Alumni Spotlight

At left, Pauline (center) is welcomed home from her year at SYA France by her mom, sister Lena FR’87, and brother Michael — the beginning of stories that would travel far beyond that moment. At right, she visits with her French mom, Nicole Pruvost, one of SYA’s longest-serving host parents, during a return visit to the Pech Merle Caves last year — a reminder that the art of being human lives in the stories we carry, the people who shape us and the connections that endure across time and place.

The Enduring Power of Story 

Pauline Chen FR’82
SYA France  |  The Loomis Chaffee School

If artificial intelligence can aggregate information in seconds, generate language on demand and predict what comes next with startling precision, what then is our true (human) superpower?

Pauline would remind us that it is not speed. It is not scale. It is not even knowledge.

It is story.

And just as important — it is the willingness to listen.

In an age captivated by algorithms, Pauline’s life and work call us back to something older, deeper and profoundly human. A surgeon, author and lifelong student of mortality, she has stood at bedsides where no data set can substitute for presence. Her memoir, Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality, is not simply a book about medicine or end-of-life care; it is a lesson in listening — to patients, to families, to the quiet truths that surface when someone feels fully seen. It reminds us that to practice medicine, at its best, is to practice humanity.

When Pauline reflected on prehistoric cave paintings at her opening convocation talk at Loomis Chaffee, reprinted in the Loomis Chaffee Magazine article “Behind Every Brush Stroke,” she returned to a discovery that began much earlier — during her time as a student at SYA France, when she first encountered the ancient paintings of the Pech Merle Caves in Cabrerets.

Discovered just decades before Pauline and her classmates visited, the caves stand as a powerful reminder of how deeply rooted the human impulse to tell and receive stories truly is. Long before machines could compute, humans told stories on limestone walls. They listened around fires. They offered attention. To enter a cave shaped by ancient hands and then emerge into the living rhythms of modern France is to feel that same continuum of human connection — one that stretches from prehistoric artists to students discovering the world beyond their own.

At SYA, we see this every day. When students step into another culture, another language, another family’s dinner table, they are invited into stories not their own. They learn that fluency is not only about vocabulary — it is about patience. About observing. About listening to the meaning beneath words. They learn to tell their own stories with humility and authenticity, and to receive others’ stories with care.

In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, studying abroad strengthens what cannot be automated: the capacity for empathy and the courage to connect human-to-human. Pauline’s journey — from SYA student to surgeon, writer and teacher — is a testament to the enduring power of these skills.

Being human is not a liability in the modern age.

It is our greatest gift.

 

 

 

 

When Wikitongues Co-founder Daniel Bögre Udell ES’08 visited SYA Spain this fall to speak with current students about his work, it felt like the perfect moment to revisit his story — first published in 2019 — and see how his mission to preserve the world’s languages has evolved.

According to some linguistic estimates, there are close to 3,000 endangered languages in the world, and every two weeks, one of them goes extinct. While social media and the internet have hastened the spread of English, Mandarin and other dominant languages, Daniel and the team at Wikitongues believe that these same tools can rescue and revitalize threatened languages — when deployed by native speakers and their communities.

“Our current situation is no accident of history,” says Daniel. “Throughout the 20th century and today, forced language assimilation was a common policy around the world. In Canada and the U.S., Indigenous children were taken from their homes and punished in boarding schools for speaking their native tongues. Welsh and Irish children were flogged in Britain. Until 2003, it was commonplace for public schools in Mexico to ban Indigenous students from speaking their languages. The list goes on. But today, the tide is turning.”

“We are here to help protect and grow living languages and to sustain the communities that speak them.” — Daniel Bögre Udell ES’08

When this story was first published in 2019, Wikitongues had documented more than 400 languages with the help of 1,500 volunteers. Today, the organization has grown into a global network of over 800 languages documented and over 65 communities actively revitalizing their tongues with the help of Language Revitalization Fellows (learn more).

Daniel and his team have expanded Wikitongues’ role beyond archival work. Their Language Revitalization Fellowship provides microgrants, mentorship, and training to grassroots activists who are breathing new life into endangered languages. “Saving a language is the work of a community,” Daniel says. “It requires a lifetime or more. We can’t do that work for them, but we can make sure they have the tools and access to sustain it.”

Recent fellows have developed educational materials in Yucatec Maya; launched storytelling projects for Southern Quechua (Bolivia), Scots (UK), Wymysorys (Poland) and Dagbani (Ghana); and built digital dictionaries and keyboards for under-documented languages of West Africa. The organization has also collaborated with the Wikimedia movement to increase visibility of Indigenous and minority languages through the “Wiki Loves Mother Tongue” campaign, which celebrates linguistic diversity across Wikipedia, Wikidata and other platforms.

While Wikitongues continues to rely heavily on volunteers, the nonprofit has grown its advisory board, launched open-source toolkits for oral history recording and is working towards a sustainable funding model. The mission remains the same: equalize access to language reclamation and ensure that every person has the right to their cultural sovereignty.

