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 his practice reflected/responded to developments in Chinese society and economy. Unbeknownst to Nick, his journey began and has been constantly impacted by Teacher Helen Lin. He is still learning lessons from her to this day.

Nick Chen, a Chinese-American lawyer from NYC (ancestral home Suzhou), currently living in Taipei, has been traveling/working in China since 1973. His firm, the Pamir Law Group (www.pamirlaw.com) has been bridging China/Taiwan with the world for decades. Nick began his professional career as a Direct Foreign Investment (“DFI”) specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) working on the General Assembly North South Project on New International Economic Order (NIEO) Direct Foreign Investment. He is a seasoned business/legal strategist and problem solver in Greater China. Today Nick is a strategic advisor to major international private groups/governments, designing and implementing strategic resilience plans to meet climate 3C (change/crisis/collapse) challenges. He advises group companies, investors, banks and governments on energy transition/project development and finance, net zero carbon, zero GHG emissions, green finance Equator Principles/IFC Performance Standards, green ESG investing and best available strategic geo-political-economic deployment options analysis. Nick graduated from Yale University (BA1979) and New York University School of Law (JD 1982). He is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia. Nick also serves as Arbitrator in three Chinese Arbitration tribunals and one Europe: China Arbitration tribunal.

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, its importance to the Chinese community during the era of Chinese exclusion and the Cold War and how its legacy impacted the image and self-identity of Chinese women. The presentation will include photographs from the collection of John C. Young, Connie’s father, a leader of the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce and organizer of the first Miss Chinatown U.S.A. pageant.

Connie Young Yu is a third generation Chinese American who has written extensively on Asian American issues and the history of pioneer Chinese communities. Connie is the author of Chinatown, San Jose, USA(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4988347-chinatown-san-jose-u-s-a) and co-editor of Voices from the Railroad: Stories by Descendants of Chinese Railroad Workers (https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2195/Voices_from_the_Railroad%3A_Stories_by_descendants_of_Chinese_railroad_workers.html). She is a board member emeritus of the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA). Her father, John C. Young, was a leader of San Francisco’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce and an organizer of the first Miss Chinatown USA contest. Recently, Connie was involved the issuance of an apology resolution from the City of San Jose, CA for that city’s destruction of its Chinatown over a century ago

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 inception in the early 1960s to the present, offering fresh perspectives that consistently challenge us to think more deeply about China and the historical craft in general. This memoir is itself a form of “doing history.” Paul Cohen uses the arc of his work to shed light on the disparity between the past as originally experienced and the past as later reconstructed through factual analyses, storytelling, and mythmaking.  In doing so, he shows that addressing this duality of  “what happened then” and “how historians view the past now” is central to the historian’s calling. In this Tiger Talk, Paul will share highlights from this memoir (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42244667-a-path-twice-traveled), reflecting on his journey traversing back and forth between the past and the present, sharing both the meaningful and challenging moments along the way.

Paul A. Cohen (Chinese name: Chinese: 柯文) is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History Emeritus at Wellesley College and an Associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University since 1965. His research interests include 19th-20th century China; historical thought; American historiography on China. Paul did his PhD with John King Fairbank and Benjamin I. Schwartz. He joined the Wellesley College faculty in 1965 and taught Chinese and Japanese history until his retirement in 2000. While at Wellesley he was instrumental not only in hiring Helen Lin to start the Chinese language program in 1966, but also fostering that program’s growth into the Chinese Department. He was the founding and long-time co-Director of both the East Asian Studies and Chinese Studies programs at Wellesley. Since retirement, Paul continues to do research and write in the field of Chinese history, focusing mainly on the period from the nineteenth century to the present. Paul remains actively involved at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese studies.

A prolific and award winning writer, many of Paul Cohen’s books were widely studied by and influential to generations of China scholars, including: History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis (2014); Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China (2009); China Unbound: Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past (2003); Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (1984); History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997); Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ch’ing China (1974).

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 firsthand. In this talk about her new book When the Red Gates Opened: A Memoir of China’s Reawakening, Dori will discuss what she learned about China’s intentions in the 1980s – about its early economic reform experiments, its interactions with foreign businesses, its tech dreams, its political reforms under Deng, its place in the world, and its focus on both stability and prosperity – and how the policies of that pivotal decade inform our understanding of China today. Knowing that many Tiger Talk folks also closely interacted with China in the 1980s, she hopes to spark a lively discussion and hear various perspectives.

