Libby Liu (劉仚) recalls the surprise she felt as a young girl visiting her grandparents in Taipei and Kaohsiung. They lived in poverty, with no indoor plumbing. At the time, her parents had just climbed out of their own as immigrants to the US.
"It was very shocking to me as a young child. They lived in quite a state of what we could consider poverty in the Western world," Liu said.
Last month, Liu, 41, became one of the world's most powerful media executives when she was tapped to be the president of Radio Free Asia (RFA), the US-funded broadcast service that brings news to the information-starved people of China and other repressive Asian regimes.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MAGGY STERNER, RADIO FREE ASIA
In that position, she will oversee a Washington-based organization of 240 people that broadcasts around the clock, seven days a week, to closed Asian countries in nine languages -- Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Tibetan, Uighur, Burmese, Khmer, Korean, Lao and Vietnamese. RFA has bureaus in Taipei, Hong Kong, Phnom Penh, Seoul and Bangkok and staffers in Tokyo and other Asian cities.
youthful enthusiasm
At first glance, Liu's appearance belies the importance of her new job. She often speaks in college-age jargon and exudes a youthful enthusiasm rarely encountered in a top-level media executive. But make no mistake about it, she is fully up to her new job.
Liu was chosen after an intensive nationwide search by the Broadcast Board of Governors, the Congressionally established governing body of RFA. She had been RFA's vice president for administration and finance. After rejecting the other candidates, the board decided she was the best person to move up to the top post.
Taiwan summers
Born in San Francisco in 1964, a year after her parents emigrated from Taiwan to the US (they went to Taiwan from China in 1949), Liu spent every summer in Taiwan from the time she was about five years old. There, she and her family visited her father's parents. Her last visit was when her grandparents died several years ago.
"My father supported them entirely based on his pittance of money he made here and there," Liu told the Taipei Times in an interview in her spacious office in downtown Washington.
Her parents' finances were not much better than that when they emigrated to San Francisco, where her father enrolled in the University of California-Berkeley as an engineering doctorate student after having graduated from National Taiwan University. Her mother graduated from National Taiwan Normal University.
As a student, her father supported himself by washing dishes at a fancy Italian restaurant north of San Francisco where the mafia held its meetings.
"My parents don't like to remember those days, but I remember as a child that things were very tight. When I was a child, I didn't get Christmas gifts. Going out for ice cream at Dairy Queen [a US ice cream chain] was a very big deal. On my birthday, I got to have a soda," Liu said.
"My father absolutely hates it when we go back to those days," she added.
Nevertheless, Liu's family gained moral support from a Taiwanese-American community in San Francisco.
"There was a core group from Taida [National Taiwan University] who all went to Berkeley for graduate school, and they all hung out together and supported each other, babysat for each other, cooked together and played mahjong on weekends," Liu recalls.
better days
Liu's father graduated and was hired by Bell Laboratories as an engineer, the family moved to New Jersey, and things got better. He is now with the National Science Foundation, the US government's premier scientific institution.
Eventually, her grandparents got indoor plumbing. And as Taiwan's economy improved, so did the family's fortune.
"When the Taiwan stock market boomed, my uncles and aunts were all `fa tsai [making money],'" she said.
Liu went to her father's alma mater, Berkeley, received a degree in finance and accounting, and got a job in crisis management with a major accounting firm. She returned to school to get a Master in Business Administration from the prestigious Wharton School, and then received a law degree from the equally prestigious University of Pennsylvania law school.
After graduation, she became a criminal prosecutor with the Riverside, California, district attorney's office, where she stayed for five years before becoming "burned out." Then she got a job as director of human resources and employment counsel at Syrus, Inc, a high-tech company in San Jose, California. Eventually, she was hired by a leading US civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to be director of administration and strategic planning, a job she held for two years before joining RFA as vice president.
She found the job through a help wanted advertisement. Her father saw the ad in an Asian-American professional journal and told her, "`You need to do this. This is so you,'" she said.
Indeed, she found that the job fit perfectly with her professional background as well as with her Taiwanese heritage.
"I think in retrospect that all the jobs I've had in the past have built up who I am to be able to do this job today. I've done crisis management, which is very applicable here. I did legal work and employment work," she said.
Her first big task at RFA was to negotiate RFA's first union contract.
Liu replaces Richard Richter, a veteran journalist and national network producer who has served at RFA since its founding in 1996.
management skills
Liu does not think her lack of journalistic or broadcasting experience will impede her effectiveness, since she can rely on the cadre of journalistic talent to handle the editorial side, while she concentrates on management.
As a Taiwanese-American, one of the opportunities Liu will have as RFA president is to oversee the spread of news in China, including news of developments in Taiwan. She insists that RFA will not try to proselytize, but instead will be even-handed in presenting the news to the Chinese people.
For instance, when asked how she would handle the issue of Taiwan's independence, Liu replied:
"To us, it's news, just like any other piece of news. We try to cover news from both angles. We do not take a position on any of those issues. We don't promote or speak against Taiwan['s] independence, but rather we make sure that we cover each event from every angle," she said.
She points to the recent rally in Taipei in support of the bill to purchase US arms that has been stymied in the Legislative Yuan.
"There was a rally for it, and there was a rally against it. We covered both. That's what we do. But the important thing to remember is that we covered it," she says. "Our goal is not to change opinion. Our goal is to enable people to form opinions, and to form an opinion you need information. That's what we do."
Her cultural heritage, though, is inescapable in her new job.
"I have an affinity to the mission here, based on my heritage. But I don't take a political position. RFA does not take a political position. But when you're dealing with a heritage that is thousands of years rich, you do have a personal commitment to try to reach people and empower people, and speak to them, because there's really an oppression of the free flow of information. I do take it personally because of my heritage," she said.
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