Washington Press Club Foundation

Catherine Shen: Interview #2

June 26, 1992 in Novato, California

Shirley Biagi, Interviewer

Catherine Shen - June 26, 1992 Tape 1 of 2

June 26th, 1992
Listen to audio

Catherine Shen - June 26, 1992 Tape 2 of 2

June 26th, 1992
Listen to audio
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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: Today, since we started yesterday in the middle, I want to go to the very beginning, and I'd like to start at the beginning of your life and then talk about your parents and what role you think they played in your life. Your birth date is officially?

Shen: My birth date is October 31, 1947, Halloween.

Biagi: Does that have any significance to you?

Shen: No, it doesn't. Who was born on Halloween? I think Lord Baden Powell was born on Halloween. I can't remember who else. People both nefarious and wonderful were born on Halloween. The only thing it meant to me was I had to share my birthday, in effect, and as a child I was terrified of all those ghouls who showed up. I used to run, screaming.

Biagi: At that point, where were your parents and what had happened to them?

Shen: They had immigrated. They were immigrants from China. Unlike many of the people who came to the West Coast, at least some, they were extremely educated, which was the reason they ended up on the East Coast. The East Coast Asian community is very different from the West Coast community, not just because there are many fewer, but although you do have Chinatowns with people from all classes and all educational backgrounds there, many of them are underemployed. In the educated classes, you get the people who are really educated. I.M. Pei basically is a New Yorker, for example. An Wang—we call him Wang An—is a family friend of ours, the founder of Wang Computers. He's a Boston area fellow. So it's a very different milieu.

My parents were both physicians. In fact, they were both hematologists. My father died in 1975. My mother is still alive.

Biagi: When did your father die?

Shen: It was in July, but I don't remember the exact date. My mother is retired, obviously. She's eighty-four, but she's still relatively hale and hearty.

Biagi: How old was your father when he died?

Shen: He was in his early sixties, so he wasn't very old, although the males in his family are not particularly long-lived. My grandmother on my maternal side, however, lived until she was over 100, so I'm expecting to live a long time and will have to plan my financial future accordingly, since there will be nobody putting any money into Social Security when I'm retired. The pool is

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going to be so small, which is something baby boomers are starting to think about. I have to talk to Kay Harris. [Laughter.] Most of these women had very well-to-do husbands.

Biagi: There's time yet. [Laughter.]

Shen: That's true. So I was basically brought up in a professional family, and my mother tells me she did stay home until I was three, and after that she went back to work. So my role model as a child was a working mother, certainly.

Biagi: Where did she work?

Shen: She worked for the Red Cross. She didn't work at the same place all those years. She worked at the Red Cross for a while. She worked as a research physician at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston, mostly those two places. She was working for another hospital when I was in college; I can't remember the name of it. It was either Peter Bent Brigham or Robert Bent Brigham in Boston.

My father had a research lab for most of my childhood, doing research. I actually don't know, I think he was into pernicious anemia.

Biagi: Did he own the lab?

Shen: It operated on grants. Basically he would apply for grants. He would get the grants.

Biagi: Through the university?

Shen: I don't know, to tell you the truth. All I know is that when the grants were up, it was a tense time in our house. He'd be working very, very hard. Then one year it wasn't renewed, actually, and he decided to switch fields and go into pathology, but he didn't really like that. At the same time he started to get ill, and so from then on mostly he actually didn't work. He was basically taking care of his health, and my mother was working. So there you are.

Biagi: You were born in Boston?

Shen: I was born in Boston Lying-in Hospital, which I believe still exists.

Biagi: Did your family live in the same house the whole time?

Shen: Until I was about three, they lived in Harvard graduate school-type student housing. My father was affiliated somehow with Harvard Medical School for a while, so we were living, in effect, in graduate housing. My parents then bought a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Bowdoin Street, which we lived in until I was about twelve or just before I was twelve. That summer we moved to Belmont, Massachusetts, to a house there with a big, big back yard, bigger house, bigger than we needed. That was where I lived until I went away to college. My mother just sold that house a few years ago to move into the condominium that she now lives in.

Biagi: She still lives in the neighborhood?

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Shen: Yes, her condominium is about a half a mile from where the house is.

Biagi: What were their backgrounds? How had they been educated?

Shen: Very well. My father went to St. John's University in Shanghai, which was originally a missionary school. By the time he graduated, it was a very well-established, prestigious one. He came from a banker's family in Shanghai. The families of both my mother and father were very well-to-do, more well-to-do, certainly, than they ever were in America, and they were making fairly decent incomes. He came from a banker's family in Shanghai. I've since been back to Shanghai and visited some of my relatives there. The house that they used to live in, the big house, now has about ten families living in it and they live elsewhere.

Biagi: Your father's full name?

Shen: Shu Chu Shen. This is Americanized phonetic.

Biagi: Your mother?

Shen: My mother is Helena Wong Shen. She went to Ling Nam University, which is in southern China, which is where she's from. She's from Kwangsi. She graduated from there, came to this country and went to Tulane.

Biagi: Where did they meet?

Shen: They met on a boat. My mother and father were always very fuzzy about this, or maybe I just wasn't listening closely. They apparently met on a boat, some inter-island boat in China, and when my mother came to this country, my father followed her.

Biagi: She came first, then?

Shen: Yes. They were married here in this country.

Biagi: Had they been married a long time before you were born?

Shen: Yes, several years, because my mother went back to China for two years to serve as a physician with the Nationalist Army, and they were both studying. It must have been at least eight or nine years.

Biagi: Do you get a feeling that they were students here or had they finished their education by the time they got here?

Shen: They were doing a lot of graduate work here. When you're a research physician, I don't think you ever stop. Work and study sort of blend in.

Biagi: So the three years when you were a baby, when your mother stayed home, your father was going to work at a research lab?

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: Then when she went back to work, did she go to work at the Red Cross?

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Shen: Yes.

Biagi: Did she have a regular routine or workday?

Shen: More or less, although with the Red Cross, when they went to farther locations, Cape Cod, for example, she'd sometimes be away overnight. I did go to nursery school and I did have people taking care of me, who basically would take care of me after I got back from school. I do remember some of those people. I remember it more clearly in grade school than I do in nursery school, but I know my mother was working when I was in nursery school, because I once faked a stomach ache and I just felt like doing it, I guess, and they had to call her and she came and got me.

Biagi: That old trick. [Laughter.]

Shen: Right. She knew, as soon as she saw me, that I didn't have a stomach ache. On the way home in the car, she said, "Why did you fake this stomach ache?"

Biagi: Were they religious people at all?

Shen: Not particularly. We did attend Harvard Epworth Methodist Church in Cambridge, not faithfully, certainly. Regularly, yes, mostly spurred on by my mother, my father and I mostly going under duress, my father in particular. Then we'd go eat dim sum in Chinatown afterwards, which was a much better experience.

Biagi: Chinatown in Boston?

Shen: Small, but nice. Very, very small. I didn't realize how small till I saw other Chinatowns.

Biagi: San Francisco has no match.

Shen: I actually do remember Sunday school pretty well, and I remember enjoying parts of Sunday school. I appreciated it when I was in college, when I was studying literature, when I was an English major, and I realized how much of Western literature is basically based on religious writing and how much the myths of Christianity, the rituals of Christianity, are so prevalent. It actually helped me out, and the music is great. I really like some of the songs.

However, when I was in Hawaii, I gave a talk to a Jewish synagogue, the one Jewish synagogue in Honolulu, and was struck, giving that talk, by how welcome children were in those services and how much warmer and how much nicer it felt than having to sit in this New England church and keep quiet throughout a boring sermon. It was just a totally different atmosphere. I remember thinking that it would have been better to be Jewish. They really seem much more welcoming to children. It really seemed much warmer. I realized how repressed that New England Methodism is.

Biagi: You did go to Sunday school?

Shen: I did go to Sunday school.

Biagi: Sunday school lessons. You remember enough of that. For a long time?