Daniel traces the roots of his passion back to a blend of early family influence and his year at SYA Spain. He grew up with some exposure to one of his heritage languages — Yiddish — an experience that planted a quiet, subconscious seed of curiosity. That seed became a clear and deliberate interest during his time at SYA, where he discovered both a love for languages and the politics that shape them. “After SYA, I firmly believe that most people who think they are ‘bad’ at languages just haven’t had the opportunity to study one constructively,” he says.

Through his history class with Álvaro Ávila de la Torre, SYA Spain’s history, art and political science teacher, he discovered Catalan and decided to study both Spanish and Catalan simultaneously. “It was very important to me to establish a life in Zaragoza,” he recalls. “I was close to my host family and made lots of Spanish friends, so I had plenty of people to practice with. For the first time, I saw how people politicize language and how it relates to identity and bias.”

That early curiosity set him on a path from the Hotchkiss School (Conn.) to Barcelona, where he volunteered for the Republican Left of Catalonia, a pro-independence party advocating for linguistic rights. Later, at The New School, he met fellow language enthusiast Frederico Andrade, and together they launched Wikitongues in 2014 with a vision of making language preservation open, participatory and global.

More than a decade later, the organization has become a cornerstone of the global movement to protect endangered languages — bridging academia, technology and community storytelling.

“Globalization doesn’t have to erase difference,” says Daniel. “When we amplify every voice, we’re building a more inclusive world — one where every language has the chance to be heard.”

Christopher Maurer ES’67, professor of Spanish at Boston University, and two colleagues were recently honored with the 2025 Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award from the Society of American Archivists for their work on Memory in Motion: Lorca and the Archive.

This award recognizes those who have increased public awareness of a specific body of archival documents. Memory in Motion / Memoria en movimiento is a cross-continental, cross-collection effort documenting the evolution of the archives of renowned Spanish modernist writer Federico García Lorca, tracing them across nearly a century of salvage, discovery, acquisition, loss and perseverance. The project culminated in both a bilingual book and a museum exhibition.

For Christopher, the project is also deeply personal. “In SYA, on a bus taking us to Córdoba, Ángel Vilalta got to his feet and read us a poem by Lorca about death and desire that hooked me on the poet forever,” he recalls. That moment set him on a lifelong path of editing, translating and writing about Lorca’s work — eventually leading him to Spain, where he met Lorca’s family and worked with the poet’s manuscripts.

The exhibition in Granada, co-curated with Andrew A. Anderson and Melissa Dinverno, drew more than 14,000 visitors and told the extraordinary story of how Lorca’s family safeguarded his manuscripts during war, exile, and dictatorship. As Christopher notes, “When politicians heave the term ‘fake news’ back and forth and have few qualms about consciously inventing a past to their own liking, the archive has acquired more importance than ever as an agent of truth and social justice.” The exhibition opens in Madrid at the Residencia de Estudiantes in April 2026.

Read more about the award. 

(reprint from the 60th Anniversary Commerative, SYA Kaleidoscope)

by Anna Ansari CN’99

On one of our first days in Beijing in September 1998, a group of us set out on our newly purchased bicycles. A classmate who had been to Beijing before wanted to introduce us to a restaurant at which he had previously eaten. As a 16-year-old, Paul’s Mandarin was already impeccable and his charisma unstoppable; we would follow him blindly and trust that he wouldn’t lead us astray. And he didn’t. We wound up down an alleyway in a small restaurant with signage in a script that looked vaguely familiar and not at all Chinese, and gorged on noodles and lamb. This was my first taste of Uyghur food. Though I had only been in Beijing for a short time, from the first bite I knew this food was something different. 

Our meals up until that point had typically consisted of wilted mystery greens with garlic, sautéed tomatoes and scrambled eggs, aubergine stewed so long it nearly liquified, diced and fried tofu in a brown sauce, kung pao chicken, clear brothy soup and, of course, a bowl of steamed white rice. Don’t get me wrong – it had all been delicious. I didn’t know what I was eating most of the time, but I loved it. It tasted somewhat similar to the Chinese food I’d eaten at my favourite Michigan Chinese-American restaurants, but better, fuller, more exciting and flavourful.

The Uyghur food, on the other hand, was something else. No bowls of white rice appeared. No stewed aubergine and mystery greens. Instead, platters were piled high with skewers of lamb, glistening with fat, partially charred from the coals, speckled with cumin seeds and red chilli flakes, a freshly baked round flatbread underneath to catch the dripping lamb juices. Then, a large bowl of noodles that looked like tagliatelle appeared, coated in a faint tomato sauce, topped with chopped red and green peppers, sliced onions and chunks of lamb. 

This was not the Chinese food of suburban Michigan, and this was not the Chinese food of China. And yet there I was, eating this seemingly non-Chinese food in an alleyway in China’s capital city, my teenage mind and world expanding with every bite. This was a whole new world of flavour –but they were flavours I knew and loved almost intuitively. This food was simultaneously new and exciting to a 17-year-old American, yet familiar and comforting to the palate of a first-generation Azeri-Iranian. Lamb with toothsome noodles was strange and different, while lamb with cumin tasted like something I had eaten all my life. 

