In 2025, the Helen T. Lin Legacy Initiative donated their collection of their previous talks, known as “Tiger Talks,” to the Elliott School of International Affairs to be archived on the Sigur Center’s website. The recordings of the talks, along with information about Helen T. Lin and the Helen T. Lin Legacy Initiative, can be found below.
The Price of Collapse: Finding the Little Ice Age in Ming China
Only recently has it become reasonable that historians should include climate in their analyses of the past. In this case, research on grain prices during the Ming dynasty revealed that China was in lock-step with Europe in experiencing what climate historians call...
Global Health: Does it Matter?
Healthcare to the masses knows no border. Kwan Kew Lai fulfilled her childhood dreams of worldwide medical volunteering when she left medical academia as a professor of medicine in 2006 to be a medical humanitarian volunteer. She began her volunteer work right after...
My 40+ Years of Living and Working in China: Reflections on It All
Joan Kaufman’s varied and accomplished career in China is a prism through which we can view the arc of China’s transformation from “reform and opening up” to today. After two degrees in Chinese Studies, a masters in health and medical sciences and a thesis (and book)...
Improving Medical Education in China: China Medical Board’s History and Mission
CMB was started in 1914 as the second major program of the Rockefeller Foundation, and it was endowed in 1928 as an independent foundation incorporated in New York. Its initial commitment was to establish and operate the Peking Union Medical College in Beijing, which...
Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China
In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China’s “Wild...
On the Confucian Communist Comeback in Contemporary China
Few Chinese intellectuals and political reformers turned to Confucianism and Communism for political inspiration at the end of the twentieth century. But the traditions have mounted remarkable comebacks in mainland China. What explains the return of Confucianism and...
China and the World: A Conversation
“This talk will invite robust audience engagement on a topic of interest to all: China’s place in a changing world. The talk will begin with a lively back-and-forth between Steve Marsheid and Terry Cooke on three focal issues pertinent to the topic: (1) China’s...
Strands of Cooperation and Competition in U.S.-China Relations
The talk will take a brisk survey of the theme of Cooperation and Competition in U.S.-China Relations as viewed from three different timeframes: (1) the historical perspective over the most recent 100 years (which will be referenced extremely lightly since it is...
Challenges and Opportunities for Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine in the USA
Acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) can provide effective and cost-efficient treatment for a wide variety of medical conditions, but have not reached their therapeutic potential in America. In China, the public has known the value of acupuncture/TCM for...
When the PRC Came to New York: The Extraordinary Foreign Affairs Group China Sent to New York in 1971 and What Became of Them
In the fall of 1971, Zhou Enlai selected an extraordinary group of Chinese foreign affairs officials to send to New York to open China’s Mission to the United Nations after the PRC regained its UN seat that November. The group that lived and worked in New York in the...
Personal Perspectives on the Evolution of China, Chinese Law/Private Legal Practice
Nick will share some stories/lessons from his professional experiences — as a frontline private practitioner of law and the founder of a cross-strait law firm (Taipei, Shanghai) — spanning China’s last 50 years, giving focus on how the evolutionary arc of...
Glamor and Grace: The Legacy of Miss Chinatown USA
The Chinese American beauty pageant began in San Francisco in 1915, an annual enhancement to Chinatown festivities and becoming a hugely successful national contest in 1958. Author Connie Young Yu will discuss the history and culture of Miss Chinatown USA,...
A Path Twice Traveled: My Journey as a Historian of China
In A Path Twice Traveled: My Journey as a Historian of China, Paul Cohen, preeminent historian, influential teacher for many Wellesley graduates, and a close colleague of Helen Lin in the founding of the Chinese Department, traces the development of his work from its...
China in the 1980s: My Perspectives Today
China’s prosperity today can best be understood by knowledge of what happened in the 1980s, when Beijing threw off the shackles of ideology and allowed capitalists to thrive. As a foreign correspondent for Business Week, Dori Jones Yang reported on those changes...
Ping Pong Diplomacy 50 Years Later: Some Personal Reflections
Marcia Burick will help us observe the 50th Anniversary of Ping Pong Diplomacy by taking us back to April, 1972, when the Chinese Table Tennis Team arrived in the U.S. at the invitation of the United States Table Tennis Association, which had visited then-Peking a...