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Shen: Over a period of years, yes, from a child until I was at least twelve. When we moved to Belmont, it was a farther distance. I was almost a teenager then. So it became a lot more irregular. Sometimes I hated those sermons so much, I would just sit in the car the whole time. I'd just go out to the car and sit there and wait and do nothing. It was preferable than sitting in that church. I had to go to Sunday school and then sit in the church. Then for a while I discovered there was a nursery upstairs, so I used to help take care of the little kids and infants, and that was better than sitting in church, listening to that sermon.

Biagi: The culture in your neighborhood, were there Chinese people?

Shen: It was totally white. I didn't know anything else at the time.

Biagi: The church and the culture were the same?

Shen: Yes, basically. In Boston in that area, you either lived in the suburbs of Boston, which were, and still are, mainly white, or you lived in Chinatown. There really wasn't anything in between. We had lots of Chinese friends, but they weren't next door to each other; they were two miles away or they were in a neighboring suburb. We were spread apart, not far apart, but these were white neighborhoods that I grew up in.

Biagi: You mentioned yesterday that there were Chinese people in your home, but those were friends who would come in and you'd have a party or something.

Shen: My parents really liked to get together with friends. I remember it was matter of fact to have six or eight people over for dinner on weekends. That was nice.

Biagi: But there weren't any other Chinese people around just day to day?

Shen: No.

Biagi: Did your family have any family here?

Shen: No.

Biagi: So they were here alone without their family. So other than friends, there wasn't anybody else close to you.

Shen: That's right.

Biagi: What about your parents' relationship? You talked about this yesterday, that it started out all right, or was it always troubled?

Shen: From the time I can remember, it was pretty troubled. In fact, I often wondered why they didn't get divorced. After my father got ill, the nature of the relationship changed, but when they were both hale and hearty—when you're a child, things are magnified, so if I were looking at it as an adult, I don't know what I'd say. To a child, to hear your parents shouting at each other is a terrible thing, so I remember that very vividly. I remember their arguments. They argued about money, they argued about a lot of different things.

Biagi: Was it what you call a privileged childhood?

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Shen: It was a middle-class to upper middle-class childhood.* Belmont, where we moved to when I was twelve, is an affluent suburb. It's four miles square, mostly populated by white-collar professionals. A lot of physicians, a lot of lawyers, a lot of Harvard professors, researchers. I'm trying to think of an equivalent in the Bay Area. Piedmont would be an equivalent, although Piedmont has somewhat grander houses and really has mansions, and Belmont has only a few of those. Belmont is a little more even than Piedmont. It doesn't go quite as high end, and it goes to a lower end, but basically most people would be hard pressed to afford a house in Belmont, Massachusetts, these days.

Biagi: And it definitely had a feeling about it that was exclusive and white collar, and if you lived in Belmont, people knew that was comfortable.

Shen: Yes. They wanted better public schools, among other things. The house we lived in in Cambridge, actually, we continued to own. My parents didn't sell that. They rented it for years and didn't sell it. It was in a very nondescript neighborhood, but I liked it a lot.

Biagi: What about your schooling?

Shen: The public schools in the Boston area in those suburbs when I was growing up in the fifties were damn good schools. They were a lot better than the private schools here in California are now. Basically you have to pay to get schools that aren't as good as those schools were. It was a different era. Boston, anyway, puts such a value on education, it's just different. I went to the Peabody School, which was in our local neighborhood. Imagine that, a neighborhood elementary school. Then for junior high, I was twelve when we moved, so I went immediately into junior high at Belmont.

Biagi: What was the name of that?

Shen: Belmont Junior High. There was one junior high and one high school.

Biagi: Was it Belmont High School?

Shen: Belmont High, yes.

Biagi: What do you remember about grammar school?

Shen: The building no longer exists. The school is still there, but it's a different school. They demolished it. Who knows? Maybe it's an evening education center. I don't know what it is now. I remember the playground and the jungle gym and playing "Red Rover, Red Rover." It was all wood inside. I remember the wooden floors and the wooden banisters.

I have a very clear memory of my first teachers, very, very. I can tell you their names. My kindergarten teachers were Miss Sheridan and Miss Hoyle. I was always late for school in kindergarten. Always late, which is interesting, because I am one of the most punctual people I know now. For some reason I was always late in kindergarten. I enjoyed kindergarten immensely. I enjoyed school in general. My first-grade teacher was Miss Huling, unimaginative spinsterish-looking woman. My second grade teacher was Miss Pulsford. She loved to read, and I loved to listen to her read. I learned Palmer penmanship out of inkwells in this school. It took me

______________________ * They spoke English and Chinese at home and with friends.

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years to undo that Palmer P. Nobody makes those funny—they look like kidney beans. I changed that. I had to change the way I wrote later on, because nobody could read my writing.

Biagi: What about the Q, the fancy Q?

Shen: Yes. That's a long time ago. Kay Harris would say that wasn't long at all.

Biagi: That's yesterday. [Laughter.]

Shen: Right. My third-grade teacher was Miss Margaret Mary Carroll, and she was great. She was wonderful.

Biagi: Sounds quite Irish.

Shen: Yes. I don't think any of these women were married.

Biagi: You called them Miss, anyway.

Shen: Yes. I really don't think they were married. I'm sure they didn't have a life besides school. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Maybe that's why they paid so much attention to school.

Shen: Yes. Then I had Miss Graham in the fourth grade, Mr. Dunn in the fifth grade, and in sixth grade, there were two sixth-grade classes. One was Miss Watson and one was the other one. The other one was mine, and I actually can't remember.

Biagi: Was it a school that went to sixth grade?

Shen: Yes. Actually, there were a lot of experiments going on in education at that time. I remember Sputnik was happening, and suddenly American educators looked around and said, "Oh, my God!"

Biagi: "They're going to the moon!" [Laughter.]

Shen: "What are we doing?" I was the experimentee in a lot of these experiments, particularly the Boston area, because there are so many schools. A lot of these suburbs are guinea pigs for Harvard School of Education. Lexington is now, not Belmont. They started to teach me French. I had conversational French in the fifth or sixth grade, very early on for those years. I came out of it not being able to babble anything. Years later when I did take French, it came very easily to me. I learned it perfectly, and people used to comment on how good my accent was. So I am, believe me, a convert. I think children should be taught another language, if not two, if you can, from the womb on. But failing that, from at least kindergarten on. I really think they should be taught a second language.

Biagi: Because even if they don't remember it, you're saying it will come back.

Shen: It will come back.

Biagi: Makes it easier later.

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Shen: Yes.

Biagi: Other highlights?

Shen: This was psychologically difficult. They separated a bunch of us out in sixth grade and sent us into an accelerated program at another school.

Biagi: What school?

Shen: At the Agassix School. It was another school. It wasn't that far from my house, but it was across a big avenue, which was sort of the dividing line, and it wasn't my school.

Biagi: That last year there, too.

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: Was that the whole sixth grade?

Shen: Yes, it was part of the sixth grade, not the whole sixth grade, and we moved the next year to Belmont, so it was no longer relevant. Some of my friends came along. Basically they took all the kids that they decided to, and they did it on the basis of IQ testing. I remember that IQ test, too. I went into a room with a very nice woman. I remember her as really being nice, who had me string beads, she had me repeat stories after she'd told them to me, she had me repeat lists of words. It was all kinds of things. There was nothing written about this test. Most of the test was oral, and it was one on one, and it lasted a long time. Supposedly the dividing line was like 125 I.Q., whatever they called the dividing line then. Anyway, so a bunch of us were separated out from all the elementary schools in Cambridge, and we were all brought together in this one class at this one particular school.

Biagi: You were going to the moon. [Laughter.]

Shen: Yes. I didn't like this new school particularly, and I just felt discombobulated, I really did. I really, really did. There was nothing particularly wrong with it. I had a very good teacher. Of course they'd give you a really good teacher. They'd give you the best teacher in school.

