Podcast appearances and mentions of lenora chu

WJCE or Women Journalist COVID-19 Experiences is brought to you by The Eastern Echo in partnership with Dr. You Li. This interview is a part of a series of interviews conducted by Dr. You Li for her project documenting women journalists' COVID-19 experiences through oral history interviews. This episode is one of ten interviews editing for listening enjoyment. To listen to the full conversation as well as many more check out the Eastern Michigan University archive website at https://commons.emich.edu/cmwj/index.html Narration: Alex Kreps Interviewer: Dr. You Li Guest: Lenora Chu Edited by: Alex Kreps

In 1996, when Peter Hessler first went to China to teach, almost all of his students were first-generation college students. Most came from large rural families, and their parents, subsistence farmers, could offer little guidance as their children entered a new world. By 2019, when Mr. Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China, as well as a new kind of student – an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious cohort of parents.     China's education system offers a means of examining the country's past, present, and future.  At a time when anti-Chinese rhetoric in America has grown intense, Other Rivers is a work of empathy that shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up.   In an interview conducted on August 6, 2024, Peter Hessler, in conversation with Lenora Chu, looks at Chinese education as a way to understand both China and the United States.  About the speakers: https://www.ncuscr.org/video/peter-hessler-other-rivers/  Follow Peter Hessler on X: @peterhessler  Follow Lenora Chu on X: @LenoraChu  Subscribe to the National Committee on YouTube for video of this interview. Follow us on Twitter (@ncuscr) and Instagram (@ncuscr).

«La exigencia educativa es la gran amiga del alumnado desfavorecido». La frase es de Nuno Crato, exministro portugués. Berta y Daniel conocen de cerca el sistema educativo, ella como periodista de ABC y él como empresario en Smartick. elDiario publicaba hace unas semanas este preocupante reportaje. Periodismo de datos con las enormes (¡inmorales!) diferencias por nivel de renta. La escuela progresista, con su discurso en contra de la exigencia y el mérito, está fallando a las familias humildes. Kapital es posible gracias a sus colaboradores: Idealista/data acaba de lanzar una plataforma para encontrar las mejores oportunidades de inversión residencial, informándote de la rentabilidad del inmueble o su alquiler estimado. Accede al análisis económico de todos los anuncios publicados en Idealista, con datos como la estimación del coste de reforma, los gastos asociados o el flujo de caja. En el buscador encontrarás además información de la zona, como la demanda de alquiler y el perfil de sus habitantes. Puedes ver cómo funciona la plataforma con la muestra en abierto de La Rioja. Idealista/data pone a tu disposición toda la información ordenada y en tiempo real del sector inmobiliario para que tomes la mejor decisión con los mejores datos. Utiliza el código Kapital_invest en el registro para recibir un descuento del 40%. Índice: 1.30. Los preocupantes resultados de PISA. 6.55. Profesores con faltas de ortografía. 20.07. ¿Por qué vemos mal separar por niveles? 27.20. Deberíamos fomentar la competición. 31.41. El éxito de la escuela Michaela. 42.36. La exigencia es el ascensor social. 48.33. «You juke the stats, and majors become colonels». 53.09. Los padres helicóptero. 1.14.51. Implementar reglas en sociedad. 1.21.05. Cómo enseñar las matemáticas. 1.29.37. Homeschooling, huir del sistema. 1.41.47. Sigo viéndolo negro. Apuntes: La movilidad social. Atlas. PISA éramos los padres. Berta González de la Vega. Michaela: el éxito de un colegio de la vieja escuela. Berta González de la Vega. Un mar de mediocridad. Xavier Sala i Martín. La escuela no es un parque de atracciones. Gregorio Luri. Todo se puede entrenar. Toni Nadal. The smartest kids in the world. Amanda Ripley. Little soldiers. Lenora Chu. Why Chinese mothers are superior. Amy Chua. School is not enough. Simon Sarris.

