Getting to know you

But on a sultry summer night seven years later she was lying in a student dormitory in Fudan, homesick, jet-lagged and questioning the wisdom of her decision to be there, realized with a new agreement between Princeton and Fudan.

"My room was right next to the bathroom, the old squat kind with one long trough, in which there would be a whoosh of water coming down every 30 minutes or so to wash everything away. All night long I listened to that sound and counted the flushes like counting sheep."

Timely comfort was provided by Professor Tan Jiazhen, then a vice president of Fudan known today for laying the foundation of genetic research in China. Tan, a California Institute of Technology graduate of the 1930s, took Ross to a small out-of-the-way campus shop selling ice cream.

"That cheered me up a lot," says Ross who, with the beginning of a new semester and the return of students and teachers in September, was finally able to make friends and have fun.

While learning "sword dancing" in her favorite tai chi class, Ross, with a minor in modern dance from Princeton, presided over a little disco training class for Chinese who wanted to learn about something that was all the rage in the US.

In her English conversation class, Ross asked students to hold mock presidential election debates, at a time when Carter was running for re-election against Ronald Reagan, a former governor of California.

Yet nothing could compare with the moment when Ross sat face to face with Ding Ling, one of China's best-known female writers of the 20th century, in the latter's Beijing home in the summer of 1980.

"Ding Ling's writing from the 1940s was the subject of my undergraduate research at Princeton. All the time I thought she was dead-there had been no news about her for some twenty years-until one day in early 1979, before I left for China, my thesis adviser at Princeton gave me an article from a Chinese newspaper saying that she was back in Beijing.