Search the Collection

• Collection > Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project (remove)
• Featured > false (remove)

Limit your search

Collection

• Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project (86)

Item Type

• Oral History (59)
• Text (27)

Result Type

• Item (86)

Featured

• false (86)

Text

• (3)
• 1 2 3 (2)
• (1)
• ->Isabela Background: -Refugee parents, grew up in a diverse community with little resources in Brooklyn and Chinatown -Got into Prep4Prep, a rigorous education program that placed minority students into elite private schools; she wanted to take what opportunity she was given as far as possible -Felt pressure to speak for underrepresented communities (be her community’s Spiderman) Early Career: -Executive Director for the Asian Pacific American Caucus, Prez/CEO APAICS… realized politics wasn’t what she wanted to do, it was just a linear career path from where she started -Thought of being a music manager because loved live music…realized that was similar to politics… wanted to coach to help people find their voice and courage [First Audio Clip: Went to a liberal university where learning about how to be an activist meant pushing against old structures; as a coach she learned that being creative can be more impactful; need perspective and a balance of pushing and creating] Currently: -Works with a diverse group of people since humanity and struggle are universal. However, still really passionate about women and Asian American communities -Looking forward to working with intergenerational women’s empowerment [Second Audio Clip: When she was younger/in her twenties, she saw the Asian American community as a struggle based community that needed a voice. She now see’s it as a community that still struggles but is strong and works together to get by; a community that she can support rather than be a hero to.] Relations to course: -Gloria helps many people of color, including Asian American women, become better leaders in their personal and work lives -She realized that you can’t just push to change old structures. This is similar to the Art of Social Change article we read where, for change to occur, you have to consider social and cultural context -Gloria works with people who have been influenced by different cultural values (ex: parents valuing boys over girls) -Exemplifies trend of future generations getting more involved in politics and activism than first generation -New information we learned: -Many second generation may feel like they need to take advantage of opportunity available to them (which can change into feelings of obligation) or they may feel like they are not deserving of the opportunity available to them -Goals of immigrants and second generation are very different. First generation mainly focuses on getting by or bringing family over; second generation focuses more on improving life and leaving a legacy ->Bryanna Planning Pre-interview research (website, Linkedin, part of her book on Amazon) Used background information to prepare key questions The questions you ask can influence the type of information you are able to gather, but Gloria was talkative, informative, & answered before we could ask Open ended (“Can you explain the type of environment you grew up in?”) Close ended (“Who would you say had the biggest influence on your drive?”) Probing questions *Clip #1* Talking about things that may have discouraged her during her journey; she said the pressure she always felt to take full advantage of her opportunities and to milk every privilege to the fullest ended up becoming discouraging for her (Harvard) In 20s: she did everything she felt she was supposed to do (cared about policy implications for AA communities, so she went to capitol hill - and became executive director of the CAUCUS. Then became President-CEO of the sister nonprofit of that CAUCUS [APAICS]) Today: She’s not trying to milk priviledge or climb anymore *clip #1* Bc I probed her, we got a better understanding and good information on her career choice Prepare logistics for the interview Team interviewing approach: Original plan: divided questions equally by section; Primary note taker = Whoever wasn’t questioning, would take notes I ended up conducting most of interview and Isabela took notes Video conference → Telephone (~1 hour long) Conducting Type of interview: Unstructured (seeking her opinion/perspective, questions flexible and dependent on the interview & responses) Friendly (professional) conversation Active listening - *clip #2* - using her passion to find her career; i repeat to understand Responding to challenging situations (realized info about children private so didn’t ask anymore) Cues: My non-verbal: Voice (loud, clear, confident)(avoid fillers, “uh” “so”); encouraging feedback; repeat when understand; rephrasing when don’t Documenting Isabela took most notes *Clip #3* - shows Gloria’s personality. Began and ended interview speaking about Asian-American relations (1)
• Amy Hall is a Chinese-American woman who was raised in Connecticut and a suburb of Philadelphia. In our 45- minute interview she always returned to the idea that since a young age she had always been interested in humanitarian work, serving others any way she could. Ms. Hall mentioned in the interview that her experience growing up as a Chinese-American girl in predominantly white spaces made her want to help others who also felt left out of society. She has been able to achieve that goal through working with a high-end fashion company called Eileen Fisher for the past 25 years as both the Director of Social Consciousness and, as of earlier this month, Vice President. As Director of Social Consciousness, Ms. Hall had the combined multilingual and cross-cultural experience to effectively negotiate with the many people in Eileen Fisher’s supply chain. Eileen Fisher also works very hard to switch over to totally environmentally friendly and sustainable practices, from labor reform among their suppliers and workers to changing the fibers they use and even recycling old Eileen Fisher products into new products for limited edition sale. We have an example of reconstructed recycled clothes here on the slide. This is just one of the many styles offered in the new collection. Projects like this has a huge impact on the environment. I don’t know if you guys know this but the fashion industry has a huge waste issue. The financial success of the fashion industry literally hinges on the fast rotation of in versus out styles. Besides this, clothes are often made with plastic or synthetic materials and these fabrics go through a washing machine particles from the clothes called microplastics seep into the water supply, and since they’re microscopic they can’t be filtered out by treatment systems. (clip1). One of my favorite parts of the interview was when Ms. Hall described how she learned from a large scale mistake. For some background, Eileen Fisher wanted to find a way to give the workers making its clothes healthcare but after getting one supplier on board, they learned the hard way about a flaw in the plan. (clip2). I think this was a really important part of the interview because it reflected the fact that American practices and moral values are not applicable everywhere else in the world. It reminded me a lot of our numerous in class discussions about American moral imperialism and how just throwing solutions tailored for US social problems won’t magically fix social problems abroad. Poverty and the working class are not the same everywhere and I think this excerpt perfectly demonstrates that if U.S citizens actually want to create change abroad you actually have to be on the ground, working with locals to create lasting solutions they actually support and want for themselves and their families. 3:50 - on diversity 5:00 - interest and language, Spanish→ Chinese 7:00 - work in human rights, how she got interested. 10:40 - work in fundraising isn’t exactly what she hoped it would be 13:30 - community relations manager four years into working fr EF, commitment to ppl in supply chain 22:07 - 23:20 - EF and sustainable practices, fibers 23:30 - Ms. Hall speaking about failure and learning from mistakes 23:50 - 26:04 - The Mistake (clip2) We centered our first bulk of questions around her early life, growing up in Connecticut and Philadelphia, and then her college career. From there we delved into more detailed questions about her classes, her major, studying abroad, and if she had any role models in her life. After that, we tried to direct the interview into her time working for Eileen Fisher, INC. Before Eileen Fisher, she works for three non-profits, and found that her skillset rested in fundraising. Yet, she found this wasn’t a great fit for her personality. Fundraising wasn’t satisfying and it didn’t bring her the impact she had, it made her feel too far removed. She wished to work hands on within the communities she helps. It was difficult to manifest what she wanted to happen, happen. She walked away from fundraising at the age of 32. She ended up getting an administrative position, as the assistant to a CEO of a small, fashion company. The CEO ended up leaving the company a few months later. — Four years later, she was given the title community relations manager. This was Eileen Fisher. She has now been working for the company for 25 years. We backtracked a bit after this bulk of conversation, asking about her time studying abroad in China in 1979. We asked if she had ever been back to China after that. She goes quite frequently, once every year or two now to visit suppliers for Eileen Fisher. Questions about Eileen Fisher, sustainability and human rights that would eventually conclude the interview. Aracely and I truly tried to capture her life and everything she has built and grown into within the short frame of our interview, and Amy was more than willing to speak on her life, even without prodding. (1)
• Carolyn Brehm is currently the Vice President for global government relations at Procter & Gamble. She has previously worked as a Vice President of Orbis International and as a director of Asia Trade Policy and Strategies at General Motors for 14 years. She attended Georgetown University where she studied East Asian Studies/Chinese. She landed her first job at the US China Business Council where she was then offered a deal by GM to set up GM’s first office in China since 1949, when all of the foreign companies exited during the Chinese Revolution. (1)
• Ms. Chou’s mission was to help people through uncovering human rights violations by bringing them into the spotlight. She is fulfilling this through her work in founding and having been the Deputy Director of Programming at Radio Free Asia, a network that reports on news that the mainstream news media does not cover. Although she has recently retired, she is now starting to work with the Human Rights Network, which is also centered around acknowledging human rights violations in order for them to be fixed. Her mission relates to women's roles in US-Asian relations because of her part as a woman in acknowledging human rights violations. Many times, women suffer from these violations, which Ms. Chou works to bring to the public’s attention. For example, one man Ms. Chou worked with was protesting against forced abortions to meet the quota for China's one family one child policy, something that infringes upon a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. From Ms. Chou, we learned that her Confucian society often discouraged her from becoming a career woman, which was an idea that was thoroughly discussed in class. Confucian society enforced harsh gender roles that women are supposed to remain unseen and in the home. According to Confucian society, women’s primary roles are to fulfill domestic responsibilities such as cleaning, cooking, and childrearing. In addition, women are expected to remain mostly subservient, all while the husband works for the family as the primary bread-winner. Ms. Chou covered lots of new information we had not previously covered in class. Her advice focused mostly on not letting disadvantages get in the way of pursuing one’s dreams. She firmly stated during the interview that hard work got her where she is, and being a female minority did not play a role in hindering or helping her progress. During out interview, we began by asking questions about Ms Chou's background because we wanted to gain context about her life. She is an accomplished individual and we wanted to find where her inspiration and drive came from. We also wanted to know how she went about achieving her life goals. The most interesting thing about our interview is that she went into great detail while answering our short prompts--we think that this is due to her background in journalism. Every answer she provided for us was extremely insightful, and on our end, we did a lot of active listening. For example, when we asked about her background and where she grew up, it was natural for us to ask what influence her parents had on the choices she made that eventually led to her career as a journalist. Post interview, we were fortunate because she gave us a lot of information based on the open ended questions that we asked. Despite our own previous knowledge of Radio Free Asia, she persisted to including more background, such as being based off of Radio Free Europe, and how she was approached to be a founder. During the interview, we did not have one set person who asked all of the questions. We each jumped in to ask and respond where we felt necessary, and, in addition, we all took our own notes. Unfortunately, we did have one problem with the interview. On occasion, Ms. Chou’s audio would fade out. Fortunately, her answers were so well-spoken that we were able to fill in the gaps if we missed some information. So, to sum up our experience, although we had questions lined up before the interview, a lot of our questions during it were based off of her responses, and we developed more of a dialogue rather than a yes or no question scenario. Active listening was very evident because we were all taking notes, and each of us provided at least one probing question after receiving her response. We all showed interest in her life and each of us found a topic that was particularly interesting and that caused us to ask more questions. One important thing to note is how she downplayed her gender discrimination. Being told by the department chair of journalism that transfer spots are limited and should be reserved for men because they would not eventually leave their careers to have a family could have been a barrier that stopped women from pursuing journalism, but it did not stop Ms. Chou. (1)
• Ms. Kolenda’s overall goal in life is to cultivate and promote a strong understanding and respect for Asian culture within American society. Throughout her professional life, she has continuously worked towards this goal. Between 1981 and 1996, Ms. Kolenda volunteered in China as an English teacher and then was hired as a paralegal for a law firm in Beijing shortly after. Through these experiences, she mastered the Chinese dialect of Mandarin and acquired a personal understanding of how the Chinese culture functions. Shortly after returning to America, Ms. Kolenda explained to us that she had started a family and decided that her occupation as a lawyer for a New York City law firm was very rigorous and not a family friendly career. As a result, she decided to alter her career path accordingly and landed a job in 1998 as a program officer for the Henry Luce foundation’s Asia program. In 2008, she was appointed to the position of director within this same program which is the position she still holds today. The Henry Luce Foundation’s Asia program has the main goals of fostering cultural and intellectual exchange between the U.S. and Asia and creating scholarly and public resources to promote a strong understanding of Asia within the United States. These goals are achieved through the process of monetary grant making to select academic institutions which is one of Ms. Kolenda’s main responsibilities as director. Overall, Ms. Kolenda’s careers and personal experiences throughout her life have greatly contributed to the topic of women in U.S.-Asian relations. She has worked to build a symbolic bridge between the United States and Asia and places a strong importance on educating America’s future generations on Asian culture. Overall, the information we obtained through our interview with Ms. Kolenda strongly reinforced several topics we have learned throughout this course. In addition, it was a very unique experience in that it not only solidified several topics within this class but also gave us a more personal and realistic perspective of women in U.S. Asian relations by allowing us to hear it first hand from Ms. Kolenda, who works in that field herself. The interview lasted a little over an hour (1:01:40) We had a mixed interview structure. Prior to the interview, we prepared a list of questions from which we sent a few general questions as well as a few thought provoking questions to Ms. Kolenda, so that she had an idea what we would be discussing during the interview. This allowed us to not waste too much time coming up with questions on the spot and hoping that she would be able to answer them properly. We did find however, that some questions would be asked on the spot, in response to an answer that she had given us, which were examples of us actively listening. For example : After answering our question concerning any descrimination for being a woman that she felt might have been in her way as she was working in China, she answered by saying no, but she always got the feeling that they would have preferred working with a man. We followed up with a question asking if she would have preffered that to have been out in the open, rather than lingering around in the darkness. We did not have a set method for how we would ask questions, we just let the conversation flow naturally. Ms. Kolenda was very chipper and made having a conversation quite easy, even inviting us to tour the foundation if we are ever in the city! There was a lot of smiling and joking going on between us, which made for a very comfortable atmosphere. Just a little humor! She loved it =] (1)
• Talk about founding her Theatre of Yugen and its mission: Theatre of Yugen is an experimental ensemble dedicated to the pursuit of the intangible essence of yugen. With a foundation in Japanese noh drama and kyogen comedy, we create works of wo evolution of live performance and foster intercultural understanding. And by training and educating we keep the legacy of theatrical discipline is an important concept in traditional Japanese aesthetics. The exact translation of the word depends on the context. In the Chinese philosophical texts the term was taken from, yūgen meant “dim”, “deep” or “mysterious”. http://www.theatreofyugen.org/our-mission/ Forms of Noh and Kyogen, Mission to share these arts with American audiences and students. Japanese born. Trained in classical theater styles of Noh and Kyogen. Brought heritage to West in 1960s. Stereotypes of Asian women in Film. Racist ideals like Yellow peril that focused on asian community destroying traditional principles in the west. This influenced asian women because female asian characters were created as a response to the growing asian population at the time. Usually as fillers. Not played by asian actresses but white women. Form of white washing. Miyoshi Umeki. Similarily learned to play many instruments and performed in the states. Sayonara broke boundaries in USA screen mouth to mouth kiss. Taboo fo sleeping with the enemy” where the film questions the post WWII mindset against people of asian background. Asian women tend to be more aware of their culture. Surrounding issues of us-asian relations, women play an integral role to the preservation of asian ethnic identity in the face of acculturation. Very personable! Open ended questions lead to more narratives and anecdotal responses Laughs a lot. Reminiscent. (1)
• 1 2 (1)
• 1 2 3 4 (1)
• 1 2 Took turns asking questions We asked a lot of active listening questions and asked for more specifics based on something she said Open-ended questions Words of encouragement “right, wow that’s interesting” Very long interview – 52 minutes Non-verbal cues – unable bc skype issue but she was smiling a lot while we were on and joking She was very professional – cautious of giving too much of her own opinions, stuck to facts, answered with examples Duration and date of interview What did our questions center around How were the answers we received 3 (1)
• 1 Associate Professor Clarissa Burt has been a teacher in the field of Arabic Literature at the United States Naval Academy for a little over a decade and has a Ph.D in comparative semitics. Clarissa lived in Cairo for about 10 years over the course of a 20 year span before coming back to the States to become a professor in the Naval Academy. Clarissa became interested in Arabic, a language mainly concentrated in the Eastern Hemisphere, after studying many other languages throughout high school. Her love for Arabic and knowledge of the language grew because of the beauty in the literatures that she was encountering while studying the ancient language. Clarissa was kind enough to give us a brief lesson on the Arabic language and notified us about how it was being used by young people during her time in Egypt and even went as far as to compare Arabic poetry in Egypt to Hip-Hop in American culture. Clarissa was also able to give us some insight about women’s roles in the Arab world. It turns out that there are tremendously different situations regarding women’s roles that differ from country to country, or sometimes even within a single country. Clarissa has watched these things change radically in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco throughout her career. The extent of women’s involvement has gone up and down with the fortunes in the Egyptian political system. There is a feminist consciousness in the Arab world which gets articulated differently from country to country. Since the revolution, Muslim 2 brotherhood backlash and hostility towards women on the streets has been a problem and there continues to be suppression towards women. Just the morning of the interview, Clarissa had heard of a death of 2 sisters who had been thrown off the top of an apartment building. Her assumption that this had to have been a murder goes to show the severity of these issues in the Arab world. On a brighter side, although there are serious problems in the Arab world, women are interested in creating opportunities for other women and in making society better for women and girls. While between 25 and 50 percent of young women cannot find jobs in the Arab world, women created an NGO that had very successfully given them pathways into careers. With some extremist groups that have the desire to push women back to a position of powerlessness and domestic seclusion still present in the Arab world, there are still women and men actively finding ways to participate and raise awareness. 2 3 (1)
