Movie producer Janet Yang '79 describes herself as a "cultural ambassador." Indeed, she's spent her career explaining the East to the West and vice versa. On campus this fall for the "Year of China" series, she described reading galleys of Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club, about the fraught relationships among a group of Chinese immigrant women and their Americanized daughters. "I thought, 'Oh my God, somebody knows my life,'" Yang said.

Frank Mullin