J. Stapleton Roy was a career American diplomat, who served with distinction in the foreign service and at overseas embassies in Asia. He was stationed in Moscow in the 1960s, later in Taipei, and helped set up the American Embassy in Beijing, in the run up to the U.S. and Beijing agreeing in 1979 to formal diplomatic relations. He also served as the nation's top envoy in Singapore (1984-86), Beijing (1991-95) and Indonesia (1996-99). Ambassador Roy later joined Kissinger Associates, the firm run by Henry A. Kissinger, and served as the founding director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center's Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. Roy was born in Nanjing, China in the 1930s, the son of American educational missionaries and studied at Princeton and the National War College.Roy's older brother, David Tod Roy, was an American sinologist and Chinese literature scholar. He died in 2016. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A. J. Stapleton Roy.Illustration by Lauren C