How a Jewish Catholic Canadian became a scholar of Confucianism and how teaching elite students at Tsinghua University made him a fan of the Chinese meritocratic ideal
- After Oxford, Princeton and Stanford, and being a university dean in China, Daniel Bell is breathing easy in Hong Kong, where his Mandarin no longer sticks out
In the 1960s in Quebec, Canada, the anglophone and francophone worlds were completely separate, but there were exceptions, including my family.
My father was an anglophone Jew and my mother was a francophone Catholic and they married against the wishes of their parents a couple of years before I was born, in 1964. My sister is 11 months younger.
When I was about two, my parents decided the best way to maintain harmony in the family was not to have any religion at all, so I was brought up in a not really religious environment except when I went to my grandparents’ home.
With my Jewish grandparents we celebrated Passover and with my Catholic grandparents we went to church. I did not experience it as a conflict and maintained an interest in both sides.
Playing the fool
My mother worked as a secretary and my father (Don Bell) was a journalist and writer. His best-known work, Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1973.