ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the stories of four Chinese scholars as examples of a cohort who played key roles in the early days of the field. They are – Wang Fangyu, Lee Pao-chen, Huang Po-fei and Teng Ssu-yu. Wang's twenty-year career at Institute of Far Eastern Languages (IFEL) was the longest among all the Chinese scholars who taught there, and his cumulative impact as a teacher, author of textbooks, and team leader on a dictionary project was also the greatest. In 1953, Lee Pao-chen left IFEL for another Chinese-teaching position, this time as chairman of the Chinese program at the Army Language School (ALS) in Monterey, California. One aspect of Huang's language development that opened a door to his future career was that he became totally bilingual in Mandarin Chinese as well as in his native dialect of Cantonese. Teng Ssu-yu taught Chinese in the early days of his academic career.
