Victor H. Mair

"There is a widespread public misperception, particularly among the New Age sector, that the Chinese word for “crisis” is composed of elements that signify “danger” and “opportunity” I first encountered this curious specimen of alleged oriental wisdom about ten years ago at an altitude of 35,000 feet sitting next to an American executive … While it is true that wēiji does indeed mean “crisis” and that the wēi syllable of wēiji does convey the notion of “danger,” the ji syllable of wēiji most definitely does not signify “opportunity” … The ji of wēiji, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)” Thus, a wēiji is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry A wēiji indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary"

"Victor has always cast his nets widely, and he could routinely amaze us with observations far afield from the Chinese text we were reading in class. Today people often attempt to simulate this cosmopolitanism under the rubric of interdisciplinary study, but for Victor, it was quite untrendy: he simply had an insatiable appetite for knowledge and pushing boundaries. Indeed, border-crossing has been our mentors dominant mode of scholarship, a mode that has constantly interrogated where those very borders are both geographically and categorically. Though never sporting fashionable jargon, Victor has always taken on phenomena and issues that engage aspects of multiculturalism, hybridity, alterity, and the subaltern, while remarkably grounding his work in painstaking philological analysis. Victor demonstrates the success of philology, often dismissed as a nineteenth-century holdover, for investigating twenty-first-century concerns."

"The same binome is printed in as many as half-a-dozen or more different combinations of characters that have been used throughout history lo write it out. This indicates powerfully the primacy of sound over written form as the ultimate determinant of Chinese language."

"Mair claims to be interested, for a variety of noble reasons, in “the search for the Indo-Europeans and their homeland”; but it is clear that a “search” of any kind is as far from his intentions as possible, since his answer (South Russia) is already determined (although he does let out that his greater personal preference would have been to locate the core of the homeland “in Southern Germany, northern Austria, and the western part of what is now the Czech Republic”, ie. in Hitler’s home-grounds), and all those who advocate any other solution automatically fall, in his opinion, in the same category as “kooks and crazies who attribute the rise of Indo-Europeans to extra-territorial visitations”!"