JOHN FISHER ZEIDMAN ’79 MEMORIAL LECTURE
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2026
7:15 P.M.
ROBERT L. SMITH MEETING ROOM
JOHN FISHER ZEIDMAN ’79
WELCOME
BRYAN GARMAN
Head of School
BETSY ZEIDMAN ‘76, P ‘20
Chinese Studies Program Advisory Committee Member
LECTURE
PETER HESSLER
Journalist and Author of River Town
Q&A
CHARLES HUTZLER
Journalist
EXPRESSION OF GRATITUDE
BRYAN GARMAN
Head of School
For more than 40 years, Sidwell Friends has been a thought leader in Chinese Studies, thanks to the John Fisher Zeidman ’79 Chinese Studies Fund, the Nancy Levy Zeidman Gift for Student Experiences, the Dora Chao M.D. Fund for Chinese Studies, the Chinese Studies Program Fund, the Allie S. and Frances W. Freed Foundation Fund for Chinese Studies, the Kugelman Family Fund for the Ida Fisher Zeidman Resource Center, and the Mei Xu Cultural Exchange Fund.
Founded in 1983 in remembrance of John Fisher Zeidman ’79, the Chinese Studies Program enables the Sidwell Friends community to deepen its knowledge of Chinese and Chinese American culture. Students in all divisions at Sidwell Friends explore China through the classroom and co-curricular activities, from exposure to Chinese language in the 4th grade; to Middle School language courses and social studies units; to advanced-level Chinese language and history courses in the Upper School.
Each spring, the Chinese Studies Program brings a distinguished Chinese expert to speak to the School community at the John Fisher Zeidman ‘79 Memorial Lecture.
Thank you for being part of the Sidwell Friends community here today. Your presence is a tribute to John Fisher Zeidman ‘79, to the great work that began more than 40 years ago, and to all the accomplishments still to come. We are grateful for your support.
To make a gift in support of the Chinese Studies Program, please contact Assistant Head of School for Advancement Tara Arras at arrast@sidwell.edu.
JOHN FISHER ZEIDMAN
JOHN FISHER ZEIDMAN
John Zeidman, a 1979 graduate of Sidwell Friends School, was studying at Beijing Normal University in fall 1981 when he contracted viral encephalitis. He was evacuated to the United States, where he died in January 1982. After his death, John’s family and friends established the John Fisher Zeidman ’79 Chinese Studies Fund to perpetuate his belief that Chinese-American relations would thrive if students began to study Chinese language, history, and culture in secondary school. Endowed by this fund, the Chinese Studies Program was inaugurated at Sidwell Friends in 1983. Since its inception, the program has grown significantly and is woven into every division of the School.
PETER HESSLER
JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR OF RIVER TOWN
Peter Hessler is a writer of narrative nonfiction, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of six books. Originally from Columbia, Missouri, he has spent most of his writing life overseas. In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps, which sent him to Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze River. For two years, he taught English and American literature at Fuling Teachers College, an experience that eventually became the subject of his first book, River Town, which was published in 2001. This book was followed by two others about China: Oracle Bones (2006) and Country Driving (2010). Together they comprise Hessler’s “China Trilogy,” covering the decade in which he lived in the country, from 1996 to 2007.
Since 2000, Hessler has been a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2011, Hessler moved with his family to Cairo, where he covered the events of the Egyptian Arab Spring for the magazine. His book about this period in Egypt, The Buried (2019), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, Hessler returned to China, teaching at Sichuan University, in the same region where he had lived two decades earlier. His most recent book, Other Rivers (2024), is about his time in Sichuan.
River Town won the Kiriyama Prize in 2001, and Oracle Bones was a finalist for the National Book Award, in 2006. Hessler won a National Magazine Award for “Instant Cities,” a two-year study of a new factory town in China’s Zhejiang province, which was published in National Geographic magazine in 2007. In 2011, Hessler was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is married to the writer Leslie T. Chang, and they currently live with their twin daughters in southwestern Colorado.
CHINESE STUDIES PROGRAM DONORS
CHINESE STUDIES PROGRAM DONORS
Donors who have made gifts since 1982 that total $5,000 and more to the endowed funds that support the Chinese Studies Program.
Elizabeth Applebaum and Harvey Applebaum
Anonymous
The Atlantic Monthly Group, Inc.
Margaret Bauer and Lane Heard
Ann Winkelman Brown ’55 and Donald Brown*
The Cohen Group
Mary Crawford and David Crawford
Carole-Ann Davies and Grant Davies
Duskin Co., Ltd.
The Edward E. Ford Foundation
The Freed Foundation, Inc.
Sheila Proby Gross and Patrick Gross
Jeanette Heard* and Frank Heard*
Jean Harrison and Earl G. Harrison Jr.*
Helen Sperry Lea Foundation
Himalaya Foundation
JEOPARDY!
Bill and Cindy Kelly
D. Kugelman* and Jane Kugelman*
The Kugelman Foundation, Inc.
