Far East, Far Out
Princeton-in-Asia celebrates a century of service
by Julie Rawe '97
Do not go back to Yogya." The colonel spoke in a monotone. "Shannon, I repeat, do not go back to Yogya." With smoke still rising from the streets of Jakarta, Shannon Slavin '97 listened to the man from the U.S. embassy in Indonesia, feeling as though she had stumbled into some B-grade action flick.
For Slavin, her classmates Kristen Rainey and Laura Wolf, and two other women Princeton-in-Asia sent to teach in Yogyakarta, 1998 will be remembered as the year Indonesia's economy collapsed and the country exploded into riots, the year the Asian financial crisis finally hit home, and the year P-i-A celebrated a century of service.
What began as a student initiative in 1898, with undergraduates voting
to send one man to work in China, is now a financially independent nonprofit
organization with headquarters on the Princeton campus and a field office
in Singapore. Each year it places some 75 recent graduates in 10 Asian countries.
P-i-A is the oldest and largest of several university-affiliated programs dedicated to promoting understanding between Asians and Americans. Most of P-i-A's 1,200 participants (about a third of whom are graduates of schools other than Princeton) have gone to Asia to teach English as a foreign language. But as the program keeps pace with the changing face of a continent, internships are becoming more specialized and now include teaching computer science in Singapore and promoting ecotourism in Laos. P-i-A is also expanding into underdeveloped regions such as the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and internships with humanitarian organizations are also on the rise.
Now, with the whimpering of Asia's tiger economies, P-i-A is preparing to underwrite more intern salaries as well as considering the possibility of scholarship funds for students at Asian schools who can no longer afford their tuition. "It's incredibly important to be friends during good times and bad times," says the program's executive director, Carrie Gordon. "And the more we're looking at the future, the more we're seeing our roots."
The scholarship proposal has resurfaced almost 50 years after P-i-A first put the idea into practice. In 1949, after the Communist Revolution closed China to foreigners, Princetonians were forced to abandon a half-century of overseas educational work. So they turned their efforts to providing scholarships for Chinese students at Princeton and sending money to universities in Taiwan and South Korea.
Throughout its century of service, P-i-A's dedication to Asia has been punctuated by such moments of high drama and ingenuity. In 1900, the man who started what became P-i-A, Robert Gailey, a member of the graduate class of 1896, ducked past snipers and hid out on a gunboat during the Boxer Rebellion. Once he had safely stashed his wife and 11-month-old baby in Japan, Gailey began planning his return to China.
Some 40 years later, during World War II, when the Japanese shut down the Princeton-affiliated Yenching University in Beijing, students and faculty marched 2,000 miles to "Free China," where Dwight Edwards '04 helped reopen the school in Chengdu.
This spirit of tenacity spans the program's 100-year history, and last year's escape from Indonesia is no exception. Student demonstrations had become common occurrences in Yogyakarta, and the P-i-A interns had grown accustomed to seeing army tanks rolling along with the city traffic.
When the call came to evacuate last May, Slavin had been in Jakarta for a field hockey tournament and found herself stranded without a passport. She decided to follow the colonel's orders -- she did not go back to Yogya. Forgoing the 16-hour journey to pack up and say goodbye, she waited instead for days in the seething capital until her roommates could meet her at the airport. But Slavin did return to Yogya last fall, as a second-year P-i-A intern.
WANDERLUST AND ACTIVISM
In certain ways, P-i-A is not just a program. It's an attitude. Since the early 1990s, P-i-A has been the largest single employer of Princeton's graduating seniors, hiring nearly five percent of each class.
LeeLee Brown '98, who is currently interning in Laos, says she signed up for P-i-A hoping to find something "totally different from all previous experiences." Many have turned to the program in search of the new and exciting, inspiring P-i-A's unofficial motto, "Far East? Far Out!"
By combining wanderlust with a sense of social activism, the grassroots program has attracted a wide array of recent graduates. Many see P-i-A as a steppingstone to a career in Asia, while those with no prior interest in the region see it as taking a break from the career treadmill. Then there are the clueless, the ones whose ambitions remain ill-defined and who are trying to buy themselves more time.
