The Chinese immigration official sees her as a fashion reporter, working for a publication with a very industrial title, “Women’s Wear Daily” which based in New York City, covering non-political events such as the Miss World beauty pageant at the city of Ordos, near Mongolia.

But that’s just a glimpse of what Kathleen McLaughlin, really is. In person, she is delightful to chat with, frank and straightforward, with occasional mischief smile flashing on her face when she tells stories about her adventure in China as a foreign correspondent for numerous publication such as Bloomberg, Global Post, The Guardian and The Economist since more than a decade ago.

One thing for sure, she is obviously more than just a fashion journalist. Kathleen was one of the first international reporters who covered Tibet in 2008, right after the worst anti-China riot in 20 years, that killed no less than 140 people –according to the Tibetan government in exile.

She is also the one who uncover the link between China’s growing plasma industry in Henan province in the early 1990s — where poor farmers were paid to donate their blood plasma– and the worrying HIV/AIDS epidemic that rapidly spread in the area.

Her stories led her to all corners of China, meeting people from all walk of life, including strangers that can put her own life in danger. One of Kathleen’s frightening moments was in 2008, when a young man guarding a factory in Xinjiang pointed a gun at her, telling her to stay away. She was there to cover the riot in a province where the Moslem Uyghur minority is often oppressed. “My photographer and I don’t even react right away, we kind of look at each other and don’t talk to each other for an hour,” she says.

I meet her for a lunch at the Dudley cafeteria, Lehmann Hall, right at the corner of Harvard Yard, last Monday. She arrives on time and gives a big smile when she sees me.

Of course, her time in China has some wonderful moments too. She loves hiking on the Great Wall of China and she often find solace outside of Beijing where she can see the blue sky. Although she can live with the pollution in Beijing, the only thing that she cant stand is the fact that sometime the sky is so grey with thick smog. “They really have to do something about the pollution,” she says.

In overall, Kathleen believes China is going upwards, with a spiral-like path, full of ups and downs. “Well, right now its going down. But you cant dispute the fact that there are more people with opportunities now compare to 20 years ago,” she says.

Kathleen first came to China in 1999. She describe her initial encounter with the country as a whim, an accidental turn that suddenly change her life. “There was a job opening as a copy editor, for a Chinese state-own media, I applied and got in,” she says. She was working as a political reporter for Lee, a newspapers chains in Montana, at the time. She covered the Native American issue, private prisons that started to expand in that state and local politics.

There is nothing much can be found on social media about Kathleen’s personal life, before or after her China’s years. There’s no mention about her family at all, or her early schools days in her hometown in Butte, Montana. She seems really discipline at keeping her private life, well, private, hidden from the public’s eyes. Her profile picture on Facebook shows it perfectly. Kathleen put a picture of herself with a big sunglasses and a headscarf that barely reveal her face. Only people who has met her before can recognize her from that photo.

All her biography pages, scattered in Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and several journalism websites, carefully written to represent her professional life only. She wrote that she finished her journalism school in University of Montana in 1993, and then work for a local publication, then went on to become a foreign correspondent in China.

“Reporting in China probably made me more careful about my personal information,” she says. “You always feel that someone is watching you and yes, I always feel a little bit paranoid.”

In her first trip to China, Kathleen’s visa has a stamp that stated that she is a ‘foreign expert’. She chuckled whenever she mentioned it. “But, that trip open my eyes, because I got to see how Chinese government works, how the censorship works, and all,” she says. Those insights would be proven useful in her following trip to China.

After her contract ended, she returned to her old job in Montana. “I had so much fun, there were many crazy stuff in Montana,” she says, laughing. After a couple of years and a wedding, she got a job as a business correspondent for BNA, a subsidiary of Bloomberg Media that specializes on business and legal issues, in Shanghai, China. “This time I brought my husband to China with me,” she says.