Biagi: Was it in a different neighborhood?

Shen: Yes. It was really physically not that far. If I had lived another five blocks in one direction, I would have gone to this school instead. But it's like neighborhoods. You don't change schools like that easily.

Biagi: Had they brought other grades there, too?

Shen: No, this was just sixth grade. They just picked this particular grade to do it in. I don't know why.

Biagi: You ended up in a class of twenty or thirty?

Shen: I don't remember, some of whom I knew and some of whom I didn't.

Biagi: So you were studying accelerated in all subjects?

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Shen: Everything. The class was kept together, so we were the class and we learned whatever they happened to teach us.

Biagi: They didn't pick out Latin for you to learn?

Shen: Not that I recall. I didn't have anything to compare it to.

Biagi: Did you do well?

Shen: I guess I did all right. All through grade school, my report cards were all ninety-fives. They were the old-fashioned way they gave report cards. I was basically a straight-A student.

One memory I have of this accelerated class was I actually started to write a novel in that class. I can't remember whether it started out as a class assignment or whether I just got interested in it. Probably it was a class assignment. Why would I go home and write a novel? I actually did start to write something. I never did finish it, but I do remember the act of writing fiction.

Biagi: What was it about?

Shen: It was a total projection. I'm kind of horrified by it now. Talk about deracinated. It was about a little blonde girl named Alicia, and I don't remember what she did, but it was obviously a projection of what I would have liked to have been, and it was obviously totally unlike what I was.

Anyway, the next year we moved. Big change. Again I remember feeling somewhat discombobulated. It was a very different group of kids.

Biagi: Very far from where you were?

Shen: No, Belmont isn't physically very far, but it is psychologically far. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a much larger community and it has everything from dire poverty to the most well-paid Harvard researchers. It's got everybody from John Kenneth Galbraith to slums in it, and it is an interesting community. Now that I have a child, it might be different, but certainly if I were to move back to the Boston area, I would probably choose Cambridge over a lot of other places to live.

Biagi: Because of the mix?

Shen: Yes, it's an interesting place to live, truly an interesting place to live. Belmont is much more suburban, trees, big lawns, much duller.

Biagi: Not at all within walking distance of downtown Boston?

Shen: Not at all, but it's very close. By public transportation, you could be in downtown Boston in half an hour. If you drove with what traffic was like in those days, you could do it in about twelve minutes. It's very close, and that's one of the reasons the prices are so high in Belmont. It succeeds in being a suburb with good schools that is extremely convenient to Boston, and there aren't very many places like that. That's why housing prices are sky high.

I remember, actually, having trouble in some of my classes, particularly math. Math had been kind of a bugaboo with me. Actually, for once, I attribute it to basically being a girl in the

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old-fashioned way they educated. I just really think that they expected girls not to be as good in math, and I think it was the way it was taught. So I had this thing about math.

Biagi: Did you have male teachers for math?

Shen: No, because in grade school you have one teacher.

Biagi: How about seventh and eighth grade?

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: You did?

Shen: Oh, yes. And my English teachers were female. I always did very, very well in English. In fact, I learned the same thing for three years.

Biagi: Meaning?

Shen: Meaning that the curriculum seemed to me, in seventh and eighth and ninth grades, to be teaching me the same stuff over and over and over again. I couldn't figure out why. Why are we learning the same grammar? Why are we learning the same thing? But in seventh grade I really did have problems. I really had academic problems. I just couldn't seem to get prepositions. I never had any trouble after that. That one year, though, was hard for me. I really think it was the transition. It was real difficult.

Biagi: Did you behave differently? Any behavior problems? Was it just academic problems?

Shen: If you'd ask my parents, they could probably tell you better. I wasn't aware of behavior problems. I was aware, though, from childhood on, from at least the age of nine or ten, that I behaved extremely well outside the home in school, and I behaved much worse at home. I don't know why that is. That probably is true to this day. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Is that right?

Shen: If I look at it, yes. I think I was a very difficult child to live with. My perception as a child was that I was very difficult to be with. I said the same thing about my married life. It's important to set limits for children. It's really important to set limits. I think I really wanted limits and they weren't set for me.

Biagi: But there were expectations.

Shen: Very high expectations, absolutely. My parents, from the get-go, partly because they were Chinese, partly because of who they were, they expected me to get extremely good grades, they expected me to do very well in school, and they expected me to go to an Ivy League school. In fact, I remember one dinner party conversation with a bunch of people, not our close friends. These were mostly white. Our close friends were never white; our close friends were always Asian. So these were professional people who my parents probably wanted to impress, and we talked about school because one of the attendees, their freshman daughter was at Mount Holyoke. They asked me what schools I wanted to go to, and I had been sort of flipping through college catalogs rather desultorily. I just picked a few names out of the air, and I picked Grinnell and I think I picked—I can't remember what they were.

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I remember, after the dinner, my parents came to me and they were furious. They were absolutely furious. They said, "Why did you mouth off all those—why did you talk about all those second-rate schools?"

Biagi: So it was important to them.

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: Then what did you do? Did you start looking into different schools?

Shen: I really did. In the end, I went to Wellesley. In the end, the schools I applied to were Radcliffe, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Wellesley.

Biagi: Was there a reason for that?

Shen: Actually, they didn't force me to apply to the school. I guess I was so brainwashed by the time I was a junior, those were the schools. I picked the schools. They didn't object.

Biagi: You didn't apply to Boston U. or anything?

Shen: No, I didn't. By then I had my own pecking order. The only two schools I considered applying to, and didn't, were Cornell and Stanford, because I thought, "Maybe I ought to give myself the experience of being in a coed school." I really thought that. But in the end, I didn't. I basically set a path for myself. I had no real good reason. When Vassar accepted me, I knew I didn't really want to go to Vassar, and I didn't get into Radcliffe. I got on the waiting list. So it was basically between Bryn Mawr and Wellesley. It was almost a flip of a coin. I didn't have a good reason for going, except Bryn Mawr is a lot smaller. All of Bryn Mawr was seven-hundred students, and Wellesley, the freshman class alone was four-hundred students. So it was considerably larger. I had really no good reason. So I ended up at Wellesley.

Biagi: What about high school, expectations for you there and other activities that you were in?

Shen: I was real active in the Drama Club, as I said. I loved it.

Biagi: How did you get involved in the Drama Club?

Shen: I don't remember. I liked to read plays. I think that's how it was. It wasn't inundated with people. I was also in chorus. I sang in the chorus and really, really enjoyed that.

Biagi: Second soprano?

Shen: Second soprano. I did not go out for sports. That's totally cultural. Now that I look back on it, it's totally cultural. My parents never encouraged me one way or another. Physical exercise was not a thing in my family. This will be very different for my son, because I believe in physical exercise for both mental and physical reasons. I think it's great. I think you need it. You need to learn to play in a team of some kind. You need to learn that running around can make you feel good. I had a very sedentary life, especially once I was past early childhood. I was passionate about my pogo stick when I was younger, and jump rope and stuff like that. But as a high schooler or in junior high school, I was basically a couch potato.

Biagi: Were there activities for girls in your high school? Was there a girls' athletic league?

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Shen: Now that I look back on it, the school probably didn't help me out there either, but there was tennis. I did try to go out for tennis. I've been trying to play tennis since I was ten years old. My father played tennis not very well. I have never been able to play well. I have had lessons. It's not for lack of opportunity. I basically have lousy hand-eye coordination. Interestingly, my son has extremely good hand-eye coordination.

Biagi: Maybe it's his dad.

Shen: It's his dad. And I emphasize it. "Let's play catch!" I want him to have that, because I know how useful that actually is. But I was a couch potato. I went out for stuff like drama. I did really try to go out for tennis, but I was so hopeless.

Biagi: Were you typecast or did you play all kinds of roles?

Shen: All kinds of roles. Basically we picked the plays we put on and we cast ourselves, with the exception of the senior play, which was a totally different thing. As it turned out, our senior play was canceled because John F. Kennedy was assassinated that year.