The globe may be warming, but that doesn't stop summer from coming to an end. So, in honor of the long weekend which symbolizes the transition from summer vacation to back-to-school, we dug up a couple gems from The Gist's archives. First up, to honor the return to school, we are replaying Mike's 2017 interview with Lenora Chu, author of Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, which tells the story of her American family's rude awakening to Chinese education practices. When Chu moved her family to Shanghai, she eagerly enrolled her young son into an elite Chinese public school. She expected academic rigor and an emphasis on work ethic. But she was surprised to find authoritarian teachers and desperate, obsequious parents. Then, to honor the long weekend, an encouragement to watch some 80s movies this weekend in the form of Mike's 2016 interview with Hadley Freeman, author of Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies (and Why We Don't Learn Them From Movies Anymore). Produced by Joel Patterson and Corey Wara  Email us at thegist@mikepesca.com  To advertise on the show: https://advertisecast.com/TheGist  Subscribe to our ad-free and/or PescaPlus versions of The Gist: https://subscribe.mikepesca.com/  Follow Mike's Substack: Pesca Profundities | Mike Pesca | Substack  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reporting on China is challenging and important. Assignment China tells the stories of some of the American journalists who have covered China from the time of the civil war of the 1940s through the COVID-19 pandemic. Former China correspondent Mike Chinoy assembles personal accounts from eminent journalists who share their stories of reporting on historic moments such as President Richard Nixon's groundbreaking visit in 1972, China's opening up to the outside world and its emergence as a global superpower, and the crackdowns in Tiananmen Square and Xinjiang. They describe the challenges of covering a complex society and offer insight into eight decades of tumultuous political, economic, and social change. In an interview conducted on March 22, 2023, Mike Chinoy and Lenora Chu discuss the people who have covered China for American media and how they have shaped American understanding of China. 0:00-3:30 background  3:30-10:11  truth vs. fiction 10:11-18:09 pre- and post- Mao era media relations 18:09-31:43 Journalism in the Deng era, Tiananmen Square 31:43- How have journalism and narratives changed? About the speakers: https://www.ncuscr.org/event/american-correspondents-in-china/ Read the transcript for this podcast Follow Mike Chinoy on Twitter: @mikechinoy Follow Lenora Chu on Twitter: @LenoraChu About the speakersSubscribe to the National Committee on YouTube for video of this interview. Follow us on Twitter (@ncuscr) and Instagram (@ncuscr).

Lenora Chu turned a story on the nuances of new conscription policies in Northern Europe into a look at balance and responsibility – at governments working to deliver what their societies need, and at the right time. Hosted by Samantha Laine Perfas.

Lenora Chu turned a story on the nuances of new conscription policies in Northern Europe into a look at balance and responsibility – at governments working to deliver what their societies need, and at the right time. Hosted by Samantha Laine Perfas.

Journalist and author Lenora Chu and senior associate consultant at The Bridgespan Group Willie Thompson discuss how their exchange experiences have shaped their views of, and enabled them to speak effectively about, China.

In this episode, we host Ruth Poulsen, Director of Curriculum and Assessment at the International School of Beijing and author of a recent article in The American Educator entitled "What's the Line between Culture Shock and Racism?" Ruth is a long-term ex-pat, having spent much of her childhood and adult life in various countries in the Middle East and Asia. In the interview, Ruth shares her cross-cultural insights gained from her years working with teachers and students living abroad and offers some strategies for coping with cultural shock, cultural misunderstandings, and negative stereotypes. Those new to the podcast might want to check out an earlier episode with Lenora Chu, which examined cross-cultural differences in the Chinese and American education systems.

Tiger mums and dads are infamous in the West, but in China the pressure is ramped up several times higher. From kindergarten to university, exams form the structure of a disciplined and competitive educational environment. It yields result - with even the poorest students in Shanghai scoring higher on maths and reading than the richest in the UK (according to PISA). But does the system value the right things, and what sacrifices are demanded? Cindy Yu speaks to journalist Lenora Chu, author of Little Soldiers (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Soldiers-American-Chinese-Achieve/dp/0349411778) , about her research and experience as a mother in the system. Read Cindy's take on the university entrance exams (gaokao) here (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/china-s-battery-farm-schools) .

Tiger mums and dads are infamous in the West, but in China the pressure is ramped up several times higher. From kindergarten to university, exams form the structure of a disciplined and competitive educational environment. It yields result - with even the poorest students in Shanghai scoring higher on maths and reading than the richest in the UK (according to PISA). But does the system value the right things, and what sacrifices are demanded? I speak to journalist Lenora Chu, author of Little Soldiers, about her research and experience as a mother in the system.Read my take on the university entrance exams (gaokao) here.

Lenora Chu, the Monitor's special correspondent for Europe, is a keen observer of culture and politics. She draws part of that from her background as the U.S.-born grandchild of migrants who fled China during the 1949 Communist revolution. But over 18 years of reporting, she's also found that her personal connections inform her coverage of unfolding events. Ann Scott Tyson, the Monitor's Beijing bureau chief, talks to Lenora about her experience writing for the Monitor and how own history enriches her reporting. In this four-part holiday series, we hear from Monitor reporters about how they find the humanity and compassion behind today's headlines.