• 1 Our interview was with Ms. Alexandra Toma, the Executive Director of the Peace and Security Funders Group, located in Washington D.C. The mission of this network is to enhance the effectiveness of philanthropy that is focused on peace and security issues. Ms. Toma, who also has experience in politics, government, and advocacy, expressed that more attention should be given to important global issues while setting politics aside. Her network aims to provide educational opportunities to members, as well as to encourage collaboration and the exchange of ideas. 2 The questions we asked were structured to influence the information we received in a pattern of general to specific information. Our first section was loosely intended to function as a biography and explanation of her work. Our second group of three questions was constructed to understand her job and industry goals and achievements in better detail. Finally, our last section was about the future of her industry with specific regard to any advice she would want to give new women coming into her field. We were active listeners throughout our interview; all of us leaned in and nodded while she spoke, occasionally throwing in clarification or follow-up questions to ensure we had understood her and that she knew we had understood. One of the main goals of her industry is to increase government funding of philanthropic ventures, which naturally raised follow-up questions about any possible political affiliations. We learned that they work in a bipartisan manner to seek funding for charitable causes. In terms of verbal cues, we maintained a neutral pitch throughout the interview to portray that we were relaxed, but our pitch changed when we asked questions to show our interest. We maintained a normal volume and did not have to raise our 3 voices. Both parties also resumed a steady rate of speaking. In relation to body language, we had smiles on our faces throughout the interview and tried to maintain eye contact the best we could through Skype. At times, Ms. Toma did look away which indicated that she was thinking about her responses before answering. 3 (1)
• 1 The mission of Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch can be seen throughout her career. She has broken down many barriers. More specifically with her current position as President of the U.S. Education trust, she has been focusing on breaking down the barriers between China and the United States; in order so that these two countries can better understand each other. Being the first of Asian origin to become Ambassador of Nepal and being a woman at that, she has used that as her motivation to go further and be successful in her career. Something that we took away from our interview was that although being a woman with such a high-ranking position, that should be all the more reason to succeed. Having a strong mentality and courage to prove others wrong can take you very far. Woman are going far and making enormous contributions to global issues today. The women of today, such as Julia Chang Block have set the bar for women of future generations. 2 The questions we asked Julia Chang Bloch were created around what basic information we knew about her from both Professor Christoff and our own independent research. In preparing our key questions we knew that what and how we asked them would influence the type of information we would be able to get from the interview. Our objective was to learn as much as we could about the accomplishments of Julia Chang Bloch in the half hour we had to spend with on her Adobe Connect. The interview was held at 4:30pm on November 10 th. We knew that Ms. Bloch was born in China and at the age of nine years old moved with her family to the United States. We started out by asking her about moving to a new country at a young age. We wanted to know what were the reasons for her move from China to the United States and what it was like as a young girl to move to another country. Ms. Bloch explained to us that it was an exciting time in her life. She stated that since she was a young girl at the time, it was her parent’s decision to move. Her father was not only a Harvard graduate, but the first Asian Graduate, and he had many friends in America that wanted him to move to the United States. She spoke about her childhood and stated that back in China she never went outside; she went from home to school and back home. Her Amah (her nanny) would drive her to and from school, she even said it was almost as if her feet never touched the ground! She was brought from one place to the next and really had no free time to play outside. She stated that girls of her generation did not go outside in China. Once she came to the United States she did not have an Amah and her parents were both 3 working. She said that her and her brother got to play outside all the time and that even as a girl she felt free in the United States. We asked Ms. Bloch about her time in the Peace Corp and wanted to know what it was like and what exactly was her driving force. We wanted to know about what inspired her. Ms. Bloch’s explanation in turn inspired us. She explained that her father had always told her that when your country does so much for you you have to give back to your country. His thinking was similar to that of another great man- John F. Kennedy. Ms. Bloch explained that it was the assassination of John F. Kennedy that was her driving force in joining the Peace Corp. As our previous slide showed, John F. Kennedy is famous for his quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corp in the 1960’s and it was Ms. Bloch’s mission to be a part of it. These questions opened up quite a dialogue for our interview. She explained that in her time many young people were involved in social programs and that today it saddens her that the same thing is not so. She would love to see young people more involved. We talked about our class and she was very interested to hear about all that we had studied. We moved onto the US-China education trust and her passion behind it. With active listening we learned that it is her goal to keep the relationship between the United States and China a good one. Both countries are tremendous super powers and in saying that need to stay on each other’s good sides. She was very clear on explaining why it is necessary and that if her two countries did not get along it would not be a good thing. She believes that with programs such as the U.S.-China education trust that a good relationship between the two countries can continue and that the United States can continue to keep the peace. Julia Chang Bloch explained to us that she has broken barriers all of her life. One of the best parts of the interview was when she told us the story about a little girl in Nepal. Ms. Bloch was appointed to Ambassador of Nepal by George H.W. Bush in 1989. Upon her welcoming visit to Nepal there was a little girl near her who was talking to her father. Within earshot of Ms. Bloch the little girl asked, “where is the American ambassador I want to see her.” To which her father replied and pointed that is her right there. The little girl then said, “ But she looks just like me.” Things like these are what has made all of her challenges worth it. Julia Chang Bloch prides herself on being able to represent her country well and at the same time being able to put herself in the shoes of others. She explained that when someone told her she wouldn’t be able to do something or couldn’t do something it was what made her push even harder. She was a wonderful interviewee and we really did enjoy interviewing her. 3 (1)
• 1 Joshua Kim & Yawen Tang AAS 307 Final Report SECTION ONE (5 points) Person interviewed: Sarah Park Interviewee’s title or position: Manager of a Martin’s Cleaners in East Setauket Date, time, and length of interview: Apr.12, 8:00 am, 35mins Our objective in conducting this interview: 1. Getting to know Sarah Park’s background: How’s her family status? How’s her childhood? How many years she has been lived in United States? 2. Getting to know Sarah Park’s work: Why she works at the cleaners? Does she own the store? What she does for her work? 3. Getting to know Sarah Park’s personal life: Is the married? Is she a religious? How’s her husband and children? 4. Getting to know the role that Sarah Park plays in the U.S.-Asian relations. We wanted to know whether Sarah Park ever met any discrimination against her. Also, we wanted to figure out how Sarah Park different from American women, and how she build up the bridge and understanding between American and Asian Women. 2 SECTION TWO (10 points) Before the interview, we only had her name and the name of the cleaners’ she works at. We wanted to find her on Facebook but failed, then we figured it is possibly because her store was not that well known. Then we found her store on the google map, with all the necessary information. For an example, we had discovered that her address is at 170 NY-25A, SetauketEast Setauket, NY 11733 and the dry cleaner place was called “Martin’s French Cleaners.” Moreover, we had discovered that her workdays and work hours were 8:00 a.m.- 6:00 p.m. every day of the week besides Sundays and Mondays. Then, we started worked on the questions. Moreover, our original questions mainly focus on her work and the woman’s role she plays as a Korean American. With the help of our professor, we wrote the interview request for her in a letter, and we gave it to her in person. However, she did not reply to the letter, the most probable reason was because she was so occupied with her work. Thus, I (Yawen) went to her store again to schedule the interview time because of the lack of communication. When I talked to her, we found out that she has Korean accent, which means she immigrated to United States instead of being born here. Therefore, we changed and added questions about her immigration, and the life she had before she came to U.S. In preparation of the interview, we had fully charged our phone for recording and prepared a camera for photos and videos the day before we took the interview. We had also wore nicer clothes than usual to give off a professional attire and had practiced the interview questions beforehand so that we do not seem unprepared and as if we were reading our questions aloud for the first time. Our friends drove us to the interview site. 3 List your interview questions. What do you do on a daily basis for your job? How did you attain your current career? What was your early childhood like? Were you ever discriminated against racially? How does your career affect your family and what is their stance on it? Do you think that White Americans work harder than Asians or vice versa? How does your religious beliefs affect your life? SECTION THREE For the interview project, we got complete answers to our questions, despite Sarah Park not being fluent in English. She tried to the utmost of her abilities to give us answers that were not curtailed, but instead longer and more descriptive, in spite of the language barrier. For an example, one of the interview questions that we had asked her was “when you had came to American, what was your hardest challenge?” Her reply paraphrased was that she had arrived in America in 1982 because of her job in an airline company named CPA and worked there for a decade before quitting. Then she had gotten involved in real estate for four or five years. During that time span, she had met her husband married him, giving birth to two sons in 1986 and 1988. She also stated that they had finally opened up their dry cleaner’s store called “Martin’s French Cleaners” in 2002. As demonstrated in this example, she had answered other questions as well without us having to ask them at all to her. The questions that she answered in addition were 4 “Were you into any other career before you have attained your current job?” and “When had you first come to America?” The primary reason she had talked for a lengthy period of time was partially because we had given her positive verbal and non -verbal cues. The structure of our interview questions was mixed with simple yet specific questions and general questions. If we had simply done simple questions, we would have gotten very specific dates, nevertheless it would be meaningless without the actual content. On the other hand, if we had attained just broad questions without any specific and simple questions, our presentation would seem very vague and not professional. The simple yet specific questions were meant to complement the broad overview attained from the general question to make our presentation look professional and assert us being very knowledgeable about our subject. An example of a simple question would be that “What year did you attend your university that you had went to?” For a broad question, an example would be “please describe your early childhood.” The probing questions that we had used was “How did you do attain the current job you have presently” and “how does your job affect your family and what are their stances on this issue?” Because each of the questions covered a lot of additional information, it is considered an open ended question or a probing question. The answers to these questions were not specific, thus it had given considerable freedom to the interviewee to state information that is correlated with the issue. Since the question is not an easy question, the answer would inevitably be a complicated one covering many subtopics to answer the primary topic of the question. For an example, “how did you attain the current job you have presently.” The process that Sarah Park had used in answering this question was to mention what college she had went to which was 5 In- cheon college in Korea as well as the previous jobs regarding her as a real estate agent and a travel agent. She could have just said that I had married, and me and my husband in 2002 pooled our financial resources together in order to buy the dry cleaner store, however she had mentioned the whole backstory of the process getting there. Regarding our team strategy in completing our final interview project, Yawen and I had split the work. She had done the first slide called the “content slide” of our presentation regarding how our interviewee’s goals related to US- Asian relations and how our interviewee accomplished those goals. Also Yawen had to state how the information regarding Sarah Park related the information we have learned in class and also in terms of new information or additional information pertaining to Sarah Park. I had to do the “interview process slide” in which I had to describe the interview process such as emailing or calling the interviewee to schedule the interview as well as the interview experience. In addition, I had to mention specific verbal and non- verbal cues that we have to give Sarah Park, as well as verbal and non- verbal cues which we thought Sarah Park would express and thought we had to wary about and take into great consideration. Some of these cues were facial expressions, voice volume, voice inflection, eye contact, sighing, nail tapping, ect. Regarding the interview questions, roughly half of the questions that were used came from me while the other half came from Yawen. The interviewee did not give us any documents or references to articles to read, but she did mention how we could also interview her husband. However, since the project was only about one person and since they both worked together as co- owners of the dry cleaner’s store, we had politely refused. The husband was busy working in the back of the store, and we would have genuinely felt guilty if we had hindered the business any further with our presence making the customers feel a little uncomfortable and making the room more crowded than it had to be. 6 SECTION 4: Regarding emerging trends, Sarah Park mentioned how feminine power was weaker than today in the twenty first century. She had said how in the early 1980s she was the only female member of her family that attended college, and how it was a big step for her. Instead of discouraging her, her parents had encouraged her to do the best she can do without having any regrets of the results if they turn out to be as not as good. Sarah Park then mentioned the new academic trend which was about how even more women today attend college, and making up now over fifty percent of the total populations in colleges throughout America, outnumbering the percentage of males in college by a small degree.. Sarah Park also mentioned parents’ different interpretation of sacrifice for their offspring between Asians and Westerners. Parents making ultimate sacrifices for their children tended to be more prominent in Asian culture rather than Western culture. In other words, American families did help out their children financially, but perhaps not to the extreme degree in which Asian families sacrificed for their sons and daughters. She then stated how her family made sacrifices financially by saving every bit of their hard earned money to send her to college. Examples were that they did not go out to restaurants as often as they once did, they bought more cheap fast foods, instead of the expensive organic food products, and stopped shopping for new goods such as clothes and new cellphones altogether. This in turn, affected Sarah Park, when she became a mother of two sons who were ready to go to college. She had said how she gave up her own cell phone to save income, because there only needs to be one cellphone between her and her husband. Another example was how she said “I don’t need three meals a day, I can just eat two meals a day.” Despite this, she did not cancel any of her sons’ cellphones, which meant that 7 she still had to pay their phone bills and did not want to upset them by taking away their phones. Her sons realized this and appreciated it. In terms of her recommendations of future interviews, Sarah Park had stated how it was extremely helpful that we had sent her the interview questions beforehand, so she was prepared to answer the questions more easily and said to keep doing that from now. She had also appreciated the fact that we had come early in the morning which was the time she had said for us to come visit her. This was because during the early morning she was not very busy and had the most time to spare for the interview. Perhaps this was the reason why she did not show any negative verbal or non- verbal signs to us to leave or end the interview sooner. The fact that we had adapted to her preferences immediately due to our flexibility with time was appreciated by her as well and was she said to us to apply that to future interviews as well. Interview notes: What do you do for your job on a daily basis? Basically the cleaner’s work in our store is separate in two areas workwise. I am covering the front and my husband is covering the back. We have a tailor and presser and my husband and myself. So what we do when the customer comes in, they bring a bundle of clothes for cleaning, then i made the ticket and tag an after the cleaned garment is I take it over and inspect if it is good enough for the press, after I start it bag it and load on the computer. My husband inspects it again after it is bagged, if there is something wrong with the clothes I talk to my husband personally. Cleaning is divided in two ways, wet clean and dry clean. Some of the garment is not good enough for dry clean. The closest explanation of wet cleaning is like handwashing. 8 What was your early childhood like? My father was a banker so for that year we have to move around, because at that time, many areas did not have a bank, so my dad established a bank. We have to move towns for that year, it was when was really young in elementary school. It was a countryside, but I have that memory which was beautiful, there were rice fields, farms, and a lot of children my age who would play all day long until dawn. It was a really bright and happy experience. But by middle school my family and I had to look for the college, so I had to study a lot. “Were you ever discriminated against racially in America?” I expected it and I did not care much about what other people thought of me and the attitudes of strangers meant nothing to me. I did have a few rude cases here and there, however there was not much instances of racism here in America. “How did your career affect your family?” I could not take care of oldest son who was in ninth grade. I understood that he was not a baby, however it is was the first time that I could not take care of him because I was busy with work. My philosophy was to suffer as fully as possible and as much as possible. When my sons were in the second and fourth grade –that was the first time in which I could not take care of them. My life exists to suffer for my children. When I had arrived home, it was already dinner time. Before, I used to always be with the children twenty four hours a day besides them being in school. “Do you think that White Americans work harder or do Asian immigrants work harder?” “The circumstances that the first generation immigrant lived life differently from the Americans. America was on the top and it is economically different for white Americans versus Asian 9 immigrants. There is not much free time for us (first generation immigrants), that is the way we had lived, and of course work is different, because we have to work in order to survive. Our attitudes are also different than Americans, because we feel like we don’t belong here. How do you think that your religious beliefs affect your life? I think that religion is different based on your personality. My personality is always asking questions such as “where did I come from ?”, “why the world is not treated equally?”, it bothers me a lot. My family in Korea was not rich but I have no memories or experiences in which money was a big issue. Everything was in my hands, whatever I had wanted, in other words I’m not that greedy and not much I wanted because we are not rich. I never felt any shortages financially . However later we had financial crises two times. The first time the store caught on fire and the second time is when my husband broke up with his partnership with his friend in business. However, I never experienced financial crisis until that moment. It was already early 40 for my age and the first time I thought about it. When I was in first or second grade, the pastor came over and my mom and pastor came out from the living room to the garden, my mom gave him something, I knew it was money. Then pastor in Korea was not that financially stable. I wondered why my mom gave money to him, is it not better that money goes in the offer, my mother was a Christian so I grew up in church and learned about ethics, but because that kind of question, my husband became baptized and married me and went to church. For the time of the financial crisis it was suffering and I could not spend enough time with my children, and I wanted to do something else besides making money. I just need basic housing. Three meals a day? I can make it two. We also thought about bible and church and religion. Though my husband and I are two totally different people personality wise, our Christian beliefs connect us and make us one and make us closer in our relationship. 10 SECTION FIVE (25 points) What aspects of the interview did you find to be particularly meaningful? There are many aspects of Sarah Park we find to be touching and interesting. The first thing is that Sarah Park helped us to know how a mundane Asian woman can have such strength and determination for her family. Sarah Park’s father was a banker, therefore, even though Sarah Park’s origin family was not incredibly rich, she grew up from a middle upper class family in Korea. Moreover, Sarah never had a memory of lacking money in her original family of the past, and she went to college to pursue her dream, which is an opportunity that is very challenging to acquire in Asian countries back in the 1970s. Growing up in such a family, Sarah Park is not a weak woman or a spoiled one. She tried her best to save money for her family, especially for her two sons. The resilience and resolve from her have been showed from her experience. We also found Sarah Park’s religious belief is very important of defining her. Even though she is occupied by her work, she still tries her best to go to the church as frequently as she can. As a businesswoman, she has so many questions to ask herself, but none of these questions is about money. She wants to know “where did I come from ?”, “why the world is not treated equally?”