Education
Schoyer studied at Yale University, where he wrote for campus humor magazine The Yale Record.
journalist novelist writer intellectual
Schoyer studied at Yale University, where he wrote for campus humor magazine The Yale Record.
After graduation in 1933, Schoyer taught English in Changsha, Hunan, for what was then the Yale-in-China Association, and returned to Yale to study Oriental literature and Chinese language. His return to China was cut short by the impending war. In 1940, he made a dramatic escape from Changsha.
After the city had been bombed eight times, he led a group of twenty doctors, nurses, and wounded by junk to escape on the Xiang River after dark, only to be discovered and attacked on the river in the morning by a Japanese fighter plane.
He managed to get the party out through Indo-China in six weeks. When the United States entered the war, he became a major in Air Intelligence, and created the Air Ground Aid Section, which instructed airmen in how to evade or escape if downed behind enemy lines.
He worked with Chinese guerrillas on several rescue operations. At the end of the war, he headed a mission to Shanghai to liberate seven thousand Allied prisoners being held in Japanese camps.
In the summer of 1941, Schoyer dated author Margaret Wise Brown.
As representative of Yale-in-China in Hong Kong in the early 1950s, he conducted negotiations between New Asia College and the government of the colony in establishing the college as an officially recognized school. From 1959 till July 1964, he was the Comptroller and Yale-in-China representative for New Asia. He was also the President of the Universities Service Centre in Hong Kong and Special Assistant to the Vice-Chancellor of the University.
Schoyer was on the first delegation to the People"s Republic organized by the National Committee on United States- China Relations in December 1972.
In 1978, he became seriously ill and in March died of lung cancer.