Student Profile: Susan Jakes '97

Susan Jakes (’97) – Founder and Editor of Chinafile online news magazine, Senior Fellow in Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations

(Excerpts from an address to outgoing Light Fellows on April 29, 2014)

It means so much to me to be back at Yale and to have a chance to talk about the impact the Light Fellowship has had—and continues to have—on my life. So I want to thank the staff and the board of the Richard U. Light Foundation especially Robert Clough and Alan Baubonis for inviting me, and especially Dr. Tim Light without whose vision none of you would be here. And I want to congratulate all of you for your wisdom in pursuing this fellowship, which, chances are, will change your lives in small and enormous ways.

On the train coming up here from Washington this afternoon I ran into the father of one of my first grade classmates, whom I hadn’t seen in many years. And as I was catching him up on my life and explaining why I was headed to New Haven, I was reminded of just how enormously the Light Fellowship has shaped my life. I owe it: not only my ability to speak Chinese, but also many of my closest friends, my career and even my marriage. They all emanate more-or-less directly from the 10 months I spent as a Light Fellow in China in 1997 and 1998.

Like many people of my generation at Yale, I first became interested in China because I had the luck to be dragged into one of Jonathan Spence’s lectures on Chinese history my sophomore year by my smart roommate.

It’s hard in 2014 to imagine or even remember what a different kind of place China held in the world and in the minds of students at the time. This was just five years after the Tiananmen demonstrations and massacre in 1989. China did not, at that moment, feel full of promise. It was seldom talked about as a world power. Its economy was a fraction of the size it is now and there were few if any mainland Chinese students at Yale College. People studied Chinese at Yale, but it wasn’t considered a practical or professionally advantageous thing to do.

I started studying Chinese at Middlebury the summer before my senior year because I thought I might want to study Chinese history at some point. But I didn’t take Chinese at Yale my senior year and had it not been for the Light Fellowship I might not have continued. It was just an interest. It certainly didn’t feel—as I think must to many of you—like a necessary skill or desirable credential. Luckily, on one particularly aimless-feeling day my senior year, I spotted a flyer for a new fellowship that would send Yale undergraduates to Asia for free. There was a meeting a few nights later and I showed up (along with maybe five or six other people.) It sounded kind of cool. But I probably wouldn’t have followed up if a few days later one of my professors hadn’t said, “You know there’s this new fellowship. They have lots of money. Why not apply?” And then, “I mean, what else are you going to do?”

So I signed up for another summer at Middlebury so I’d qualify, filled out a pretty perfunctory application form and that did it. The fall after I graduated I set out for China with a fellowship that not only included tuition at two very strong language programs, but also $40 for a bicycle to get around Beijing and a little more to buy a padded cloth jacket and padded cloth pants for my winter/spring term in the far northeastern city of Harbin.

I learned a lot of Chinese that year—a good thing, since that was the purpose of the fellowship, but many of the other things I learned have been equally if not more important to me in the years since and so I want to linger a bit on those.

The first concerns improvisation.

My life at Yale had been so structured and predictable and China, then maybe a bit more than now, was not. I couldn’t say half of what I wanted to be able to say and so pretty much anything I said was improvised. And every time I left my campus, some stranger or group of strangers would invite me home for dinner because I had apologized in broken Chinese for bumping into them on the subway, or ask me to go bowling with them because I happened to be standing in front them in line at the bank, or beckon me to step into the back of their windowless van parked in a dark alley, because they were curious about foreigners (true story, very nice family and I hung out in the van a lot). A cop in the destitute, coal-dust caked city of Harbin took me driving in his spotless white Mercedes. A Beijing rock musician taught me how to bushwhack onto the Great Wall without buying a ticket. I sat, unwashed after a week of backpacking, beside a flock of neatly pressed provincial officials on the reviewing stand for a parade in a town I had wandered into by mistake. I was paid (in drinks) to visit a local bar each Friday night, a group of rural schoolchildren who had never met a foreigner took my by the hand and led me up a steep wooded mountain to show me their ancestors’ graves.

