This fall, with support from the Centers’ Ellen Krosney Shockro International Hospitality Fund, WCW became temporary home to two distinguished Asian scholars.
Professor Tao Jie of the English department of Peking University in Beijing has a particular interest in the work of the Centers after serving
as the founding deputy director of the Center for Research on Women at her university in China. A skilled translator and interpreter for English-speaking writers and authors, Professor Tao Jie has been an essential liaison between women’s studies programs in the West and those in Asia. She has co-hosted numerous international conferences and produced and edited many writings, including a book on women in China, which will be published in 2003 by the Feminist Press of New York. The Chinese Writers’ Union awarded her a prestigious prize for her translation of William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary. While at WCW, she presented a luncheon seminar entitled “A Chinese Scholar, Translator, and Interpreter Looks at Research on Women in China and Discusses Her Work on Women in the Fiction of William Faulkner.”
Raquel David-Ching of Manila has a long history with the National S.E.E.D. Project on Inclusive Curriculum, co-directed by Peggy McIntosh and Emily Style. Following S.E.E.D. training in the summer of 1991, Raquel returned to the International School of Manila where she led S.E.E.D. seminars for her colleagues. Having been encouraged to create S.E.E.D. seminars to fit the context of her own school and culture, she found that the lenses of gender, race, class, and nation gave her a new awareness of injustice in the school salary structure, whereby Filipino teachers and staff were paid far less than their American counterparts. After a six-year struggle to amend this situation, Raquel and the teachers’ union, of which she was president, took their case to court. In 2000, the Supreme Court of the Philippines ruled in favor of pay equity. Another international school in the Philippines immediately complied with the ruling, and now various other international institutions are looking at their policies. David-Ching is a staff member of National S.E.E.D., and comes to the U.S. twice a year to attend the winter planning meeting and the summer New S.E.E.D. Leaders Week. While at the Centers she is writing about diversity programs in the U.S., including Anytown, S.E.E.D., and the Institute for Cross-Cultural Communication in Portland, Oregon.