Dori Jones Yang began her journalism career early when she took a summer internship with her hometown newspaper. At Princeton, she majored in history but spent most of her waking hours at the college newspaper,The Daily Princetonian. Eager to explore the world, she taught English in Singapore, under the auspices of Princeton-in-Asia, for two years, where she plunged into the study of Chinese, and traveled all over Asia on a shoestring. To deepen her understanding of Asia, she earned a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins in international studies, with a focus on China.

As a foreign correspondent for Business Week, Dori was among the first to report on the changes in China in the 1980s, traveling throughout China and interviewing Chinese entrepreneurs and American business investors. Fluent in Mandarin and married to a Chinese man, she listened to ordinary citizens as well as officials and explained their perspectives to her American readers. In this talk, Dori will discuss what she learned about China’s intentions in the 1980s and how the policies of that pivotal decade inform our understanding of China today.

After reporting on China for Business Week from 1982 to 1990, Dori moved to the Seattle area, where she continued to write for Business Week and US News & World Report. She has written eight books, including her recent memoir, When the Red Gates Opened: A Memoir of China’s Reawakening. For more information see her website, https://dorijonesyang.com/.

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 year earlier when hosted by Premier Zhou En-Lai. Organized by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, this was the first visit to the U.S by any delegation from the Peoples Republic of China since the 1949 break in diplomatic relations. Marcia served on the Committee staff as Press Officer, traveling with the teams, along with members of both the Chinese and U.S. press, as they played competitive ping pong and toured from Detroit/Ann Arbor to Memphis, Colonial Williamsburg, Washington, D.C., New York and Los Angeles. Billed as a people-to-people visit, the theme of “Friendship First” prevailed, even as the Vietnam War loomed in the background.

Press Consultant to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations

Marcia Burick graduated from Wellesley College in 1962, with a major in Political Science and a focus on the Asian courses in several departments that were available at the time. There were sadly no Chinese language courses offered until Professor Lin founded the program several years later.(Marcia used the money from two Mai Ling Soong prizes to attend a NATO Youth Conference in the south of France.) She joined the staff of the Press and Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Mission to the U.N., under the leadership of Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson, in September, 1962, just a few weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis. She then spent much of the next decade having two wonderful children and working as a press director and speech writer for such organizations as Planned Parenthood of New York City, the Institute for International Education, The Fund for Peace and, occasionally, for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and accompanied her family to Taiwan in the summer of 1970.

She used to say that she drifted to the job of Press Officer for the visit of the Chinese Table Tennis Team to the United States in Spring, 1972 after the National Committee, a non-governmental organization, asked the U.S. Table Team Association, then in China in Spring, 1971 at the invitation of Premier Zhou En-Lai, to invite the Chinese team to make a return visit to the U.S. in 1972, the beginning of U.S.-China Relations. She traveled with the teams throughout the U.S. in April, 1972.

Having moved to Northampton, Mass., she earned an M.A. in Urban Studies at Smith College, and wrote her thesis on Hong Kong Resettlement Housing, having received the Mary Elvira Stevens Fellowship for Wellesley alums for travel and research abroad. It was during that time, in winter, 1973, while living in Hong Kong, that she and her young family visited China, under the auspices of the All-China Sports Federation. (They were told that the seven year old and two year old boys were the first young American children to be there in many decades.) Marcia returned to Northampton and became active in politics and community services. In 1980 she became chief aide to the Mayor of Northampton for a number of interesting years in local government and, during breaks, was able to organize and conduct several tours to China, including one for Wellesley alums which, in 1983, was happily for us led by Professor Helen Lin.

She worked for many years, often under USIS or USAID auspices, consulting on social services or teaching government best practices in such places as the Baltics, Poland, Nigeria, Gaza, South Africa, and ran a program over several years for the Institute for Training and Development for government officials in Indonesia. She is pleased to be able to speak to Tiger Talk participants about those three weeks in 1972 at the beginning of Ping Pong Diplomacy: the rest is history.