I think something about the open-endedness of the fellowship, the fact that I wasn’t worried about earning a living or finding a job, that I had a stretch of time free to just learn a language and that I was actively encouraged to view anything I did in that language as part of that endeavor, allowed me to explore, improvise, get into stuff I wasn’t always sure—or even thinking about—how I’d get out of.

I recommend this.

Of course, learn your languages, study. But if you can use the language study as a chance to practice improvising, do it.

A second part of the Fellowship year I treasure—and it’s closely related—is the extent to which it forced me to talk to strangers. Not just strangers in the sense that I’d never met them, but people whose life experiences—the corrupt cop, the school kids on the mountain, the family in the van—were really different from mine. I spent a lot of time that year (and this is in part because it was the first extended period of time I’d spent in a foreign country) learning to get along with strangers and learning to notice or at least to see a little more clearly the way things I’d thought were universal were particular (language training is also great for this) and the way things I’d thought were personal, were universal.

A lot of you have probably noticed—and I just read an article in the New York Times this weekend that suggests there’s now some research to back it up—that your personality is a little different in your learned language than in your mother tongue. In my case, Little Zhai (which was what my teachers in Harbin called me) was just less shy, less afraid get the words wrong or to be the class clown, than her English speaking counterpart and that meant that I, spent a lot of time talking to people my English-speaking self probably would never have approached.

So despite what your parents may have told you, DO TALK TO STRANGERS.

My feeling is that these are lessons that are worthwhile in and of themselves, whether you choose to put them to some specific professional use or not. But in my case they helped shape the work I did in the years after the fellowship.

I came back from my Light Fellowship without any real intention of continuing to spend time in China. I was going to teach middle school history and pottery in the Adirondacks. But the year I was in China, a longtime political prisoner and democracy advocate, Wei Jingsheng, whose essays I had read and found inspiring in my first Chinese history class at Yale, was released to the U.S.—after 19 years in jail. He needed an assistant who could also be his interpreter and a friend recommended me for the job.

Needless to say, I was not an interpreter. Nor had I done any of the other things that became part of my job—managing a foundation, writing op-eds, running interference for an extended exile family, hiring lawyers when my boss landed in traffic court—the same day he was supposed to meet with the German Foreign Minister or, one time, the Dalai Llama. That job, in some ways uniquely, leaned heavily on the roll-with-the-punches improvisation skills I’d learned on my Light Fellowship.

After a year, I moved to Hong Kong to begin work as a reporter for Time magazine, reporting mostly from China. Again, the Chinese language skills opened doors that would never have been open without them. I wasn’t a trained journalist. I hadn’t gone to journalism school. I knew next to nothing about most of the subjects I reported on. Often I would fly to some remote Chinese city without the vaguest idea what I was going to do when I landed. And I spent all day talking to strangers.

After a couple of years I moved to Beijing (where I met my husband—who likes to remind me that he taught himself Chinese, while I had that cushy Light deal with the bicycle and the padded pants) and I stayed there as a correspondent for Time until 2007 when I decided to come back to Yale to study Chinese history as I’d planned all along.

The week after I passed my orals, the phone rang. On the line was someone I’d known since the early days with Wei Jingsheng, asking if I wanted to start a new online publication about China. Did it have a name? I asked? Who was the intended, audience? Who would fund it? Who would contribute? Who would read it? The answer was “well, Susie, you’ll more or less have to make it up as you go along.”

That was the beginning of ChinaFile, the online magazine I now edit. I talk to strangers every day. I improvise every minute—deciding what stories to cover, writing a headline, chasing a grant, and never more so than when I’m parenting my three year old daughter. This is, I should add, an underrated benefit of the Light Fellowship: a year of speaking a foreign language is excellent preparation for taking care of a toddler.

Which is all to say that the Light fellowship enriched my life beyond measure and I am certain it will continue to do so for a long time.

So congratulations to all of you. You are tremendously privileged to have this opportunity. Study hard. Get lost. Talk to strangers. And while you are fortunate enough to be traveling Light, make time to get out of your classrooms and make things up as you go along.