Lenora Chu, the Monitor's special correspondent for Europe, is a keen observer of culture and politics. She draws part of that from her background as the U.S.-born grandchild of migrants who fled China during the 1949 Communist revolution. But over 18 years of reporting, she's also found that her personal connections inform her coverage of unfolding events. Ann Scott Tyson, the Monitor's Beijing bureau chief, talks to Lenora about her experience writing for the Monitor and how own history enriches her reporting. In this four-part holiday series, we hear from Monitor reporters about how they find the humanity and compassion behind today's headlines.

Lenora Chu, the Monitor's special correspondent for Europe, is a keen observer of culture and politics. She draws part of that from her background as the U.S.-born grandchild of migrants who fled China during the 1949 Communist revolution. But over 18 years of reporting, she's also found that her personal connections inform her coverage of unfolding events. Ann Scott Tyson, the Monitor's Beijing bureau chief, talks to Lenora about her experience writing for the Monitor and how own history enriches her reporting. In this four-part holiday series, we hear from Monitor reporters about how they find the humanity and compassion behind today's headlines.

From 2018 - Lenora Chu, author of "Little Soldiers: An American Boy, A Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve."

Following on the previous BATG episode about the Chinese education system, in this installment, Jeremiah and David are pleased to continue this discussion with award-winning journalist and author Lenora Chu. Lenora is the author of Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School and the Global Race to Achieve, a melding of memoir and journalism that brings to light the enormous cultural differences between the Chinese and American education systems. In recounting the sometimes traumatic adjustments of her young son to the academic environment of an elite Shanghai elementary school, Chu explores the complex web of social conditioning and parental cooperation that results in the high-achieving “little soldiers” in the Chinese system and weighs the advantages and disadvantages of the East and West educational models. The conversation also touches on the gaokao, the controversial college entrance exam, the supposed “creativity gap” in the Chinese model, and the similarities in the phenomenon of “helicopter parents” in the two cultures. As a commentator, Chu has appeared on NPR, CBS, BBC, and the CBC, and her articles and op-eds have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Cut, and Business Insider, among others. 8.1.2

#2 "Little soldiers" by Lenora Chu, 2018 /Бяцхан цэргүүд/ Хятад гаралтай Америк сэтгүүлч эмэгтэй Шанхай хотын алдартай хятад цэцэрлэгт 3 настай хүүгээ оруулснаар хятад, америкийн боловсролын ялгаа, тэдгээрийн онцлогийн талаар өөрийн биеэр олж мэддэг. Хятадын боловсролын системийн талаар ямарваа нэгэн шинэ зүйлтэй учрах бүртээ тэрийгээ биеэр очиж ажиглалт хийх, багш, боловсролын салбарын эрдэмтэдтэй уулзах, судалгаа, статистикийг лавшруулан судлах зэргээр баяжуулж бичигдсэн ном юм. Хятад, Америкийн боловсролын системээс бид юуг авч, юуг гээх талаар бодож тунгаахад хэрэгтэй болов уу.

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! (Send me your feelings/ideas/opinions about the book to my email - shannon.mabry.vipkid@gmail.com ) --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

For this new podcast series, I will be reading the book "Little Soldiers" by Lenora Chu. I hope you enjoy listening to this book, of which I believe, has the ability to help us all become much better VIPKid teachers! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/VIPKidWorld/message

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/   Little Soldiers is a book by Lenora Chu about the Chinese education system. I haven’t read it. This is a review of Dormin111’s review of Little Soldiers. Dormin describes the “plot”: The author is a second-generation Chinese-American woman, raised by demanding Asian parents. Her parents made her work herself to the bone to get perfect grades in school, practice piano, get into Ivy League schools, etc. She resisted and resented the hell she was forced to go through (though she got into Stanford, so she couldn’t have resisted too hard). Skip a decade. She is grown up, married, and has a three year old child. Her husband (a white guy named Rob) gets a job in China, so they move to Shanghai. She wants their three-year-old son to be bilingual/bicultural, so she enrolls him in Soong Qing Ling, the Harvard of Chinese preschools. The book is about her experiences there and what it taught her about various aspects of Chinese education. Like the lunches: During his first week at Soong Qing Ling, Rainey began complaining to his mom about eating eggs. This puzzled Lenora because as far as she knew, Rainey refused to eat eggs and never did so at home. But somehow he was eating them at school. After much coaxing (three-year-olds aren’t especially articulate), Lenora discovered that Rainey was being force-fed eggs. By his telling, every day at school, Rainey’s teacher would pass hardboiled eggs to all students and order them to eat. When Rainey refused (as he always did), the teacher would grab the egg and shove it in his mouth. When Rainey spit the egg out (as he always did), the teacher would do the same thing. This cycle would repeat 3-5 times with louder yelling from the teacher each time until Rainey surrendered and ate the egg.

