In response to:

Letter from a Chinese College from the September 25, 1980 issue

To the Editors:

The anonymous “Letter from a Chinese College” [NYR, September 25] has caused some amusement here. You really didn’t have to cross the Pacific for such material; it abounds in this country. For example, I enrolled in the Escuela Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City a few years ago and my naïve hopes of learning something about anthropology sank out of sight in the same boring hours of “thought education” described in “Letter.” Request a syllabus from them and learn that the basic text on linguistics is…sit tight…J. Stalin’s. When I decided to leave and seek instruction farther north, I was reproached for lapsing into heresy. “Compañero,” a faculty member said, “You [] will be studying imperialist anthropology!” And my experience can be duplicated on almost any level of what is called education here.

H.L. Rodríguez

Mexicali, BC, Mexico

This Issue

January 22, 1981