I Was Locked In A Cave On My First Trip to China — with Orville Schell

Welcome back!

My first piece on Orville’s experience in the 80s had good reader reception, many thanks to your support! This piece focuses on Orville's story in the 60s and 70s working on China. Orville Schell is the Director of Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society.

In this one, you will hear about Orville’s grandfather who taught medicine in Changsha in late qing; his semi-activist mom; studying with John Fairbank at Harvard; drinking tea with Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei; locked in a cave by CCP officials on his first trip to China; and getting chased out of Indonesia by the Indonesian communists. It shines a light on a not-so-distant era. Not sure about you; I certainly hear many echoes with our time.

Enjoy!

Content

- Changsha, Tahiti, and Taiwan

- First trip to China and a wake-up call

- Living in Taiwan, dreaming of Beijing

- John Fairbank and Edgar Snow

- ‘Ganyang America!’ (‘Crush America’ in Indonesian)

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are bilingual online publications that take you down memory lane of recent history in China and narrate China’s reality through the personal tales of China experts. We present subjective, opinionated, and coloured views of veterans in the field based on their first-hand experience and direct observations. The project grew out of Leo’s research at Hoover Institution where he collects long oral history of China experts living in America. The stories here are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming. 

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Recruitment

I am recruiting a part-time editorial helpers for this Substack. Drop me an email with your CV and a short self-intro at heliu@stanford.edu if you are interested.

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