. Her religious belief makes her care about not only herself or immediate family, but also others and the whole world. Her daily work routine at the cleaners does not stop her being someone that thinking of philosophical questions. Of course that she is not like a famous political figure, but she serves as an epitome of thousands of ordinary Asian women who live in US who are trying their best to support their family and keep their own faith. 11 What aspects were not useful? What more would you like to know? We find the interview as whole is very meaningful, and each question does lead us to somewhere. However, if we have to say, we think her daily work routine is not very useful to our interview. We spent three mins on how she does her work, which is neither interesting nor defines her character. Also, we think the specific information of her sons is not very useful either, such as when did she give births to her two sons and how they spoke Korean. These details are not very useful to the interview. Sarah Park is a very interesting lady but we did not have enough time to talk with her. We want to know more about her personal life. We want to know questions like “Does she have time to hangout with her friends? ””Are they mostly Korean or American? ” Because she is a highly-educated woman, we also want to know how does she think the political environment in Korea compared to in U.S.? We are also curious about does she ever feel depressed or disappointed of doing her current job, for she went to college but ended up with doing some profession that does not require high education. What other in-class presentations did you find particularly useful? Explain The presentations which I (Yawen ), had found useful and interesting were about Eileen Lui and Grace Young. For the first presentation, Eileen Lui is the Founder of “Soyai” which is a social enterprise whose purpose is to help the youths in underdeveloped areas of countries such as Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, etc. She had used to work at Cambodia, and volunteered for children with the disease HIV at orphanages. Many of these children were without hope, because they knew that they were gravely ill, however Eileen Lui gave them hope and happiness by playing with them, talking to them, and simply being with them. In addition, she supported a monastery in Cambodia and financially supported them, however the people in charge of the 12 monastery continuously asked for more and more money. Thus, she had to ask her friends in Malaysia to sponsor a youth center there. In that youth center, she had encouraged teens who were old enough to work stating to them that they were the oldest out of the kids and needed to step and take responsibility financially wise, though Eileen would keep supporting them for a while, she could not do it forever. Moreover, at their request she helped them learn basic English and learn how to use computers. As a result, they had attained jobs such as interior designers and programmers who now could use computers to help them work. Eileen Lui really left a lasting impression on those in need in the Asian countries she had visited and helped, through her social work. She did not have to be as an Asian immigrant to comprehend the hardships people are enduring and suffering through, as a Asian American she wanted to uplift these impoverished people in Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar. Though at first, bombarded because of the financial demands of the monastery, she established a permanent youth center mentioned previously to establish a sustainable and permanent way of life for the teens and children there, not simply a temporary way of life receiving her money, however not working or having no way to work. Another presentation which I found useful was Grace Young. She is a cookbook writer who has integrated storytelling and traditional cooking to her books. Grace Young was a Chinese immigrant and learned traditional cooking techniques from her parents. She had visited chefs in China to see how they cook and if she could learn new additional recipes from her native culture. When she was arrived there and was in the Chef’s kitchen, she noticed that he used a different type of sugar from rock sugar for the recipe of pork belly, which consisted of the ingredients of rice wine, soy sauce, cinnamon, ect. Also regarding her personal life, her own shyness was her main obstacle. Her goal was to bring the Western World and the Eastern World together and keep Asian tradition ongoing in the ever changing world. My personal opinion regarding her 13 goal is very positive, and I admire how she is working in her own ways no matter how small to uphold traditional values and gain acceptance from more and more Westerners of all native Chinese dishes through the work of her cookbooks which introduce such dishes to the Canada, America, United Kingdom, etc. Her desire to combine both worlds and be a bridge between them can be compared to Pearl S. Buck, though a smaller scale which involves cultural foods. (1)
• AAS 307: Women in US-Asian Relations Lauren B Slater December 16, 2016 108764697 I. Marilyn Morin Slater - WWII Nurse Part 1- Friday, November 25th, 2016 at 2:51PM, approx. 44 minutes. Part 2- Monday, November 28th, 2016 at 11:49PM, approx. 42 minutes. Objective: As a child, I heard about Marilyn’s travels, but I never realized the significance of her adventures before taking this course. During this interview, I aimed to gain a better understanding of her experiences and motives for traveling in Japan and the Middle East. II. Pre-Interview Preparation My pre-interview research consisted of me writing down everything I knew about Marilyn, my grandmother, in time sequential order and sending it to my father, her son, Timothy. He then filled in some significant holes and corrected a few of my mistakes, and this is what I based my initial questions off of. When I first approached Marilyn to see if she would be interested in participating in this interview, October 29th, she seemed very reluctant, and was skeptical that her experiences would give me any insight into women in US-Asian relations. She said several times, “Well, why don't you find a nice Japanese or Muslim girl and interview her;” however, as she shared her experiences in Afghanistan over tea in her kitchen that Saturday, I explained to her that the short story she just told me about dining with her husband and Afghani men in 1975 gave me much insight about cultural differences and being a woman in the middle east. She !1 seemed to realize how determined I was to learn from her experiences, and seemed much more forthcoming afterwards. After our initial discussion, I received a lengthy email containing a short summary of her time in Japan. She said she had difficulty keeping dates straight in her head, so she prepared them for me ahead of time. We decided that November 12th would be a good day for the interview, but due to an untimely death in the family, the interview was postponed to the 25th. Prior to the 12th, I sent my revised questions to Professor Christoff for review, and there were many of them. I am so curious about everything that my grandmother has experienced and she aided me in honing in on the questions that would really give insight and allow me to apply my knowledge of US-Asian relations. Part One: General Information When and where were you born? What are the names of your parents and siblings? When and where were they born? Where did you grow up and where did you go to school (K-12)? When and where did you go to college? How did you meet Grandpa? When and where did you get married? Part Two: International Experiences (especially in Asia) Of all the countries that you lived in or visited (Italy, Germany, Afghanistan, Japan, etc), which ones did you like the most and why? What years were you in these countries and for what reasons? Because the class I’m taking course focuses on Asia, I wondered if you could tell me about your experiences in Afghanistan and Japan: • What years did you go to these countries? • Did you enjoy living in these countries? • What friendships did you develop? How long did these friendships last? !2 • What kinds of things did you do in these countries – to learn about the people and cultures? Part Three: Family Stories I’ve heard a lot about your life growing up and I wondered if you could answer some questions I always had: • Can you tell me about the dinner you shared with Grandpa’s peers? [Will she know what dinner you are referring to?] • How did you meet Shafi? What is he like? • Who is Indra? How did you meet him? • When did you attend Dartmouth’s intensive language course? What was it like? • Did you take Japanese to prepare for your trip to Japan? • How did you become interested in Japanese weaving? Were you interested in weaving before you began to learn about Japan? • What did your friends think about your endeavors? Did they do similar things? Did they have similar interests? Do you have any photos or letters you wrote or received while living in Afghanistan? We would love to see them. Part Four: What would you like to tell the future generation of women about living outside of the United States? Do you think everyone should have an international experience? Why or why not? III. The Interview 1. Did you get complete answers to your questions? Explain. For the most part, yes, I received complete answers to my questions. Mostly, I just asked her about her time in a country and she would tell the full story, beginning to end. I would interject with unplanned questions here and there, but all the questions were resolved without much effort on my part. We did not discuss one question about her friend Indra, because that was a different trip. She travelled to Pakistan for a short while and we did not have time to cover that trip as well. !3 2. Was your interview structured, unstructured, or mixed? Explain. The interview was fairly structured, my questions were asked in four parts. The first was general information, the second international experiences which had to be split into two interviews. Marilyn is 93 years old and although her mind is still sharp for her age, she gets tired easily and I didn't want to pressure her or stress her out about dates and such, so we discussed Japan on Saturday and then when we reconvened on Monday we discussed her international experiences in terms of Afghanistan and then went on to discuss part three, family stories, and part four, her concluding remarks and statements. Most of part three was answered in part two, and where it was appropriate I would ask part three questions while she was telling her stories. After discussing the bulk of her time in Japan, I suggested we look through some photo albums to spark her memory. She had many photos of her time in Afghanistan as well, although they were in traditional slide technology and at the time her slide projector was not working. 3. What probing questions did you use? Explain. Most of my information was gathered through probing questions. For example, when we were discussing Japan I asked her to tell me about some of the photos she took while she was there. We went through the photo album and she told me about the friends she made and the festivals she went to without me even having to ask. She mentioned that one of the first customs she learned was to take off her shoes when she entered a home, so I proceeded to ask her about other customs that may have come as a surprise. While we were discussing Afghanistan, she described a house as “typical,” but because I am not familiar with Afghani culture I asked her what she meant by that, which lead to quite an elaborate description of the !4 home and gave some insight into the domestic life and customs and she stressed how important teahouses and drinking tea was to their lifestyle. 4. Explain your team approach. That is, who did what? I worked on my own, but Professor Christoff and my Uncle Gregory aided me significantly. Professor Christoff helped me develop the interview questions and organize them. My Uncle Gregory, Marilyn’s oldest son, typed up the summary of her time in Japan and emailed it to me. He also pulled out all her corresponding photo albums, tried to set up the slide projector, and was present during the interview to offer information such as dates and locations when necessary. 5. Did the interviewee give you any documents or references to articles to read, or did she mention other people for you to talk to (or research)? Explain. Yes, Marilyn gave me a typed up summary of her time in Japan and she wanted to go through the photo slides of Afghanistan to spark her memory a bit more, but unfortunately the slide projector was broken so we only made it through two slides. She wanted to give me a book on Afghanistan; however, we could not find it. IV. Interview Notes She was a little nervous and uncomfortable in the beginning, I think the interview was an inconvenience for her. When I opened my computer to begin the video, she was startled and then she asked me to get her a hat upstairs. While I asked her general information she was staring at herself in the computer and when she was trying to recall something she would look to her upper left corner (I was sitting on her right side, about a 90 degree angle from her). She spoke fairly !5 quietly, until she started talking about what she like about a place, Boston specifically. As she began to talk about her life, I noticed a lot of similarities between us. She was forced to move in the middle of high school, as was I, and when she discussed going to nursing school with her mother, her mother told her she wouldn't be a good nurse, which reminded me of when I started college she told me I wouldn't be a good engineer and that I should do something else, but we both stuck it out and ended up loving it. She was quite animated when discussing her time at the Jersey City Medical Center and her relationship with her husband, Gregory. She laughed when she told me how he proposed. When I asked her of all the countries she like the best, she responded that she had a fondness for Italy, but her favorite is Japan. So, I proceeded to ask her about Italy and she got a little flustered and articulated that Italy wasn't her favorite, Japan was her favorite, so I apologized and asked her why Japan was the best. She sort of ignored my question and just went on to tell the story about how she got thinking about traveling to Japan and then when it came time to discuss her actual trip she read aloud from a paper she had prepared. Afterwards, I tried to get her to more freely discuss her time there and we went through photos. Whenever she remembered something from a photo she would say, “Oh, now here is something interesting” and point down at the photo. When I asked her about other customs and such that she learned she got very quiet and took a long pause trying to recollect her memories. She started to talk a little slower towards the end, because she was getting tired, so we stopped after forty-five minutes to take a break. Afterwards I brought her some water and she took a nap. !6 We reconvened three days later and she seemed much more comfortable the second time around. She started discussing why Gregory was going to Afghanistan, and when I asked her why she went she got a little irritated and said, “I just told you why.” When she started talking about living there her voice got light and you could hear in her intonations how amazing even her memories were of the trip. She laughed a lot while she was telling this story specifically I think out of embarrassment for inviting her friend Shafi up to her apartment and then when she talked about running through a field of poppies and her husband calling her to come back. She loved talking about seeing the camels. When I asked her about the meal she shared with her husband and his Afghani peers she sort of rolled her eyes and made a sound sending the message that she was still put off by the experience. She said, “Oh, you mean the dinner where no one talked to me, well…”. Her experience in Afghanistan reminded me of the experiences of the missionary’s wives and the theme of identity as a foreigner crossed my mind as well. When I asked her about her friends in Connecticut and if they had adventures similar to hers, she didn't quite understand what I was asking at first. It was like she didn't notice that she had all these experiences and adventures that no one else had. Marilyn told me about a conversation she had with her good friend Deandra just a few days earlier who said to her that she could never think of going anyplace like Afghanistan by herself and Marilyn simply responded, “Well, I just go,” as if there was nothing to it. Through her travels in Afghanistan, she reminded me of the missionary’s wives, providing a female perspective to a culture which was not much known and how her purpose in the country !7 was to benefit a community. In terms of cultural identity, I think she struggled here and felt alienated before she met Shafi. I picked up bits and pieces that suggested she felt like an outsider, not fitting in with the hospital staff, not fitting in with the women, not fitting in with her husbands male friends. When traveling in Japan, she seemed much more prepared than Afghanistan and could communicate with the culture more effectively. I think also at the time of her travels, between 1975 and 1986, Asian culture was much more open to Americans than Afghani culture was. She mentioned making many friends and going to parties and feeling safe even in the city at night in Japan, it really seemed like she felt at home there. V. Analysis I found the whole interview to be meaningful. To have an oral history of my Grandmother, even though it is just fragments of her life, means very much to me and it is something I hoped to do even if I didn't take this course; however, integrating the themes of US-Asian relations definitely made me view her life in a different perspective and really tie her life and the opportunities she had to a larger picture. I especially loved hearing the little stories, like when she met her husband and their proposal, when she leaned on a paper wall at the weaving school and fell through the wall, and her running through the field of poppies. I have only known her for a little of her life, and I have never seen that side of her. What wasn't useful, was the time constraint. I would have loved to talk with her and ask her questions for hours. I think what I want to know most after interviewing her is what her mother thought of all of this. What she thought about her husband, about traveling through Europe so young, about her hobbies and adventures. I would like to !8 know more about her travels through Europe, South America, Egypt, Russia, and Pakistan and how her relationship with her husband changed (if at all) from being a wife to a mother. After watching all the other final presentations, I especially loved hearing about Sophie Richardson and Vanessa Johanson. The interview with Sophie Richardson revealed that her goal was to improve human rights and work more directly with the locals in the community. I thought that was very interesting and the connection towards the textile case we discussed in class and how locals were advocating for rights despite fear of persecution was very strong. I think her goal of improving human rights by working at a local level and by improving relationships in China will prove to be very successful based on our class readings. I also thought it was very comical that she told off Obama for not doing his job, that story gave some insight into her personality. Vanessa Johanson also gave off a very good vibe and she seemed to very strongly advocate for women’s empowerment which was a very big topic in the video-recorded panel I participated in. She articulated that the wants women to take more firm control and initiative and she wants to develop further solutions to help the government fight rebel groups in Myanmar. What I thought was most interesting about her experiences was that even after she spend so much time living in Myanmar, knew the language and the culture, she still did not feel integrated. She said that even though she knew the language there was always a language barrier and she had trouble making friends due to a law that had recently been abolished banning foreigners from entering the homes of locals. I thought this was very interesting in terms of cultural identity and I related this !9 experience of hers to the one Marilyn Slater had in Afghanistan. Marilyn mentioned that at a dinner she shared with her husband and his Afghani peers, not one of them spoke a single word to her the whole time and she recollected that she had wished she could go sit in the kitchen with the women, but even then she said she wasn't sure she would have been welcome there either. These experiences are similar, because they bring up cultural differences which directly effect how foreigners integrate and develop their own identity in a strange place. Lastly, the message Mrs. Slater felt she wanted to share was that anywhere you travel or live abroad it is essential to learn the language prior to your travels and while listening to all the presentations, I found that this message was a common one! !10 (1)
• Alfreda Murck is an art historian and independent scholar who was born in Eugene, Oregon and grew up in California. From 1978 to 1991, she worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she helped organize the creation of the Astor garden (the second picture) in the Chinese art section. And from 1991 to 2013, she and her husband lived in Taiwan and in Beijing, where she worked as a consultant for the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum. 1 When I asked her why she chose to pursue the study of Chinese art, she said, “Well, I wanted to see the world.” Although she originally wanted to study French Impressionism, she ended up traveling to Hong Kong because of her realistic yet open-minded approach to life. After her study abroad in Hong Kong galvanized her interest in Chinese art history, she went back to school to study Chinese Art and Archaeology. As an art historian, Dr. Murck discusses the value of “cultural exchange” between the United States and China: it exposes people to different cultures and allows them to gain a greater understanding of these cultures. Oftentimes, art is also a vital part of diplomatic relations: “exhibitions are often turned to as a first gesture of diplomatic relations.” Not only are art and art history valuable for cultural exchange and diplomatic relations, it also has the power to enhance life. Dr. Murck worked with the Luce Foundation to promote the teaching of Western art inside China, a move she explained was motivated by a greater need for the study of Western art than for Chinese art and by how presumptuous it would have been for Westerners to teach the Chinese how to study their own art. This reminded me of the missionaries’ efforts to do exactly that—teach the people whose countries they were living in how to live their lives; and in some ways, the course of 2 Dr. Murck’s life is similar to that of the missionaries we discussed, as James and John mentioned yesterday in connection to their interviewee. But thankfully, as we can see in Dr. Murck’s description of the organization’s work, we have learned some lessons from history. 2 My interview was a little different in that I interviewed Dr. Murck in person at her apartment in the city—the professor even lent me her video camera and tripod. Because it was an in person interview, the nonverbal cues were a little more readily apparent than they might have been otherwise. I noticed at the beginning of the interview that both our postures were a little tense—I was leaning forward in my chair because, as the interviewer, I wanted to look attentive—but, as the interview progressed, we both relaxed into more comfortable positions and stopped shifting around in our chairs. We had steady eye contact throughout as well. In terms of verbal cues, Dr. Murck began the interview by jokingly asking if the camera was too close and if her head was cut off in the video camera—and it was. After I set up the video camera again correctly, she complimented my first question (about how her parents had influenced her life) and said that it was something she had never thought to consider. For me, I hope that I seemed as interested and curious during the interview as I was—my major is art history and so speaking to an art historian about her life and her career was an amazing experience. I prepared about 15 questions before the interview that were organized chronologically; my intention going into the interview was to trace over Dr. Murck’s early life, education, and career, and then connect her life and work to the greater context of U.S.-Asia relations. She answered many of my questions with her 3 response to my first question—I don’t know if that was because my question was too broad or the interviewee had the expectation that she should give this overall summary of herself first. Thinking that I would need to come up with questions on the spot, I was a little flustered but I went ahead and asked the questions she had answered with her first response anyway. She only traced over the arc of her life generally, so with my specific questions I was able to elicit more detailed, specific responses. That is one example of active listening from the interview. I think this interview was a very interesting experience in that it reflected many of the stories we have discussed over the course of the class but with modern perspectives and sensibilities. 3 (1)