Covering China
Three foreign correspondents look back at their experiences covering China and Greater China spanning the decades from the beginning of China’s economic reforms to the 2020s, reflecting how Middlebury and Chinese language study prepared them for roles as observers of...
Environmental History and its Lessons for China Today
In the past two decades, environmental historians have uncovered a great deal about how Chinese states and societies have transformed the natural environment. They have shown that the Chinese population from earliest times to the present has drastically changed the...
Exploring the Hidden History of Asian Americans in Houston
Houston, Texas today has the seventh largest Asian American population in the country, yet their experiences and contributions remain invisible in the narrative of Asian Americans and U.S. history. Their rich and colorful history is now captured in the Houston Asian...
The Impact of China’s 2009 Health Reforms and How Well Did It Serve the Pandemic Response
“China’s rapid economic growth over the past 40 years was accompanied by emerging health problems such as non-communicable diseases, an ageing population, and rising expectations about health. Difficulties with health financing, healthcare delivery, and public...
Go East, Young Woman! Two Decades of the National Palace Museum – Wellesley Connection, 1968-1989
Please join us as four Wellesley Alumnae reflect on what motivated them to study Chinese, Mrs. Lin’s role in that endeavor, their decision to travel to Taiwan and work at the National Palace Museum (NPM) after graduating from college, and where their lives took them...
Poetry and the Literacy of Imperial Women in the Ming Dynasty
The first empress of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) had such humble beginnings, her impoverished family gave her away to be raised in the household of a local military leader in present day Anhui Province, towards the end of the Yuan dynasty. In 1352, she married an...
Wong Chin Foo: The First Chinese American
America’s civil rights movements have all had their Martin Luther Kings, their César Chávezes and their Gloria Steinems. But to whom can Chinese Americans point? More than 70 years before Dr. King dreamed of an America that judged people according to the “content of...
Four Decades of Business in and with China: Reflecting Back, Looking Forward
Please join us for another “living history” conversation, this time focused on business in and with China, as two pioneers in the China-US finance and business sectors, Terry and Steve, look back over the past four decades, and contemplate what the present day...
Programming on Law, Rights, and Governance in China: The Ford Foundation Experience in Different Times
The Ford Foundation opened its office in Beijing at the beginning of 1988, after starting to program in China in 1983. From the beginning, legal reform and governance were core parts of Ford’s work in China, at the request of Chinese law schools and government...
How Chinese Must a Chinese be? Identities of Chinese Indonesian Asylum Seekers On Trial in the US
This talk will explore the vexing question, “How do you verify someone is Chinese?” What constitutes being “Chinese” — physical attributes, the language you speak, where you were born, your family’s culture, or other characteristics? Please join anthropologist...
Not so Insular: The Influence of Other Languages and Dialects on Mandarin
Neil Kubler, who has devoted his career to Chinese language teaching and learning, observes as a polyglot that all languages are subject to the influence of other languages with which their speakers or readers come into contact. English, for example, has borrowed...
China – US Relations: A Sino-Optimist’s View – Past Present and Future
Priscilla will share her perspective not only as someone who served as a China Analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, but also as a child of parents who had been missionaries in China and maintained a lifelong love of Chinese culture...
How an Accidental Art Historian Found Her Way to China and Tea
Katharine will reflect on the merit of serendipity and chance, mixed with a large dose of stubbornness and perseverance, in developing her career as an art historian and academic. The role of Helen Lin, Wellesley College (and Middlebury), and the Wellesley motto, Non...
What’s in a name: The origin of place names (地 名) in ancient China and their role in the imperial system
Jim will share findings from his recent research on the origin of place names (diming 地名) in China in the period before Qin unification in 221 BCE. Since all China scholars, especially those who work in the imperial era (Qin Dynasty and thereafter through to the Qing...
Fire, Water, Earth, Wood, Metal — How Hong Kong Lost its Quest for Democracy
Edith used a Chinese metaphysical model to outline the end of One Country, Two Systems and the likely next version of Hong Kong as it integrates more tightly with the mainland, based on her insights as a former journalist and current strategic consultant. Among the...
