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The Lazy Path to Excellence - Some cooks spend hours in the kitchen, go through pounds and pounds of ingredients, use tons of equipment, and create great dishes. Others use just a few choice ingredients, a pan or two, and the results are also good. One way isn't better than the other - but I aspire to the second. Simple doesn't mean simplistic. When the ingredients are few, they have to be well chosen and cooked. More thinking and preparation might go into the simple dish than the complex.
My Work - Taking complex subjects and making them understandable has been the central focus of my journalism career. I have always worked for international news organizations - as a contributing editor at Fortune, news editor at Asiaweek in Hong Kong, and a correspondent in the Hong Kong and Tokyo bureaus of Reuters. That required taking issues of importance in one country and reporting on it fully for readers there, while simultaneously explaining to readers in many other countries in an understandable way why they also needed to pay attention. Covering business and economics required similar translations - reporting in enough detail and depth to inform business pros, but with sufficient clarity for non-business readers. (For a summary of my career, here's my resume.)
Multinational/Multicultural
- Born in Tokyo, Japan, of an American father and a Japanese mother, growing
up binational, bilingual and bicultural, I couldn't help but be . . .
confused. But watching cartoons every day as a kid was a better way of
becoming fluent in Japanese that sweating over college texts years later.
A third layer of befuddlement was added when my family moved to Taipei,
Taiwan, in my teenage years. I finally "returned" to the U.S.
for the first time when I attended college, but in many ways, that was
like moving to a foreign country again. And work since has always been
in an international context. Today, I always - with mixed success - look
at stories as a local and as a foreigner.
A confession - I aspire to to the path of laziness, but I too often end up working through the night to get the story just so. But one day, I know, it's all going to be easy.
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