• Aracely Jimenez-Hudis and Emily Seiller AAS 307 Final Report May 9 2018 Section I - Interviewee information Amy Hall Vice President, Eileen Fisher April 18, 2018 4:30 p.m. EST Objective: to obtain an oral history from Amy Hall documenting her childhood, collegiate career and professional careers. Section II - Pre-Interview Process After our interview with Charlene Barshefsky fell through, we wanted to research and schedule an interview with Amy Hall as soon as possible. A simple google search of “Amy Hall Eileen Fisher” turned up her LinkedIn profile, which was very helpful in providing a skeletal outline for different possible interview questions. Ms. Hall had all her education and work experience listed and although we were not completely familiar with all the places she has worked, research on these organizations also gave us a good starting point for formulation questions. We broke up our list of questions into four main sections: Early life/childhood, education, early career and current career/reflection. Ms. Hall has worked at Eileen Fisher for the past 25 years so we focused a lot of our questions on the current career/reflection section. Although we came up with interview questions separately, we met prior to the interview itself and divided the questions in half for each of us to ask. Since we were able to conduct our interview over Skype, we thought it would be best if both of us were fully engaged in the conversation rather than have one person ask questions and the other mostly just take notes. Here are our interview questions as they were originally organized: Early Life - Where did you grow up? - Are there any childhood experiences that influenced your career path? - Have you always been interested in sustainability? Education - What was the most valuable lesson you learned at Georgetown University? - Did you have have any influential mentors during your undergraduate career? - What were some of your life or career goals when you graduated from Georgetown? - What prompted you to get your MBA in 2008? Career Early career - Tell us about your time at the Institute for International Education. What was your most challenging project as Manager of Resource Development? Current career - Tell us about your position as Director of Social Consciousness at Eileen Fisher. - Do you think the fashion industry can be a leader in the movement toward sustainable practices? - What projects or innovations that you spearheaded at Eileen Fisher are you most proud of? - How do you think your background in Linguistics has influenced your career, the way you communicate ideas or the way handle certain projects? What advice do you have for people looking to either lead more sustainable lives or enter a career in sustainability? Do you think purchasing power at the level of the individual consumer has a significant impact on creating an atmosphere/culture of sustainability and environmental awareness? Section III - Interview Summary 1. We definitely got complete answers to most of our questions. After a couple minutes went by during the interview we quickly noticed that Ms. Hall had a lot to say about her life and career and she actually ended up touching on a few of our questions unprompted. As a result, we let Ms. Hall lead the flow of the interview for the most part, letting her speak at length and connecting topics to one another. One example that comes to mind is when Ms. Hall was describing how her study of languages in college helped her get to the position she has now at Eileen Fisher. 2. Our interview was a mix of structured and unstructured. As we mentioned in the answer to the previous question, we had set categories of questions but if Ms. Hall began to speak at length about a topic, we let her, even if it was not necessarily in a precise chronological order. 3. Throughout the project, the workload was shared equally. The initial interview inquiry letter was drafted on a shared Google Doc, as were the interview questions and this very report. Even our presentation was divided equally. In the interview itself, our approach was very similar. As previously mentioned, we split up the questions beforehand and each of us asked our fair share of probing questions, some we had planned on asking and other we asked on the spot. We also made sure to not let there be long gaps in the interview. For example, if we were at a stage in the interview where we were asking questions pertaining to particular section of questions, one of us would jump in with either a topic switch or a new follow up question. 4. While Ms. Hall did not refer any outside links or resources, she did encourage us to check out the Eileen Fisher website which has a lot of information about its human rights and environmental sustainability initiatives. Section IV - Interview Transcript EMILY SEILLER (ES): Where did you grow up? AMY HALL (AH): Until seventh grade I grew up in Connecticut and junior high and high school in a suburb of Philadelphia. They were both suburban and in terms of the Connecticut experience my family was the diversity in the town. My father was Chinese and my mother Caucasian and both were born here so being in CT and being Asian in appearance though obviously American in upbringing was an interesting experience. This goes back to the ‘60s and people just looked at us as different and weird and not like them. There was a lot of bullying and ostracising and stuff like that. ARACELY JIMENEZ (AJ): Did that situation change or improve when you moved to the Philadelphia suburb? AH: When we got to Philadelphia we were still very much a minority. There were a handful more, very small number of Asian kids in the schools, maybe fewer than ten. And probably fewer than four African-American kids, it was very white-oriented. How that influenced me though was when I got to college. I always loved languages and so when I applied to college I really wanted to study languages. My primary language at that point, besides English, was Spanish and I thought I would be a Spanish major. But when I got to college and saw how many Spanish majors there were, the intake counselor asked me what other languages would I want to study and I said “Definitely Chinese,” because of my background I’m sort of curious about it. So he said I should write about it in my application and in doing that I ended up actually majoring in Chinese even though I had never studied it before, nor had I ever known anything about it. My point about that is, I think growing up and feeling different from people and wondering what that Chinese thing in my background was all about caused me to study the language and reconnect with my roots. AJ: Were there any experiences in your early life that influenced your interest in sustainability or non-profit work? AH: It’s funny, I don’t even think of myself as working in sustainability because my work covers multiple areas. It’s part environmental sustainability, it’s also human rights and it’s also women and girls. So growing up, partially because I was so bullied, and I was mortally shy, I just always had a lot of compassion for other people who were also left out. I would just automatically gravitate towards them and I would just feel really badly about them and I wanted to help them! So I was thinking about what to do with my life and I said wow, I just want to do something that helps the world, because for myself it had been a tough upbringing. I thought about being a social worker but I didn’t think it quite suited my personality. Nobody told me when I went to college that it’s really hard to get a job with just a language unless you want to be an interpreter or a translator, which was not my thing either. When I got out of college I wasn’t sure what to do. The kind of work I do now didn’t exist back then and I also had no interest in working in business because I was really interested in helping people. So I got a master’s degree in teaching English as a second language and in doing that I discovered that my shyness made it really hard for me to actually do the work. I had trouble being in front of a class for a long time, keeping them entertained. It was a really harsh discovery so I went into the nonprofit world and found a job in Chinatown in New York City. I started as the assistant of the executive director but because I was the only native English speaker on staff, they started asking me to help out with grant requests. When the time came to look for another job, I realized I was acquiring a skill set around fundraising. So the next three jobs I had were working in nonprofit. I worked for Asia Society, I worked for China Institute. I was fundraising, writing grants, doing events and after doing that for nine years that’s when I realized that was also not a great fit for my personality because I didn’t like rejection. Fundraising just didn’t feel satisfying to me, I didn’t feel like I was having the impact I wanted to have, and I think I was too far removed from the actual work of the organizations, I wasn’t out there hands on with people or communities. When I decided to walk away from fundraising I decided just to take any old job for a couple years until I could figure out what to do with myself. By now I was already thirty-two, so I had already had a career. Long story short I ended up getting an administrative assistant job to the CEO of this tiny clothing company that I had never heard of. The reason I chose that was because growing up I used to make all my own clothes. The CEO left the company within six months, they never replaced him. It was a small and growing company so I just started helping out wherever I could. One of the things I was able to do successfully was start responding to organizations who were sending in letter asking for donations of merchandise I said, well I used to write letters like this, I know what to do with those letters, I’ll organize a system. So four years later I was given the title Community Relations Manager, and that to me was the perfect marriage of what I had been doing with this new situation and I was able to suddenly feel like I could have impact. Well, this was Eileen Fisher, and this is now my twenty-fifth year with the company. The year I got the title Community Relations Manager, 1997, Eileen Fisher made a commitment to the people in its supply chain because we were hearing all kinds of news stories about sweatshops and we thought wow, we’re so small nobody would think to include us in those articles, but we sure could’ve been, and we’d better do something about it. They were looking for someone to do something about the people in our supply chain and I got that job and I didn’t apply for it but the reason they looked at me was because of those languages I had studied! They wanted someone who had cross-cultural experience, who had lived in China and I had all of that. AJ: You just mentioned that you lived in China, could you expand on that? AH: When you’re a language major typically you do a study abroad program and at the time I was in school, I went to college in 1979. So where do you go to study Chinese in 1981, this would have been my junior year, the option was either Taiwan, Hong Kong (where they speak Cantonese, not Mandarin), or mainland China had just opened. It had opened to the West in 1977 and they had just started exchange programs in 1980 or 81. My best friend was studying Chinese and she went to Taiwan and I thought well, that’s cheating, you have to go to the real China. So, I went to China. And when I had landed in China, I had already studied Chinese for two years at that point. Nowadays I think they teach it much better but at that time it was a new language to be taught and they hadn’t figured out how to do it efficiently and my two years of Chinese language study included tons of historical articles. I knew five different ways to say invade or invasion because so much of the historical literature was based of military stuff. I also know a lot of folk tales, but I literally did not know how to say “I’m hungry” or “Where’s the bathroom.” We knew no vernacular, we didn’t study any of that. So when I landed in China I was mortified that I actually couldn’t say anything that was useful. I could give you a whole philosophical treatise on something. So I spent the first three months really miserable and then suddenly it just started clicking and my fluency picked up and I made a lot of friends. I felt like a guinea pig, I was one of four Americans segregated in our own dormitory with about twenty-five Japanese students who were mostly businessmen learning for business purposes. It was a very isolating experience, we were watched all the time. I made Chinese friends and the only reason I was able to do that is if I don’t wear any makeup and if I dress a certain way, I can look a hundred percent Chinese. I blended in if I wanted to but it was really risky. At times I was really close to either getting myself in trouble or getting my friends in trouble because they weren’t supposed to mix with Americans. But it was an amazing year, well before the country started to modernize. It was still very communist, everyone was wearing Mao jackets, everything was rationed, there were no modern conveniences at all and we were in Shanghai. It was quite an impactful year and it did make think about going into international relations. I was at Georgetown and got a scholarship when I was finishing up my fourth year of school to study international relations at Taipei University but something happened and I wasn’t able to take advantage of it. ES: Have you been back to China since then? AH: Yes, many times. On a personal level, I did briefly marry a man who was from China, so we went and visited his family once or twice. But on a professional level, I started going back to China with this new role at the company. By then I was in my mid-thirties and it been many years since I graduated from college and my Chinese fluency was really poor. I went back and found a local Chinese language school and took classes to refresh and so I developed our early auditing protocol for our suppliers-- I will say also at the time, and even today, our US based suppliers are mostly Chinese speaking. The owners will speak English but most of the workers don’t speak a lot of English. I had to learn new vocabulary, I had never spoken about working hours, wage documentation, human rights, so I had to learn all that vocabulary. But I do get to travel to China, I don’t know if I go every year, but maybe every other year I go back. Actually I was there last year and I’m going next month. But it’s about once or every two years I go back to visit suppliers. ES: Do you think the fashion industry, and Eileen Fisher, can be a leader in the movement toward sustainable practices? AH: Many people say that we are already but there’s a lot of things that we do that are beyond what the average apparel company does. We our sights set on changing every single fiber we use over to some environmentally low-impact fiber, whether it’s organic or recycled so we’re moving in that direction. We also have very high expectations for the people in our supply chain regarding living wages and worker voice, worker happiness. We work at all levels of our supply chain, we have goals around all our fibers, the chemistry, the carbon, the water. AJ: In the past twenty-five years you’ve worked with Eileen Fisher, can you tell us about a project that you’re most proud of? AH: SO what’s interesting about that question is, this is the reality of this work-- a lot of the things that we’ve done, have failed, and we’ve learned an awful lot from it. An example is, some years back I’d always been frustrated with the fact that our suppliers here in New York City, or any of the US based suppliers, it’s not typical for them to offer health benefits, something we take for granted as employed American citizens. We looked into what it would entail for our suppliers to offer health insurance. We worked with a health insurance provider and we got one of our suppliers to agree to a pilot program whereby we would pay a premium to the supplier for every single piece that they make which would go toward health insurance premiums for their employees. All US suppliers are relatively small, this one at the time had thirty-five or forty workers. Only one third of them signed up for health insurance. We had a representative from the health insurance company come and talk to them, it was all fully translated. The workers, it turns out, were so suspicious. They were used to going to their acupuncturist, or going to the emergency room when they had a real problem. Very few of them wanted to be bothered with any kind of forms they would have to fill out, some kind of referral form if the needed to see a certain kind of doctor. It turns out, one of the reasons they liked not having health insurance was because they could reflect a very low income and get access to government benefits. By giving them health insurance, it raised their income and suddenly they didn’t qualify for some of the benefits like government housing. So after six months all of the people who had been in the program dropped out. We realized we can’t always apply American values to other people’s experiences, whether they’re American, new Americans or in other countries. We always think about that when we go to other countries but we didn’t think about it in terms of the immigrants here. We think if they’ve come here they want the full experience but in fact they didn’t. It showed us we can’t make assumptions about what other people want or need. AJ: Do you think the purchasing power of an individual consumer can have an impact? AH: It totally can. I’m going to be speaking next week at FIT at Fashion Revolution Day, April 24. I think consumers need to exercise their power much more than we do. It’s too easy right now to buy a ten dollar H&M shirt or Forever 21. We all do it, I have two daughters, they shop, they like stuff. It takes more time to go an research and think oh my gosh, I’m tempted by that over there, I’m gonna save my money and invest in this beautiful sweater. I could either buy four over here or one over here and this one is organic and it’s going to last for ten years. That is a behavior change and a mindset change that is really hard to live up to when you’re surrounded on a day-to-day basis with the magazines and ads. However, I can tell you one time we received a single note from a single person saying how disappointed she was that we used angora and how could we do that knowing the conditions that angora rabbits are raised in. And we thought, wow we never really thought about that so our manufacturing leader went to China where the angora had come from and scheduled a tour of some angora rabbit farms. I was sufficiently appalled by the conditions of the rabbits that we dropped angora after that and just one letter from a single customer. For me, that illustrates a power that people can have if they really take the time to learn about the issue and send a note in. I doesn’t mean every single time we get a note from a customer we go and do something, but a lot of times they will wake us up to issues we weren’t aware of. ES: You mentioned you were speaking at FIT, does your company strive to work with fashion students? AH: Sure, we do a lot. Three or four years ago maybe we worked with professional organization called the council of fashion designers of America, the CFDA, and with them we organized a competition that went out to twenty or twenty-five fashion or design schools in the country and we selected three winners. We were looking for three talented designers to come work with us for a year. Well it turned out, completely randomly, that all three we chose came from Parsons. They came and worked with us to create a line of clothing out of the clothing we were now taking back, we take back previously worn Eileen Fisher clothes and we hold on to it and we create new things out of them. Those three design students started this new line for us which we call ‘Renew,’ and it was the beginning of our whole circular initiative. But in addition to that we bring students in as interns, we go to schools and work with classes or speak to them about what we’re doing to inspire them, we provide materials to schools, leftover materials. AJ: How long has Eileen Fisher been recycling clothes? AH: We started in 2009 and we have two stand-alone stores that only sell previously worn Eileen Fisher clothing. We started by taking clothes back and reselling them but we realized that forty to fifty percent of the clothes we take back can’t actually be resold because they’re too damaged. So we keep everything and we sort it, it’s a very manual process, and we make new things out of it. So we might cut the clothing into pieces and sew it into something like a dress, a tunic or something. Or we’ll cut them into small pieces and we have a felting process that makes upholstery quality fabric. Our two stand alone stores that sell Eileen Fisher Renew clothing are in Irvington New York and Seattle. AJ: I want to move back briefly to your time at Georgetown. Did you have any mentors during your undergraduate career? AH: Not as an undergraduate, I was really undirected, that came much later in life for me. AJ: If you could change one thing that you did at Eileen Fisher, what would it be? AH: I’m not sure I can answer that specifically. What I could say is if there’s something I wish I had known how to do, but I didn’t figure this out until at least ten years into my job, I wished somebody had told me that to be successful and really good at this kind of work I do now, it would have been really good to know this. When I think about the kind of work that I do, which is environmental sustainability, human rights primarily, saying that we want to be a certain kind of company, talking with other teams in the company, talking with other businesses outside the company as an influencer, so what does that require? It actually requires very strong organizational development skills, culture change skills, because what you’re actually doing is changing people’s behavior or mindset. SO, we’ll go and speak with the owner of a factory and say, hey Mr. Li, I know you’ve been doing things this way the entire time you’ve been running this factory and maybe your father did it this way, but let me say we now know we need to do this thing differently. And he’s comfortable because he’s making money doing whatever he’s doing and we need to come in and say, ‘this is better because you’re going to help the environment, you’re going to help all these people and your story may get out on the internet, maybe get on our website.’ Convincing them, anybody in our supply chain, anyone in our whole sphere of influence, it can take many conversations, many visits, many pilot projects, trial and error, it can take that something is the right way to go. It usually requires of them additional money, process change, pulling them out of their comfort zone. Knowing how to manage that human behavior change would have been really useful. People are coming out of college with environmental sustainability degrees, human rights degrees, but I don’t think they’re coming out of college really knowing how to work with people because really what this is all about is getting people to shift their way. And maybe that’s what business in general is all about, I’m not sure, but in this work it would be really useful so I think it should be taught in college. AJ: That kind of work is a lot like topics we’ve been studying in class that has to do with social movements, do you consider yourself part of a broader social movement? AH: I do, in certain instances we think of ourselves as activists, we do a lot of policy work, we go to Capitol Hill, someone in my team goes to pipeline protests. We really are creating a new standard for business, we’re trying to reinvent how the business of fashion should be done in this century. How do you do it in a way that not only does less harm, but eventually nourishes the environment, nourishes the planet, leaves people in a better state than when we first arrived. A lot of what we do is work that hasn’t been tried by another company and in that regard I think we’re activists. It’s definitely two steps forward, one back and it’ exhausting but it’s worth it. ES: Do you have any upcoming projects that you’re excited about? AH: There’s so many! Something that we’re talking about right now is how do we get the whole company, even people in facilities, to really embrace all our values and make their decisions through those lenses, so I feel that is the next big thing. The other big thing, I’m not directly involved in this but I’m excited about it, we did a mapping project where we tried to figure out why our carbon footprint was so high. Basically we figured out quickly that our carbon footprint is high because we airship much of our product from China. So obviously, we should not be airshipping but seashipping, why are we airshipping so much? Through the process of designing and developing the product, they end up with not enough time to send it by sea so often they send by air. Where we are right now, there’s a whole bunch of people working in the company to completely shift our internal processes to shorten the development timeline of a product, give our suppliers more time to do what we want them to do. I mentioned earlier that there’s a lot of failure in this work. Some of our suppliers, we’ve been working with them for over twenty years and yet the core issues have not changed a whole lot. Workers still get paid pretty low wages, hours are still really high, why is that, why can’t we nudge them forward? We figured that because we don’t actually give them enough time to get the product done because we’re putting too much pressure on them. We place the order, we change the order, we update the order, we placed the order for a hundred, now we want two hundred and we still need it delivered on this date. So they run out of time and they airship it, and they don’t want to tell us that they had a lot of overtime and they don’t want to tell us that they weren’t able to pay a higher wage because we’re still paying them the same original amount that we agreed upon. We realized that the suppliers were not able to do their work ethically because of what we’re doing. So we have this whole project to shift our internal process to alleviate the stress on the suppliers and ultimately lead to higher well-being for the workers. So we’ll see, it’ll be another year or so before we see if the intend result happens. But it’s really exciting, this kind of work doesn’t happen at other companies. Section V - Interview Analysis The interview in its entirety was both meaningful and enlightening— it is not often you are given the opportunity to speak to someone with so much life experience who continues to make changes in the world daily. It was very wonderful that she had given us the chance and time to hold the interview, and Amy Hall was incredibly insightful and enthusiastic to the very end. I would say, however, that the most meaningful topic occurred during her talk of getting healthcare to those who work in the supply factories here in America and elsewhere, and the shock of realizing that most, if not all, did not want to partake in the healthcare program and would rather keep to their own customs and cultures— we cannot force American values onto others, even those who live here, and even if one believes what they are doing is for the greater good, it may not be that way towards those they wish to aid towards a more fulfilling life. I do not believe any aspects of the interview were necessarily not useful, any bit of information on her life and the story she had to tell came off as necessary and important. I think there would’ve been tons more to talk about if we had really gotten into the ins and outs of Eileen Fisher, her past careers, and even her recent trips to China which we didn’t really dissect in their entirety due to time constraints. All of the in class presentations were interesting and useful in their own ways— the careers of the women interviewed ranged through classes, cultures and societies. And it was enriching to hear all the stories told. Personally, I found the interview of the laundry owner the most fascinating, perhaps because it was significantly different than the others in that way. It was eye opening and gave us an insight into the life of someone often overlooked and regarded as insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Her life truly spoke to the idea of soft roles. She wasn’t a powerful politician, an author, a diplomat, a lawyer, a ceo. Her connection to her culture felt true and wonderful, and everything that was presented to the class was genuine. (1)
• Asha Samuel, Arianny Santana, & Shamarie Williams Final Paper: Interview Section One Person Interviewed: Dr. Carol Hamrin Interviewee’s title and position: Senior associate at the Global China Center; previously a research professor at George Mason University and senior research specialist at the State Department Date, time, & length: The interview took place on 11/13/15 at 10:33 a.m. and lasted one hour and two minutes Objective: to learn about the career path of Dr. Hamrin and how that is reflective of the role of women in U.S.-Asian relations Section Two Before the interview, Dr. Hamrin sent us a resume with information about her education, her different positions in her career, her publications, and links to various videos of her speaking. Unfortunately, the videos didn’t work but the rest of the information was very valuable in our preparation. We had already read excerpts from a book that she edited, Salt and Light. We utilized resources she provided us with along with information we found on the internet from researching her, to formulate the questions. We prepared 13 questions. We asked three questions about her early life, which allowed us to understand how her childhood and education helped shape her path. We asked five questions about her career in the State Department and her involvement in human rights and religious freedom. Finally, we asked five questions that asked her to reflect on her career and the role of women in US-Asian relations. Of all these questions, we emailed her five that we felt were comprehensive of the entire set: - Because we are interested in women in US-Asian relations, we wondered if being a woman affected your career path. - What led you to choose to focus on religion and how does it impact your career? - What influenced you to pursue a career as a speaker and consultant? - What, in your opinion, is one of the biggest issues concerning religious freedom? - What, in your opinion, is one of the biggest issues concerning human rights? How does it affect women in China? Section Three For our interview, we definitely got very complete answers to our questions from Dr. Hamrin. She took time to think about her answers and gave very thorough responses. For the most part, because of how complete her answers were, the interview was mixed structured. We were able to ask questions about her opinion or experiences in situations that we didn’t anticipate being able to ask ahead of time but for much of the interview, it wasn’t necessary. She answered the questions to the fullest so we didn’t need to ask many follow up questions. In fact, sometimes her answers allowed us to skip other questions. Our questions about the actual subject matter of her career were probing. They were questions that asked her to tie her career to current affairs and allowed us to gain much more knowledge about the subjects. Our team was very balanced in our work. Asha initiated contact with Dr. Hamrin, Arianny contacted her about the questions we would ask, and Shamarie sent her a follow up thank you email. During the interview, we all asked questions in a rotation. Although Asha was designated to take notes, we all jotted down comments we found interesting or important so we could get a more accurate portrayal of our opinions during the interview. Dr. Hamrin didn’t outright give us resources but she did mention various people that were involved in her career and the State Department as a whole. Section Four Through the interview, we were able to understand Dr. Hamrin’s career path and how that ties in with the role women play in U.S.-Asian relations. Dr. Hamrin’s interest in Asia, particularly China, started with her father who was in the Pacific during World War II. The souvenirs from his time overseas and the Pearl Buck books that lined his bookshelves peaked her curiosity. She didn’t realize how much this impacted her until recently when she began writing memoirs for her own children. Her motivation to go to college came from her mother. As a widow, her mother constantly said that it would be Dr. Hamrin’s brother that would go to college so that he could support the family. This instilled a sense of determination in her to have a higher education. She knew that she wanted to go to college out of state and was able to do so by attending St. Olaf College with a scholarship from her church. This also allowed her to study abroad in Thailand and Hong Kong. At the time the Red Guards were rioting in Macao, and even though she couldn't go there due to the chaos of the rioting, she was able to witness in person the Cultural Revolution in Macau. These experiences sparked an interest in her wanting to understand the Cultural Revolution in China as a whole. While doing her Masters at Yale, she focused on China and learned the Chinese language. She got married after college; she and her husband moved to Wisconsin after she finished her Masters. She struggled to find teaching jobs and instead applied to be a typist at an Asian American Studies office. She ended up walking out of the office with a four-year fellowship to study in China. She earned her Ph.D. in comparative world history from the University of Wisconsin. Even though it was atypical for anyone, let alone a woman, to go for a doctorate, her husband encouraged her to pursue the degree. Fortunately, it opened up many doors for her. She entered the State Department during the feminist movement. During this time, there was a raising of social consciousness and her coworkers were aware of her stance and involvement as a feminist. When we asked her if being a woman affected how she was treated, she said that it didn’t. Because her coworkers knew she was a feminist, they occasionally make jokes and tried to be politically correct. Her doctorate allowed her to be taken seriously; her high level of education outweighed her gender. Dr. Hamrin became involved with human rights and religious freedom because the State Department was required to do an annual human rights analysis on every country around the world. Specialists had to figure out the human rights platform of China, and one of the categories of the report was religious freedom. At the time they didn't know much about the situation and it was difficult to get information. For the most part people saw China as having a secular society. There was so little information about religion. People believed there were underground Christians, but that only ethnic minorities were religious believers. Using her own contacts with missionaries, Dr. Hamrin was able to start working on preparing information. It is important to note that not only is she a career woman but she is also a family woman. She has a husband, Bob, who she said is very supportive, and at one point was the only supporter she had in pursuing higher education and achieving a high level career. She also has three children, and when she needed to focus more on her family, her and Bob both stepped up. He started working at home, and she had the State Department create the first part time job in history for her-- even though she was still doing the work of three people. Back then, it was the norm for women to stay at home and care for the family instead of pursuing a career, but she did both because she had that support from her husband and children. During this time, in 1986, Dr. Hamrin was approached by Ruth Graham (the wife of the famous evangelist Billy Graham) to help them prepare for their first trip to China. The Grahams wanted to be conscious and respectful of Chinese culture so they wanted an expert involved in their plans. She worked with them from 1986 to 1988 by doing research on the history of the Church in China, helping them prepare, and travelling with them to China. She continued to do more reporting and analysis on religion in China for the annual reports. She said that she was considered an expert on China and its religious issues because she was the only one who cared. Under the Clinton Administration, the White House asked her to brief Congress on religion in China and work on a plan to send a group of religious leaders to China during the big debate of what was the most favored nation. The Clinton Administration wanted to find ways of dealing with the issue of religious freedom in China so it took the initiative of trying to get business people to pay more attention, sending religious delegations to China, and requiring more reporting on religious freedom. Dr. Hamrin mentioned that it was evident that the U.S. government was just touching the surface of understanding foreign relations and foreign policy with China, at the time when China opened up to a market economy. The U.S. didn't understand certain things because the government didn’t have the resources to thoroughly investigate and study certain changes. All the U.S. learned and had time to focus on was what was given from the foreign ministries and high-level leaders. She made it her mission to know more so she took a 2-year sabbatical to study the Five Year Plan in China. This was the start of her being the one to take the initiative to not just speculate and reach for the surface of what was going on is China, but to dig deeper. Dr. Hamrin said that around the late ‘90s and early 2000s the U.S. government would ask the Chinese about religious freedom but ignore the big underlying issues. The U.S. would focus on major world religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, but ignore the issue of religious freedom for the 90% of Han Chinese who were being persecuted. This was an issue for her and when there was a big internal debate in the government about whether or not a persecuted cult religion in China should be defended, she argued that as long as its practices are safe and legal, it should be defended just like any other religion. In the early 2000s, Dr. Hamrin was eligible for early retirement from the State Department and decided to take it. She was tired of politics and wanted to work for herself. She now works from home as a senior associate for the Global China Center in Virginia. After covering her influences and career path, we transitioned to more reflective questions about the current state of China and where it could be headed. There is great controversy among experts on religious freedom in China. There are some that would agree that things are getting better and some who wouldn’t. According to Dr. Hamrin, the growth of religion is China has forced the government to recognize religious freedom, but it doesn’t know how to fix the issue. Dr. Hamrin mentioned that people in China on the ground are choosing more and more to ignore governmental restrictions and policies, and are living by their commitments and faith. She said that this gradually will force chance de facto and the government will have to respond to the issue. She also mentioned that this way in which the people has stood up for themselves, has forced a lot of change in China already, including economic change, and the government has had to change policies to keep up with what's happening. The interrelationships among different sectors (i.e., economic, political, cultural, social) have impacted foreign relations and domestic change in China. Dr. Hamrin mentioned that the basic freedoms in China need help, but the freedom of association is one of greatest concerns. She said that China’s governmental structure is still Marxist-Leninist although the economy is Capitalist. So, in theory equality reigns but this is not the case in practice. The Party dominates key decision making, though the leadership at the top is having a power struggle that isn't getting resolved. She said that Freedom of Association has been growing for non-governmental organizations, but the party still has strong control over these organizations by authorizing those that work closely with the party, and delegitimizing those that don't. We ended the interview with asking Dr. Hamrin for advice she could give to us or anyone who wants to pursue a career similar to hers. She told us to find our calling, find our niche in a field, and pursue it. She particularly emphasized not letting anyone talk us out of our interests because even if it might not seem viable or traditional now, what we want to do might be the norm in ten years. She told us that perseverance and passion are crucial for a successful and happy career. Section Five Overall, there were many parts of the interview that we found useful, both for this project and as a personal takeaway. Hearing about her career path was definitely useful. It gave us a clearer picture of how women in government can be involved in foreign relations and how being specialized opened doors for her. It was interesting to see how sticking with a particular area of interest can be incredibly helpful. When she first started out, she struggled to get a teaching job. But because of her education and her focus on religious issues, she was able to go farther than she imagined. It was also great learning about how much the State Department changed in the years she was working there, and how she became a part of that change. Her interest in China was something that ultimately benefitted not only her but the State Department as well. We also found the fact that she noticed a bias occurring when people discussed religious freedom in China and worked towards rectifying it meaningful. In the interview, she stated that she wanted to work towards religious freedom for all, not only her religion and the fact she recognized the fact that minority religious groups indicated a lot about the type of person she is and why she choose to focus on religious freedom. Dr. Hamrin’s advice to us was particularly useful. She told us to find our unique calling, and focus on that. It’s not often that you get to sit down with someone that’s made it in her field and ask for help. It’s an opportunity that all three of us valued. Students often hear advice to chase their dreams but it never seems realistic. The way Dr. Hamrin phrased it made having a career in something you’re passionate about seem doable. In general, we would’ve liked to hear more about Dr. Hamrin’s work now with the Global China Center and exactly what that entails. Learning more about how her previous experience affects her work now would’ve been very interesting. In fact, learning more in depth about the various stages of her career would’ve been useful. The purpose of our interview was to learn about her career path so it wasn’t feasible for us to go into depth when her career started in the ‘70s. After listening to the presentations of other groups we would have also liked to learn more about current projects that she is involved with. Although many of the women in other groups stated that their work didn’t focus specifically on women, their role in current projects was essential and would have been a great way to map Dr. Hamrin’s career trajectory. All of the projects that we got to see were fascinating; it was great to see all these different perspectives on women in U.S.-Asian relations. It was especially interesting to see when other interviewees touched on subjects similar to things Dr. Hamrin told us. One of these ideas was the fact that Dr. Hamrin felt like being a woman didn’t negatively affect her career path. She gave us a specific answer to the reason for this, that she was well educated. However, the groups that interviewed Jennifer Chou and Dr. Latha Chandran mentioned that their interviewees felt the same way. If we had known beforehand that many people had this experience, we would’ve asked her more about how she thinks being a woman affects other careers. Another idea that was similar to something Dr. Hamrin said, and something we’ve touched on in class, was mentioned by Margarethe Adams. She said that female ethnographers have a different perspective than male ethnographers. She would get the perspective of other females especially those who have families whereas single male ethnographers would get the perspectives of other single men in the area. This was a sentiment that Dr. Hamrin also expressed when she talked about her work in the State Department. She said that the men would approach situations with solely a political perspective while she would look more at social issues. Hearing about Dimon Liu was exciting because she is also involved in human rights in China. This was an interesting juxtaposition because Dimon Liu worked directly with the issue while Dr. Hamrin worked to rectify these issues from a different position. It’s important to consider that when Dimon Liu was trying to get the government’s attention about China, it refused to help as opposed to when Dr. Hamrin was in the State Department and they especially focused on it. It highlights the need for different positions of power and ability when it comes to righting wrongs. We could talk about all the women we learned about for pages. They all offered such interesting perspectives and work in such powerful ways to try to change the world. It’s easy to get something out of each presentation and be able to relate to all these women. The biggest takeaway from this project is that there are so many ways of being involved as long as you don’t let anything hold you back. Whether or not they felt like they were being faced with injustice, these women fought to break that glass ceiling and get to where they want to be. They showed us that there are many different ways to be involved with foreign relations and that being a woman in this is a very specific, important niche. (1)