What’s wrong with bribing your 3-year-old with a gold star? Or, if you’re in China, it’s a red star. Chinese American journalist Lenora Chu was a new mother when she first moved to Shanghai with her husband, she quickly discovered the authoritarian style of Chinese schooling clashed with her American upbringing in Texas.  How? What did she do? Well, she wrote a book called “Little Soldiers” describing how children are educated and what the education system is designed to accomplish. Check out my interview with Lenora Chu in this episode - “This Chinese American Life- What’s an education for?” Music used: One in a Billion Theme Song by Brad McCarthy Interplanetary Forest by Meydn The Place I Called Home by Julie Maxwell You're Right But I'm Me by Doctor Turtle Meeting the Demon by MMFFF Little Idea by Scott Holmes Stage 1 Level 24 by Monplaisir Estampe Galactus Barbere Epaul Giraffe Ennui by Monplaisir We want to include you in this conversation. To send us your comments or stories, just go to our Facebook page or our website at OneinABillionVoices.org under “Pitch a Story.” Share your thoughts? Pitch me a story? “One in a Billion” is listening to #China, one person at a time. Subscribe to “One in a Billion” below: PRx | iTunes | SoundCloud      

On air October 28th, 2019. Recorded October 19th, 2019. In the debut episode of The Bad Chinese Teacher Podcast, we look at Chinese-American journalist Lenora Chu's book Little Soldiers and how traditional Chinese methods of classroom instruction inform Mandarin language teaching outside of China today. Why do some native-speaker Chinese teachers struggle in Western classroms? Should Western cultures learn to be okay with allowing students to “suffer” while learning? Why does Chinese education emphasize obedience so much? How do we help struggling students “fight through the suck” of learning Chinese, and what does the discipline of practice have to do with it all? Show notes for this episode and all other episodes of the Bad Chinese Teacher Podcast can be found at badchineseteacher.com. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, leave a comment, and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and YouTube. Connect with us on Instagram (@badchineseteacher), Twitter (@badchinesepod), and Facebook. Follow Patricia's personal account on Instagram (@patricialiu), and check out her writing at blog.patricialiu.net. New episodes of The Bad Chinese Teacher Podcast are posted every Monday at 8am Eastern.

At what point is the price of preparing children for academic excellence simply too high? To answer this question, Lenora Chu spent years investigating the Chinese educational system, spurred in no small part by her son’s experiences in a public school in Shanghai. Based on her findings, Lenora subsequently wrote the best-selling and hard-hitting exploration of China’s educational system in a global perspective, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve. On this episode, Lenora discusses the challenges of writing a book with such personal subject matter as well as the main takeaways from her up-close comparisons of the U.S. and Chinese educational systems. Enjoyed this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and follow @taforta on Twitter.

At what point is the price of preparing children for academic excellence simply too high? To answer this question, Lenora Chu spent years investigating the Chinese educational system, spurred in no small part by her son’s experiences in a public school in Shanghai. Based on her findings, Lenora subsequently wrote the best-selling and hard-hitting exploration of China’s educational system in a global perspective, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve. On this episode, Lenora discusses the challenges of writing a book with such personal subject matter as well as the main takeaways from her up-close comparisons of the U.S. and Chinese educational systems. Enjoyed this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and follow @taforta on Twitter.

The state of public education is a constant concern these days -- for families, for legislators, for teachers and experts. Many are questioning methods embraced by American school systems as we see other countries besting us, particularly in math and science.

In this episode we talk to Lenora Chu, author of Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, which tells the story of China’s education system through the perspective of an American mother and journalist. Joined by co-host Ruoping Chen of AmCham Shanghai, we discuss Chu’s experience’s raising her son in the Chinese education system, how this system differs from the U.S., and what she’s learned from her firsthand encounter with Chinese schools.

