Harold Miles Tanner

Harold Tanner is a native of Princeton, New Jersey. As he grew up, he realised that he had absolutely no desire to have a normal life, job, or career. He received a valuable, but checkered (particularly in terms of grades) education at Friends World College on Long Island and at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire and Arundel, U.K. During and after a sometimes bumpy academic career, he managed to hitchhike in Scotland and Europe, study in Nepal with the Experiment in International Learning, work on farms, factories, and an orchard, visit India and Thailand, begin learning Chinese, and travel for six months (in 1984) in China. As reality began to close in, he packed himself onto the Trans-Siberian express from Beijing to Moscow, went on to London, and began his studies of Chinese politics, law, and culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Nine years later, he had inexplicably spent several years in China, earned an M.A. from SOAS and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and found a job teaching Chinese history at the University of North Texas. He is still there, and has compromised with normality enought to have a family, a dog, a house, and a stable income. But he still likes to travel. He is the author of two books and is working on two more.