• Benjamin Tucker Professor Christoff AAS/POL 307 5 May 2018 Final Report Section One Person Interviewed: Roberta Lipson Title or Position: Chairwoman of United Family Healthcare Date, time and length of interview: April 23, 2018, 9:08 PM, 37:34 minutes Objective: To obtain a full life’s history of the interviewee, with a particular focus on the interviewee’s career. We sought to learn how gain insight into Roberta’s companies, as well as her own personal contributions to relations between Asia and the United States. Section Two Our pre-interview research consisted of a Google search which led us to 3 past interviews conducted with Roberta (The Beijinger, SupChina, and CityWeekend). These interviews were read and analyzed to garner any information pertinent to our project. A filmed interview conducted by CCTV was also watched not only to obtain more information, but to gain a feel for how Roberta spoke and responded to questioning. We also found information listed on Roberta’s LinkedIn, as well as a page of information regarding Roberta’s professional statistics on Bloomberg’s website such as age (62), location of corporate headquarters (Bethesda, Maryland), educational history (Brandeis and Columbia), and titles and board memberships. We created a list of potential questions for Roberta, making sure not to ask too many questions that she had previously answered in other interviews. This list was sent via email to Roberta’s assistant for review. Questions for Roberta: Early Life: 1. When and where were you born? 2. What were your family’s dynamics growing up? Continued Education: 3. How difficult was learning Mandarin/Cantonese as an adult, while simultaneously earning your MBA at Columbia? 4. What was the ratio of men to women in your MBA program? Did notice any discrimination based on your sex or gender while earning your degree? 5. Were you single when you moved China? [Conditional] Did you feel any trepidation moving to a foreign country by yourself (having to live alone/ speak a secondary language)? What was your living situation like before meeting Elyse Beth Silverberg? Challenges in China: 6. Why did the Chinese government initially give the idea of United Family a “poor reception” when you began discussing its inception during the early 90’s (SupChina, 2017)? 7. You’ve said in the past that the only folks who have access to United Family Hospitals are those “who have money and really good private insurance”. How can the Chinese government incentivize talented physicians to choose employment as family practitioners and clinicians in the healthcare tiers normally reserved for the impoverished (SupChina, 2017)? 8. Why is it so difficult to provide adequate modern medicine through a non for profit system? 9. Does United Family Healthcare have any plans to provide services, perhaps through rural clinics, to the less wealthy people of China? 10. Do Chinese government officials still consider healthcare one of their obligations to the people, or has the for profit system become normalized? 11. Have you faced any discrimination based on your sex or gender while working in China? 12. In what ways has the flow of information between the U.S. and China changed over the past 30 years? I know you had previously mentioned in another interview that when you first began importing ultrasound technology, which had become commonplace in the states, medical practitioners in China hadn’t even heard of the device. Has information exchange improved? 13. Does United Family Healthcare provide services to rural migrants? Reflections on Career: 14. Do you have any regrets in your career? 15. Does the future look promising for the healthcare industry in China? 16. Over the course of your career in China, have you encountered a large number of female CEOs? 17. In your opinion, what is the political relationship dynamic between the United States and China? 18. Do you think your work with Chindex and United Family Healthcare has strengthened relations between the U.S. and China? 19. Do you believe your work as an entrepreneur has affected your personal life in any way? [Conditional] Did you have to give up family life to excel in the workplace? 20. What would you say is your primary goal for the future of Chindex and United Family Healthcare? Where do you see the company and yourself in 10 years? 21. How has the hukou system affected your clients/ patients in terms of being able to receive healthcare? 22. As a woman, what was it like being the primary decision maker during business deals with US exporters. [Conditional] Do you feel that you had to change your behavior being surrounded by men? 23. Do have any personal memories of an individual who has been provided services from one of your hospitals? Section Three 1. I think we obtained complete answers to our questions. Roberta was very forthright and candid. The only question that required coaxing was that concerning Roberta’s behavior while in the company of other executives, who by our understanding of her answer, were almost exclusively men. After some deliberation Roberta provided us with another answer that seemed quite honest. 2. Our interview was a mixed format. Our questions were sent to Roberta prior to our conversation, and although we primarily stuck to those questions, we also deviated at times and spoke adlibbed. The tone of the conversation began formally and became friendlier as it progressed. 3. “Why do you think that is?”- This question was in response to a statement Roberta made after describing the challenges of attracting doctors from the public sector to the for-profit model of healthcare. Her answer, while rich with information, did not address this this specifically and need elaboration. “You said at first that it was difficult to attract talent to China; could you elaborate on that? Besides the language barrier, what are some cultural differences that are apparent?”- This probing question was proposed to have Roberta elaborate on her previous answer. 4. Background research was completed by Ben and Ashley. The list of questions was brainstormed by both Ben and Ashley, and typed out by Ben. Contact between Roberta Lipson’s assistant Melissa before the interview was maintained by both Ashley and Ben in order to establish a date and time of interview, as well as to exchange contact information in case the Skype call was disconnected. The transcript of the interview was written by both Ben and Ashley. This report was written and reviewed by Ben. 5. Roberta referenced us to her LinkedIn which contained articles that described the issue of diversity within her company and within healthcare in general. Section Four Ben & Ashley: Hello Roberta! Roberta: Hello! Ben: How are you? Roberta: I’m doing well. Could you explain to me your project before we begin? Ben: Sure. We are conducting with women from all sorts of walks of life. We were assigned you by our instructor Professor Christoff. Roberta: Oh how nice! Ben: She thought that you would be a very interesting person to talk to seeing as you’ve had firsthand experience working in Asia, and we thought it would be a great pick as well. Ashley: Our class is an Asian studies class on women and relations between the U.S. and Asia. Roberta: Ok, great! Good good good. Ben: Could you tell us a little bit about when and where you were born? Roberta: Sure, I was born in 1955, June, in Brooklyn, New York. Ashley: Oh my goodness! Roberta: I lived there until I was five, and then moved to Long Island until university, living in a very homogeneous environment; probably 98% of my public school classmates were upwardly mobile, Jewish, liberal kind of people. Which, probably, fueled my interest in things that were different at the university. Ben: Yeah, we understand you earned a masters in business administration from Columbia. Roberta: Yeah. Ben: And you studied Mandarin or Cantonese while you were earning that degree? Roberta: So I studied Chinese and Asian history undergraduate. Ben: Oh, ok. Roberta: At university I studied Mandarin Chinese, and then went to Taiwan in my junior year to continue my studies, and then came back and went to graduate school at Columbia University straight out of college. And continued a little bit of my Mandarin studies then, but I had a dual finance and marketing major, but my desire was always to use that degree to get to China and do something in China. Ben: In your class, would you say that you were one of the few women who pursued… Roberta: If I remember correctly there was either 35 women or 35% women but I don’t remember what that was. I’m embarrassed to say, I suspect it was more like 35 women. Which is much better than the ratio that I usually find myself in here now when I’m among my peers. Ben: Oh! That was one of our follow up questions for later on, do you mind if we address that now? Roberta: I got to it in advance. Let’s keep going in your order. Ashley: Did you move to China alone? Roberta: I did. When I got out of business school, I was looking for a job in China but couldn’t find it, because I guess it was too early. So I worked for almost 2 years in a pharmaceutical company in Jersey. I worked and then I got job to go to China and work for an American company that was invited to open an office in Beijing; and yes, I was single. Ashley: Oh, I see. Ben: And you met your husband in China? Roberta: I did, ten years later. Ben: Oh, so in the interim you started Chindex, with Elyse Silverberg. How did you begin that operation, how did that come about? Roberta: Well, she had moved to China more or less at the same time, maybe one month before I did, but she was here studying at Peking University. She came from a similar background that I did; she also grew up on Long Island. She studied Chinese in college at SUNY Albany, and she came here to do her Mandarin studies. And she came around looking for a part time job with our company. So, we hired her, and two years later the company had changed its strategy, and we decided to start Chindex. So we met by chance. And actually a Chinese businessman from Hong Kong met her and she actually had been working part time in the office of China business council, and this Hong Kong businessman had met her and their office was also in the Peking hotel “Hey you ought to meet this other Jewish girl from Long Island on the 16th floor!” And that’s how we met. Ben: Would you say she was instrumental in getting the initial ball rolling in terms of starting United Family Healthcare? Because you’ve said in the past that it was very difficult to be taken seriously. Roberta: At that point it wasn’t so difficult to be taken seriously because we were helping Chinese hospitals to import equipment that they desperately needed from the United States. I would say that it was really helpful to have a partner when we started the company and not to be a hundred percent all alone but at least to have one other person that was in it with you. From that perspective she was quite instrumental in that she was willing to take this leap with me. Ben: I’m happy you had that sort of partnership and that you weren’t completely alone in those first few years. In such a foreign environment that must have been very strange. Roberta: Yeah, it was good to have a comrade. In fact, it wasn’t only the first few years but our partnership lasted in some ways until now. She’s retired from operations but she’s still a director on our board. Not too long after that we took in a partner who also retired recently but remains a director. Ben: In terms of privatized healthcare, do you think the Chinese government is moving towards that becoming the norm, or is public access still the normal… Roberta: Yes, the Chinese government has stated that they want private healthcare to play an increasing supplemental role and they’re trying to implement policies in support of that. Now, if you look at just the sheer number of hospitals in China, about 50% of them are private. However, they have only about 20% of the total bed count, and only about 15% or less of the patients. Ben: So the public hospitals are severely overcrowded? Roberta: They’re overcrowded and they’re dominant, yes. So our healthcare system, United Family Healthcare, operates in a little bit of a niche market. We target 10% of the people who can most afford to make choices in healthcare financially. Ashley: What are some of the challenges in providing modern medicine a nonprofit system? Roberta: Through a non-profit system? We’re actually a for profit company, and I guess we can say our biggest challenge is finding talent. For example, administrative talent, because private healthcare is relatively new in China and most of the experienced managers are those we’ve trained over the years. So there’s not a ready pool of hospital management talent. Because in the Chinese public system, generally surgeons take the role of administrators for a couple of years at a time while they’re still doing surgery. So it's not a completely transferable experience from the public sector to the private modern management sector. So we have to import of our talent, and then we have the challenge of “can those people adjust to China if we’re importing them, or do they have language barriers. So that slowly but surely alleviates itself. Private investment in healthcare has become one of the hottest sectors in China. We have a lot of competition of course; people want to hire the people that we’ve trained. There’s the traditional medical world in China, tradition bias towards private healthcare from the academic side. Although United Family has built a reputation that is probably the most reputable, most trusted brand in healthcare in China, still it's still a big decision from doctors to go from public academia to the private system. Ben: Why do you think that is? Roberta: It’s a really long story. Ben: Ok! [laughter] Roberta: It stems from early, unscrupulous players in private healthcare who started out by attracting people to the STD market, saying “we’re going to cure your sexually transmitted diseases” and charging a lot of money and over-treating and over-testing, playing on people’s fears that didn’t want their STDs to be known by government run hospitals. It started out that private healthcare had a really bad reputation that we had to overcome by doing, really, always ALWAYS doing the right thing. Ben: It seems like, from your previous interviews, that you’ve focused on women’s health in particular. It seems like you’ve had some really good stories about… Roberta: In the beginning, women’s health was the easy fit for Chinese women because the actual patient experience was so bad for women in the public hospitals. I have to take a little break, remember what I just said, I need to read something in the paper very quickly. I’m sorry. Ashley: That’s ok! Ben: It’s totally fine. Thank you for your time. [Pause in the interview, Roberta reads briefing and responds to her assistant in Chinese regarding changes that need to be made to a written statement] [Roberta returns] Ben: Hello! You were just telling us how female healthcare was the easiest to target. Roberta: So, since women were having a terrible, terrible experience in the public system, we were showing a completely different, joyous approach to childbirth. And because childbirth is a set package of services, we could tell them one price. They wouldn’t have to worry that it was going to get more expensive. “This is what it's going to cost”. So it was easier for women to make the decision to have that joyous experience. The first people who came to us were movie stars and people who been abroad and seen other ways of healthcare. They were willing and excited to talk about their experience at United Family, because it wasn’t like they were talking about their broken leg or their cancer or something like that. They were talking about something really joyous. They would go the press and talk about their luxurious experience. After their babies were born they would bring their babies to us for pediatric care as they got older and more and different healthcare needs as they got even older. They would continue to come to us, but because they had talked about their childbirth experience, we kind of became known for that. We started as sort of a primary care, community hospital, but because of that we’ve now grown to be a tertiary care hospital system over many cities providing a full range of healthcare services. But because early on most people talked about the childbirths, most people have this impression that we’re primarily a women’s hospital. Ben: That must have been good publicity, like you said. Roberta: Yeah, it was good publicity, but on the other hand we have over the years suffered because of this idea that we’re a women’s hospital; which has changed to a certain extent. People now know more about what we do. Ben: Do you still import technology through Chindex? Roberta: No. Well, Chindex does, but we sold that medical equipment distribution business to Folsom Pharma three years ago so I’m not really involved in it anymore. But the company continues to do what it’s always done. But we import technology for our own use; for our own hospitals. Ben: You said at first that it was difficult to attract talent to China; could you elaborate on that? Besides the language barrier, what are some cultural differences that are apparent? Roberta: Well, not only attracting outside talent but also asking Chinese doctors who had an iron rice bowl in the public system. Asking them to give up the iron rice bowl and come and work for our little teeny startup new idea situation. And same thing, to ask midcareer doctors in the United States, experienced people, to give up their practice that was maybe successful. Because we only want people who are good and successful to give that up and come across and do this experiment in private healthcare in the world’s largest socialist country was daunting! So it was definitely challenging. Ben: Yeah, I can see that. Are there any changes you would have made during your career in terms of talent you’ve chosen, or hospitals you’ve established? Is there anything you would go back and change at this point? Roberta: Yeah, I mean everybody has things that they could have done better in their career, but generally speaking I’m happy, good. Things are good. Ben: Great, that’s good to hear. Ashley: How would you say that your career has affected your family life? Roberta: Wow. Well first of all I’m very lucky that my parents were supportive and encouraging even though I know they hated having me so far away; including now. My 95 year old mother living in Florida doesn’t love the fact that not I’m living close by, so definitely that’s been hard. But my parents have been amazingly supportive troopers. Oh jeez, I didn’t call her this morning. So I try and call my mom every morning, and it means a lot to her. I just realized, with all that’s happened this morning, I missed the call, which is really bad. Ben: We won’t keep you for much longer if you need to call her. Roberta: It’s too late to call her now anyways so don’t worry about it. I’ve worked really hard and long hours, and I was lucky enough to meet my husband after I got to China. He comes from New Jersey. Not from a completely dissimilar background to mine. It was partly really good luck, and partly, he was Elyse’s first cousin. He still is Elyse’s first cousin. He came to visit her on his way on his bicycle trip; not planning to stay in China at all. But then we met and one thing led to another and he never left. I was lucky enough to have him remind me to take time out to smell the flowers and to connect with my family and friends. That’s been great, we’ve had three sons. It was wonderful being in China in a way, because it’s possible to have very good help with child care here. Basically, there were always three women in our house who were the partners of my husband and myself in raising our children and most of my children, generally, I think they feel that they’re fortunate to have almost 4 mothers, rather than 1, and still are very close to the ladies that helped us through their childhood. They are now all in their early 20s. So being able to have a family, and have a career, and build a company I think is something that may have been harder to do “not” in China or in the US where child care is not that readily available and affordable and acceptable. I honestly wasn't able to spend as much time with my kids growing up as a stay at home mom would have, but I think generally speaking they're proud of me, and considering what I’ve done, to be worthwhile; that their sacrifice of not having me home all the time was something that ended up with a good thing and they appreciate that. Ben: Are they finishing university now? Roberta: No, they’re all out of school. Two of them are in China actually now. One is a musician, and one is an editor for an English language magazine in Guangzhou; editor, reporter, writer. Ben: That’s great! Ashley: That’s amazing! Ben: That’s one of the things we’ve talked about in our class, is positions of soft power and how those can affect U.S. Asian relations. I’m sure he has a unique perspective and is able to share that through that paper. Roberta: Yes, and my husband is a journalist as well. He writes for The Economist magazine. We talk about things like that [inaudible] all the time. They, I think, have found it really interesting growing up in China and mostly appreciate it. I think especially when they look at what's going on in the U.S. we’re all kind of happy not to be there. Ben: It’s very scary. Roberta: It is, it is. It’s also really hard because it used to be possible to be proud of the U.S. and its values and now it’s really embarrassing. Ben: What kind of rhetoric are you guys hearing over there about the states? What’s our image like? Roberta: I think that the Chinese see our leadership as a joke. And they see what's happening in the U.S. and think it's an opportunity for China to take its place on the world stage. They kind of thank Trump for giving them the opportunity to fill the vacuum that we’ve caused. Ben: Do you think they’re up to the task, can fulfill that position well? I know that's a difficult question to answer. Roberta: No, I think they have a strategy where we don’t. Ben: That seems to be the case Roberta: China really has an impressive strategy. You know I'm not making a value judgment good or bad but I think it’s hard to say well intentioned… yeah, certainly as well intentioned as the United States was in trying to rule the world. Ben: Can we shrink the conversation back to healthcare? Roberta: Sure! Whatever you’d like. Ben: What's the corporate culture like there? Is it predominantly men? Roberta: Every culture, as I say whenever I’m outside among my peers, it’s very rare that there's more than 10% women on any panel, or in any sort of government led meeting, or industry led meeting, even though healthcare is more predominantly female than other industries. When you get to leadership peers, women are sadly in the minority. That's something we’re proud of. Our company, I think that all of our numbers, if not a majority women in leadership roles, certainly not less than 50%. We are very proud of that. Ashley: Would you say you had to take a firmer stand or over compensate because you’re a woman in a leadership role? Roberta: Internally? Ashley: Well, to everyone else. To your employees, or to business partners. Roberta: No, no. Certainly internally… We’re a firmer stand… Do you mean tougher? Ashley: Yeah. Roberta: No, no. The question is “tougher than what”? I don't try to compensate for the fact that I’m a women by being a tough guy. I think we have a pretty much a consensusdriven leadership approach in our company and I wouldn't change it so I could look more