In her second trip, Kathleen enter China with a student visa. She enrolled in Shanghai Jiaotong University as a student in their language course. But being a student was not intended as a disguise for her reporting job. “If you’ve been in the streets in China, you’ll know that its hard to get around without knowing the language,” she says. So, she learns Mandarin and in a year, she can converse seamlessly with locals. “I still have many things to learn about the reading and writing,” she adds.

This time, being in China is not just a whim anymore. She wanted to be there. “At the time, China was like on the verge of explosion,” she says. With the economy booming, China rapidly become the centre of global attention. “I felt I need to get back there,” Kathleen says.

In 2008, she began working for Global Post, a digital media that focus on international news. She now has the chance to reach a wider audience in the internet. However, when she applied for a journalist visa, the Chinese government flatly rejected it. “They never give a visa to online media before,” Kathleen says.

At the same time, she heard about a fashion publication based in New York, called Women’s Wear Daily, who was looking for someone to write business news in Asia Pacific for them. They hired Kathleen, and her visa was issued promptly after.

Even though she never plan to use her fashion journalist credential as a disguise, it works well for her. By being a non-threatening fashion reporter, she gained access to the elite in Chinese society who usually never speaks to the international press. “From them, I receive information about many things and got invited to many governments’ events,” she says.

Kathleen remembers how the Mayor of Ordos, in China, invited her for dinner, just before the Miss World Beauty Pageant in that city. It was a chance for her to see how the Chinese elite think and behave, especially knowing that Ordos is one of the most corrupt place in China, where buildings upon buildings were built but no one ever live in it, creating ghost towns.

Kathleen also remembers how shocked she was when she saw the situation in Lhasa, Tibet, in 2008, just after the riot. “I was shocked, shocked, shocked at what I saw,” she says, repeating the word “shocked” three times. “The city was occupied, there were tanks in the street. Soldiers everywhere. Monasteries empty, the monks all gone. Who knows what happened to them.”

She believes the only factor that made Chinese government allow her to enter Tibet was pure luck. “I think I got lucky. After the riot, the Chinese want to say to the world that they let foreign journalist into Tibet,” she says. “I was one of only few journalists who actually apply to go.”

Besides the harrowing scenes that she saw, Kathleen movement in Tibet was also tightly monitored. “I’m sure I was followed,” she adds. “One day, someone broke in my hotel room and check my stuff.”

However, her biggest clash with the Chinese government happened in 2011. With the support from Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Kathleen embarked on a journey to Tanzania and Uganda, to investigate the widespread distribution of fake anti-malaria medicine there. This happened when Chinese health aid and pharmaceutical companies were making big presence in Africa. Her story was published in the front page of the Guardian. But then something odd happened.

“I was on a Christmas holiday in the US, when my husband whose still in China, called and asked about our subscription to the Global Times in China,” she says. They don’t subscribe to that newspapers, but that day, there was one copy on their front door. On its front page, there was a headline about Kathleen’s story but with a twist: the government vehemently denied it.

“I later found out that the state media went full offensive against my story, because Chinese President Xi Jinping was making his first trip overseas to Tanzania, where I did this reporting,” she says. Not only that, a couple of days later, Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned The Guardian Bureau Chief in China and threatened to revoke her visa.

“After that, The Guardian just cancel the publication of the second half of the project,” she says, barely able to hide her contempt. They were supposed to continue her investigation into the factories producing these fake medicine inside China. “That’s how they interfere with my work. Very clever,” she says.

Although nothing happened to Kathleen personally afterwards, the incident deeply impact her. She recalls how sometime police officers will suddenly appears during her interviews and that really disturb her sources. Another time, a source cancel their appointment, and make sure she knew that they was told not to talk. She was repeatedly detained, hold up, for hours, just to delay her reaching a place or meeting someone.

All that didn’t deter Kathleen from doing her job. She even become more focus in revealing things that was kept hidden in many parts of China. In the last five years, she specialized on health and scientific research issues.

