Half of a Lifelong Friendship

By Susan Blumberg-Kason //

The world knew him as C.T. Hsia, the man who brought Chinese literature–and Eileen Chang–to the West. But to my dad, Avrom Blumberg, he was his old friend, Jonathan.

In 1949, at the age of 21, my dad started graduate school at Yale. He quickly befriended another graduate student named Jonathan Hsia, although they were in different departments–my dad in the chemistry department and Jonathan in the English department. Jonathan wasn’t just any student though: he was the best English student Yale had ever seen.

Jonathan had moved from China in 1947, leaving his teaching job at Peking University to begin a Ph.D program in New Haven. He had left a country in turmoil. World War II had ended a couple of years earlier, but the Chinese civil war had started back up and there was no sign of things settling down anytime soon.