like a man. Ashley: That’s good. Well what about externally? Roberta: Externally? It’s hard to… Maybe sometimes I feel the need, but not really. I kind of feel like my style is what it is and I’m not sure if I consciously compensate or try to be tough. Every once in a while like anybody in a situation would say “Ok, this calls for being a tough guy and you do it”. Ben: Where do you think your company has played a role in terms of U.S./Asian relations. Do you think that you’ve opened up more diplomacy? Do you think you’ve softened relations? Because I remember growing up we didn't hear anything about China, now there's more and more information coming out but it’s still very regulated. Do you think your company has played a role in that? Roberta: I think that increasing understanding through contact on the grass roots level, you know, on this side in China, showing people a really ethical place to work. We have over two thousand employees and over the years maybe we’ve touched ten thousand people’s lives or more. And patients, certainly hundreds of thousands, millions of people. And to show that coming from an international US originated company, I think has been wonderful. I’m a real believer in grass roots, people to people understanding. Being able to play a good role in keeping peace and harmony in the world. Bringing lots of American technology to China has increased Chinese people's appreciation for the level of technology in the US. Which people still respect, even if they don't respect our leadership. Ben: We don’t either. Roberta: I've always been on the board of either of the American Chambers of Commerce in China, AMCHAM, it’s not the U.S. Chamber, it’s AMCHAM China, or U.S. China Business Council, I’m on the board of directors of that. So that’s always encouraging discussion, every year there delegation which I’ve been on before and I will be on this year again, of U.S. business leaders in China that go back to talk to people in Congress about the relationship and our view from on the ground. We’re talking to Chinese government leaders all the time, so yeah I think we do play a role. Ben: What does the future hold for United Healthcare? Do you have any big plans that you want to announce? Roberta: Yea, well from the beginning, from our first hospital our goal was not only to provide healthcare to as many people as we could, good evidence based healthcare in a respectful environment, but also set an example for different models of healthcare that could be reflected in reforms in the Chinese public system. We feel like by example we have done that. We see some of the things we’ve done echoed in the public system including the focus and investment we’ve made in the importance in primary care. Including proactive preventative health rather than just disease intervention. We see all of that being reflected in Chinese policy and we hope to be able to continue doing that. We’re now involved in an insurance partnership that is kind of like a Kaiser HMO, and we think it’s a really good approach to healthcare, and we hope that we’ll get acceptance and grow and build more places where Chinese people can enjoy the wonderful healthcare that United Family provides. Ben: Very well said. Do you have any more questions Ashley? Ashley: She’s pretty much answered all of mine. Roberta: Let me just say one thing. Ben: Yeah, of course! Roberta: So, I understand this is more of like a women’s role in the relationship kind of thing. So, I have some articles on Linkedin that are relevant on diversity. So if you check my Linkedin I think there are some things that are relevant on how we do diversity in our company and the importance of diversity in healthcare. So, I would recommend you have a look there. Ben: We’ll check it out. Thank you very much. Ashley: Thank you so much. Roberta: You’re very welcome. Good luck. Ben: Thank you for the interview! Roberta: Will you share what you write? I don’t need the transcript but I’ll be interested in the product, what you end up writing. Ben: I’ll make sure you get a copy. Roberta: Ok, very good. Thank you! Ben: Thank you for talking to us! Ashley: Thank you for the interview! It seems that Roberta has created a company in which there is equal opportunities for women, both in direct care and administration. Roberta did mention that outside of her own company, and within China, the great majority of CEOs are male; as is the trend in the rest of the world. I think that future interviews should focus on the policies of United Family Healthcare concerning diversity and equality and how those policies might be implemented in other industries; not only in China but in other countries as well. Section Five I found Roberta’s life story incredibly inspirational. Roberta’s initiative and ability to seize the opportunities presented before her allowed her to capitalize on China’s burgeoning private business sector. It was excellent to hear that Roberta did not compensate or compromise her identity as a female in order to succeed in China’s private industries. It was not particularly useful to hear about the publicity United Family Healthcare received during its first years, as this was not pertinent to our research. I would like to learn more about the challenges faced by China’s public healthcare system under hukou policy, as those questions were not addressed during our interview. I found similarities between ours and Beyza and Stephanie’s presentation. Both of our groups faced problems when established a Skype connection, as both of our interviewees’ had privacy blocks placed on their internet access by their respective governments; Roberta’s by the Chinese government and Economy’s by the U.S. government. It was clear from our interview that we can learn quite a lot here in the United States by observing and analyzing what is happening right now in China’s private business sector. Roberta Lipson’s career showcases the relative lack of gender discrimination taking place within China. Roberta’s dedication to learning the language of Mandarin has allowed her to integrate herself in Chinese culture on a level that is inaccessible to non-Mandarin speakers. In this way Roberta has subscribed to one of the tenants of the Art of Social Change as described by Kwame Anthony Appiah. (1)
• Biography Rosemarie Barnett is an Immigration Rights Attorney based in New York, she was born and raised in an affluent family of 7 (3rd sister) in India and she has also spent time living in Taiwan. Her family encountered financial difficulties after the death of her father when she was 10 years old. After his death her mother made an emphasis on investing in an education rather than dowries (which was more typical in India), and was sent to an exclusive boarding school. She later attended a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts through a scholarship, and out of practicality she decided to obtain a Bachelors in Business, but her true dream was to become an Engineer (she was not able to pursue this due to finances and her school). Upon graduating she went on to her MBA, and took a class related to law which sparked her interest in pursuing a career in law. She met her husband while earning her MBA and has had 3 children between earning her MBA and law degree. Since earning her law degree she has worked at an elite law firm for 12-13 years and has since opened up her own practice. Main points/relation to Asian American Women Rosemarie has emphasized the importance of personal happiness and how ultimately life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. She talked to us about the many incidences she has faced due to the fact that she was an Asian American woman from being harrassed on a bus in India as well as being told by a hiring manager that she needs to be taking care of her children, despite being qualified for the position. In Order to overcome these barriers she emphasized that women need to become more assertive and appeal to others about their capabilities and to borrow from the “men’s playbook” 1) 2) Reinforced things we learned in class - Mention relation to Missing 33% video a) One of the questions we asked her was what is some advice you can give to women who want progress and get ahead in their career, and how different is this process in comparison to men. Video we watched in one of the lectures called the b) “Missing 33%”, or why women could not become as successful in their careers in comparison to men. It was revealed that often times mentors would try to build the confidence of women, while they spent time teaching the actual business to men. Because of this difference in mentoring, the gap between men and women was developed. Provided new information - Advice for young people finding their careers - Focus on trying to drown out negative voices, think about what you like to do. The bright side of living in this generation is that there are way more opportunities and options. In her generation the goal was working for a large company with great benefits. She mentioned internet business, bloggers and things that are unconventional, embrace the freedom and the opportunities that are available now. Introduce clip: a) How do you progress in your career/get ahead (as a woman) in India or the U.S.? i) Are the rules of “progressing” up the ladder different for men and women? Step 1: Pre-Interview Research ● Once Professor Christoff told us which prominent Asian-American woman we’d be researching, we started with a Google search on Rosemarie, which led us to her LinkedIn profile and her professional website. Her LinkedIn provided us with background information like where she attended school, and her previous jobs at large law firms, which is where she started out. Her website led us to more up-to-date information on her current law firm that she runs, and the various cases that she has covered in the short five years since opening her own firm. Step 2: Preparing Questions ● Once we had a rough basis of Rosemarie’s life and work, we drafted questions that would give us more insight on her life growing up in India because the Internet did not tell us much about that, as well as some thought-provoking career-related questions like things the things she did to jump start her career and what kind of difficulties she has faced along the way because she is an Asian American woman. Step 3: The Interview ● We were very fortunate that the person we were interviewing was a great speaker. Whenever we would ask a question, even something basic like “Where did you attend school in India?” she would often go on personal anecdotes and give us even more insight than we had asked for, which was very helpful. She told us a lot about gender biases in India, and the challenges women face in today’s society to be taken seriously or just as seriously as their male counterparts. An example of a time where we used active listening was when she told us the story of how she came to be a lawyer, and we referenced parts of that story when asking a follow-up question on what she would have done differently on her path to success. In regards to verbal cues, the only noticeable changes in her tone was when she talked about her father’s death and the impact it had on her family (which is understandable because it’s obviously a heavy topic). Her body language throughout the interview was very relaxed, she kind of spoke to us like we were her kids asking for advice (because her kids are around our age) and because she was comfortable, we were also comfortable throughout the conversation. (1)
• Christopher Gomez, Michael Munson, Seth Williams AAS 307 - Final Paper Section 1: Person interviewed: Clarissa Burt Interviewee’s title or position: Associate Professor of Arabic Language, Literature and Culture at the United States Naval Academy Date, time and length of interview: November 10th, 7:00 pm, 45 minutes Your objective in conducting the interview: To learn about the career and goals of Associate Professor, Clarissa Burt Section 2: Description of the pre-interview research (What did you find out prior to the interview about the person and/or place with which she is affiliated? How did you prepare for the interview?) List your interview questions. For our pre-interview research, we decided to Google our interviewee. The person that we found online was an actress and model. Before conducting any further research, we asked Professor Christoff if this was indeed the correct woman. It turned out that it was a different woman, so we were fortunate to catch this early on. Christopher conducted most of the communication between our group and Clarissa Burt, including initially contacting her about the interview, scheduling a time for the interview, and getting information from Clarissa. We were also given information by our professor as a part of our research. We learned facts such as Clarissa being a professor at the US Naval Academy, her living in the Arabic world for over 10 years in a 20 year span, and about her interest in Arabic culture and literature. It was from this information that we were able to construct questions as a group for the interview. The group discussed and proposed each question, and organized them in an order that we found appropriate in regards to a chronological perspective. Each member had a printed out list of the questions we intended to ask Clarissa during the interview. These are some of the questions that we asked: What interested you into studying Arabic? What is it about Arabic literature that makes it stand out to you (as opposed to other types of literatures)? Do you plan to return to the Arabic world? What interested into becoming a professor? What kinds of responses have you gotten from your students? What is a current project of yours? Section 3: Answer these questions: 1. Did you get complete answers to your questions? Explain 2. Was your interview structured, unstructured, or mixed? Explain 3. What probing questions did you use? Explain 4. Explain your team approach. That is, who did what? 5. Did the interviewee give you any documents or references to articles to read, or did she mention other people for you to talk to (or research)? Explain Throughout the interview, Clarissa gave us vastly complete and elaborative answers to our questions. In fact, she would often answer the next couple of questions we had set up before we could even ask them. It made sense that would answer the next questions that we had, as our list of questions was what we found to be chronological. For every question asked, she left us well informed on that specific topic and mentioned only information that was relevant to that topic. For example, when asked about what interested her into Arabic, she included every important point leading up to her ultimate decision, including what she was studying previously and what interested her in general. We consider that our interview was mixed, leaning more towards a structured format. Our group planned to follow the list of questions we had printed out, but at the same time, ask probing questions when appropriate in order to engage in somewhat of a “small talk” conversation. An example of a probing question that we used was when she told us about what interested her in Arabic literature, she mentioned the beauties specific to it. We asked her what exactly it was about the literature that made it so special, and sure enough she gave us a descriptive and immersive answer. She explained that she was hooked on the works of ancient Arabics like nomadic pastoralists and traders who lived such unique lives, and even by the ways young Arabs use literature as a means of establishing themselves and calling for change. Christopher conducted the communication between the group and Clarissa. From there the group worked together to construct our questions. Some notes were taken during the interview, but we also tried to focus on the conversations we were having with our interviewee, as we understood that we could take advantage of the interview being recorded. Michael was our group’s moderator during the interview, that is, he started us off and ended the event. All members participated in asking the questions that we had prepared as well as questions that were not printed out that came as responses to Clarissa’s answers. Professor Burt did in fact give us some poets to look into. As a part of one of her answers, she mentioned Wadih Saadeh who now lives in Australia and whose work is documented on the Internet (many of which are translated by Professor Burt). At the end of the interview, Clarissa was apologetic in her current project not being womancentered and gave us two women poets that we could also look into online: Iman Mercal and Farah Chammah. Section 4: Insert your interview notes/write up here. Remember to be accurate and concise. Consider what was said, any emerging trends your interviewee mentioned, different interpretations, and recommendations for follow up interviews. Being a teacher in the field of Arabic Literature and Culture at the United States Naval Academy for about 11 or 12 years, Clarissa formally introduced herself as Associate Professor Clarissa Burt. Clarissa was also quick to point out that she had lived in Cairo for about 10 years total over a 20-year span prior to starting at the Naval Academy. It was be hard to hide our growing interest in Clarissa’s motives for learning Arabic (a language mostly concentrated in the Eastern Hemisphere) so we got right to asking her why she learned Arabic in the first place. Clarissa found the question humorous and responded with a story: Clarissa actually did not learn Arabic from the get-go. Clarissa had studied numerous languages in High School (and even some in Middle School) and grew an immense interest for theology and the bible by her early twenties. More specifically, Clarissa concentrated on Latin and German in High School and then concentrated more on Hebrew and Greek as an undergraduate. Because of her peers and teachers tendency to tell Clarissa that Arabic would be too hard to learn without a prior general knowledge of the aforementioned languages, Clarissa saved Arabic for the last (but definitely not least) language that she would learn. Clarissa was immediately hooked on Arabic because of the beauty in the literatures she was encountering while studying the ancient language. Besides, Clarissa could go to the cafes in Cairo and bond with contemporary poets over the Arabic language and, well, what could be better than that!?! Ancient Arabic is different than other literatures and poetry because it shares a great deal with other Semitic languages and ancient poetries. With a Ph.D. in comparative Semitics, Clarissa is extremely knowledgeable on the subject and was able to give us a quick rundown about Arabic. Arabic has its own unique beauties and specificities because of the lifestyles of the Ancient Arabs who were nomadic pastoralists in the desert and people doing trading across the Arabian Peninsula. Clarissa was also naturally fascinated by how Arabic poetry was specifically being used by young people during her time in Egypt. Young people used this poetry to promote change for their generation and in society and displayed a tendency to go against what their parents were doing. Arab culture also has much more powerful poetry than the United States does. Poets would come to town in the Arab world and sell out giant stadiums, much like Beyoncé would do in the United States. The final interesting fact about Arabic was that women’s participation in literate culture and cultural space was much more evident in Egypt than it was in the United States during the late eighties and early nineties. It is important to note that women in Egypt were actually playing a big part in politics, the working world, and literature at the time. They had a voice and a great ability to use the power of literature and poetry in order to preach their own concerns. This has interested Clarissa all throughout the course of her career. After hearing Clarissa rave about her experiences in Cairo and her love for the Arab world, we asked why she came back to the States and become a professor. The simple answer to this question is because Clarissa wanted to make a living doing what she loved and refused to settle for anything less. Clarissa loved studying and teaching the literature and language so much that there was no other option than for her to become a professor. Plus, Clarissa knew that her teaching could potentially open the doors for others to follow her footsteps into the Arab world. Clarissa has been very fortunate to have excellent students at the naval academy and has been tremendously gratified by the students who really take an interest in her work. She has gone on to watch some of her students become excellent in Arabic and this is what keeps her going. She always hopes that some of her students will use their Arabic skills in business, politics, or diplomacy after the navy. Finally, we asked Clarissa to give us some insight on women’s roles in the Arab world. It turns out that there are tremendously different situations regarding women’s roles that differ from country to country, or sometimes even within a single country. Clarissa has watched things change radically in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco throughout her career. The extent of women’s involvement has gone up and down with the fortunes in the Egyptian political system. There is a feminist consciousness in the Arab world, which gets articulated differently from country to country. Since the revolution, Muslim brotherhood backlash and hostility towards women on the streets has been a problem and there continues to be suppression towards women. Just that morning, Clarissa had heard of a death of two sisters who had been thrown off the top of an apartment building. Her assumption that this was a murder goes to show the severity of these issues in the Arab world. On a brighter side, although there are serious problems in the Arab world, women are interested in creating opportunities for other women and in making society better for women and girls. While between 25 and 50 percent of young women cannot find jobs in the Arab world, women created an NGO that had very successfully given them pathways into careers. With some extremist groups that have the desire to push women back to a position of powerlessness and domestic seclusion still present in the Arab world, there are still women and men actively finding ways to participate and raise awareness. Section 5: Your analysis: What aspects of the interview did you find to be particularly meaningful? What aspects were not useful? What more would you like to know? What other in-class presentations did you find particularly useful? Explain In my few years studying at Stony Brook University, I have only been assigned one interview, for my freshman seminar class. At first I thought because this task was so tedious that it would not be helpful. I figured that doing an interview was just a filler assignment, just a project to keep us busy and kill time. After interviewing someone in our Stony Brook marine biology department, I learned a lot about the practices at our Stony Brook South Hampton campus, the biologist’s life and findings during her travels. This knowledge gave me great insight on some of the amazing things people are doing around the world. Learning about these experiences from a primary source is an excellent way to figure out more about the world and more about you. After doing my first interview it opened up my mind to new things that I may want to study here at Stony Brook in order to take advantage of my college experience while I am young and still have the chance. The same curiosity that is fulfilled with knowledge by reading books and articles can be achieved during an interview of knowledgeable people. Interviewing professionals has taught me that even if some have not yet gotten the luxury of publishing their life experiences into a book or journal, they still have amazing life changing lessons and experiences that are capable of inspiring those who are willing to listen. This year I was granted the luxury of being able to have a conversation over video chat with Professor Clarissa Burt. Professor Burt is a professor of Arabic studies at US Naval Academy. Her eventful life experiences have brought on her passion for the Arab culture. She spent 10 years living in the city of Cairo in Egypt where she was able to gauge her love for the topic from first-hand experience. She learned the language and grew an everlasting relationship with the Middle East. Within Clarissa’s journey throughout the Middle East, her main attachment grew between her and the art of poetry expressed there. She spoke to us of wonderful poets that inspired her, including Iman Mercal and Farah Chammah to name a few. In her spare time she would enjoy watching these poets live in order to feel the emotions they convey through their work. Professor Burt wishes to be able to spread awareness to all of the unwritten languages that exist in the Arabic world. She wants to be able to eventually develop a written language platform for these languages, so that they may be understood by all who are willing and curious to learn more. Clarissa informed us of her relationship that started her family with a man she met in this Arabic land. She does not say much about this man other than the fact that he is the father of her children. Professor Burt also tells us a little about the backstory of one of her favorite writers Wadih Saadeh. Although that information is interesting I decided to place more focus on her effort to make Arabic poetry more globally recognized. While Clarissa’s works may not directly impact the career trajectories that our group wishes to follow, we found what we learned to be incredibly interesting. We find Clarissa Burt’s life to be an inspiration, and has persuaded us into looking more into Arabic literature. Our group would also like to learn more about women’s roles in the Arabic world, therefore the poets that Clarissa mentioned would be good starting points. The main interview that intrigued me was the group that interviewed Nancy Davis Lewis. Since my group had our own experience interviewing a woman whose main purpose was to implement change, this one caught my eye because her purpose was similar. Though Clarissa Burt’s goal was to implement change with language, Nancy Lewis thought that women should be agents of change. Nancy Davis Lewis a director of research at “East West Society”. Some of her main points that she preached is that she believes women to be more caring for the environment and that women should be the main leaders in the development of society. She thinks that the voice of women being heard is important in going forward. (1)
