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Dori Yang: When the Red Gates Opened
Published July 25, 2021
Author Dori Jones Yang is a former foreign correspondent in Asia. Dori grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, the daughter of a bookseller. At Princeton, she majored in history but spent most of her waking hours at the college newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. Eager to explore the world, she taught English in Singapore for two years, where she plunged into the study of Chinese. She traveled all over Asia on a shoestring and returned home through Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, six months before the Shah fell. To deepen her understanding of Asia, she earned a master’s at Johns Hopkins in international studies, with a focus on China.
She began her career just as Washington and Beijing established diplomatic relations. BusinessWeek offered her dream job: foreign correspondent in Hong Kong. The youngest of the magazine’s foreign bureau chiefs, she covered the negotiations over Hong Kong’s future, the opening of China, and the Tiananmen Square crisis in Beijing. During eight years there, she met and married a Chinese man, Paul Yang, and they had a daughter, Emily. She tells the full story of those amazing years in her memoir, When the Red Gates Opened, publication date September 22, 2020. Disheartened by the Tiananmen crackdown, she moved to Seattle in 1990, where she covered Northwest companies for Business Week and later worked for U.S. News & World Report, covering Silicon Valley. Recorded May 14, 2021.
Shownotes:
03:05 DY on how her upbringing was very different from the life she later chose to lead.
03:42 DY on how a love for foreign languages led her to an international career.
05:33 DY on having to study Mandarin in Singapore as China was closed to Americans.
07:50 DY on witnessing Deng Xiaoping’s first visit to Washington D.C.
08:47 DY on the excitement in the American business community when the US began to normalize relations with China.
11:01 DY on just how communist life in China was in the 1980s.
13:34 DY on shopping for unmentionables in communist China when her Chinese still wasn’t that good.
16:56 DY on witnessing the birth of private enterprise in China.
20:24 DY on how every aspiring capitalist country needs a hyper-capitalist incubator city like Hong Kong.
22:12 DY on the difference between American and Chinese views on capitalism.
24:08 DY on how Reagan-era capitalism shaped her outlook.
26:41 DY on having repeated front row seats to history.
29:03 DY on how so many observers thought Tiananmen would put an end to the Chinese experiment with capitalism.
31:20 DY on the extremely difficult choices that Deng had to make at Tiananmen.
36:38 DY on what it was like to marry into a Chinese family.
41:37 DY on assertive Chinese women playing against western stereotypes.
45:20 DY on the secret to making cross-cultural marriages work.
50:04 DY on how terrifying it was the break the news of her decision to her parents in Ohio.
54:30 DY on her other publishing projects, both past and upcoming.
1:04:22 DY and JF on the parallels between their lives.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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By The Reorient! Podcast
5
22 ratings
Published July 25, 2021
Author Dori Jones Yang is a former foreign correspondent in Asia. Dori grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, the daughter of a bookseller. At Princeton, she majored in history but spent most of her waking hours at the college newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. Eager to explore the world, she taught English in Singapore for two years, where she plunged into the study of Chinese. She traveled all over Asia on a shoestring and returned home through Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, six months before the Shah fell. To deepen her understanding of Asia, she earned a master’s at Johns Hopkins in international studies, with a focus on China.
She began her career just as Washington and Beijing established diplomatic relations. BusinessWeek offered her dream job: foreign correspondent in Hong Kong. The youngest of the magazine’s foreign bureau chiefs, she covered the negotiations over Hong Kong’s future, the opening of China, and the Tiananmen Square crisis in Beijing. During eight years there, she met and married a Chinese man, Paul Yang, and they had a daughter, Emily. She tells the full story of those amazing years in her memoir, When the Red Gates Opened, publication date September 22, 2020. Disheartened by the Tiananmen crackdown, she moved to Seattle in 1990, where she covered Northwest companies for Business Week and later worked for U.S. News & World Report, covering Silicon Valley. Recorded May 14, 2021.
Shownotes:
03:05 DY on how her upbringing was very different from the life she later chose to lead.
03:42 DY on how a love for foreign languages led her to an international career.
05:33 DY on having to study Mandarin in Singapore as China was closed to Americans.
07:50 DY on witnessing Deng Xiaoping’s first visit to Washington D.C.
08:47 DY on the excitement in the American business community when the US began to normalize relations with China.
11:01 DY on just how communist life in China was in the 1980s.
13:34 DY on shopping for unmentionables in communist China when her Chinese still wasn’t that good.
16:56 DY on witnessing the birth of private enterprise in China.
20:24 DY on how every aspiring capitalist country needs a hyper-capitalist incubator city like Hong Kong.
22:12 DY on the difference between American and Chinese views on capitalism.
24:08 DY on how Reagan-era capitalism shaped her outlook.
26:41 DY on having repeated front row seats to history.
29:03 DY on how so many observers thought Tiananmen would put an end to the Chinese experiment with capitalism.
31:20 DY on the extremely difficult choices that Deng had to make at Tiananmen.
36:38 DY on what it was like to marry into a Chinese family.
41:37 DY on assertive Chinese women playing against western stereotypes.
45:20 DY on the secret to making cross-cultural marriages work.
50:04 DY on how terrifying it was the break the news of her decision to her parents in Ohio.
54:30 DY on her other publishing projects, both past and upcoming.
1:04:22 DY and JF on the parallels between their lives.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.