On The Gist, we can have sympathy for all kinds of people—just not the guy who loses all his money on bitcoin. In the interview, Lenora Chu tells the story of her American family’s rude awakening to Chinese education practices. When Chu moved her family to Shanghai, she eagerly enrolled her young son into an elite Chinese public school. She expected academic rigor and an emphasis on work ethic. But she was surprised to find authoritarian teachers and desperate, obsequious parents. What, if anything, should the U.S. borrow from the Chinese education model? Chu’s book is Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve.   In the Spiel, what the abortion issue did to sort the parties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On The Gist, we can have sympathy for all kinds of people—just not the guy who loses all his money on bitcoin. In the interview, Lenora Chu tells the story of her American family’s rude awakening to Chinese education practices. When Chu moved her family to Shanghai, she eagerly enrolled her young son into an elite Chinese public school. She expected academic rigor and an emphasis on work ethic. But she was surprised to find authoritarian teachers and desperate, obsequious parents. What, if anything, should the U.S. borrow from the Chinese education model? Chu’s book is Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve.   In the Spiel, what the abortion issue did to sort the parties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lenora Chu, an American journalist, decided to send her son to a local public school when she and her family relocated to Shanghai. In this episode of the podcast, she talks with Marty West about what she learned about the Chinese education system, which is also the topic of her new book, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, A Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve. You can read a print interview of Lenora Chu conducted by Michelle Rhee for Education Next here: http://educationnext.org/american-perspective-on-chinese-schooling-lenora-chu-little-soldiers-michelle-rhee

Chinese students from cities like Shanghai are doing extremely well on worldwide standardized tests. What is the Chinese education system doing right? And what can we learn from it?

When American journalist Lenora Chu moved to Shanghai, she faced tough choices about where and how to educate her kindergarten-age son. She chose an elite state-run school down the street, but soon found that its authoritarian teaching style offended many of her sensibilities of how to nurture a child. At the same time, she found herself appreciating the discipline and mathematical ability that the system was instilling in Rainey. She embarked on an investigative mission to answer the question: What price do the Chinese pay to produce their “smart” kids, and what lessons might Western parents and educators learn from this system? Her book, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, tells not just the story of Lenora and Rainey, but also the story of China’s educational system as a whole, backed up by research and interviews with a variety of students, teachers, and experts. Jeremy and Kaiser sat down with Lenora to discuss the Chinese educational system and the range of pros and cons it presents, and to compare that with the dramatically different American system. Recommendations: Jeremy: A Washington Post article titled “To deter North Korea, Japan and South Korea should go nuclear,” written by Bilahari Kausikan, formerly the permanent secretary of Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It’s an interesting and compelling argument, whether or not you agree with it. Lenora: Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, the new book by Ellen Pao, a woman trying to pull back the curtain on gender discrimination in Silicon Valley. Kaiser: He recommends that residents in his town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, vote for Hongbin Gu, a woman running for the Chapel Hill Town Council who is a quantitative psychiatric researcher originally from Shanghai.

In April 1992, China implemented a law that, for the first time, allowed families from other countries to adopt Chinese children. Since then, around 120,000 Chinese have been adopted abroad, with 80,000 finding a home in the United States. But when adoptions started in that first year, only 206 came to America. Rae Winborn is one of that first wave of adoptees, brought over at just nine months old to the U.S. to grow up with a white, middle-class American family in Durango, Colorado. Charlotte Cotter was adopted a few years later at the age of five months in 1995, and grew up with two moms in Newton, Massachusetts. She is now the president of China’s Children International, a support and networking organization run by and for Chinese adoptees around the world, which she co-founded in 2011. Kaiser and Jeremy had a conversation with Rae and Charlotte about their experiences growing up in America, why they both chose to learn Chinese and spend time working in China — which Rae described as the “Chinese-American experience on steroids” — and what it was like when Charlotte made contact with her birth family. Recommendations: Jeremy: Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, an excellent book on education by Lenora Chu. Also, The China Questions: Critical Insights Into a Rising Power, by Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi. Rae: italki, a private tutoring service for language learning where you can get Skype lessons to improve your Chinese. Charlotte: Somewhere Between, a documentary of Chinese adoptees in America by Linda Goldstein Knowlton, and Twinsters, a movie about two Korean twins separated at birth and raised separately in America and France. Kaiser: The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection, a book written by Yingyu Zhang and translated by Christopher G. Rea and Bruce Rusk, which describes the incredibly clever ways in which people cheated one another in 17th-century China.