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 one of the greatest transformations the world has seen. Rick Gladstone landed in China in 1983, with the Beijing Bureau of the Associated Press, returning to New York with the AP in 1985, and moving to the international desk of the New York Times in 1997, where he has been since. Jeremy Mark covered Japan, Taiwan and Singapore for the Asian Wall Street Journal in the 1980s and 1990s, and considers Taiwan “his second home.” Andrew Quinn spent 20 years with Reuters, like Jeremy covering Taiwan, before moving to China for four years covering the political crackdown following the Tiananmen protests, the beginnings of China’s economic boom and the Sino-British negotiations that determined the future of Hong Kong. All three have wide experience with other parts of the world. Andrew and Jeremy have pursued careers outside journalism – Jeremy with the International Monetary Fund and Atlantic Council, and Andrew with the Aspen Institute, where he leads the New Voices Fellowship. Journalism is sometimes described as a front-row seat on history. Our panelists have been witnesses to China’s trajectory under the “socialist market economy.” Deng Xiaoping’s “To Get Rich is Glorious” that propelled unprecedented economic growth is replaced by today’s new slogan of “Common Prosperity” as China enters an era of slower growth and tighter economic and social controls under President Xi Jinping. Rick, Jeremy and Andrew will share their perceptions of the political and economic drivers behind China’s extraordinary changes over the last 40 years, and the pressures faced by journalists in delivering this globally important story.

Senior Staff Editor at The New York Times

Rick Gladstone is a Senior Staff Editor at The New York Times, where he has been an editor and reporter on the International Desk for nearly two decades, covering breaking news on a range of topics that include China and its neighbors. He also is an accredited correspondent for the Times at the United Nations.

Rick began working for the Times as an editor in the business section in 1997, just as the seeds of a global financial crisis took root in Asia. He moved to the International Desk when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Before joining the Times, he was a reporter and editor at The Associated Press for 17 years, moving to the AP Foreign Desk in 1981 and to the AP’s Beijing bureau in 1983. He returned to New York in 1985 to join the AP’s Business Desk.

His time in China coincided with Deng Xiaoping’s effort to open the country, a period when Western journalists could more easily test the boundaries of China’s authoritarian structure. Based in Beijing, he was able to travel many times, including trips to Tibet and Qinghai. He and his wife, Peggy Chan, a fellow Middlebury Chinese School alum whose family is originally from Taishan in Guangdong Province, also traveled there. His articles ranged from the opening of Chairman Mao’s mausoleum, to the China-UK negotiations over the 1997 Hong Kong handover, to the first-ever Western rock concert in China (Wham! in 1985). After the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdowns, he collaborated with AP correspondents John Roderick and Jim Abramson the book: “China: From the Long March to Tiananmen Square (Henry Holt & Co.)

A native of Ann Arbor, Mich., Rick first studied Chinese while attending the University of Michigan. He then attended the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School in Journalism. But it was Middlebury Chinese School that shaped not only his professional but personal life. He attended for two summers (1976 and 1978), met his wife there and considers Helen Lin his favorite instructor.

Former Reuters foreign correspondent and the founding director of the New Voices initiative at the Aspen Institute

Andrew Quinn is a former Reuters foreign correspondent and the founding director of the New Voices initiative at the Aspen Institute, a groundbreaking program aimed at amplifying expert voices from Africa, Asia and Latin America in the global development discussion.

Andrew spent more than 20 years with Reuters, starting as a junior reporter in Taiwan just after the end of martial law and then moving to Beijing, where he served for four years covering the political crackdown that followed the Tiananmen Square protests, fraught Sino-UK negotiations over Hong Kong’s future and the beginnings of China’s long economic boom.

Other postings included stints in Pakistan and Vietnam, coverage of both Gulf wars, and longer assignments in Washington and California. He served as Southern Africa bureau chief during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and spent more than three years traveling the world with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as Reuters’ State Department correspondent.

A “faculty brat” at Wellesley College, Andrew began his Chinese studies young thanks to Mrs. Lin and patient student teachers at Wellesley’s Chinese Department. He went on to major in East Asian Studies at Columbia University, and obtained a degree in journalism from the University of California-Berkeley. He was a 2008 Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard University.

At Aspen, Andrew is leading the New Voices Fellowship which identifies, trains and supports a new cadre of experts from developing countries who seek to play a larger role in championing solutions and setting priorities for global development work.

Senior Fellow at the GeoEconomics Center of the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C

As a Senior Fellow at the GeoEconomics center, Jeremy writes on a range of economic and diplomatic topics, including U.S.-China trade, technology supply chains, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on developing countries, and other issues that keep him up at night. He worked for the International Monetary Fund as a communications specialist for more than two decades, but has always been a journalist at heart. During the 1980s and 1990s he was a reporter and editor for The Asian Wall Street Journal, based in New York, Tokyo, Taipei, and Singapore, where he finished his journalism career running the newsroom at CNBC Asia during the Asian financial crisis. He received an Overseas Press Club Award in 1996 for coverage of the collapse of Barings Bank in Singapore. He and his family moved to Washington in 1998, and he made the awkward transition to international bureaucrat. He retired from the IMF in 2019 and began writing for the Atlantic Council just as the world went into pandemic lockdown.