“In 2020, China will spend more money in scientific research than the US, but there is no independent reporting and investigation toward their scientific practices,” she says. “Nobody really look into it.”

Chinese local media tried to investigate but they are facing a lot of restrictions and censors. “I find it really interesting, and no one is doing it,” Kathleen says. Does she has better access to this kind of stories? She smiles, “I don’t want to interview Donatella Versace for the fourth time. My days as fashion journalists is over.”

She understand the risk of doing real journalism in China. But, she also become more and more familiar with the people and its culture. “China is hard to explain. Their [censorship–] style is not like what you saw anywhere else in the world. Its kind of subtle,” Kathleen says.

She remembers a story when she went to North Korea border with her colleague. They hired a young driver who takes them around. In the last day of their trip, the driver asked for more money. After a small squabble, they agreed to paid him a little extra.

“We went back to our hotel, and found out that he had called the police on us, complaining that we don’t pay him enough,” Kathleen says. They then explained to the officer that they had paid him three times the usual rate. The police understand and left.

“But then the driver start calling us, and threatens to beat us off,” she says. Once again, the police came, this time it was Kathleen who was asking for help. That day, those Chinese police protected and escorted them safely out of town. (*)

Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that the ease of this insta-knowledge can lead to quick conclusions and easy answers, lulling some to think they “know” something or someone: all of the intimacy with none of the time, and little work.

Internet: Now a substitute for real human interaction. (Yep, it’s spelled wrong in the gif image.)

As a journalist, I was aware of how extensive research can lead to smarter questions. But for this assignment, I was curious to see what goes missing when the process is reversed: Would relying on a trail of facts from the internet create a accurate picture, an appropriate analysis? How close could it come to the truth of an experience, or the essence of an individual? What goes missing? What is assumed?

Sophie Chou laughing over a caffeinated beverage. (at least it is not a salad)

Sophie Chou describes herself as a cat, reader, writer, and Hacker girl.

She told me she was a first year graduate student at MIT, working at the Media Lab. I “knew” this, and a bit more, from what I learned researching her online.

Sophie’s all over the internet, giving a talk about how to democratize data science to a major conference for computer professionals, cooking up really delicious looking inventive food (YUM), and sharing thoughtful and insightful social media and blog posts about her varied interests.

But becoming a computer scientist, and a creative, was quite the journey.

Sophie told me she was born in West Philadelphia, where her dad, a scientist, came to study for his doctorate at Drexel University.

Her parents met in Beijing, where they knew each other since they were young, before the revolution took her mom to the Sorbonne in Paris. 

Her family moved to Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where she was raised with her older sister, Cleo.

Sophie’s family, as food: her dad, mom, older sister, Nummy the cat and Sophie.

Here’s how she describes what she wanted as a child in this blog denouncing Boy Scout policies:

“When I was a little girl I had two main (American-as-apple-pie) agendas on my wish list: one, to be the proud owner of an American Girl doll, and two, to join the Girl Scout Brownie troup. My mother was a steadfast soldier against both fronts, no matter how much a begged and pleaded and whined, flipping the pages of the beloved catalog and circling favorite items until the staples wore off.”  [source]

From the age of five to fifteen, her world was with filled with reading and rhythmic gymnastics.  (I asked her if the two were connected. “There was definitely no causation, because I always liked reading,” she said)

Matilda was her favorite book as child. Reading began her love affair with words, and later writing.”The only reason I ever really liked school was from reading and writing was the other way to get to reading.”

Here are the words she used in 2013 to describe her time as a competitive gymnast:

“As maybe a few of you know, I had a rather interesting adolescence training as a competitive Rhythmic Gymnast for 10 years of my life. this included summer training camps in Canada and Russia, along with 20 hours a week of practice in middle school and other such crazy experiences. As it was occasionally traumatizing, most of the time I prefer to shove these memories in the back of my mind. However, sometimes, I do stumble upon them, and think of various things I’ve gained and/or lost from this decade of my life.

