“They taught me to read history like a dialogue rather than a script—to question, interpret, and connect. “
Stephanie Kai ’28, 2025 Summer School in Shanghai Program Participant
December 15, 2025
When I signed up for this program, I had a small identity crisis: how could I, a Chinese person, know so little about Chinese history? Growing up, my family bounced between Boston, Hong Kong, New York, and mainland China. My history classes felt like half-told stories, sometimes glorified, sometimes sanitized, always incomplete.
That changed when I took “The United States and China, Opium War to Present.” For the first time, I studied China not only through domestic textbooks but
also through Western interpretations. I remember reading materials that compared different views of intellectuals in Chinese history; it felt like watching two entirely different films about the same story.
The other course, ” Global Food: The Case of China,” was equally eye-opening. I’ll never forget the lecture on Chinese American cuisine. General Tso’s chicken, once a dish I’d ordered half-jokingly at Panda Express, suddenly became a story of migration, adaptation, and resilience. Food, I realized, is a living archive. Every dumpling or stir-fried noodle dish carries traces of history, borders, and identity.
These moments changed how I look at media studies, my own field. History showed me that censorship, propaganda, and selective storytelling aren’t new they’ve always been with us. Reading about imperial edicts reminded me of today’s digital filters, algorithms, and the narratives they reinforce. The parallels were uncanny.
In the end, these courses didn’t just fill gaps in my knowledge. They taught me to read history like a dialogue rather than a script—to question, interpret, and connect. In discovering China again, I discovered new ways of seeing the world, and myself, more clearly.
To learn more about the Harvard Summer School Program in Shanghai, click here.