Donald Lowe
(d.2009)
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1963
China, Critical Social Thought
Appointed 1968
Emeritus, 1992
Born in Shanghai on December 27, 1928 and died at the age of 80 on July 29, 2009 in Houston, Texas. The arc of his early life took him from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Rangoon, Dali (Yunnan), and Calcutta, always a step ahead of the Japanese Imperial Army, and finally to the United States in 1934. Eldest son of an upwardly mobile Christian family, Donald’s father, Chuan-hua Gershom Lowe, and his mother Hsien-en Sharon Lowe (nee Nie), worked in the diplomatic corps of the Guomindang until Liberation in 1949. Originally from Jiujiang, Jiangxi, Gersham’s branch of the Lowes had moved to Hankou in Hubei, where Donald’s grandfather worked in the Anglican missionary compound. The family dialect and comfort food is Hubei.
After a dislocated and spotty primary education during the family’s long flight, Donald attended Williston Academy in Easthampton Massachusetts, Yale University and took his M.A. at University of Chicago (where his father and uncles had been educated) and his doctoral degree in History at University of California, Berkeley, where his two daughters were born. His first marriage ended in divorce. Lowe taught at Duquesne University, University of California at Riverside and City College of New York before settling at San Francisco State University in 1968 where he taught until his retirement in 1993. Ever itinerant he set down new roots in Columbia, Missouri, Seattle, Washington and Houston, Texas for his temperament and his life experience oriented him to look optimistically toward what he always called “the next destination.”
Donald Lowe wrote three major books: The Function of China in Marx, Lenin and Mao (University of California Press, 1966), The History of Bourgeois Perception (University of Chicago Press,1982) and The Body in Late-Capitalist USA (Duke University Press, 1995). Each published just before its time, each has become what he liked to call “a sleeper,” outliving the work of his contemporaries by many decades.
An inspired teacher he stubbornly persisted in giving an elite university education to the working class commuter students who made up the bulk of his student following. Among those who went on to fruitful intellectual and literary work is Bob Black the prominent Anarchist theoretician and performance artist, Stanya Kahn. And during the turbulent years of the Sixties Donald Lowe began the great odyssey of his existence: recreating himself in the image of the man he sought to be, learning, he claimed, as much from his counter culture students as they from him, binding with us to start his life anew. He grew his hair long and developed a moustache. He lived as passionately as any of us did during those extraordinary times. He turned back to Marx, Lenin and Mao as sources of intellectual inspiration, rather than simply evidence, while also embracing and interpreting the tidal wave of Foucault and Kojeve, Baudrillard and Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari and in a fiery three year long reading group he organized at SFSU in the mid 1980s, Laclau, Mouffe and Derrida.
After retiring Donald moved to Seattle where he worked with his wife, Tani Barlow, and local architect Anne Van Dyne to create a beautiful modernist loft space in the Union Art Co-op where the couple lived for 14 years. During these years he worked steadily to support the journal positions, founded in 1992, along with Barlow’s cohort of theoretically adventurous and politically engaged scholars whose interests and education had led them to specialize in the languages and histories of “Asia” (“what ever that means,” in the catch slogan of those early days). In that capacity he served as a bridge between more orthodox scholars on the Left, who found it difficult to accept the ideas he himself embraced, and seemed so threatening to some of his own peers, so-called called “post-modernism” or “poststructuralism.” In these years, he also traveled extensively. He indulged his passion for Italy and particularly Sicily. He took his partner to Istanbul and to Morocco and his entire, three generation nuclear family to Yunnan. Mostly he reconnected with extended family, friends and colleagues in China and Japan where he spent significant amounts of time and made many new friends. He was always the oldest person in the room. And in a room of his age group he was always the most alive.
Donald Lowe was an immigrant scholar. He had rocklike confidence in his upbringing as loving son to his mother, filial son to his father and loyal father to his children and in this regard considered himself to be a Chinese man. After sojourning with his wife at Shanghai Teachers College in 1980-81 (an experience the two wrote about in Teaching China’s Lost Generation, San Francisco: China Books, 1987), Lowe and Barlow opened their lives to Luo relatives from the PRC, supporting the education and migration of two nephews and two nieces and living in the same compound with ten members of the extended immigrant family, including the patriarch, Gershom, who the couple supported until his death in 1995. Donald Lowe labored for his family and, like his father before him, became a bridge across the ocean. Yet, Donald Lowe’s greatest struggle was to become more and to live beyond the obligations and expectations he came, particularly as he aged, to affectionately embrace as core elements of the complex person he had become.
He was conservative, excessively frugal, private and bookish in everyday life, and an apologetic, self-proclaimed “party pooper.” He compulsively played Solitaire to relax and often cheated. Ba Jin’s novel “Family” affected him deeply and he referred to himself as a morose May Fourth-style intellectual at times. But he was deeply versed in the love lives of Hollywood movie stars of the 1920s through the 1970s, which knowledge seemingly gave him as much pleasure as Sartre’s Search for a Method. Fearful that his grandchildren might lack a sense of humor he consciously undertook a humor campaign, sending annual comical gifts and pictures of himself in improbable outfits or situations.
Though not gregarious by nature, he nonetheless took to heart the ethical and political imperative to live a visible and exemplary life devoted to justice, fairness, cultural flexibility, a commitment never to discriminate, to compassion and civility. He had beautiful manners and a graceful way of focusing his attention on every interlocutor without discrimination. His greatest personal struggle was to learn to love freely and to accept the loving presence of other people. Donald Lowe did not always succeed in his desire, for he was as human as the next person. But more than anyone I have ever met, he struggled hard at this project until the day he died. Donald Lowe was our comrade. As Jesook Song pointed out in a letter she wrote to Donald after hearing of his death, and addressed to him as her comrade, “Comradeship might sound anachronistic in the context where faithful collective actions with common political goals became rare and sabotaged as dogmatic, where intellectuals are relinquished from the representational authority, and where revolutionary ideologies were subsumed under Cold War competitions within state-based ideological power. However, you are one of visionaries who knew and showed that this is the time we need to build true comradeship neither losing focus on revolution nor denying different positions.” This sentiment is echoed many times in the letters and tributes that comrades around the world have sent and shared.
Donald M. Lowe leaves behind his life partner of thirty-five years, Barlow, his daughters Lisa M. Lowe of San Diego, and Lydia M. Lowe of Cambridge, MA, and three granddaughters, Juliet Nebolon, Kaya Mark and Thea Mark, as well as a large, loving family in the United States, the People’s Republic of China and the United Kingdom.