She didn’t consider herself “particularly good” though she placed in sport, and for a decade, pursued it like a career. On February 26, 2013, Sophie shared what she learned:

you can only really excel at doing something if and when

Young Sophie in competitive gymnastics.

you love what you do. This does not mean that the practice has to come easily; often, challenges are essential to enjoyment. However, make sure that the issues you are fighting are worthy pursuits.

and

 The relentless pursuit of perfectionism is lethal. The enjoyment of life and culture is not only pleasant, but has great artistic and social worth.

By fifteen, she stopped gymnastics (“the short version is I hurt my back, but I was like, this is too much”, she told me), took up dance classes, and joined the schools tennis team:  “It was really fun.”

Sophie was inducted in the National Honor Society, was named a National Merit finalist and distinguished scholar and involved in science competitions. She worked at Hunan Wok, and the local library.

She applied for college. “My entrance essay to Columbia was a narrative about growing up in the library, and I wouldn’t have gained admission without it.” [source]

On December 10, 2009, she shared with her Facebook friends that she “got into Columbia!”

Sophie chose to pursue chemistry when she began the fall semester of 2010, a subject she loved in high school. But her first year of college, she “hated” every class she took – except writing.

Computer science, she told me, was a lot like writing. “The fact that you do have a concept…and then you figure out how to get that across, and you model it and you draft it in a similar way.” Computer science theory was something with which she was aligned – a language she could understand.  Internships at OMGPOP, a failed gaming startup  secured her new path.

But it wasn’t all coding and programming. She also studied philosophy, and wrote four essays for the Spectrum opinion section of the Spectator newspaper. One piece examined how industry jargon “gets in the way of our ability to learn more and connect with interesting characters.”

Her most personal piece was her first one, written while a sophomore in college.

“I used to dream of communes and utopias,” she wrote. “Gradually and grudgingly, I have realized that when one relies so fully on the image of oneself, it can be heart-wrenching when this vision is shattered.”  With two years left on my plate, I hope to remind myself that when we stop hedging all our bets on a definitive notion of good, stop expecting our lives to be magical, that it becomes good. It’s a work in progress.”

She was a hackNY fellow, met a mentor mathbabe in the summer of 2012. She interned at Knewton, an education technology company, in the summer of 2013.

Sophie and her family at her Columbia graduation in spring 2014.

In 2014, she graduated with a degree in computer science, with a focus on machine learning.

When she was accepted at MIT last year, she wrote this on her blog:

I think if my mother taught me one thing,
it is that
it is not how successful you are
or how wealthy you are
or even how hard you work that matters.
what matters is how interesting you are
because that is your human value.

Interesting people are interested, and Sophie’s world consists of varied interests.

There is food, feminism, and of course, there are the cats.

“I’ve always just liked cats and identified with them personality wise,” she texted when I asked why she identified as a cat.

The cat Pusheen, from the webcomic, adorns her twitter header, and she on Valentine’s Day she tweeted: “Guys really important do u think @Pusheen is the new @hellokitty what does this mean for the easternization of western culture #mynewthesis.”

The other topic that rivals cats in consistency and frequency of posts is food.

“eating a meal is both an event and an action and an

Chef Chou’s interest in food began young.

indication. The food we eat (along with the food that we do not permit ourselves to consume) form little landmarks in our lives.” –September 2013 blog

 

Her food blog, Pika Chews, catalogues her culinary adventures: black sesame cupcakes with matcha buttercreme, butternut squash tacos, baozi, steamed buns.Her S’mores cookie bars were even highlighted on the foodie blog, Serious Eats. Her food favorites — eggs, a pikachu cake, and Super Mario cupcakes are snapped in colorful detail, and posted on Facebook, Instagram, ink361, Twitter.