Jeremy spent the summer of 1973 studying first-year Chinese at Middlebury, where his introduction to the language was a dazzling performance by Helen Lin, who—in the space of an hour—assigned every first-year student a Chinese name rich in meaning and subtlety. It is a story he has repeated hundreds of times over the years. He studied in Taiwan in 1974, but nearly 20 years passed before he was able to use his Chinese professionally as a reporter in Taipei—and then only after a detour into Japanese, which he is unable to speak with any comfort. He has never lived in China and considers Taiwan to be his second home.

He holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Vassar College, an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London and another in journalism from Columbia University.

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 interactions of land, water, plants, animals, and humans, in the interests of military security, state consolidation, economic growth, and aesthetic ideals. What are the implications of this long history for China’s current environmental policies? Professor Perdue will offer a few thoughts on this question, based on the research conducted by him and others.

Peter Perdue: Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University

Peter C. Perdue has taught courses on East Asian history and civilization, Chinese social and economic history, the Silk Road, and historical methodology. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850 A.D. (Harvard University Press,1987), examined long-term agricultural change in one Chinese province. His book China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005), discusses environmental change, ethnicity, long-term economic change and military conquest in an integrated account of the Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian contention over Siberia and Central Eurasia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a coeditor of two books on empires: Imperial Formations, (SAR Press, 2007) and Shared Histories of Modernity, (Routledge, 2008), and a co-author of the forthcoming Global Connections, and Asia Inside Out, three volumes on inter-Asian connections. His current research focuses on Chinese frontiers, Chinese environmental history, and the history of tea.

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 American Archive (HAAA) at Rice University. Eleven years into its existence, the Archive has garnered awards and collected more than four hundred stories. Anne Shen Chao will discuss the Archive’s genesis and share some of the remarkable stories in its collection.

Anne Chao: Adjunct Lecturer in the Humanities and Manager of the Houston Asian American Archive (HAAA), at Rice University, Houston, Texas

Anne S. Chao is a modern Chinese historian and a community volunteer. She graduated from Wellesley College and obtained her PhD in modern Chinese history at Rice University. Her current titles are Adjunct Lecturer in the Humanities and Manager of the Houston Asian American Archive (HAAA), at Rice University, Houston, Texas. She founded HAAA eleven years ago, and the archive has collected over three hundred oral interviews of Asian Americans in the greater Houston region. She is currently researching for her book on the life and social networks of the founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu.

A transplant to Houston for almost forty years, Anne sits on the board of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Houston Ballet, the Houston Endowment, Wellesley College, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Arts and Science, the Dunhuang Foundation, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific Center and the National Archives Foundation.

“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 health made health service reform urgent.

In 2009, China embarked upon comprehensive reform of the health system after decades of community complaints about difficulties in access to and cost of health care. Ten years later the effectiveness of the new health system was tested by the COVID-19 pandemic. This talk will consider the achievements and shortfalls of the health reform and consider how well the health system was prepared for COVID-19, if not the next health challenge.

Vivian Lin will provide a history of health policy and reform in China, highlighting SARS and what led to the 2009 reforms. Involved with the 10-year review of the reforms conducted at the request of the Chinese government, Vivian will share data from that review to discuss the impact of the reforms over the 2009-19 decade. The final portion of her presentation will look back and also look forward, reflecting on COVID and implications for the future.”

Vivian K. Lin: Executive Associate Dean, Professor of Practice (Public Health), LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong

Executive Associate Dean, the LKS Faculty of Medicine of Hong Kong University as of March 2019. She is concurrently Professor of Public Health Practice. She was Chair of Public Health from 2000-2013 at La Trobe University in Melbourne before serving the WHO as Director of Health Systems in the Western Pacific Regional Office for 2013-2018, where she led on the global priorities of universal health coverage and sustainable development goals, cross-cutting priority issues of antimicrobial resistance, ageing, and gender-based violence, and on health system development issues including, among others, traditional medicines.

