Recently, one of my colleagues discovered a recording of my graduate school advisor, Edward W. Wagner, on a 1985 KBS program. He was interviewed about his work and the development of the Korean program at Harvard. I was so, so delighted to watch the video and see a younger, vibrant professor and friend. My last memory of him was when I visited him at the senior care center when he was deep in the throes of Alzheimer's. Now, to see him as a young sixty-year-old, a man just a little older than the man who taught me Korean history in graduate seminars, brought back a flood of happy memories.

Professor Wagner was always cheerful. In the interview, he would chuckle as he made typical self-effacing comments, as he drew irony out of the question given to him, as he found an interesting twist to the discussion at hand. Wagner was intelligent, first and foremost. And he was diligent. These traits all showed up in the TV interview.

I was again impressed with his Korean language ability. He would speak slowly and clearly and above all, precisely — reminding me of the classes where we would burrow down deeply into the sentences at hand, parsing out the meaning and the nuance of each word in context. We studied historical texts and........

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