Melanie Kirkpatrick '73 attributes her development of certain "habits of mind" -- "openness to new ideas, an adventurous spirit, and the abiding sense that the world holds many unexplored wonders" -- to the year she spent as a P-i-A fellow teaching English to Japanese businessmen. "Princeton-in-Asia participants have seen an Asia hidden from the views of most Westerners, and have often been the first Americans their Asian colleagues have ever met," Kirkpatrick says. "From the start, it's been clear that the Americans learn as much, if not more, than the Asians with whom they work."
Like many of the program's participants, Kirkpatrick says P-i-A helped launch her career, and as the assistant editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, she gratefully volunteered her weekends to write Princeton-in-Asia: A Century of Service, published last fall in Hong Kong.
Many P-i-A alumni have gone on to medical or law school, and they can also be found doing everything from selling hot tubs in southern California to organizing human rights missions in Hong Kong.
According to Gordon, 60 percent of all Princetonians working in Asia got their start in P-i-A, and former interns now hold leadership positions in international fields ranging from government to banking to education.
NEW FRONTIERS
"People in Asia have this 'Wizard of Oz' idea of Princeton-in-Asia, that it's some all-powerful organization," Gordon says. "They'd be pretty surprised to see what's behind the curtain." She glances around the small cluttered office, renovations in Palmer Hall having pushed P-i-A into temporary digs in a trailer on the asphalt pit behind Dillon Gym.
"You get a hard-working, smart, dedicated kid for really cheap," the director says of arranging new internships. "It's not a hard sell."
With her easy grace and engaging humor, Gordon could probably sell a Pinto to Ralph Nader '55 if she wanted to. The Stanford graduate received her master's degree in international education from Columbia University, and spent five years working in Vietnamese refugee camps in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Since becoming director in 1994, Gordon has steered P-i-A into Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan, and plans to send the program's first intern to Nepal next year. "Our mission is to send people to positions that expose them to Asia," she says. In Japan alone, this exposure ranges from teaching kindergarten in small towns to working with computer programmers in Tokyo.
Over the years, P-i-A has maintained what some have called an "elastic" definition of Asia, which includes several short-lived internships in the Middle East and a brief appearance in Greece. As missionaries flooded into China at the turn of the century, a handful of Princeton graduates headed for Peking to spread the gospel and sow the seeds of democracy. "We had a Cause which gripped us," wrote Richard Ritter '17. "We believed in Jesus Christ and Woodrow Wilson." The Princeton work in Peking gradually shifted its focus from evangelism to education, establishing a business school in 1914 and a public affairs college in 1927. Princetonians also helped found the predecessor of Beijing University, and as the program spread across Asia, the first P-i-A internships in each country usually went to teaching positions. Most of P-i-A's positions still involve teaching -- usually of English -- but now it is branching out into more specialized territories.
"At this point, we're just a giant catcher's mitt," says the program's second-in-command, Daniel Dick (P-i-A Thailand). "People come to us and say, 'Hey, what about this?' and then we go and check it out."
The latest tip-off has led to a new internship scheduled to begin next year at the China Daily, a newspaper in Beijing. During the course of her work at Time-Asia in Hong Kong, Hilary Roxe '97, who joined the magazine's staff last year after starting out as a P-i-A intern, established contacts at the Beijing newspaper and eventually pitched the internship idea to an editor. "It sounds like a job that will come with a lot of frustrations, but whoever takes it will have an insider's view of how newspapers work in China," Roxe says. "Working as a journalist in Asia is a fantastic way to find out about the region. You have no choice but to follow the news and the shifting dynamics between very volatile nations."
P-i-A is preparing to underwrite the cost of language training for specialized internships such as the one at the China Daily, as well as assuming costs directly associated with the region's ongoing economic crisis. Last year, after the Indonesia interns watched their salaries shrink with the devaluation of the rupiah and the onset of rampant inflation, Gordon sent "election gifts" to supplement the teachers' salaries. "We are trying to be very sensitive to the fact that these countries are going through a great deal of pain," Gordon says. "One response is for us to remain committed and to not ask schools to give pay raises."
This fall, the university helped to launch P-i-A's first major fund-raising campaign -- with a goal of raising $2 million for the endowment -- by honoring the program's centennial with a six-figure gift.
