Across the World

Attending an alumni weekend at a downtown San Francisco hotel is one way that former UC San Francisco School of Nursing students and faculty reconnect.

Or they can run into each other halfway across the world.

Pat Jackson Allen That’s what happened after Patricia Jackson Allen, former director of the School’s Pediatric Nurse Practitioner program, bid in a fundraiser at Yale University, where she is a professor emerita. Jackson, who earned her master’s degree in maternal-child nursing and pediatric nurse practitioner certificate from the School of Nursing, won a three-night stay at the Linden Centre, a historically distinct boutique hotel in southwest China’s Yunnan province.

Arriving at the Linden Centre in March 2014, she and her husband met the American couple, Jeanee and Brian Linden, who own the hotel.

“I think I know you,” Jeanee Linden said.

It turned out Linden (née Quan) was a 1994 graduate of the Master’s Entry Program in Nursing, and Allen had been one of her teachers. “To be halfway around the world and meet a fellow UCSF alumna was quite amazing,” Allen says.

Allen and her husband were also impressed with the center, which is more than just a hotel. It is a nationally protected heritage site, founded in a merchant’s 1947 courtyard home and set in a pristine village – Xizhou Town – in the foothills of the Himalayas. A 2014 finalist for the US Secretary of State’s Award for Corporate Excellence, the center has been hailed as a model of sustainable luxury tourism, offering classes and activities that immerse visitors in village life and the regional Bai culture.

To Jeanee Linden, running into someone from her nursing school days isn’t surprising. “I have found that our center is a magnet for bringing people together.”

The Path from Nursing

The Linden Centre Linden grew up in the Bay Area but fell in love with China on an undergraduate study program to Nanjing University in 1987, where she met Brian Linden, who also was there as a student. He “spoke wonderful Chinese” and had already traveled all over the country.

Eventually, Linden turned to nursing because she wanted to help people and be able to work anywhere in the world. “I was interested in the practical side of nursing, wanted to take care of people of all ages and wanted the broadest education possible,” she says.

Over the next few years, Jeanee worked as a nurse practitioner for the US Embassy in Taipei, while Brian pursued a career in international education. They returned to the United States to open their eponymous art gallery, which sells Asian arts and antiques, in Door County, Wisconsin. In 2004, their young sons, now 18 and 15, accompanied them as they searched the hinterlands of China for a place to establish an intellectual retreat, modeled on the Aspen Institute. “So much of the current intellectual interaction in China occurs in its increasingly homogenous cities,” Linden said.

The complex they found had survived the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, but needed a major facelift to incorporate modern amenities into its traditional ones. They won cooperation from local authorities through their passion for the region, and they give back by offering language classes, employing local artisans and hosting high school and college students from US and Chinese schools.

The couple divide their time between the United States and China and are about to open their third site, in another traditional Xizhou building. Jeanee says her nursing training has been instrumental in her work today.

“I continue to think like a nurse,” she says. “Our guests benefit from the lessons I learned from UCSF. I am working in the nursing field still, just in the ‘hospitality’ sector.”