• Denisse Ceballos, Ayodele Ajibade POL/AAS 307 SECTION ONE Person Interviewed: Madelyn Ross Interviewee’s title or position: Madelyn Ross current position is Director of Hopkins-Nanjing Center Washington D.C. and Associate Director of John Hopkins School of Advance International Studies (SAIS) China. She has experience in US-China relations including education, economics and government relations. Date: Friday November 18, 2016 Time, and length of interview: 47:57 Via Audio Recording Your objective in conducting this interview: Our objectives for conducting this interview is very similar to the objectives of this course. We wanted to examine the role Madelyn Ross plays in U.S.-Asian relations as a women and what experiences has she had throughout her life that brought her to where she is now. Also, we wanted to know the knowledge of the different ways women have made an impact on the relationships between U.S. and the many nations in Asia. This interview would help us speak with a primary source directly and learn just how U.S- and Asian relations have changed. We also wished to share some of the knowledge we received from our interviewee. SECTION TWO With a little help from Professor Christoff, she told us how Madelyn Ross was one of the first students to arrive in China from America once President Carter normalized relations. Afterwards, we decided to google our interviewee. The first thing that came up was her LinkedIn page. From there, we found out the basics of her life. Madelyn Ross went to Princeton University in obtaining a BA in East Asian Studies. Also, she went to Columbia University in the City of New York to obtain her MA in International Affairs. It was intriguing to see how she went to Fudan University where she earned a certificate in modern Chinese literature. Subsequently, we looked at her experience and were captivated by them all. Firstly, she was an Editor-in-Chief of the China Business Review and Executive Director of the China Business Forum. We were astonished how she went to the business field since the page didn’t even mention her earning that degree. Secondly, she was an Editor in Washington Journal of Modern China, Director of China initiatives and China Coordinator and the Director of Global Consortium before her current position. We knew that her passion was to create dialogues and friendships that will help illuminate China to America and America to China. From all these experiences, we were able to construct questions for the interview. While we were creating the questions to ask her, we decided to organize in regards to a chronological perspective. We broke it into three parts; Childhood, Education, and Career Path/Reflections. We sent Madelyn a couple of questions prior to the interview to make her feel more prepared and comfortable. Also, it was to give her a sense of the direction we were going. The questions we sent her are listed below: Childhood 1. Is there any significant event or family member in your childhood that sparked your interest in China? 2. How would you describe U.S. and Asian relations when you were our age? Education and Studies in China 1. Was Asian studies your initial major in your undergrad? (Did you change majors?) 2. What did the normalization of U.S.-China relations mean to you? Career Path and Reflections 1. How would you describe your responsibilities as Director of Hopkins-Nanjing Center Washington Office? 2. Could you give us an example of when you fought for a certain cause and how did you feel about the situation and outcome? While we sent her these questions, we prepared more because we wanted to be ready and show her how engrossed we were in her life. The questions listed below are what we made to ask her and didn’t send it to her: Childhood 1. What college did you go to? 2. Did you have any experiences that influenced your interest in Asian studies? (We didn’t ask this because she answered that question while we were talking) 3. Could you tell us about your education path before college? (We didn’t ask this because she answered that question while we were talking) Education and Studies in China 1. Was Asian Studies your initial major in your undergrad? 2. Being an American in China; Pros? Cons? Misconceptions? (if you could give us any example) 3. Were there any difficulties or challenges with language? Was it easy to communicate or were people not accepting? Any challenges you faced in China? 4. What graduate school did she go to? 5. Did you study economics in China? 6. Seeing how you study economics, in your opinion what is your biggest issues concerning the economy in China? (Past and Present) 7. How does it affect women in China? Career Path and Reflections 1. How would you describe your responsibilities as director for SAIS China? 2. Who would you consider your role model in sense to women in general, in Asia and/or US? 3. What advice would you give someone who is pursuing your field of study? SECTION THREE Did you get complete answers to your questions? Yes. majority of Madelyn Ross’s answers were packed with background information that gave us the big picture. Yet, constantly, after all was said she would conclude her statement with a clear answer to our question. Some questions that we hoped to get more information from some specific questions but instead were given a general answer. Instead of moving on, we would ask the question again hoping to get an opposing idea. This mainly occurred during the second part of the interview when we wanted to know about her experiences in China. Was your interview structured, unstructured, or mixed? Our interview was a mix of structured and unstructured. We split the interview into three parts concerning Madelyn Ross’s life experiences and her opinions about certain topics pertaining to women and U.S.-Asian relations, especially China, relations. There was a slight order that we wanted to follow, with the first segment revolving around her childhood, the second segment about her education and her studies in China, and third segment which focused on her career path and reflections. The first part of the interview consisted of non-structured questions that jumped between asking about the person that influenced her significantly as a child to asking her to describe the relationship between China and the United States. Similarly, the first segment and the second segment of the interview were not in any specific order. Instead, it was very unstructured because some questions asked during this part lead us on a tangent. From any tangent, we would ask follow up questions that were not under our list of questions. What probing questions did you use? The probing questions we a bit difficult to create when we tried sticking to the format given in the PowerPoint provided on Blackboard. This was because it seemed like the probing questions described in the document were centered around first, getting a response from the interviewee and then following up with a probing question. Creating the probing questions became a lot easier after we read the slide notes that better explained this style of questions. We asked her if she had experiences with any misconceptions of the Chinese people that were proven wrong while she was in China. In her answer, she told that she knew that China had been a difficult place to live during the cultural revolution but didn’t know the personal feelings of the people living there. She then explained how she learned more about the sufferings and emotions of the people because of her experience in Fudan University. This question allowed us to get more information about the cultural shock she experienced, saying “I got to Shanghai and it was like going into a time capsule”. Some more probing questions were, how does the economy of China affect women in China and how she felt after fighting for a certain cause. Explain your team approach. That is, who did what? Our team is very dynamic and impromptu. This helps us get out of tough situations quickly but at the same time makes us run into more tough situations that could be eased with better planning. This characteristic affected our approach. From sending Madelyn Ross the very first email to concluding the skype call, our main goal was to keep Madelyn Ross comfortable with us. This is significantly shown in the beginning of our interview where we ask her about her day, aiming to break any “ice” or tenseness between us. The question making responsibility was divided between both of us evenly. For the interview, Denisse oversaw asking the childhood questions while Ayodele oversaw asking the education and her studies in China questions. However, during the interview we decided to take turns asking questions. Did the interviewee give you any documents or references to articles to read, or did she mention other people for you to talk to (or research)? No, she didn’t give us any documents or references to read. However, she did mention Ding Ling’s name while giving us her background information before getting to her point which we greatly appreciated her doing. In the final part of the interview Madelyn Ross made a very admirable statement that we took as great advice. When we asked her about what advice she would give a person pursuing the same field as her, she said, “Having an open mind towards seeing all sides of a problem is important. Go see the world and get to know how other people live. Put in the time to learn the language”. SECTION FOUR Interview Notes: • Ice Breaker o How was your day? Ask about weather o Introduce ourselves and tell her about our majors o Told her our undergraduate year Childhood • High school student around the 1970sà graduate in 1975 • 15 years old when President Nixon went to China o (Huge impression and her smiling) • Loves to study languageà took French and Spanish in high school • Didn’t learn Mandarin in High School since they didn’t offer it • Grandfather born in Russia influenced her interest in China o Disenchanted with Russia o Became more interested in China version of communism • Only applied to colleges who offered ChineseàPrinceton had the best Chinese program • Perry Link was her first Chinese Professor she ever had o He was a non-Asian person who spoke fluent Chinese o Found him very inspiring • Very interested in American studies (Latin America) o Especially Brazil • Loved learning the language Education and her studies in China • In the summer of her Junior year, she went to Taiwan to study Chinese o Couldn’t go to China since there was no normalized relation between us-china • Senior year, wrote her thesis of Ding Ling o Ding Ling was a writer and novelist during the 1930s. Her article was condemned by Mao Zedong because she questioned the party’s commitment to change popular attitudes towards women. During the late 1950s anti-writer campaign, she was outspoken and was punished where she was sent down to the country side. She disappeared. During the 1970s, Madelyn became interested in her writing. She even wrote her thesis paper on her. She reemerged by 1979. • In the middle of her senior year, President Carter normalized relations with China. January 1979 • Applied for Princeton’s fellowship called Sachs Scholarship because she wanted to go to China o The scholarship is only given to one graduating senior o She won it • She met Ding Ling while she was in China o Sounded very excited • • • • • • • • • • • • • Culture shock: o airport small, very dark. Going back to time capsule. Not many cars; only old Russian cars. Very few lights. Bicycle everywhere. Big eye opener She was one of the first people on the front line when she visited China People in China were warm and welcoming o People who weren’t living in cities were afraid of foreigners due to the Culture Revolution o Many people who didn’t speak Mandarin outside of the city o Having foreign friends could land you in jail Denisse’s phone rang (should have put it in silent) Between August 1979 to August 1980: the economy in china was finally starting to open to the west. She wanted to understand how the economy work, how international trade and international business worked. She wanted to be part of the US-China economic opening. Her phone rang which made Denisse more comfortable When she graduated from Columbia, she went to Hong Kong for one year to work in the Bank of America doing economic research on China especially on Chinese provinces. o Chinese statistic wasn’t reliable back then. She was working with a group providing providential economic so that business people who wanted to go to China learned that if you wanted to trade in light industry places where, what was the agriculture, industry in these different providential economic. She asked if we were taking notes.; we forgot to tell her that we were recording her o She was very understanding and only said it because she was throwing allot of information to us Editor of China Review o She was writing stories about the businesses between US-China Kept her eyes on us when we were asking her questions “Women hold up the sky” She sees women as coming from a long way. They are participating in all levels of professional life. One interesting development is the changing attitudes towards marriage. Women used to focus on marrying well and finding a good husband. Now they are putting their careers first. o Attitude towards divorce was frowned upon in the past but now it is skyrocketing Rushed because she had another commitment to attend. o Asked for a copy of Final o Asked if we have any more questions we can email her and schedule another chat o Super friendly and kind SECTION FIVE Your analysis: What aspects of the interview did you find to be particularly meaningful? What aspects were not useful? What more would you like to know? What other in-class presentations did you find particularly useful? Explain This assignment was, without a doubt, a huge pleasure and joy. Not only were we able to learn about some of the most inspirational and respected women who have an impact on U.S.-Asian relations, this assignment allowed us to experience speaking with one of these women first hand. Interviewing Madelyn Ross opened windows that we wouldn’t have opened through just papers. Her ability to remember the events she mentioned in the interview is very remarkable and was very useful for this assignment. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we had to minimize our interview length and get all that we could with the time we had. She was very cooperative and wonderful to listen to. Professor Christoff mentioned right after our interview asked us if we knew about Madelyn Ross’s YouTube channel. We did not know she had a YouTube channel and even after a quick search we could not find it; something we wished we could have asked Madelyn about in the interview. During the in-class presentations we heard about other women and the group’s processes. Presenters like Julie/Danielle, who spoke about Jennifer Staats, Matt/Alejandra, who spoke about Hodei Sultan, and many others spoke about women involved in the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Jennifer Straats was described to be very optimistic and was, ironically, the one who started the interview with Julie/Danielle. the idea of the interviewer becoming the interviewee was very interesting. Many of the presenters said that ,in their interview, the interviewee described issues coming from age and little to none from gender which greatly surprised all of us. We were surprised because after that was said, the interviewee would answer probing questions with answers that clearly described gender inequality. (1)
• Dr. Latha Chandran was born and raised in Kerala, which is the most southern part of India. At the age of 17, she moved to the United States where an arranged marriage was planned for her. Before traveling to the United States, she pursued a medical degree from the University of Kerala Medical School. When she left India for the United States, she had no idea what was in store for her. She began applying to different residency programs, even while being seven months pregnant. After getting denied several times from the residency program here at Stony Brook, she began applying elsewhere even though it was inconvenient. She eventually got accepted into a residency program at Lincoln Medical Center in New York City. After working there for several months, the chief of residents at Stony Brook eventually realized what she is capable of. She was then offered a position at Stony Brook University Hospital, where she was asked to be chief resident after only being there for three months. Now after thirty years of practicing medicine, she focuses most of her time towards undergraduate medical education, where she stands as the vice dean. Dr. Chandran is outstanding physician, who has overcame tremendous obstacles to get to where she is today. The questions that we asked Dr. Chandran were centered on the obstacles that she faced while being here in the United States. Although she left her family behind in India at a young age to move to the United States, it was never a decision she regretted. When asking why she wanted to pursue a career in medicine, she responded “my mother wanted a child that was a doctor.” This was significant because it demonstrated the relationship between parents and children within different cultures. Dr. Chandra claimed that when she came to the United States she wanted to make a difference. She wanted to change the way that us Americans view Indians and their culture. This in person interview was conducted on November 5th at approximately 3:00. This interview lasted for about 40 minutes. We asked Dr. Chandra prior to our interview if we could audio record her, which was done on both an ipad and an iphone. Audio recording her was extremely beneficial because it gave us the chance to go back and analyze the information that she had provided for us. This interview was conducted like a mixed structured interview. There were both prescribed and flexible questions that were asked and Dr. Chandran provided us with her own opinions. She was extremely enthusiastic and grateful to be interviewed for our final project. Publisher’s note (3/16/2017) The following document is the same as above, but with corrections made by the interviewee, Dr. Latha Chandran, in red. Dr. Latha Chandran was born and raised in Kerala, which is the most southern part of India. She moved to the US after having an arranged (not forced) marriage when she was 25.At the age of 17, she moved to the United States where an arranged marriage was planned for her. Before traveling to the United States, she pursued a medical degree from the University of Kerala Trivandrum Medical CollegeSchool. When she left India for the United States, she had no idea what was in store for her. She began applying to different residency programs, even while being seven months pregnant. After getting denied several times from the residency program here at Stony Brook, she began applying elsewhere even though it was inconvenient. She eventually got accepted into a residency program at Lincoln Medical Center in New York City. Although she was rejected three times from the residency program at Stony Brook, she transferred her in her final year of residency. After working there for several months, the chief of residents at Stony Brook eventually realized what she is capable of. She was then offered a position at Stony Brook University Hospital, where Sshe was asked to be chief resident after only being there for three months. Now after twenty threethirty years of practicing medicine, she focuses most of her time towards undergraduate medical education, where she servetands as the vice dean. Dr. Chandran is an outstanding physician, who has overcoame tremendous obstacles to get to where she is today. The questions that we asked Dr. Chandran were centered on the obstacles that she faced while being here in the United States. Although she left her family behind in India at a young age to move to the United States, it was never a decision she regretted. When asking why she wanted to pursue a career in medicine, she responded “my mother wanted a child that was a doctor.” This was significant because it demonstrated the relationship between parents and children within different cultures. Dr. Chandran claimed that when she came to the United States she wanted to make a difference. She wanted to change the way that us Americans view Indians and their culture. This in person interview was conducted on November 5th at approximately 3:00. This interview lasted for about 40 minutes. We asked Dr. Chandran prior to our interview if we could audio record her, which was done on both an ipad and an iphone. Audio recording her was extremely beneficial because it gave us the chance to go back and analyze the information that she had provided for us. This interview was conducted like a mixed structured interview. There were both prescribed and flexible questions that were asked and Dr. Chandran provided us with her own opinions. She was extremely enthusiastic and grateful to be interviewed for our final project. (1)

86 results