The Fulbright Experience 1946-1986 (review)

234 SAIS REVIEW Not only did the government fail the Chinese people, it failed Cheng personally , and Meiping's mysterious death cut the only substantial tie Cheng had retained with China. The government's obstruction of justice and inability to admit mistakes, especially regarding Meiping's death, made Cheng resolve to leave China forever. Life and Death in Shanghai is a moving story of Cheng's detention and rehabilitation. It relates to Western ears what they want to hear: communist China is a paranoid, backward society with corrupt leaders. However, it also leaves questions for the readers: why did the jailers allow Cheng to live, and why did officials allow her to emigrate? Whether or not the readers agree with Cheng, her narrative is thought provoking. The book is a good introduction to Chinese politics for the amateur and a valuable source for the professional. Certainly, the strongest souvenir of the book is a desire to meet the survivor, Nien Cheng. The Fulbright Experience 1946-1986. Edited by Arthur Power Dudden and Russell R. Dynes. Foreword by J. William Fulbright. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, Inc., 1987. 314 pp. $29.95/cloth. Reviewed by Claudia Franco Hijuelos, M.A. candidate, SAIS. More than forty years agoJ. William Fulbright, a freshman Democratic senator from Arkansas, introduced a bill to authorize the utilization of funds to finance a new project of international education and cultural exchange. It was intended to challenge the United States to invest "its talent and material wealth in a new way," as the lawmaker put it, through international education. This book consists of a collection ofessays by fifty authors about their professional and academic experiences abroad and by foreigners who came to the United States as grantees of the program that has since been identified with its initiator. Their personal testimonies, most of which appear as anecdotes, are intended to give a firsthand account of what these people consider to be the "Fulbright experience." One may qualify the book's title, however, by pointing to the fact that by the spring of 1985, although there was a ratio of one American student to every two foreigners involved in the exchanges, the book contains only eight essays by foreign authors about their experiences in the United States. The editors of this book, former Fulbright grantees themselves, have contributed a comprehensive introduction tracing the development of the Fulbright program, and its relations with participating foreign governments and U.S. government organizations, including the U.S. Information Agency. Essays are grouped in such sections as "Transforming Careers" and "Educating America." Such divisions are rather arbitrary, since they tend to editorialize material that the reader would otherwise label, and the contents of the various essays often overlap. Furthermore, the editors gratuitously warn against "biased judgments" by the authors, "which is not surprising given the disparate backgrounds and educational specializations of the essayists as well as the range of countries and BOOK REVIEWS 235 disciplines they represent." In these exercises of individual recollection and appraisal of personal experiences, which form the majority of the essays included, the ultimate contribution may precisely be their subjectivity, even though the perspective they reflect might not coincide with the reader's or, in this case, the editors'. The essays are written in different styles and moods, ranging from the very informal and witty to the more scholarly and profound, but invariably the reader will find that they are rich in thoughts about the value of international education , of which the authors' vocations and careers are proof. AsJeanneJ. Smoot writes in her essay, "Ambassador Unaware," the kind of learning that is gained may not always be hung on a wall — international education goes beyond mere degrees into intangibles, such as the ability to empathize with foreign cultures and to examine one's own culture at arm's length. Although Robin Winks, in his "A Tissue of Clichés," argues that thoughts about the transcendence of the Fulbright experience "invariably consist of a string of clichés," his thoughts are nevertheless quite insightful and otherwise universal, for among the things he learned was that "the scholar's greatest skill was applying the seat of the pants to a chair...