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.
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.
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