Stephanie Lawson* and Eugene Lawson*
Anna Lea* and Sperry Lea*
Natalie Lichenstein and Willard Tom Bret Lowell
Rochelle Mayer and Eric Mayer
Karen Mayers and Daniel Mayers
Elaine Mode and Paul Mode Jr.
Virginia W. Newmyer* and James Newmyer ‘37*
Betty Ann Schneider Ottinger*
Frederick Pelzman*
Vincent Reed
Adele Silver
Mary Speyer and James Speyer
Alexander C. and Tillie S. Speyer Foundation
C.T. Teng*
Mei Su Teng
David Wang
Margaret Willens ’79
Susan Willens
Elsa Walsh and Robert Woodward
Mei Xu and Alessandro Rebucci
Betsy Zeidman ‘76, P ‘20 and David Kleeman ’75
Eugene M. Zeidman*
Nancy Zeidman*and Philip Zeidman
CHINESE STUDIES PROGRAM DONORS
Donors who made a gift between July 1, 2025 and January 9, 2026, to the endowed funds that support the Chinese Studies Program.
Jennifer Zeidman Bloch ’85 and Gene Bloch
Irene Korsak and Emanuel Faust Jr.
Lucia Buchanan Pierce
Betsy Zeidman ‘76, P ‘20
The Chinese Studies Program benefits from the generous support of these endowed funds.
The Dora Chao M.D. Fund for Chinese Studies
The Chinese Studies Program Fund
The Allie S. and Frances W. Freed Foundation Fund for Chinese Studies
The Kugelman Family Fund for the Ida Fisher Zeidman Resource Center
The Mei Xu Cultural Exchange Fund
The John Fisher Zeidman ’79 Chinese Studies Fund
The Nancy Levy Zeidman Gift for Student Experiences
To make a gift in support of the Chinese Studies Program, please contact Assistant Head of School for Advancement
Tara Arras at 202-537-8117. Please notify us immediately of any corrections by emailing schreiberh@sidwell.edu.
CHINESE STUDIES PROGRAM DONORS
1983 John King Fairbank, Professor of Chinese History, Harvard University
1984 John Hersey, Professor of English, Yale University; Author; and 1945 Pulitzer Prize Winner
1985 Jonathan Spence, Professor of History, Yale University
1986 Harrison Salisbury, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist for The New York Times
1987 Arthur Miller, Playwright and Author of Death of a Salesman, 1949 Pulitzer Prize Winner
1988 Han Xu, Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to the United States
1989 Harry Harding, Dean of the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University
1990 Michel Oksenberg, Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan
1991 Perry Link, Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University
1992 Nien Cheng, Author of Life and Death in Shanghai
1993 Oleg Troyanovsky ’37, Soviet Union Ambassador to Japan, the United States, and China
1994 Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalists for The New York Times
1995 Warren Cohen, Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
1996 Nicholas Hope, Director, World Bank’s Operations in China and Mongolia
1997 Mary Gardner Gates, Director, Seattle Art Museum
1998 Andrew Nathan, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University
1999 Li Zhaoxing, Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to the United States
2000 Jonathan Spence, Author and Professor of History, Yale University
To learn more, visit sidwell.edu/chinese-studies.
2001 James Lilley, U.S. Ambassador to Korea (1986–1989) and the People’s Republic of China (1989–1991); and Steven Mufson, Beijing Correspondent for The Washington Post
2002 Maxine Hong Kingston, Chinese American Author
2003 Yang Jiechi, Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to the United States
2004 Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley
2005 Huston Smith, Author and Emeritus Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Syracuse University
2006 Carma Hinton, Filmmaker, and Da Chen, Writer
2007 John Pomfret, Author and Bureau Chief, The Washington Post Los Angeles Bureau
2008 Rob Gifford, Author and Former Beijing Correspondent, National Public Radio
2009 Losang Rabgey, Director and Co-Founder, Machik; Tashi Rabgey, Co-Founder, Machik; Co-Director, Tibet Center at the University of Virginia; and David Germano, University of Virginia
2010 James Fallows, Author and National Correspondent, The Atlantic
2011 Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine
2012 Prasenjit Duara, Professor of Humanities, National University of Singapor; Director, Asia Research Institute and Research in Humanities and Social Sciences
2013 Cheng Li, Director, Research and Senior Fellow, John T. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution
2014 Madeleine K. Albright, 64th U.S. Secretary of State
2015 Evan Osnos, Journalist and Author
2016 Mei Fong, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist and Author
2017 Eric Liu, Author, Educator, and Civic Entrepreneur
2018 Max Sieben Baucus, U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, U.S. Senator from Montana
2019 Charles Hutzler, China Bureau Chief, The Wall Street Journal; Christina Larson, Global Science and Environment Correspondent, Associated Press; and Edward Wong, Diplomatic Correspondent, The New York Times
2021 Erika Lee, Regents Professor, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, and Director of the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota
2022 Gary Locke, Former Governor of Washington State, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and U.S. Ambassador to China
2023 Jessica Chen Weiss, Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies in the Department of Government at Cornell University
2024 Ian Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Writer, Researcher, and Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
2025 Katherine Tai ’92, 19th United States Trade Representative, 2021-2025