Johnny Lin, 22
Brown University

by Taylor Barnes // Brown University 

But Lin, now at school in Rhode Island, is hardly the carefree surfer boy you might expect for someone who went to high school a short drive from Long Beach. He's busy finishing up three majors and preparing to enter the working world. And on top of that, he’s spent the past three years with a side project that is more like a full-time job: organizing Strait Talk, an annual transnational conference that brings Taiwanese, Chinese and American students together to discuss and debate the political status of Taiwan and devise a roadmap for resolution of a cross-strait conflict.

The Taiwan  Strait—from which the conference derives its name—separates mainland China and the island of Taiwan, which have been in conflict for the past 60 years. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, but many in Taiwan maintain its own sovereignty. The U.S. trades extensively with the island but does not support its independence.

Lin lived in Taiwan with his Chinese mother and Taiwanese father until his family moved to California when he was 13. “I grew up hearing both sides of the debate,” Lin says.

Lin says he became frustrated with the unchanging rhetoric continually presented by each side during the decades-long debate. He started to address this vexation by working with a Taiwanese advocacy group the summer after his freshman year at Brown to lobby congressmen in Washington, D.C. Realizing that they knew little about the conflict, he began to think about a larger project to address the matter.

Thus, in 2005, Lin started a conference for scholars, journalists and students to foster debate and open discussion about the issue. Lin's hope is that students, by participating in Strait Talk, will be motivated to resolve a problem over which an older generation seems to be stuck in a stalemate. That’s why, he says, “Strait Talk is ultimately about the process”—about dialogue rather than pushing narrow political agendas.

Several students involved in the project emphasize that Strait Talk is ultimately about group consensus, with equal consideration given to the ideas of each of its staffers. “It was Johnny's vision, but it was everybody's project,” says Victoria Chao, a senior who has worked on the project since she transferred to Brown as a sophomore.

“When I first started working with him, I was in awe of him,” Chao says. “Here's a kid who really isn't much older than me, but had a really great idea and great vision.”

This kind of respect helped Lin keep such dedicated staffers moving the project forward. “One of the reasons that it was meaningful is that Johnny is the one doing it,” says Nick Poon, a junior at Brown who works on the event’s financing. Lin encourages staffers by interacting with them personally, rather than just acting as a distant leader, according to Poon.

Strait Talk has convened annually in Providence, R.I. since 2005. About two dozen student delegates and speakers participate in campus-wide lectures and closed-door discussions.

Lin plans to keep working with Strait Talk after he graduates in May, but his full-time job will be with the Bridgespan Group, a consulting firm for non-profits in San Francisco. His dedication to conflict resolution goes beyond Brown and Strait Talk's geographical scope, and he actually missed the conference in 2006. The globe-trotting self-starter, who now speaks Spanish, had taken the year off from classes to work with Fundación Escuela Nueva, an education NGO in Bogotá, Colombia. There, he worked with refugee children and lived in, as he wrote in an e-mail, a part of Bogotá that was “slightly shady but full of personality.”

And although Colombia is far away from Brown and the Taiwan Strait, Lin says that his experiences there are “broadly related.” “[It's about] how to transcend conflicts in a creative way.”

But it’s not all about conflict resolution for Lin. He also has recreationally explored visual arts, cooking and acting. “He's really creative and multi-talented,” Chao says.

Wearing such a variety of hats, Lin's got a wardrobe to match. “He can pull of wearing these neon-yellow sneakers,” Chao says with a laugh. “Johnny Lin's got his own style going on.”
 

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