The captain, you know, he went on the radio and he's like,

we just want to make sure everyone knows he has a perfect champion on the plane.

On the podium is back with more Olympians and Paralympians sharing their remarkable stories.

On the podium, listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service.

Today we're going back to the early 1980s when Chinese students first started venturing out

to study overseas after the cultural revolution.

Fahana Haida has been speaking to writer Shah Shahying who is one of the first pupils to

arrive in the U.S. from Communist China. So this telegram was delivered to me. I remember I was

in the Pig University student dorm and it was only three sentences. Application received.

We have scholarship. Please send transparent. This meant everything to me.

In 1980, Shahying was a student at the newly reopened Peking University, now Beijing University.

At the time China was just emerging from its so-called cultural revolution which had thrown

the country into a decade of chaos. Shahying was seven when the cultural revolution was launched

in 1966 where the communist leader Chairman Mao. Mao mobilized the country's young people to

eliminate his rivals and for much of the next decade students were judged on their political

verva rather than their academic abilities. No child was too young to join in.

In some cases beat up their teachers, in some cases burning books and whole Chinese school system

collapsed. So I ended up out of the kindergarten with no school to go. So I grew up in this

environment that was very chaotic and confusing and from elementary schools through high school,

we had actually very slap dash kind of curriculum and all of us, we also have to periodically

be sent to factories and farms to do so called education. The cultural revolution ended when

...