Thus was born Chal’s first book, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945. Scalapino asked Chal to index this microfilmed collection, offering him the opportunity to use it for his Ph.D. (He only later became influential in the China field.) On a trip to Japan, he had microfilmed the archives of a World War II era bureaucrat, Hatano Ken’ichi, who had taken home his papers for safekeeping in advance of the American firebombing of Tokyo and simply kept them. Robert Scalapino was then best known as a Japan scholar. We returned to Berkeley the next day because we both had final exams to take. We were married in May 1957 in Reno, Nevada, having left the car in a 15-minute parking zone. Can I invite you to do something interesting one of these days?” And so our brief but intensive courtship began. Several weeks later, I bumped into Chal on campus and he said, “I hear you’re a free woman. (Even in those early days of “free love,” I’d concluded that for women the price was too high.) I wasn’t home, but my boyfriend was and informed Chal that I was leaving him. In return, in January 1957 he decided to deliver my final grade in Scalapino’s course in person. I had invited Chal to a Christmas party at my apartment (and even fixed him up with a date).

As an undergraduate at Berkeley he’d majored in economics, but he was now a graduate student in political science and teaching assistant for Robert Scalapino, whose course on “America’s Role in the Far East” I took. When his LST was docked in Yokosuka, he started to study Japanese.

He was living at home with his parents in Alameda to save money, and had only recently finished his master’s thesis on “thought reform” in Communist China in the period just before and after Mao Zedong took over in 1949. Chal, by contrast, was six years older, and just returned from two years with the Navy in Korea, where the ship on which he was the communications officer, LST 883, had been tasked with ferrying Chinese prisoners of war from South Korea back to North Korean ports. When we met in the fall of 1956, I was a 19-year-old junior at the University of California, Berkeley, “shacked up” with a boyfriend. More than most people suspected, he was a radical all along, whose intellectual impulses were tempered only by his birth in the Depression year of 1931 and his determination to make a decent living without “joining the establishment.” Second - and it was an unavoidable recollection - he worked with manic energy and maniacally hard all his life. In other words, he was not a right-winger who became more liberal and outspoken as he got older. First, contrary to what many of his obituaries said, his writings and thoughts were remarkably consistent throughout his life.

In going through my husband’s files, books, and papers after his death, I’ve been forcibly struck by two things.

Blowback by Chalmers Johnson