"We've never really strong-armed people for money," Gordon says. "We're just very good at getting people to do things for us."
NETWORKING IN THE HIMALAYAS
Last year, one P-i-A intern working in Almaty, Kazakhstan, discovered
just how extensive the Princeton network is after a hundred-mile hike through
the Himalayas in Nepal. Edgar Chen '97 had begun to pick his way down from
13,000 feet when an abdominal cramp set in that would later be diagnosed
as a blocked intestine. As the pain intensified, Chen hitched his gear to
a passing train of pack mules and managed to drag himself back to Kathmandu,
where the U.S. embassy recommended a hospital called the B&B Nursing
Home.
Although Chen's medical insurance included evacuation coverage -- P-i-A strongly recommends it for interns traveling to regions with substandard health care -- the blockage required surgery within 24 hours, which left little time to arrange a medical transport to a hospital in another country. Gordon phoned to ask if Chen felt comfortable having surgery at the B&B. "It's a really modern hospital," he replied, citing a remote-control TV as evidence.
The television appeared courtesy of Robert Gabor '88, vice-consul to the U.S. embassy in Nepal, who thought a healthy dose of The Simpsons might lift Chen's spirits. Gabor also helped sort out insurance forms and plane tickets with Yuko Fukuda '91 (P-i-A Japan), the medical evacuation coordinator in Seattle arranging Chen's post-surgery transport to a hospital in Singapore.
Meanwhile, Sam Patten was the conduit in Kazakhstan, where he had signed on with Chevron after completing his P-i-A internship three years ago. Patten kept everyone in Almaty informed of Chen's condition, including the U.S. ambassador.
Once in Singapore, the bedridden Chen was visited by a half dozen P-i-A interns as well as Jon Wonnell '81 (P-i-A Taiwan), who located a surrogate Singaporean family, the Lams, to care for Chen following his release from the hospital. The Lams were both physicians and had sent their daughters to Princeton; Patricia graduated in 1993, and Katherine is currently a junior.
"People from Princeton, friends and strangers, all came to my assistance in Southeast Asia," Chen says, and admits that prior to this experience he was a bit suspicious of the Princeton old-boy network. Chen says he pictured alumni in "the upper echelons of backroom power, puffing on cigars while controlling world politics from some inner sanctum. Far from a secret society of skulduggery, however, I discovered a helpful and friendly cushion of alumni who came to my rescue after I nearly died in the high Himalayas."
THE ROMANCE FACTOR
P-i-A's centennial book describes the program as "more matrimonial agency than employment agency," and rightly so, because introducing young people to Asia has launched almost as many relationships as careers.
"The romance factor has been a constant," Gordon says, pointing to one "bumper year" when three interns from the Class of 1976 went to Singapore, and all three came back with Chinese spouses. Tom Pyle fell for a local girl and managed to convince her father, who had three wives and 19 children, that the match was a good one. Bruce Von Cannon met his wife years later while working in Taiwan, and Dori Jones Yang ended up sitting next to her future husband on a transpacific flight out of Hong Kong. "At that time the point of P-i-A was to take people who knew nothing about Asia and immerse us in it and get us to love it," Yang says. "All three of us picked careers and spouses based on our love of Asia."
With the advent of coeducation, it was only a matter of time before a couple signed up to intern together or fell for each other overseas. Michael Northrop '81 and Kathy Regan '82 applied for internships in Indonesia in 1982. Within hours of their arrival, the couple sensed there would be disapproval, "so we made up a story about getting married in Hong Kong on the way over," Northrop says.
The couple officially tied the knot a few years later, and the P-i-A application now contains the following warning: "At almost all posts, it is culturally inappropriate and insensitive to have visitors of the opposite sex living with you unless you are married. ... If there is a significant other in the picture, inform us early in the application process."
Many romances have blossomed in Asia, but many have also withered and died. Gordon adds that the program tries to place couples in the same city but at different institutions. "So if they break up, they don't have to see each other every day."
One happy ending involves Marcia Ellis '85 and Bruce Einhorn '87, who met as interns in 1987 at a regional P-i-A conference in Wuhan, China. "Marcia stood out immediately, since she was wearing a scarf around her head, babuschka-style," her husband says. "Turns out that the water supply to her apartment building had died, and she hadn't been able to wash her hair for quite a while!" The couple returned to Wuhan three years ago to visit some of their old haunts, this time taking along their 11-month-old daughter.
