By ZHAO XU in New York | China Daily Global | Updated: 2021-01-16 04:18 Share CLOSE Ezra Vogel (center) with Michael Szonyi (left) and another China scholar, Rod MacFarquhark, at a symposium held on the 60th anniversary of the Fairbank Center in October 2016. ALL PHOTOS PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY
Colleagues, family members recall intrepid days of Ezra Vogel, renowned author and scholar on East Asia who stayed active up to his death at age 90. Zhao Xu reports from New York.
David Vogel, adjunct lecturer of psychology at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, always remembers the way his father looked longingly toward the Chinese mainland, while the two were on the Hong Kong side of the divide in the mid-1960s.
12 January 2021
Author: Richard Dyck, Tokyo
Ezra Vogel, among the world’s foremost scholars of Asian studies, died on 20 December of complications during an operation. Ezra was a robust 90 years old, actively corresponding with friends and colleagues until the day of his death. This sudden, unanticipated loss of a scholar and close friend was a sad end to a challenging year.
There was nothing in Ezra’s early life to portend his eventual rise to prominence as an Asian scholar. He grew up in Delaware, Ohio a small town 20 miles from the state capital of Columbus. His parents, Joe and Edith Vogel, were immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the Vogels were among the few Jewish families in this Protestant Midwestern town. His father owned a clothing store in town, where Ezra helped out after school. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University, where he majored in sociology as an undergraduate. After two years in the army, he entered graduate school at Harvard, where he studied in the Soci
Dec 21, 2020
Ezra F. Vogel, 90, one of the country’s leading experts on East Asia through a career that spanned six decades, passed away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Sunday due to complications from surgery.
Vogel studied an extraordinary range of substantive topics in multiple countries from the perspectives of various academic disciplines, retooling himself as a scholar many times over in his academic career.
He was originally trained as a sociologist studying the family in the United States. He devoted two years to language study and field research in Japan in 1958-60, emerging as a specialist on Japanese society. He then embarked on Chinese-language study in the 1960s, before it was possible to travel to mainland China, and became an accomplished scholar of Chinese society as well.