E12/ Dori Yang: China Re-opening, Memories of Open Hearts, Open Gates and Open Minds (May 14, 2021)
A personal journey from the Mid-West to the Far East
Princeton in Asia and SAIS alumna, Dori Yang, is a former Businessweek correspondent in Asia and author of When the Red Gates Opened. Recalling her front row seat to China’s economic liberalization, she tells us how the foundations for today’s China were really laid down in the 1980s, a decade before Tiananmen Square. As the China story made the front pages of Western media, Dori was experiencing a merger of East and West in her personal life. A prolific author, her most widely read book is Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (1997), co-authored with Howard Schultz, chairman and CEO of Starbucks.
E3 / Kevin Kwan: Crazy Rich Asians and La Bella Vita (November 20, 2020)
Kevin Kwan was born in Singapore as the youngest of three boys into an established Chinese Singaporean family. His great-grandfather, Oh Sian Guan, was a founding director of Singapore’s oldest bank, the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation. He later immigrated to the US and became a prolific author, including Crazy Rich Asians, the international bestselling novel that has been translated into more than 40 languages. For several weeks in 2018, the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy commanded the top three positions of the New York Times bestseller list – an almost unprecedented single-author trifecta, and the film adaptation became Hollywood’s highest grossing romantic comedy in over a decade. Kevin’s latest novel, Sex & Vanity, was published in June 2020 and became an instant New York Times bestseller. In 2018, Kevin was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Photograph by Raen Badua