About Helen T. Lin (March 29, 1928 – April 6, 1986)
Born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, Helen Lin moved to Beijing (Peiping) as a child. During Helen’s adolescence, she and her family fled to Xian to escape increasingly dire circumstances in Beijing due to the Japanese occupation and WWII. Her family moved to Taiwan in 1947. In 1950, she graduated from NTU with a degree in agricultural economics, where she conducted research and taught until 1954. In 1957, after Helen’s husband assumed a position at Tunghai University in Taichung, she secured a position at the United States Foreign Service Institute (USFSI) Language School in Taichung, where she taught Chinese until 1962. Hugh M. Stimson, the Assistant Director at USFSI, encouraged Helen to teach at Yale’s Institute for Far Eastern Languages (IFEL). While at IFEL, she worked on Henry C. Fenn’s “Speak Mandarin,” a leading textbook for teaching Chinese.
Helen became one of a few native speaker teachers viewed by leading American authorities of Chinese language pedagogy at that time as capable of teaching Chinese syntax in a systematic and methodical way. In 1966, Helen Lin assumed a position as Lecturer at Wellesley College to start the College’s Chinese language program, with funding from the Edith Stix Wasserman Foundation. In 1970, through the support of Helen’s colleagues at Wellesley, the Chinese Program became the Chinese Department. Helen was its Chair, with tenure-track status as an Assistant Professor. Interdepartmental and individual majors in Chinese Studies and East Asian Studies were established, with Helen and Professor Paul Cohen of the History Department as co-directors.
In the 1980s, Helen led the effort to hire native speakers from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), believing their life experience more than compensated for the absence of academic credentials from American universities. By 1986, the Chinese Department had eight faculty members and offered twenty courses. From 1980 to 1982, Helen Lin held the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship, a rotating honorary professorship that recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves both as scholars and as teachers. Helen was awarded the Pinanski Teaching Prize honoring excellence in teaching posthumously in 1986. In 2001, The Wellesley Magazine named Helen to the “faculty pantheon” in celebration of the College’s 125th Anniversary. From 1972 to 1976, Helen Lin was also associated with Middlebury College Chinese Summer School. She became Director of the Chinese Summer School and served in that role until 1976.
Helen advised her students to take courses in history, religion, political science, and art history and become East Asian Studies, History, or Chinese Studies majors, instead of focusing solely on language learning. She expected her students to speak Chinese with an appreciation of Chinese culture and what makes China an important country on the world stage.
Early in her career, Helen overcame the predominant bias in US academia that while native speakers of Chinese might have an innate understanding of their language, they were not capable of systematically elucidating the deep underlying syntactical structures of the language. Prior to her untimely death in 1986, Helen completed Essential Grammar for Modern Chinese, a book she considered the culmination of her life’s work. Planned as both a textbook and a teacher training tool, Essential Grammar provides “a quick and comprehensive overview of the sentence structures of modern Chinese grammar for students who have already had one year of Chinese.” Helen Lin served on the Executive Board of the Chinese Language Teachers’ Association (1972-75). From 1979-81, with a grant from the William R. Kenan Foundation, Lin traveled to China to conduct extensive surveys on the evolving language. Hosted by the Central Academy for Nationalities, she shared her pedagogical methods with over 60 Chinese specialists and visited senior faculty of the Chinese literature and language departments at 14 major universities to exchange ideas about teaching Chinese.
Read the full version of Helen T. Lin’s bio here: https://htllegacy.wixsite.com/website/biography.
About the Helen T. Lin Legacy Initiative
The Helen T. Lin Legacy Initiative’s “tiger community” includes former students and colleagues who studied and worked with Professor Lin from 1966 – 1986, a seminal time in China-U.S. relations. They represent a diverse array of sectors and academic fields, from business, journalism, and law to such academic fields as anthropology, art history, language teaching, literature, history, and political science. Some of them devoted their careers to China Studies or China-US relations. Some of them did not.
Given the era in which the members of the community studied Chinese or worked with Prof. Lin, many of them had the opportunity to study or work in China during the transformative period of the China’s “opening” to the West, monumental economic reforms, and metamorphosis into a major geopolitical player and the world’s second largest economy.
Many of members of the community went on to play a leading role in their respective fields forging mutual exchange and deeper relations with China precisely because of the preparation Helen Lin provided — not only in terms of language proficiency, but also cultural understanding and competence.
The Helen T. Lin Legacy Initiative community and steering group represent a wide range of backgrounds and views. The Helen T. Lin Legacy Initiative is not aligned with any government, political party, or partisan organization.