Sophie made this Pikachu cake, and shared the recipe on her food blog, Pika Chews.

Cooking, she wrote, is “her favorite way of dealing with stress“.

One could imagine that navigating the world of hackers and coders could be a bit stressful as one of the few females in a male dominated profession criticized for its’ treatment of women.

Sophie hinted at this in a tweet, a facebook post and in her blog.

“Let me tell you that unfortunately, I have *NEVER* worked in a single lab or workplace of a technical nature where I have not experienced some sort of sexism– ranging from inappropriate comments to outright harassment,” she wrote in October 2014. “That is right– not a SINGLE lab or company.”

While she’s been aware of “gender as a social construct“, she has only recently become aware that race may be one. “We seek a logical, scientific proof of the existence of race, yet issues of racial thinking and racism clearly cannot be approached in such matters,” she wrote in a response to her Race and Racism class she took last sememster.

When she took the class, she noticed a similarity between early racial categorization and statistical classification for machine learning. “What we are doing now– what Google does with its personalized search, what Facebook does with its unsettlingly accurate ads– is automating that same thought process of 19th century anthropologists,” she wrote in  October 2014. “We look at a person,… her technological imprint on the web, the traces she leaves, her purchase history, friends, and log-ins, then say: “what sort of human being are you”? And then, using our charts and tables– no longer printed ones, but weights on variables in our algorithms and databases of records– we first classify her, and after, yes, we rank her (sometimes we rank her first and then classify her, as well).”

Self-doodle, by Sophie.

Her evolving ideas about her identity, are some of the resonant evident of her journey. One of her most lovely essays about identity, reflected in a persimmon tree her parents planted in her yard. “Each one reminds me of my parent’s love and my roots– that I am not as American as apple pie, but that the fruit is sweeter still,” she wrote.

Her blog, which began in 2012 at the encouragement of a mentor, traverses on a range of topics.  A sampling:

 On her personality:  “I’m somewhat hot-headed and a whole lotta stubborn, so it’s very, very easy for me to jump to binary (GOOD || BAD) conclusions about things right off the bat, when in reality, this can be a silly, not to mention dangerous, practice. And if 2013′s taught me anything at all, people (and life) are constantly full of surprises.”

on the death of the first start-up she worked at: “if working for and supporting NYC startups for the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that life is unstable, unpredictable, and not to be taken too seriously. things change, companies boom and burst and are bought and then disappear; the next big thing is already yesterday’s news by the time you download it, but the relationships you make in the office will last far beyond those confines.

Dancing in a performance for a hip hop group while at Columbia

on dance: “Sometimes it’s good to want so much to be good at something that isn’t just a desk job.” “It’s a struggle, and so much work, just to be able to express one-tenth of what I want to say in my movement. But in that moment when I’m finally on the beat, and not stumbling over my own feet, I never feel so much alive.”

on creativity: “If you’re bilingual, do you know that feeling, where you kind of just “tune in” to another language, not even switch gears but just slightly adjust the radio knob to receive a different wavelength? That’s how I feel about the creative state of mind. You know that it’s there and a language you can speak but there are others equally adequate and all of them interesting to use, but also that if you don’t speak it for a while all of a sudden you’re fumbling over verbs and names. Whatever language you use in your daily life will be the easiest and sharpest tool, but you know the feelings of the words and sounds of the mother tongue”

Creative communication seem to connect the varied interests of Sophie’s choices: clearly explaining markov chains in text or video; doodling insights from the mind of an introvert; sharing how to make the perfect egg.

This assignment allowed me to deconstruct how we verify information, how we use it construct what we think we know, and how it shapes our assumptions.  I found that for someone with an active, rich online presence, learning about what Sophie did was easy.

But it did not provide the why: Why did she decide to pursue computer engineering? Why did stop gymnastics? Why didn’t she pursue writing? (She didn’t think it was a viable career option until later)

That omission was the difference between knowing and understanding.

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