International Pioneering – China Segment 5 by Priscilla Hofert
CHINA, SEGMENT 5: ZHANG CAI LI AND JUDY, by Priscilla Hofert, submitted October 2022
When we first came to Tianjin to live, Professor Zhang Cai Li came to our home and asked if I would come to her graduate students’ lab to have conversation with her students to help them improve their English.
I gladly came, usually once a week, to the lab and met her students there. Since I had read some of the students’ papers, I knew they were very grateful for the sacrifices their parents had
made for them. So when I asked them to tell me about someone they greatly admired I thought they would mention their parents. I was shocked when the first student said they admired Mao Zi Tung. I quickly recovered from my inward shock and realized that these students had been given the Communist view of him.
Through the many years we stayed in Tianjin, Zhang Cai Li would invite us to dinner every semester or so. She was a delightful woman, always cheerful and full of laughter. She had an active mind, keeping up with research in her field. Her students did their research and together they went to conferences and presented their findings.
Judy was a very bright and cheerful student who, while she was a PHD student, invited us to have dinner with her family. She accompanied us to her family’s place in a nearby suburb. It was an occasion for her family to meet foreigners. So her whole family, as well as a niece and nephew, all came to meet us. The food was exceedingly good.
Zhang Cai Li, me, and Maureen in first row, Judy, Iris, and Michael in second row 
Judy, her sisters, mom, dad, and nephew 
Judy’s whole family, including her sisters’ husbands and a niece and nephew