Biagi: What were your favorite roles?

Shen: I can't remember which one I played. You know Clare Booth Luce's "The Women"? One of those roles. There was a role in "The Crucible," Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," but I don't remember the role. There were some other. I don't even remember these plays. In some cases I stage-managed, too. I was involved backstage. I remember being involved backstage in "Antigone." I don't remember the others. "Mad Woman of Chaillot," we put that on. No musicals. I remember stage-managing our talent show one year. I really enjoyed that.

Biagi: So you'd stay after school and work on the plays.

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: Were there any other clubs you were involved in?

Shen: No, not that I remember.

Biagi: Any publications? The newspaper?

Shen: I don't even know if we had one. I had absolutely no interest in that whatsoever. English was one of my favorite classes, but I had no interest in it as an extracurricular activity.

Biagi: Then you graduated in 1963?

Shen: I graduated in '65. The senior class [play] I was going to attend that year [1963] was canceled. "The Mad Woman of Chaillot" was our senior class play, and we did put that on. I graduated in '65. Kennedy was assassinated in '63.

Biagi: Then you headed off to Wellesley. Is there any reason that you chose a women's college?

Shen: Simply because the Ivy League schools in general were not coed at that time. Yale went coed when I was halfway through college. Had they been truly coed, I would have applied, yes. They were not coed. They're coed now.

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Biagi: Stanford was, however.

Shen: Stanford was, yes, but I never did end up applying to Stanford. To me, I guess Ivy League also meant East. If they had been coed, I certainly would have applied. I would have considered that a plus. When I look back on it now, my vantage point now is I am totally convinced that a non-coed college education is better for women.

Biagi: Why?

Shen: Because you are listened to. I don't think you get as listened to, I just don't think you're treated as equally, and certainly wouldn't have been back then, in a coed school. I think when you go to an all-women's college like that, you absorb the fact that you can do anything.

Biagi: Why do you think that happens?

Shen: There are no boys to impress in classes, there are no distractions in the classes themselves. You're not competing with the way that the culture feels about men as opposed to women. It makes for an odd social life, but my feeling about that now, looking back, is who the hell cares? [Laughter.]

Biagi: What was your social life?

Shen: There's a big gap between weekends and the week. You don't say, "Hey, why don't we go study together after class? Why don't we grab a cup of coffee or milkshake?" Which is kind of a natural way to interact with somebody. No, instead you end up going to these hideous mixers or going on these blind dates. It's a thing, you know. You're going out on a date, you have to take the shower, get dressed, they have to pick you up or you have to meet them. There's nothing casual about it. It's very stilted.

Biagi: So it's organized, too. You know the weekends, that's what they're for.

Shen: Yes. It's not pleasant. It's really not pleasant.

Biagi: Do you think that upset your social patterns, not having friends during the week?

Shen: Particularly since I am basically an only child, no brothers and sisters. This just sort of exacerbated tendencies I probably already had. I think there's no question that you have a better chance of actually truly excelling as a woman, particularly back then, because we're talking about mid to late sixties.

Biagi: What was the atmosphere? When people talk about the sixties, of course, they think of Vietnam, they think of protests. Were there any around Wellesley?

Shen: Actually, there certainly were by the time of my later years, '69, for example, but I was extremely apolitical. I was not an activist. I'm sort of still not, although in some ways I'm probably more radical now than I was then. No, there were protests going on all around me. One of my best friends transferred to UC Berkeley after two years at Wellesley, because I think she felt she was being smothered by this pink cocoon. She was very active in all kinds of things, but it just kind of swirled around me. I think the first time I truly became aware of it, there were some protests at Harvard, I think my last year, that actually made the network TV shows, where a few people were bloodied. It was nothing compared to what was happening elsewhere. Then it

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really hit home to me that actually a lot of people my age were quite incensed about this war. Largely it was the people I knew, the people I went around with weren't either. I think that what your peers are interested in tends to be what you're interested in.

Biagi: Was there discussion of the feminist movement?

Shen: No.

Biagi: At a women's college, there wasn't—

Shen: There wasn't with the people I talked with.

Biagi: Social movements kind of escaped you.

Shen: They really did.

Biagi: The cocoon you talked about, that your friend didn't like, did you feel like you were in a cocoon?

Shen: I had feelings. I didn't think Wellesley was the be-all and the end-all, but I enjoyed my years in college, I really did.

Biagi: You've said you had an excellent education.

Shen: I felt I did not take advantage of it. I did not do particularly well in college. In fact, for the first time in my life, in college I began to have trouble in English. I actually got to where I was kind of blocked about it. I went to talk to the head of the English department at the time, whose name was David Ferry, and he said, "Oh, I'm sure it's just a temporary thing. I'm sure you won't have a problem. I've seen it happen time and time again." Well, it wasn't just a temporary problem. I really had a block about analyzing printed matter. I couldn't break through it. I really, really couldn't. I think I might have finally broken through it in graduate school, and I wouldn't have any problem now, but it's a mystery to me to this day. I don't know what it was.

Biagi: When you say you didn't do well, does that mean Bs?

Shen: No, it means Cs. It means Bs and Cs. I think I did get a D in world history. I did very well in French. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Due to your early experience, yes.

Shen: French literature I really loved. I read a lot. I took Chinese and learned it for a while well enough to write my diary in it, and now I can't read the diary.

Biagi: Did you keep a diary all through college?

Shen: I started keeping a diary when I was much younger, but I didn't do it every year. I take a look at them. I think my mother has them. I think there are three or four of them. I think I started it when I was in sixth grade, but I wasn't real faithful every year, so I kept one on and off. They are very banal. They are so banal. If you read those, you would say, "This is the most boring person in the world." I'm sure that most people have more interesting—I wrote about what

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I ate, I wrote about what I wore, I wrote about just very mundane things. There's not even a lot of self-examination. They are really awful! I mean really awful.

Biagi: You didn't even write down books that you read?

Shen: No! Nothing.

Biagi: Movies you went to see?

Shen: No. I wrote about the weather. I basically wrote about what had happened to me during the day, but what happened to me during the day wasn't particularly interesting on a day-to-day basis.

Biagi: What was happening on the weekends, this massive social life that you were accumulating there?

Shen: Actually, I don't think I wrote that much about it. I think I stopped. My social life was not a particularly good social life. It really wasn't. In my freshman year, I dated a lot of different people, all of whom I was indifferent to. I finally met a fellow who was totally unsuitable, who was a college dropout, who was actually a friend of a high school friend of mine who lived in Belmont, much older than I was, four years older than I was. When you're that young, it's a big difference. He drove, and he was totally unsuitable, and my parents hated him, and I went out with him for three years. Basically, when I went to graduate school, I tearfully said goodbye to him and then never thought twice about him, frankly.

Biagi: Your parents met him, obviously. You brought him home?

Shen: They were terrified I would end up married to this person. They were just terrified. When I look back on it now, he was totally unsuitable.

Biagi: Why?

Shen: He was a nice guy, but he really had some learning disabilities. He was the adopted son of a guy who sold steel for Bethlehem Steel. His mother didn't work. His brother was also adopted. He wasn't from an academic family, he wasn't from a particularly white-collar family. I can understand why my parents were—he wasn't a real reader. There was nothing extremely sophisticated. He just wasn't—

Biagi: Good company?

Shen: We were snobs. You can tell what snobs our family was.

Biagi: Were you aware of that, that you were a snob? Or are you saying that now?

Shen: I'm saying that now. I was not aware of being a snob then, no. When I was in graduate school, I met my first husband.

Biagi: How did you decide to go to graduate school?

Shen: I really couldn't decide on anything else I wanted to do. Really, I decided I could do with another year of school. I think I'd like to go on. There wasn't anything in particular. My senior

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year in college, I actually tried to get a newspaper internship with the Quincy Patriot-Ledger. They turned me down.