P-i-A already boasts a few second-generation families. Chris Meserve '88 and Saya Huddleston went to Asia some 30 years after their fathers, Ham Meserve '59 and Jack Huddleston '60, spent the summer of 1958 in Japan as P-i-A's first postwar interns. The program has also welcomed Bill Volckhausen '59, who served as P-i-A's first fellow in Taiwan, and both of his children, Sharon '91 (P-i-A South Korea) and Alex '93 (P-i-A Singapore). [See related story on page 15.]
EXPONENTIAL EFFECTS
Like many nonprofits, P-i-A is constantly testing just how far it can
stretch a dollar. Last summer, two interns conducted a six-week English
training program for local teachers in Vietnam, paying each of the 20-some
participants the equivalent of two months' salary, and providing year-long
scholarships for 10 students. Total cost: $1,000.
P-i-A has conducted similar workshops in China, with the obvious goal of better teachers, better students, but the program's exponential effects can be more subtle. "My family and all my friends suddenly became more aware of that part of the world," Rob Quinn '88 says of his year in Beijing. He was there during the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and says the experience cemented his interest in the law and human rights. A graduate of Fordham Law School, Quinn is currently organizing a human rights mission to Hong Kong for Fordham's Crowley Program for International Human Rights, founded by Martin Flaherty '81 and Tracy Higgins '86.
Cultural exchange programs such as P-i-A are of critical importance to the human rights movement, Quinn says. "The only way human rights are going to be secure is when people are able to put faces on the map."
P-i-A has been putting faces on the map for over a century, teaching people how to communicate across cultures. The program invites Princetonians to look beyond national borders and has become the embodiment of the university's new credo, "Princeton in the Nation's Service, and in the Service of All Nations." Donald Wallace Carruthers '15 perhaps said it best when reflecting on the years he spent in Peking: "There is a Chinese proverb, 'I live in a small house but my windows look out upon a very large world.' My four years there had much to do with the widening of my own personal world horizons."
Julie Rawe '97 is a freelance writer living in New York City.
World War II marked a turning point for Princetonians in Asia. Following
the Japanese occupation of northern China in 1937, teaching interns would
not be sent overseas for more than 20 years, until two students made their
way to Tokyo in the summer of 1958.
With Communist China closed to foreigners, Ham Meserve '59 and Jack Huddleston '60 set their sights on Japan after taking Professor Robert Butow's Asian history course. Yoshio Osawa '25, president of the Princeton Club of Japan, agreed to arrange a summer program for them in Tokyo as one of several postwar gestures designed to improve Japanese relations with Americans. (Osawa also enrolled his son, Zenro, in the Class of 1957 and invited the Class of 1925 to celebrate its 30th reunion in Tokyo.) Meserve and Huddleston spent six weeks teaching English in Japan, and 40 years later the Osawa internship continues to send students to Tokyo for the summer.
Both men would later choose careers in Asia, with Meserve in banking and Huddleston in business, and P-i-A's first postwar teaching fellow would follow a similar path. As Chinese Communists shelled the off-shore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, Bill Volckhausen '59 headed for Taiwan in the fall of 1959 with a $2,000 life insurance policy in hand to begin teaching at the newly founded Tunghai University. He went on to practice law in Chinatown in New York City and joined the boards of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund and the Asian American Federation.
"My Princeton-in-Asia experience had a strong influence on many of my most important life decisions," Volckhausen says. "Most important was my marriage to Grace Lyu, a Korean-American." Likewise, Huddleston married a Japanese woman and Meserve met his wife in Japanese language school. All three men now boast second-generation P-i-A families. Chris Meserve '88 (P-i-A Indonesia) was the first to follow his father to Asia, followed closely by both of Volckhausen's children, Sharon '91 (P-i-A South Korea) and Alex '93 (P-i-A Singapore). Huddleston, whose daughter Saya (Middlebury '96) went to Japan almost 40 years after his internship, adds that he hopes one of his three grandchildren will join the program, "perhaps in Mongolia."
-- J.R.
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