Chinese Scholars

Re Theodore Zhou ’83’s “My Father: A Princetonian in China” (posted June 26 at PAW Online): a fascinating (and unfortunately typical) story of what happened to so many Chinese, especially those who’d made the mistake of being educated in the West prior to ’49.

Many years ago a letter to me (I was provost at Middlebury at the time, and a historian of China) from Beijing introduced the writer as a former student at the Middlebury German School in 1947, who was now looking at the possibility of finding an opening for her son. His mother and father had gone back to China after 1949 determined to help the motherland, and needless to say were not given an easy time, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. We admitted the young man, and as he spoke pure Beijing Mandarin, put him to work as a drill instructor in our first-year Chinese program. He now lives in California, and has had a couple of careers both in this country and China.