In a globalized world where millions of people travel between east and west each year and formerly separate cultural zones now overlap, it has never been more important to understand the values and perspectives that inform cross-cultural relations. Two new works of cultural observation and commentary put the differences in education, identity, and politics in the United States and China in perspective: Lenora Chu’s Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, examines the benefits and drawbacks of China’s famously rigorous education system through the lens of her son’s experience attending an elite public school in Shanghai. The book then expands to consider what Americans can learn from Chinese pedagogy, and, more broadly, what the purpose of education is. Gish Jen’s The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, is a wide-ranging investigation of how differing conceptions of the self in Asia and the western world can explain the incongruous expectations and assumptions that can produce awkward or confusing cross-cultural encounters. Gish Jen explores how emphasis on the individual or on context in western and eastern cultures respectively anchor very different understandings of the same events and behavior, which is ultimately reflected in distinctive educational, business, and governing institutions.   On September 18, 2017, both authors joined the National Committee for a conversation about their books, contemporary east-west exchange, and how people on both sides of the cultural divide can better understand and learn from one another, in a conversation moderated by NCUSCR Senior Director for Educational Programs Margot Landman. A former TV correspondent with Thomson Reuters and a contributing writer with CNNMoney.com, Lenora Chu is an award-winning journalist. Her freelance work has appeared in The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, APM’s Marketplace and PRI’s The World. She has lived in Shanghai since 2010. Ms. Chu holds degrees from Stanford University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and she speaks Mandarin. The author of six previous books, both fiction and non-fiction, renowned writer Gish Jen has published short pieces in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals and anthologies. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.  Ms. Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and numerous other awards. An American Academy of Arts and Letters jury granted her a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award. Ms. Jen delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 2012.  She is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  

In a globalized world where millions of people travel between east and west each year and formerly separate cultural zones now overlap, it has never been more important to understand the values and perspectives that inform cross-cultural relations. Two new works of cultural observation and commentary put the differences in education, identity, and politics in the United States and China in perspective: Lenora Chu’s Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, examines the benefits and drawbacks of China’s famously rigorous education system through the lens of her son’s experience attending an elite public school in Shanghai. The book then expands to consider what Americans can learn from Chinese pedagogy, and, more broadly, what the purpose of education is. Gish Jen’s The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, is a wide-ranging investigation of how differing conceptions of the self in Asia and the western world can explain the incongruous expectations and assumptions that can produce awkward or confusing cross-cultural encounters. Gish Jen explores how emphasis on the individual or on context in western and eastern cultures respectively anchor very different understandings of the same events and behavior, which is ultimately reflected in distinctive educational, business, and governing institutions.   On September 18, 2017, both authors joined the National Committee for a conversation about their books, contemporary east-west exchange, and how people on both sides of the cultural divide can better understand and learn from one another, in a conversation moderated by NCUSCR Senior Director for Educational Programs Margot Landman. A former TV correspondent with Thomson Reuters and a contributing writer with CNNMoney.com, Lenora Chu is an award-winning journalist. Her freelance work has appeared in The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, APM’s Marketplace and PRI’s The World. She has lived in Shanghai since 2010. Ms. Chu holds degrees from Stanford University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and she speaks Mandarin. The author of six previous books, both fiction and non-fiction, renowned writer Gish Jen has published short pieces in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals and anthologies. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.  Ms. Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and numerous other awards. An American Academy of Arts and Letters jury granted her a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award. Ms. Jen delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 2012.  She is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  

Chinese-American journalist Lenora Chu arrived in Shanghai in 2010 with her family enrolling her son in a top-performing school. Chu discusses the culture clash she experienced in her book, “Little Soldiers: An American Boy, Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve," and what America could learn from China.

David Rank became the leading diplomat for one of America’s most important embassies during the transition when Iowa governor Terry Branstad formally succeeded former Montana senator Max Baucus as U.S. ambassador to China on May 24, 2017. He soon found himself in a moral quandary: Carry out what he believed to be a deeply misguided order from the president of the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, or resign in protest. He chose the latter, becoming the highest-ranking State Department official to do so — thus far — under the Trump administration. Kaiser met with Dave in his home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to better understand his reaction to Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Dave also discussed the current state of U.S.-China diplomacy, and looked ahead at how the two countries might work together in the future. Recommendations: Dave: The Maine Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, gives an inside look at both the author’s famed advocacy of rugged individualism and the remarkable transformation of 19th-century America due to the Protestant work ethic and the new industrial economy. Kaiser: Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, by Lenora Chu, is set for release in September, but you can pre-order this well-written exploration of China’s educational system now.