Harvey Loh

Growing up in multicultural and multilingual Malaysia for the first formative seventeen years of my life has bestowed upon me with fluency in five languages—Hokkien (my mother tongue), Malay (the national language), English (Malaysia was part of the British Empire), Mandarin (taught at school), and Cantonese (the language of popular Chinese period dramas). I took Japanese, French, and German courses at Sierra College and tutored those languages as a PASS peer tutor (student tutor) in the Sierra College Tutoring Center. While double majoring in both Japanese and German at UC Davis as an undergraduate student from 2021 to 2024, I established and ran two language learning clubs at UC Davis, namely The Learned Society for Classical Japanese Research at UC Davis and The German Fantasy Association at UC Davis. While growing up in Malaysia, I was engrossed with Chinese character etymology, Classical Chinese, and Chinese calligraphy and painting. The fact that my mother tongue of Hokkien shares many cognate historical Middle Chinese pronunciations of Chinese characters from the Jin 晉 (266–420) and Tang 唐 (618–907) dynasties with Japanese has allowed me to excel in the Japanese courses at UC Davis. My Chinese proficiency has also blessed me with the linguistic skills needed to excel in the German courses at UC Davis because German is morphologically and syntactically similar to both contemporary Chinese and Classical Chinese. I am in love with German and feel that German is the most “Chinese” European language, and Chinese the most “German” East Asian language. In addition, my fluency in Malay allows me to enjoy and appreciate both Latin and Greek as many of the Sanskrit loanwords in Malay are cognates of Latin and Greek words because Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit are conservative descendants of Proto-Indo-European.

Captivated by both Germanic and Greco-Roman mythology, folktales, and legends, I am currently working towards completing a Designated Emphasis in Classics and Classical Receptions while primarily completing my German M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at UC Davis. I anticipate writing a dissertation paper explaining how German fantasy literature incorporates elements from both Nordic and Mediterranean folklore, and researching how Japanese video games, anime, and manga creatively incorporate a synthesis of Nordic and Mediterranean mythology, folktales, and legends.