Biagi: They turned you down. You always remember that.

Shen: Yes, they turned me down.

Biagi: Why do you think you tried to do that? What appealed to you?

Shen: The other job I applied for, which was already filled, as it turned out, was being an assistant at the Boston Athenaeum, which is a very Boston brahmin library, as you can imagine. I was obviously kind of a bookish person. I can't tell you why. Isn't that odd? I was not at all active. There was a school paper at Wellesley. In fact, the editor, Penny Ortner, went on to be a very successful producer of films, TV documentaries. I don't know what her married name is. To this day she's a very successful producer of TV documentaries and other documentaries in Florida, I believe, is where she lives. She was always very directed. This was what she wanted to do, and she was very active in journalism, so to speak. I was not, and don't ask me why. I really don't know why, but I did it. There you are. I think it just sounded interesting to me. Working at the Boston Athenaeum sounded interesting.

Biagi: Did you hear about the Patriot-Ledger internship in school, do you think?

Shen: I don't remember. It's odd, isn't it? Because I didn't apply to the Boston Globe, for example, which would have been a more logical choice, the bigger paper. I don't know why. I must have heard about it from somebody.

Biagi: Did you apply to many graduate schools?

Shen: No, I applied to NYU, I applied to Claremont graduate school, I think North Carolina maybe. Basically I think I wanted to try California. I wanted to get away from home. I just wanted to get away from home!

Biagi: By this time your father had been sick?

Shen: He was ill, although he wasn't an invalid.

Biagi: He had cancer?

Shen: Yes. He actually died from the aftereffects of cancer. He had cancer when I was nine. It was a tumor. They blasted him with so much radiation that he eventually died from the aftereffects of the radiation as it accumulated years later. The cancer, in effect, was cured, but they just didn't regulate dosages the way they do now.

Biagi: It was primitive at that point, wasn't it?

Shen: Exactly.

Biagi: But he wasn't working at this point?

Shen: He wasn't working, no. I went to graduate school and basically was glad I had come to California, even though I hated L.A.

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Biagi: Your parents funded all this?

Shen: They really did.

Biagi: There wasn't a requirement that you work or help out?

Shen: No, there wasn't. I did work as a lab technician in a neighboring lab to my mother's, I think for two years. I worked as a salesperson in a small gift shop in Harvard Square, but that money was more or less—I basically did what I wanted with it. There was no requirement that I work. This is too bad, my parents basically didn't ever talk finances with me. In fact, my father treated it as a subject that I really had no business asking about. I think that's too bad.

Biagi: Was your mother excluded from that, too? Was it his job to take care of the finances?

Shen: No.

Biagi: Your mother talked about it.

Shen: And fought about it. Eventually they fought about it. You asked whether it was a privileged childhood or not. Certainly in material terms, it was a fairly privileged childhood. I never wanted for anything. Actually, this is a good lesson in how not to bring up a child. If I wanted something, I simply asked for the money for it. There was not really an allowance given, where I had to budget or I had to manage it. I think it's not a good way to bring up a child. But they paid for summer camps, they paid for piano lessons, skating lessons, my mother mostly. This was all at my mother's instigation. She took me to shows.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Shen: I was thinking about what happens to girls as they enter puberty and adolescence and how suddenly their mindset changes. It's really a study of what happens in this culture with women. Something did change for me.

Biagi: What do you think? What perspective changed?

Shen: It suddenly became harder for me to achieve certain things. I can't put my finger on it, really, but I'm aware of a change.

Biagi: You mean like math, like those kinds of things?

Shen: Math was an earlier thing. I think it was a gradual coming on. I think something happened, and I can't point a finger at it, to tell you the truth.

Biagi: What about the concept of competition? Was there any place in that growing up that you felt that you had to compete, you had to be better than everybody else?

Shen: All my life. My parents fostered that kind of competition. All my life. I am competitive now. I hate to lose at anything. My father used to just quit playing chess with me because he thought I was such a poor sport. That was relatively unfair, since I probably learned being a poor sport from him. No, I hate losing. I hate not being the best at anything I do.

Biagi: Did you beat him at chess?

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Shen: No, actually I didn't beat him. I was good at chess, but I didn't beat him. If you put me up against a chess player now, I'd be awful, but at the time I was ten or twelve years old. No, no, no, that's always been unhealthfully important to me, I think, but I am very competitive. It came out in my marriage, among other things. It comes out with my peers. I try to keep it at bay, but it comes out in my feelings with my son. It's not that I'm competitive with my son; it's my feelings for my son, I suppose, in his competition with other kids. I'm conscious of it. You know, parents are hard. The worst part of it is Little League parents, you know. That kind of thing. It's something I consciously try to rein in. It's something that I think is not a good thing. I think it's great to be competitive up to a certain point. I think it's unhealthy to think you always have to be first, you always have to be the best.

Biagi: What about perfectionism? You're running an article about perfectionism.

Shen: I read that. I always take those little quizzes, "Are You a Perfectionist?"

Biagi: I wondered about that. Are you? How did you do on the quiz?

Shen: I came out as a perfectionist. There's no question about it. In the quiz I did. If you were to ask me now if I'm a perfectionist, I would say no. I can let go of projects, and basically, when they're done, they're done. I don't hold them and dot the last I. I'm not like that, I'm really not. In fact, sometimes I think my work is too sloppy, that I'm not willing to go the extra mile, that I'm not willing to do that one last thing to make it perfect, if anything.

Biagi: Deadlines are important? You'll meet the deadline and let it go and not have it be perfect? Or will you hold off and not meet the deadline and keep fiddling with things?

Shen: No, I believe in deadlines, but I also believe in meeting them with a decent product. That's never been a problem. I can always get it done.

Biagi: At Wellesley, did you have a roommate?

Shen: No. See, I'm a real loner that way. Freshman year, I did not have a roommate. Sophomore year, I did. We had a two-room suite and it was a disastrous experience to have a roommate, even though we were sort of friends. We got together because it was a lottery system for sophomores for housing. We had numbers together, and it was her idea. I wouldn't have done it. Anyway, so we got the housing we wanted, but as it turned out, we were terrible roommates, just terrible. We ended up one of us living in one room and the other living in the other. It was really awful.

Biagi: Was she an only child also?

Shen: No. Nancy was a spoiled Jewish princess from Scarsdale with an older brother at Harvard.

Biagi: And you weren't at all spoiled?

Shen: I was very spoiled, but I knew a spoiled child when I met one. She's now a very successful executive with Lever Bros., or was the last time I heard about her. She went to Harvard Business School. We remained friends afterwards. We just knew we could never be roommates. After that I had my own room. As a junior and senior, it's no problem anyway. I had my own room. Hell, when I was married, I would rather have had my own room, too, I think. That's always been one of the problems.

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Biagi: You have to share. [Laughter.]

Shen: Yes. I want my own space.

Biagi: What about Claremont? Did you have a roommate?

Shen: It was an apartment with a central kitchen and living area all in one room with three bedrooms off of it and a shared bathroom. We all had separate bedrooms.

Biagi: Did you have in mind a specific course of study?

Shen: No.

Biagi: You were now how old?

Shen: Twenty-one.

Biagi: So you graduated in '69. You went to Claremont right away?

Shen: Yes, the next fall, so the same year, in effect.

Biagi: You had planned for a year's study?

Shen: I had planned to get a master's degree, which I did at the end of the year. I had no wish to go on and get a Ph.D., because as far as I could see, in my field, the only thing it would be good for would be teaching, and I didn't want to go into teaching. Basically, I bought a year, sort of have fun, figure things out. I had the luxury of doing so.

Biagi: You got past the block?

Shen: Yes, over that year I got past the block. I learned to really enjoy literature again. I had one very good professor whose name escapes me. That's how memory is. You remember things when you were one year old, but you don't remember the stuff that happened more recently. He was really good, and he helped me out.

Biagi: At Wellesley?

