaps you aren’t sure, but I’d like to suggest that we can both agree and disagree with that idea simultaneously. For instance, thinking back to what may have been one of the defining experiences of your college years, in other words the pandemic, doesn’t it seem like just yesterday that we were quarantining and masking and testing seemingly endlessly? And yet at the same time doesn’t it seem like just a distant and almost unreal memory that you can hardly believe actually happened? And looking forward to graduation and the next chapter of your lives, doesn’t it seem in one moment like a distant aspiration and in the next moment it has come galloping towards you and suddenly it’s here!
Another way of thinking about this is in terms of the speed in which we can communicate across vast distances and how much that has changed with new technologies. Back in the 18th century, 300 years ago, it took 2 years for European missionaries at the court in Beijing to receive a response to a request for guidance from the Pope in Rome. Their letter had to make the weeks long journey to Guangzhou, to be carried to Europe on a ship which might take 9 months to reach port and then be delivered. Then, after carefully considering his reply, the Pope had to send it all the way back which could take another year. And by the time the answer reached Beijing it was often, well, outdated. And then telecommunications revolutionized everything! First through the telegraph and the telephone and radio and television, and later with the internet. In the 1930s, for example, the King of England was able for the first time directly to address people all around the world, reaching not just the United Kingdom but Canada and Australia and New Zealand. Just imagine what that must have felt like, at a time when weeks-long ocean travel was still quite routine and even by airplane it still took days to fly across the world.
In the 1980s when I was living in Beijing doing dissertation research, when I wanted to call home I had to place a call and wait for a call back, which usually took at least a couple of hours. And now we have our mobile phones, and can chat across the world whenever and wherever we want to; we can stream a movie while we’re on the subway; we can run a seminar with participants in five continents—and we can stream a graduation ceremony across the world!
And this profound shift in how we experience time, space and distance has quietly transformed our whole understanding of the world and our place in it, and those changes will undoubtedly continue.
When it comes to how different generations interact, there is no shortage of opinions about what each thinks of the others. It is probably true to say that every generation thinks that its own experiences, both good and bad, are unprecedented—we are all convinced that nothing like our own experience ever happened to those who came before us and that those who follow will never have quite the degree and quality of wisdom that we ourselves have gained from our own experiences nor the same skills for dealing with them. The American writer Mark Twain put it aptly when he famously wrote that “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” I wonder how his children felt about him as they grew up.
Just as we exist in multiple contexts at once, we also belong to multiple generations simultaneously. The generational gap works in both directions, for while we may sometimes feel scorn for older generations, we ourselves are always morphing into the very generation we once scorned. Yet as we join that older generation, we may still feel like children in the presence of elders, as for instance the great Chinese poet and cookbook author Yuan Mei, who wrote regarding his mother that:
'Long after my own hair was grey she went on treating me as though I were a child. When I went to her room she never failed to give me a sweetmeat or a slice of melon, make sure if it was hot that I was not too warmly dressed, or if it was cold, that I was well wrapped up, and to satisfy herself that I was getting wholesome things to eat and drink. I, of course, played up to her view of me as a small child, and ended by quite forgetting that I was a battered old man. Indeed it was not till I lost her that I fully realized I was a man of sixty-two.'
This cycle of becoming, of watching roles reverse and perspectives shift, is precisely what you have experienced these past four years and will continue to experience. And as you transition from freshman to senior, from undergraduate to graduate, from student to teacher and from mentee to mentor, you will become the generation to which the next generation looks for guidance and example, even as you continue to look up to the generations that preceded you. The generations are woven together by a single thread just as, as Confucius taught us, and as you have learned here, understanding comes from learning a wide variety of things and then tracing the threads that connect them all. In short, wisdom begins when we acknowledge our interdependence, the ties that bind us together across generations, linking past, present and future in one continuous journey, upward, and onward, always.
So, Class of 2025, as you go forth into the next phase of your lives, continue to listen and learn across generations, knowing that receiving and transmitting wisdom will help to create a richer and better world for us all.
As the American-British poet TS Eliot wrote:
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
Congratulations, Class of 2025!