The Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association’s history stretches back to 1908, making it one of the oldest international educational and cultural exchange organizations in the U.S. Its many alumni have gone on to pursue a variety of careers and can be found in all corners of the world. On Nov. 17, one such alum, Daniel Tam-Claiborne, OC ’09, visited Oberlin to reflect on his experience with Shansi at the event, “Between Here and There: Cultivating Belonging Between Worlds.” His talk gave students a glimpse into Oberlin’s time-honored Shansi Fellowship in Taigu, a district of Shanxi province in China and the location that influenced Shansi’s foundation.
The Shansi program began in Taigu with the intention of providing mission education. As years progressed, the program evolved to include other teaching programs and later secularized. Tam-Claiborne participated in the Shansi Fellowship from 2009–11 and taught English at an agricultural university.
Tam-Claiborne’s path to Shansi was winding. He grew up in New York with a Chinese mother and a white father. He was not surrounded by a large Asian American community and felt that he did not truly get the chance to explore his intercultural identity until he arrived at Oberlin.
“Oberlin was definitely a place where I was able to come to a greater understanding of what it meant to be Asian American,” Tam‑Claiborne said. “Being able to take classes in Asian American studies, Asian American history, and sociology and then, of course, benefiting from the collective knowledge of my peers, … I think all of those things were very formative to my understanding of myself in that particular vector.”
To Tam-Claiborne, the Shansi Fellowship was a brilliant opportunity to continue exploring his identity. In 2009, right around the time that the Swine Flu outbreak began, he took a plane to Taigu. This pandemic colored his experience in a similar way that COVID-19 impacted Americans several years later. However, he still gained a lot from the Fellowship. In addition to teaching English, he took Mandarin classes and spent countless hours exploring the surrounding regions. He also forged strong connections with other people in the program.
“There was this strong comfort [with] Oberlin alum[ni] who were fellows,” Tam-Claiborne said. “There was that ethos that permeated the ways in which we interacted. There was extensive familiarity, even though none of us really knew each other when we were in school here.”
The Oberlin camaraderie that Tam-Claiborne experienced in China reveals itself in Shansi’s strong alumni network. Yuji Kono, OC ’25, has been teaching in Taigu for about three months. He explained that Shansi provides many occasions to connect with past fellows and learn about their experiences.
“We’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of other alumni,” Kono said. “We met people who were here in the 2010s, and it seems like every five years it changes so much.”
Today, the train ride from Taigu to Beijing takes a few hours. Talking to past fellows, Kono learned that the ride used to last over 10 hours. This is just one of many developments that situate Taigu within a larger history of change.
At Oberlin, Kono studied Politics, History, and German, while also engaging with Japanese activities and studies. With the Taigu program, he was eager to delve deeper into East Asian culture and explore the connections between China and Japan.
“It’s a school of 30,000 students, so you feel the density that is really special to China compared to the U.S.,” Kono said. “At the same time, we’re basically the only Americans in this town. … That’s kind of a weird thing to wrap your mind around, at least for me.”
Like Tam-Claiborne, Kono finds the difficulty of adapting to a new environment rewarding.
“The fact that it’s more rural makes making connections a bit harder because it means we need to have a higher Chinese level, but it also means that the connections we do make have been that much more meaningful,” Kono said.
In his talk, Tam-Claiborne explained the reciprocal impact that students and teachers had on each other during the Fellowship. Some students’ entire life trajectory changed as they were influenced to explore English studies in other parts of the world.
Indeed, Tam-Claiborne’s time in China inspired much of his following career. After he left China, he returned to Oberlin to work on his writing. With the help of the student magazine Wilder Voice, he published What Never Leaves, which tells a semi-autobiographical story of a man working as an English teacher in Taigu. This October, Tam-Claiborne published his debut novel, Transplants. The novel was also influenced by his journey exploring his intercultural identity.
Tam-Claiborne and Kono’s experiences reflect a small sliver of Oberlin’s extensive intercultural exchanges that constitute a large part of Oberlin post-graduate life. Shansi Senior Director Ted Samuel commented on the value of international studies.
“We live in a world that seems increasingly fractured these days, and I think that there is so much value to people-to-people exchange and actually getting to know someone who … lives a life that in many ways may seem very different than yours,” Samuel said. “It also helps demystify the other. Certain forces in this world thrive on separation, and programs like Shansi directly counteract that.”