Shen: No, at Claremont Graduate School. He taught the American literature course. That's where my dramatic training stood me in good stead, because not only did we have to write papers, but we also had to present them, in effect, verbally, as if we were professors. Having starred in all those plays, I was extremely good at presenting material. In fact, the grades I would get on the oral presentation were always much higher than I'd get on the written presentation.

Biagi: Did you have to write a thesis?

Shen: No, I didn't, not for the master's.

Biagi: So it was a series of papers you did?

Shen: Yes, a series of papers, a language exam I did have to pass. I did it in French. Let me tell you, that elementary school French, it really paid off all those many years later. It really did.

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Biagi: At that time had you read any Asian writers?

Shen: None. Zilch. Monkey, those sort of legendary Chinese folktales. One of our best family friends was Professor Yang at Harvard. He's since died, but he was a legendary professor of Chinese literature at Harvard. He once gave me a book, a translation by Arthur Waley, of the Monkey folktales. I was entranced by them, just entranced by them. That was the only Chinese literature. My parents did take me to some Peking opera. I thought to myself, and I still think, "What a bunch of caterwauling." [Laughter.]

Biagi: Like Italian opera.

Shen: But I like it. I like opera. I just don't like Chinese opera. I like melodrama. I find that interesting, but I've never been able to get into Chinese opera. It's always sounded awful to me.

Biagi: At Claremont, you finished your studies. Did you have any particular love for any kind of literature, or did you just feel like you had to achieve and get through the master's program?

Shen: I wanted to get through it, but there were things that I enjoyed. I really like American literature, [Nathaniel] Hawthorne and Henry James. For years I was enamored of Henry James' writing. I still am, but now it's not as much of a passion with me.

Biagi: He always circles around.

Shen: He always comes back. I like early and late James, I really do. I find him riveting, although I don't have the passion to this day. I think Nathaniel Hawthorne is amazing.

Biagi: Structured.

Shen: I had very specific interests. There was a mythology course given at Claremont Graduate School taught by a professor whose last name is Friedman, and I don't remember his first name. He was a very gifted man. They wouldn't let me into the mythology course because it was basically for people going on for their Ph.D.s. I did take an introductory course from him that was fabulous. I do remember a mixture at graduate school of being totally bored, totally terrified, but also being very interested in very specific things. I'm a reader. I read voraciously. I still do.

Biagi: If you had to list your five favorite authors at this point, who would they be besides Hawthorne and James?

Shen: Jane Austen, Bruce Chatwin. That's a mysterious story. I don't quite believe the story of his getting some blood disease in China. I'm trying to think of more contemporary writers who I really have a passion for.

Biagi: You said Paul Theroux.

Shen: I like Paul Theroux's travel writings. I don't like his novels at all. I do like his stuff, but he's not on the same plane as the other people. It's just not the same. The interesting thing about Bruce Chatwin is I don't like his travel writing, but I do like his novels. On Black Hill, which was about these two Welsh twins from babyhood through death, was one of the best books I've read. One of the most fabulous books, except for the end, that I've read is Possession by A.S. Byatt recently.

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Biagi: I'm reading it now.

Shen: Oh, it's wonderful!

Biagi: It was a slow beginning.

Shen: But it's wonderful! It's great. Nothing lights up my life like a good book. I can't think of an experience that's at all comparable. None.

Biagi: What about your parents? Were they readers?

Shen: No, not particularly. Newspapers were around. I remember reading newspapers. There were newspapers in my house. I remember the Boston Record-American. I used to read the funnies. I was entranced by the funnies. I also used to read the stock pages because my father did. I don't read the funnies at all now, which is interesting. After that, it was the Boston Globe. At some point they stopped taking the Record-American and started the Boston Globe, so there were newspapers coming into my house.

They read a lot of magazines. A lot of magazines came into my house, I know, because I would anxiously get home and see what was in the mail. I remember Life and Reader's Digest and National Geographic, not women's magazines, Harper's, the literary magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly. I don't recall my parents reading them so much. I go home to my house, and my mother's tables are still piled high with magazines, so she obviously is a magazine reader. She gets Boston and Time and U.S. News and World Report and National Geographic and Modern Maturity, because everybody over sixty-five gets Modern Maturity. But she obviously does read magazines, but she's not a book reader. In fact, I send her books. I sent her the Amy Tan book. I sent her Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, which she told me she thought was incomprehensible and crazy.

Biagi: Did she read it?

Shen: She read part of it and she put it down. She likes mysteries. No, they weren't really book readers.

Biagi: So in the house there weren't novels written in Chinese?

Shen: No, not really.

Biagi: Did your parents remain fluent?

Shen: They are, although they've never been really smooth English speakers, particularly my father. There are some Chinese who speak relatively very beautiful English or American English. My parents aren't like that, never were.

Biagi: As a child, did you ever speak to them in Chinese?

Shen: No, except for the few times I was learning Chinese. They sent me to Saturday lessons to learn Chinese, which put me off it for a long, long time. They never stopped trying to make me more Chinese, and I resisted. Boy, I'm sorry now I did, but I resisted it.

Biagi: After Claremont?

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Shen: I met the man who became my first husband in Claremont. He was in the School of Education. We both hated L.A., really. I still do. Even when I go back, the things about it I hate are still there, the light, the traffic, a lot of things. We decided that we wanted to be together and we decided we'd like to be in San Francisco, so we came up. I applied to the summer journalism program. See, I'm never conscious of actually wanting to be a journalist, but I actually do these things.

Biagi: Where?

Shen: This was at UC Berkeley, which had a summer journalism course. In fact, Herb Jacobs was my teacher. He's a great man. I really enjoyed him, although the courses were much too easy. To me they were just gut courses. One of them was photojournalism, which I really enjoyed. I learned to print photographs. I had a wonderful time. I can't remember what Peter was doing that summer. We weren't married yet. Maybe he was doing summer school classes, too.

Biagi: This was '70?

Shen: This was '71. We rented a little house in Berkeley on Benvenue, just a few blocks off of Telegraph Avenue, walking distance of campus. Had a great time, had just a wonderful time.

Biagi: Did you have your car?

Shen: Yes, I had my Volvo, and he had a car, a little Datsun. We started looking for jobs. He found a job as a teacher, and I found a job, as I talked about yesterday, by a fluke, at Harcourt Brace publisher.

Biagi: Were you driven by location again?

Shen: San Francisco was definitely a location. It wasn't that far.

Biagi: It was escaping L.A.

Shen: It was getting out of L.A., really, and San Francisco was something new. I'd heard good things about it. It seemed pleasant. I had visited it briefly when I was eighteen. I went to the Far East with my mother that summer. My mother had a convention in Sydney, Australia, and she was going to combine it with a trip to Hong Kong. She offered to take me, and I said, "Great!" So I went, and we went through San Francisco. I remember being very intrigued by San Francisco. I thought it was a really pretty city. I really liked San Francisco. Actually, it was my freshman year. It was between my freshman and sophomore years. So I had good memories of San Francisco. I remember the hills, I remember the pastel colors. Compared to Boston, it looked like some strange watercolor to me. So I wanted to try it.

Biagi: The weather was a little different.

Shen: The weather was different, although I don't remember weather as being particularly a plus. So I ended up back here. In effect, I've probably lived in the San Francisco area as long as I ever lived in the Boston area.

Biagi: Was there ever a thought at that point to go back home?

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Shen: No, although I remember missing home and I remember still considering Boston my home. That feeling lasted a long time. It didn't leave. Probably if you were to ask me when I was thirty, by then I would have considered the Bay Area my home.

Biagi: Before that, you called Boston home?

Shen: I would call New England home, because I did live in Maine in the early seventies for a year or two when I was twenty-five.

Biagi: You're at Berkeley in 1971. Granted, you're at Berkeley in the summer, but with Berkeley comes a certain idea of protest activities, political activities.

Shen: No, not me.

Biagi: None of that again?