Vivian has also worked at senior executive level in health policy in several Australian jurisdictions, including as Executive Officer of the National Public Health Partnership. She has also consulted widely for the World Bank, UK Department for International Development, Australian Agency for International Development, World Health Organization, and various Australian governments at state and federal levels. In addition, Vivian has served on multiple academic, government and community boards, including, President for Scientific Affairs for the International Union for Health Promotion and Education in 2007-2013, chair of Australian National Network of Academic Public Health Institutions for 2006-2008, member of the public health committee of the Australian Medical Association for 2003-2006, policy convenor for the Public Health Association of Australia in 1995-2001, and board member of the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health for 2003-2009. As ministerial appointee, she was the inaugural president of the Chinese Medicine Registration Board of Victoria serving between 2000-2009, member of the Australia-China Council 2006-2009, and member of the Diary Food Safety Board of Victoria for 2000-2003.

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 afterwards.

Panelist MJ Clark was the first Wellesley graduate to work at the NPM, a position arranged personally with the museum’s director. How the position evolved into the Wellesley Yenching Fellowship remains somewhat a mystery.

Founded in 1925, the NPM is one of the largest museums of its kind, with almost 700,000 artifacts and pieces of art that cover an 8000 year span – a collection with holdings from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing imperial courts. Recognized today as one of the world’s major museums, the NPM has reflected the vicissitudes of China in the 20th century.

In the 1930’s, as Japanese troops advanced across North China, the Chinese made preparations to relocate the museum’s most precious pieces, so they would not be destroyed or seized by the Japanese. In 1933, the National Beijing Palace Museum objects, along with objects from the Summer Palace and the Imperial Hanlin Academy, were placed in thousands of crates and relocated to Shanghai. In 1936, the collection was moved to Nanjing. As the war with the Japanese grew more fierce, the collection was moved to a more remote area, and eventually returned to Nanjing in 1947.
When the conflict between the Chinese Communists and Nationalists intensified in 1948, the National Beijing Palace Museum and five other institutions agreed to transport what were considered the most valued objects to Taiwan. Only 22% of the original collection in Nanjing made it to Taiwan.

The NPM was used in the 1960’s and 1970’s by the Kuomintang to bolster its claim that the Republic of China on Taiwan was the true government of China, pointing to its possession and preservation of traditional Chinese culture. This message was used especially during times of upheaval on the Chinese mainland, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), on the other hand, viewed the collection as stolen and asserted its legitimate claim to the collection. Since the 2000’s, as relations between Taiwan and the PRC have warmed, the Palace Museum in Beijing and the NPM in Taiwan have lent relics to each other and tried to promote a more inclusive view of China’s cultural heritage.

Katherine Burnett: Founding Director, Global Tea Initiative for the Study of Tea Culture and Science; Professor, Chinese Art History, Department of Art and Art History, University of California, Davis

Katharine “discovered” China in a Chinese Art History class her junior year at Wellesley. A classmate encouraged her to study Chinese, which she did with Helen Lin her senior year in college. With Mrs. Lin’s encouragement, she attended the Middlebury Chinese Summer Language Program and then lived in Taiwan for three years, working as the Wellesley College Intern at the NPM for two years, and at the Taipei Art Guild for two years, where she served as Director for the last year. When she returned to the US, she earned her doctorate in Art History at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She returned to Taipei for a Fulbright year of dissertation research as a doctoral student, again at the NPM.

Katharine Burnett is currently Professor and Chair, Department of Art History; and Founder and Director of the Global Tea Initiative for the Study of Tea Culture and Science (GTI) at the University of California, Davis. In research and teaching, she explores definitions of culture and how culture is formed. Her publications include Shaping Chinese Art History: Pang Yuanji and His Painting Collection (2020), one of Book Authority’s 16 Best New Art History Books To Read In 2021,https://bookauthority.org/books/new-art-history-books); and Dimensions of Originality: Essays on Seventeenth-Century Chinese Art Theory and Criticism (2013; Chinese version forthcoming 2023). Her new projects include research into Art History without the Art: The Curious Case of Sino-Vietnamese Teapots before 1700. Indeed, it was a fascination with teapots and the philosophy and politics involved in shaping them that led her to found GTI. Dr. Burnett’s efforts for GTI have been recognized locally by UC Davis (Chancellor’s Award for International Engagement, Global Affairs, 2021); nationally by the US/Canada tea industry (Best Tea Health Advocate, World Tea Expo, 2018), and internationally (O-Cha Pioneer Award, World Green Tea Association, Shizuoka Prefectural Government, Japan, 2021).