In Beijing, starting with that first bowl of Uyghur noodles, I discovered that I was connected to something much bigger than I had previously understood. This was a food culture whose proliferation, transmission and evolution could be traced back generations and centuries to intrepid travellers and traders who moved across the routes and roads that would one day be dubbed the Silk Roads by a German Baron. It was my Iranian father’s food culture. It was my food culture. And it was the Uyghurs’ food culture. All at the same time. 

The food culture that I connected to in Beijing in 1998, with that first bowl of Uyghur noodles, is one that spans thousands of miles, from the shores of the Black Sea, over the Caucasus and Pamir Mountains, and across the Tamalakan and Gobi deserts. It is a culture that encompasses ancient Mongol emperors, Kazakh eagle-hunters, Persian tea merchants, Zorastrian prophets, Chinese imperial envoys, and all those who have travelled and lived along the so-called Silk Roads, including myself, my father and my family. These routes carried not only individuals and trade goods, but ideas, flavours, ingredients and memories – all informing and linking to each other across time and space, to this day. Indeed, the Silk Roads take us through the arteries of Asia in centuries past to my father, a 20th-century Iranian immigrant in Detroit, Michigan, and all the way to me, an Iranian-American putting dinner on the table for my family in east London. 

Influences, ingredients, flavours and foods have criss-crossed the world since time immemorial. Tomatoes made their way from the New World to Italy. Chillies crossed oceans to arrive in India. Cinnamon. Corn. Potatoes. They have emigrated and integrated, become embedded in and integral to cultures and cuisines where, to start with, they were nothing more than foreign and unknown imports. Books on food and books on history and even books on trade focus generally on the sea routes, trading patterns and economies of Western European empires and nations and, later, America. Little time and few words have been spent on the transmission of food, flavours and ingredients over land and by non-Western, non-Judeo-Christian travellers, traders, empires and nations, at least in the English language. 

Guide-posted by the fabled routes once traversed by merchants, travellers, adventurers and pilgrims, my forthcoming cookbook, The Silk Roads: Recipes from Baku to Beijing (to be published by DK in October 2025) traces the flavours, ingredients and dishes of the Silk Roads, from Baku to Beijing and beyond, across generations and continents. Together, we travel from the mountainous region in northwest Iran where my father was born and raised, across the Central Asian plains, mountains and desert oases, and into the Uyghur neighbourhoods of China where I spent formative years of my youth and early adulthood, starting of course with my year on SYA. 

Mine is a book about food and cooking, but it is also one about leaving home – and coming home. It’s a book about the flavours, dishes, ingredients and people that have travelled across the most romanticized of those ancient roads. It’s also an immigrant story: a story of what gets taken with us when we leave our homes, what we introduce to others as a way of introducing ourselves, and what remains when we are gone – what pieces and tastes of one culture are introduced and absorbed into new ones. It’s a book about what we bring to the table, and about what we leave behind. It is a book to remind us that borders are geopolitical constructs, and that authenticity and ownership can sometimes be (and oftentimes are) shared, fluid or imagined. 

I hope everyone who reads and cooks from my book comes away with a deeper understanding and enjoyment of not only the foods of the Silk Roads, but also of its people, history and legacy. I hope they feel connected to a region, a route, an imaginary road that they may have only intangibly, fuzzily, dreamily pictured before, if at all. I want to take everyone on a journey across cultures, generations and continents. And, of course, I want to feed everyone some incredible food in the meantime.

To that end, I offer you this recipe which I call “A Memory of Lamian.”  The dish is a translation of a memory. It is as close to that early September day in 1998 as I will ever – can ever – get. And that’s OK. It’s life. We cannot go back. I learned that right around then as well, while reading my forever favourite book, Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, for the first time—an SYA assignment, of course.

I have tried, since then, as did the novel’s main character, to be a traveller – not a tourist – when I leave home, to confront both myself and my native culture, to reevaluate my values, assumptions and worldviews based on experiences, sights, scenes, smells, tastes, conversations and feelings encountered when I travel. SYA gave me that. Paul Bowles gave me that, as well as this maxim to live by, a reminder to cherish the present, to relish in the now – because you can’t go back, ever: “One never took the time to savour the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and fatal, that there never would be a return, another time.” He also gave Kit the fuzzy end of the proverbial lollipop, if you ask me, but that’s neither here nor there.

In any event, I can’t go back to that 1998 alleyway in Beijing-- I can’t be back on SYA, on Xinjiekouwai, at Erfuzhong, no matter how I sometimes wish I could. And I will never have the mind-blowing epiphany of a teenage girl from Michigan, tasting her first bowl of Uyghur lamian; but at least I can have this, and at least I can give it to you. 

I’ve also given you a recipe (download here) and method for making hand-pulled noodles, but feel free to use pre-packaged noodles. There are so many great ones available at Asian supermarkets these days that I only pull my own noodles when I’m really feeling nostalgic. While you can easily use lamb here, I urge you to use mutton instead, as the more mature meat lends the dish a much-deserved deeper, richer flavour.

About Anna's cookbook

Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing is being released this October

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