Shen: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No, my memories of Berkeley, I remember hearing a noise of breaking glass and a hullabaloo late at night, and was quite shocked to get up the next morning and discover they had trashed Telegraph Avenue. [Laughter.]

Biagi: You weren't out there.

Shen: No, I couldn't imagine why they would do such a thing. Actually, there was no good reason for it at the time. People's Park to me was a sort of history. No, it really didn't touch me. Berkeley, to me, was eating Mexican food on Telegraph Avenue and spending a lot of time in Mo's Books. I was a bookstore prowler, still am.

Biagi: Mo's is still there.

Shen: Yes, Mo's is still there. Then it was very funky. It wasn't the new Mo's; it was the old Mo's. It was really like somebody's attic. I used to find my favorite spots and I'd just sit there for hours, going through books. Not newspapers; books. I was not a newspaper collector. We got the paper and I read it, but I was not particularly interested in the newspaper any more than any consumer would be.

Biagi: Popular media? Did you watch television? Did you like movies?

Shen: No, we didn't. As an adult, I watch little or no television. I watch no television. The last thing I watched, and this is unusual, because Benjamin was having dinner with his father, because I will not have the TV on while he's in the house, I just won't, was the Mike Wallace Watergate retrospective program. I did watch that. I did watch the ice skating championships, the Olympic ones, the finals. I watched the news coverage of the East Bay fire. I watched the Tienanmen Square coverage. That was three years ago. That's about it.

Biagi: At the time, the seventies—

Shen: We didn't own a TV. We didn't have a TV.

Biagi: In your house in Boston growing up, was there television?

Shen: I watched a lot of TV as a child, a lot of TV.

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Biagi: What do you remember?

Shen: The best things were the old movies. When I was a kid growing up in the fifties, I would pay attention to the year movies were made. You could then still see movies that were made in 1929. I actually paid attention to the year these movies were made. I thought it was fascinating. You got a lot of movies from the thirties and forties. I remember the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies. At the time I liked the story and hated the dancing. Now, of course, it's the exact opposite. It occurred to me I remember—it seemed like a revelation at an early age—that all these movies had the same plot. It was basically boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. I realized very early on that this was essentially the same plot. I remember thinking to myself, "Geez!"

I also read comic books. I had stacks of comic books in my room, Archie and Jughead, particularly. I loved romances, also those romance novels, the one that Roy Lichtenstein parodies, with the big tears coming out of the woman's eyes. I loved them. Classics comic books, where you could read about Lorna Doone, ten pages. Superman. Superwoman, too, was a good one.

Biagi: Did you like Veronica or did you like Betty?

Shen: I liked Betty. Betty seemed to me more down to earth, nicer. I liked Jughead, though.

Biagi: Comic relief.

Shen: See, I was addicted to all these trashy things as a child. I watched TV, Pinky Lee, Kate Smith, the Mickey Mouse Club. I distinctly remember playing with Ginette dolls and sitting and watching the Mickey Mouse Club, sure. There was a TV in my house, and I watched a lot of it. It ruined my eyesight. Saturday morning cartoons. I would beg my mother, I would say, "Please, can we just skip the tap dancing lessons today?" Saturday mornings I was always taking some kind of lesson, either ice skating or ballet or tap dancing, and I would just beg to stay home and watch the cartoons. Crusader Rabbit was one of my favorites and the old Superman cartoon was one.

Biagi: Did you see "Batman"?

Shen: No, I have not seen either. Since I've become a mother, I'm afraid my—"Shadows and Fog" was the last movie I saw, and didn't like it. I would like to see "Fried Green Tomatoes."

Biagi: You would like that, I think.

Shen: I like the book. I read the book recently and liked it very, very much, much more than I thought I would. You know she's [Fannie Flagg] a TV screenwriter who lives in Montecito? [Laughter.]

Biagi: She's actually been in television for years.

Shen: I had trouble getting around that in the book. So all these trashy things, and now I basically listen to classical music and opera, I watch no TV, I can't stand most movies because I think they're too middle brow, I don't even like most on-Broadway shows, because to me it's too middle brow. I like off-Broadway a lot. In some ways I'm a total cultural snob, but it's actually because it's what I enjoy. As a child, I ate hot dogs, you know. It's funny, isn't it?

Biagi: What about for your son?

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Shen: He is not going to watch cartoons.

Biagi: Is that right?

Shen: He is not going to watch.

Biagi: What if he begs you on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons?

Shen: He's not going to know they're on. I know I can't keep him from it forever, but for as long as I can, he will not be eating candy, he will not be watching TV. I suppose I'm almost an adherent of a Waldorf education, except it's too Eurocentric. I did go visit a Waldorf kindergarten, actually. There was no plastic in the place. None.

Biagi: What was there in there?

Shen: There was a lot of wooden toys, a lot of natural fabrics. They had us make little elves, little gnomes.

Biagi: You had to make this?

Shen: They were kind of recreating for visiting parents what a Waldorf kindergarten day would be like, so they actually had us do the stuff. They actually combed and carded the wool that we used to stuff these little gnomes, you know. I mean, it was quite interesting. I don't go that far that there's no plastic. There's plenty of plastic. But he's not going to watch most TV. I just consider most TV and most movies, they're too violent, they don't encourage a long span of concentration.

Biagi: And you don't think that he's going to visit his friends' houses and sit in front of a television set?

Shen: I'm sure he will eventually. There's no question about it. But all I can do is try when he's young. I think it comes back to you in some way, I really do.

Biagi: Like the French? [Laughter.]

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: Let me ask you about your son. Throughout most of your early working years, you didn't have children.

Shen: Didn't want them. Don't like children.

Biagi: Was it a conscious decision?

Shen: I couldn't imagine having a child. It's never been a goal of mine, ever. I don't even like children. I've never liked being around children.

Biagi: How did you come to this conclusion that you don't like children?

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Shen: When you see other people with children, some people just really seem to like being with them. I never liked being with children. I never felt I related particularly well to them. I didn't find them particularly cute, either. I found them tiresome. I just couldn't imagine one in my life.

Biagi: It was a conscious decision all those years not to have a child?

Shen: I used birth control.

Biagi: So you made a conscious decision.

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: So then here you are with a child. How did the thinking change?

Shen: The thinking never really changed. I got pregnant rather accidentally and decided it was about time to have a child. Bruce and I weren't married at the time. We got married while I was pregnant. We had been thinking about getting married. Suddenly I really wanted to do it. I was also in Hawaii at the time, which is more family oriented than any other place I've lived. San Francisco is actually anti-child. My friends in Hawaii had children. I was in a different environment from the one I'd been in, where I saw that you could have a child and actually still be a person, still be happy. I spent more time with children because my best friend in Hawaii had a child while I was there turn from one year old to almost four, and when we went out together, we took Christopher along with us. So I was actually with a child. It was no longer a terrifying experience to me. It was no longer so much of an unknown, and I actually think I saw you could be a professional woman and have a child. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Why are you laughing?

Shen: Well, because, yes, you can be, but it exacts a great toll. So, yes, I did have a child and I will not have another child. One, because of age, and, two, I don't want another child. It would be nice for Benjamin to have a sibling, and if I were thirty-six I might think about it, but I haven't suddenly become a child dévotée.

Biagi: Or what we'd call maternal.

Shen: No.

Biagi: It hasn't occurred to you to call yourself maternal in any way?

Shen: No, but I am a very motherly mother. I probably spend more time with my child than a lot of working mothers. Cathy Black, for example, basically sees her child after eight o'clock, if she sees him at all.

Biagi: In the evening?

Shen: Yes. She has a live-in nanny. This is the way she lives. Her husband has told her, "Don't tell anybody that, okay?" I think she sees him more on weekends, but basically that's not a life. If I have a child, I'm going to see more of my child. I actually am a motherly mother. I am very conscientious about researching schools, play activities. I put a lot of time and thought into this, but it's sort of an extension of the way I do things. If I get interested, as I have in various times in my life, in wine or art or stereo equipment or whatever, I really learn as much as I can about it.

