With an interest in Chinese language fostered by her undergraduate training in theoretical linguistics, Professor Elvira Masson studied at the Beijing Foreign Language Normal College spring semester 1983 before heading to Stanford to further her investigations of the transition of Chinese drama from opera to the spoken play. Chinese literature is filled with historical allusions and she soon realized that the more she researched history, the more compelling she found the ‘real’ stories rather than the literary stories. But before she could finish her intended course at Stanford, she was offered an opportunity to live and work in Beijing. After almost a decade working in Sino-American educational and academic exchange, she came to NMSU in 1994. From 2007 to 2020 she served as US-Side Director of the Confucius Institute at NMSU.