Kristen Day: International Business Ethics Consultant and former Co-Chair for the Columbia University Seminar on China International Business

Kristen is a 1987 Wellesley graduate, where she majored in Chinese and was a student of Mrs. Lin. She was a Wellesley Yenching fellow at the National Palace Museum1987-88. Following her return to the U.S. in 1988, Kristen worked at the headquarters of the U.S. China People’s Friendship Association in Washington DC. In that role, she helped organize study tours to China – until the tragic events of June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square resulted in her sudden unemployment. She quickly found a job as a contractor at the U.S. Small Business Administration. This motivated her to get her MBA at Columbia University before once again heading back to Asia. While living in Hong Kong from 1993-1997, she worked as a sales manager for a U.S. multinational company representing various German meat processing equipment manufacturers in China. Subsequently, she joined San Miguel Brewing of the Philippines, providing project management support to global brewery projects. After returning to the U.S. in 1997, Kristen renewed her ties with Columbia and served for several years as Co-Chair for the University Seminar on China International Business. This culminated in her 2005 publication China’s Environment and the Challenge of Sustainable Development. Kristen has worked as a consultant in the field of international business ethics from 1997 to the present, helping organizations build and strengthen their ethics and compliance programs. Most recently, this has included stints in the ethics offices of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C.

Rachel Wang: Former Asia Director of the Elisabeth Luce Moore ’24 Wellesley-Yenching Internship Program and former Managing Director-Asia, Acoustiguide Corporation

Rachel was 10 years old when her family emigrated from Taiwan to Massachusetts. At Wellesley, she enrolled in Chinese literature classes in an effort to reconnect with her native language and heritage. After braving Classical Chinese with Mrs. Lin (Fall semester, 1985), Rachel spent Junior Year studying Chinese modern literature and linguistics at Beijing Normal University, and traveling around China. Upon graduation, Rachel served as the Wellesley-Yenching Fellow at Taipei’s National Palace Museum. Afterwards, she worked at Ogilvy & Mather Taiwan, before relocating to Hong Kong, where she became Manager at Hanart T Z Gallery. In 1993, Rachel joined the NYC-based Acoustiguide Corporation, focusing on regional business development, and establishing audio-guide services at Taichung’s National Museum of Natural Science, Taipei’s National Palace Museum, and Shanghai Museum. As Acoustiguide’s Managing Director-Asia, she oversaw operations and personnel in Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. In 1998, Rachel took an active role in conceptualizing and launching the pilot Elisabeth Luce Moore ’24 Wellesley-Yenching International Internship Program, then served as the Program’s Asia Director until her family relocated from Hong Kong to Sydney. In subsequent years, Rachel continued to promote alum networking, experiential education, and intercultural communications, acting as a longtime volunteer in the international school community in Tokyo, where her family lived for nearly a decade. In 2020, Rachel completed an MFA in Writing for Children. Currently, she is developing manuscripts, editing literary translations, and writing for Kirkus Reviews. Also, she has resumed studying Classical Chinese.

Mary Jane Clark

Mary Jane Clark: Art appraiser and principal for Art Care & Appraisals LLC, and former museum management professional

Mary Jane is currently an art appraiser and principal for Art Care & Appraisals LLC, in Norwich, Vermont. She studied Chinese with Mrs. Lin for two years, shortly after the time Mrs. Lin arrived at Wellesley. Upon graduating from Wellesley in 1971 with an independent major in Asian Studies, she studied Classical Chinese at Middlebury during the summer of 1971. From 1971-74, she worked at the National Palace Museum in Taipei as a translator and English language editor in the Department of Painting & Calligraphy and the Director’s Office. Mary Jane subsequently studied at Yale from 1974-78, with her Master’s thesis on the Yuan artist Zhao Mengfu, and her doctoral dissertation on the Ming calligrapher Zhu Yunming. Since then, she has led group tours to China and couriered artwork around the world. She has also taught courses on Chinese art and archaeology at Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of New Mexico; Chinese language at The Mountain School in Vermont; and Chinese cooking wherever she has had a spacious kitchen. Her museum career in collections management and traveling exhibitions over the past fifty years has included positions at the Ashmolean Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Dartmouth College Museum & Galleries, and the Guggenheim Museum. While at Yale, she co-authored Traces of the Brush: Studies in Chinese Calligraphy.