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It becomes something I really research, and I enjoy it and I learn a lot about it. Well, in a way, pre-school is the same thing. It's just the way I do things. Or about birth. I read everything about birth. Or raising children, I go home and I read Berry Brazelton. It's just the way I approach things.

Biagi: So Benjamin was born in Hawaii?

Shen: Yes, and I was pregnant in Hawaii, sick as a dog. For the first five months, it was the worst kind of sickness, because most morning sickness you feel nauseous, you throw up, and it's over at twelve weeks. I not only threw up, I had ptyalism, which is fairly rare. It's common among Haitians. You produce saliva in copious amounts. Let me tell you, it was the worst experience of my life, and another reason why I don't want [another child]. I went to meetings with a cup that I would pretend was coffee or something I was drinking. I used to keep a cup I could spit into in the car. Wads of tissue in my pocket. I worked until I was two weeks from my due date, and after five months it didn't bother me.

Other than that, the pregnancy was no problem at all. My ankles never swelled up unduly, I never had trouble doing anything. I felt great, actually, except for these sort of physical problems during the first five months. But I really think a lot of them were psychological. They were physical, but I think there was a huge psychological component to morning sickness. I think there's a physical part of it, too, but I also think there's a huge psychological component.

I became sick with morning sickness—I felt great up until then—the day after I was at a dinner where a woman and I talked about having children. She did not have a good relationship with her husband. She had two children. Her husband was mostly doing business in Shanghai and wasn't even there. She talked about how hard it was to cope and how her children were her greatest joy and her greatest trial at the same time. The next morning, I was sick with morning sickness.

Biagi: And you had not been up until that point?

Shen: No. And I also had enormously mixed feelings about having this child, enormously mixed feelings, because I knew how much it would change my life.

Biagi: Were you right?

Shen: Yes. I was absolutely right, and I was right to feel all those trepidations.

Biagi: What were your worries?

Shen: That my life would no longer really be my own, that it was a lifetime commitment as far as time, energy, anything. I really felt that my days of freedom were over, and I was right. I was absolutely right. For all the joys, my days of freedom in the way that I considered freedom were, and are, over. I'm no longer as mobile as I was. To think about packing and moving is just a whole different proposition to me now.

Biagi: Other fears you had about having a child or how it would change you life?

Shen: Mostly it was the loss of freedom, to do what I wanted when I wanted. I had seen other women with children. At USA Today, one of the women I worked closely with was a divorced parent. She shared custody of her child, who at the time was seven or eight. She adored her child,

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but I saw that sometimes she would just want to do stuff and she couldn't. She just couldn't because she had a responsibility that evening or whatever. And I could.

Biagi: You'd never had that kind of limit on you, is what you're saying.

Shen: I'd never had that kind of limit, no, never.

Biagi: If you decided not to do something, you decided not to do it. It wasn't because somebody else had decided that for you.

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: How did your working life change after your son was born?

Shen: After my son was born, I took four months off. It was hard. Actually, I enjoyed it immensely. I wish I had taken a year off. But it took me a while before I could say to myself, "Listen, there is actually nothing I really have to accomplish today. I don't have to make these mental lists. All I have to do is really enjoy the baby." Of course, having a new baby is so exhausting, and it was hard because I was actually in Hawaii by myself most of my pregnancy. My husband lived in San Francisco.

Biagi: When did that happen that he went to San Francisco?

Shen: He was in San Francisco. We continued to date when I left for USA Today.

Biagi: But he stayed here in the Bay Area.

Shen: Yes. He stayed here when I moved to Hawaii.

Biagi: He never went to live with you there for any period of time?

Shen: No, except when the baby was born. Then we spent two months together.

Biagi: What was he doing for a job?

Shen: He had been a freelance writer, so he continued to freelance, and he was trying to set up a restaurant in San Francisco that he eventually did open. It was a difficult time, and two months into my four-month leave, we moved back to San Francisco, found a new house, the whole bit. It was a lot of upheaval.

Biagi: So that's when you left the Star-Bulletin?

Shen: Yes. I had told Gannett I was going to do that. It wasn't public, but I told them fairly early on into the pregnancy that was what I was going to do. So they knew it.

Biagi: They looked around for a place for you?

Shen: I basically told them, "I'm going to move to San Francisco, and I can either work for you in San Francisco or I can work for somebody else in San Francisco." I basically said, "I want to work in a metro area. And by metro I don't mean Stockton." It's amazing. The chutzpah, now that I

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think about it, was incredible. I wrote them a letter. They did it for me. They basically created a job for me.

Biagi: Now that you're here and you have Benjamin's responsibility, has your perspective changed at all?

Shen: On what?

Biagi: On children, on stories, on women in management.

Shen: Yes, it has. I have much more admiration now for women who manage to raise a family and work at anything, whether it's answering the phone or it's discovering a cure for cancer. I'm probably more radical in some ways and more conservative in other ways. What happens in the realm of education, child legislation, family legislation, which didn't interest me at all formerly, interests me very, very much now. I am much more sympathetic to family problems, to the problems of working women, which are all around me in the building. They were all around me then, but I wasn't that sympathetic. I'm a better person, actually, I would say. I'm not necessarily a happier person, but I am a better person, and probably a more complete person.

Biagi: How was your relationship with Bruce affected by having a child?

Shen: He liked the idea of having this child, and it's his only son. He has two grown daughters by a previous marriage. He likes children, more or less. He certainly likes them a lot more than I do. He's raised two of them, and he really dotes on Benjamin. We probably wouldn't see each other at all, even though we get along, except for the child. We see more of each other, then we get to see more of the child. We had a very difficult marriage and it didn't last very long. It was stormy from day one. We had a stormy relationship before we were married. It continued stormy.

Biagi: He's quite a bit older?

Shen: No, he's two years older than I am. Two and a half. His first marriage was when he was like twenty-one years old. He was still in college. They had a child while he was a senior in college. He has grown children because he had them so early. That's basically what it is.

Biagi: But you had gone back to work by the time you got divorced?

Shen: Oh, yes. We separated a year ago in March, so we had been together for one and a half years or so.

Biagi: As you described to me, there's still a close relationship, at least friendly. The way you're raising Benjamin is kind of unusual, I would think.

Shen: We're taking Benjamin to dinner together tonight, because there is a Latin jazz group that we saw at a street fair, Benjamin and I, and we liked them so much and they're playing over in Berkeley in front of a restaurant that we like, so we're all going to go over.

Biagi: Now as you're working, would you say that Bruce is helping you with child care or do you still feel like it's your responsibility?

Shen: He helps me, but one of the frictions in my marriage was that although he would never admit it, I think he has a much more traditional role for women and men. Even though he's only

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two and a half years older, I really detect a strong generational difference between him and me. His previous wife, even though he talks about how the wives of all his friends work, and, indeed, his close friends in college were David Martin, who is now the Pentagon correspondent for the network that Dan Rather's on, his wife is a very successful gynecologist; his other friend from Wesleyan, where he went to college, is Kit Laybourne, his wife, Gerry Laybourne, runs Nickelodeon. I mean, but his wife, Bruce's first wife, didn't really work. The ironic thing is when she did work, she actually was a part-time stringer for a newspaper in Rhinebeck, New York. She didn't really work, no. She basically raised their children.

So it was always my responsibility mostly to do the grocery shopping, do the laundry. We hired somebody to do the cleaning, otherwise I'm sure I would have done the cleaning. It's all that stuff. He doesn't investigate the pre-schools; I do. I'm the one who sees that Benjamin has shoes when he outgrows the old ones. I basically do all that stuff, and I just want a more equal marriage than that, and most of my friends do have a more equal marriage than that.

Biagi: Did you just take that on by default?

Shen: I took it on by default. Into the vacuum I stepped.

Biagi: If you didn't do it, it wouldn't get done.

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: Let's stop, because it's about your deadline.

Shen: Okay.