Catherine Shen: Interview #4

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: Today we want to start with the standard questions. I want to ask you, first of all, the role that you think your parents played in your upbringing and encouraging you to follow the profession that you eventually did, if you had to separate them out, your mother and your father.

Shen: I never received any specific encouragement from them in this specific field, because it's a mystery to most people. What the hell does a journalist really do? What the hell does a publisher do? What the hell does an editor do? They didn't know anybody. They were physicians. Their world was science. They would have been thrilled if I'd gone into science, medicine, engineering, anything that they could more readily understand and also see how I could make a living. I think they would have been thrilled if I had become a lawyer. So I certainly didn't receive any specific encouragement, and I didn't really know anybody in my childhood who was involved in journalism.

There was a family friend whose last name is Shen, the same last name. I think his first name is James and his wife is named Grace. He teaches journalism at Boston University. He may only recently have retired. But I didn't even know he taught journalism until I was a teenager. This was just whatever he did. Basically, I just knew him as somebody who came over with his family for dinner once in a while and vice versa. There was never any particular encouragement at all.

What I think, when I look back on it, was important was I was an only child. The expectations were on me that basically I could do anything I wanted, and that I would succeed and that I would excel. There was a lot of pressure indirectly and directly, I suppose, put on me to perform well in school and to do really well and to get into a good college and to be an academic success. I also remember my mother telling me at some point—I remember it, although it didn't seem that pithy to me at the time—that no one was going to take care of me if I didn't know how to take care of myself.

I was on a panel in Hawaii with the American Association of University Women, the AAUW, and the panel was about women succeeding and not succeeding. I remember the moderator of it, who was some kind of a psychologist, saying that I was one of the few cases where parents really gave permission for their daughter to really succeed, because that wasn't the case, she said, in many cases for daughters; it was the case for sons. I think I was brought up very much as a son would have been brought up.

Biagi: Because you were an only child?

Shen: Because I was an only child. All my parents' expectations were on me. They were immigrants to this country, well-educated immigrants, but immigrants nonetheless. I was the first generation to be brought up in this country. Part of the reason they came here was probably for the unborn generation at the time. So there were a lot of expectations on me, and I don't know how they ever really defined success, except other than academically. I wish in some ways I had a

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It was balance sheets, it was cost accounting, which was pretty terrible. Cost accounting is the organic chemistry of business. It's really awful.

But the other parts of it, the analysis parts, I actually found fascinating, probably because I had the most gifted professor I think I've ever had in my life. His name was Aharon Ofer, Ronnie Ofer. He's a professor at that school, and he's Israeli. He has a dual citizenship. I think he spends half the year in Israel and half the year at Northwestern. He's such a gifted professor that he can make anything interesting, and he succeeded in making business management to me one of the most fascinating topics. Profitability ratios—he made them interesting. Profitability ratios!

Biagi: That's an achievement.

Shen: Yes. I was fascinated by this. What I learned is that figures are as subjective as a novel, and that looking at a balance sheet is like reading a novel. It was a revelation. I wish I had had it when I was twenty-one.

Biagi: Do you think, too, though, that now that you need that information, there's some impetus for you to pay attention to it?

Shen: That's true, although I hardly needed Dostoyevsky at the age of sixteen, but I liked it. So need didn't really enter into it at all.

Biagi: Did you have, at sixteen, dreams about what you'd be when you grew up?

Shen: No.

Biagi: No dreams at all?

Shen: No.

Biagi: You had no concept that you were going to grow up?

Shen: I really actually don't recall. It is a funny vacuum, isn't it? It may be I've repressed them. It may totally be that. But honestly, if you were to ask me, "When you were sixteen, what did you want to be?" I'm sure I would have had an answer, but looking back now, I really cannot fathom what that answer would have been.

Biagi: Did you envision yourself married? Did you envision yourself single? Do you remember?

Shen: Neither one. I know that I certainly didn't think I'd get married at an early age. As it turned out, I was married at twenty-three, which now seems incredibly young. At the time, relatively, it was probably about average. Now it seems young. I had envisioned getting married at twenty-eight or thirty at the time. What I did envision was that I would work and support myself and be out in the world. I never imagined a dependence on somebody else. That I never did.

I also didn't envision children. As it was, I thought children, if I ever wanted them, and I did not like children, would be way off, way off in the future. As it was, I got pregnant almost accidentally. This wasn't a real—"Next month." I love my child, but I don't love children. I would not make a good preschool teacher. I'm not the kind of mother that wades into a bunch of

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would if he were going to Princeton, and I pay for his pre-school. His pre-school, this is three mornings a week, is about $3,600 a year. And $375 times fifty-two is $18,000.

Biagi: You've obviously figured that out. [Laughter.]

Shen: This doesn't count board, food, clothing, medical deductibles, toys, fun stuff, museums, anything. I'm paying $21,000 a year. This is the same as I would be paying to send my child to a prestigious private college, and he's only three and a half. And it's not going to end. This will be basically the base on which I build, and I'm not really looking forward to that expenditure of money. On the other hand, I think it's the most important thing I can give him. I mean, 100 percent cotton clothing is nothing compared to the quality of his education. You know what I mean?

Biagi: So basically a support family would help that.

Shen: It would help that, although given the age of any grandparents I would have around, if my mother lived with me, I'd probably have to hire a helper to take care of my mother, quite frankly. Talk about a sandwich generation, because my mother is eighty-four and she's just started to have physical problems. She had an angina attack a few months ago, and she's having problems in her hip. She has osteoarthritis. So she's really just starting to have mobility problems, and she did have a relative who was there on weekends, but that relative has since gone back to— [Tape interruption.]

Biagi: Let's go on and define the sandwich generation, just what you mean by sandwich. It isn't tuna fish you're talking about.

Shen: No. It means you're sort of caught in the middle between caring for young children and caring for older parents. That's my situation exactly. I'm in my early forties, my mother is in her mid-eighties, my child is three and a half. So I've often envisioned that if we actually did all live together, maybe I could make my nanny do double duties, since the child is increasingly in school more and more, but you need her for after-school time. You just sort of have them around. You're paying full-time salary anyway, and have that person also help out my mom, I suppose. That would be one way to do it. But the idea of having grandparents who could really help you take care of a child depends on grandparents who are in their sixties or fifties. With people having children later and later, and with smaller families to begin with, so there aren't all these siblings, this becomes increasingly impractical.

Biagi: What about, then, relationships between you and other women your age and men your age, your social life, in other words? Is it difficult?

Shen: What social life? [Laughter.]

Biagi: Do you have any time for a social life?

Shen: I do have a limited social life. I actually choose to limit it at this point. I could have more of a social life. For one thing, frankly, having waited until now to have a young child, I'm ready to give time to that child. I'm ready to give time to being a mother. I had a good twenty years of as much social life as I wanted. I don't need it. I don't feel the urge to go out a lot anymore, frankly. I've just sort of done it all, as far as that's concerned. I've probably eaten in every restaurant. I mean, it gets old after a while.

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Biagi: Let's go back to your earliest days now. We got away from that a little bit. I want to ask you your earliest recollections of your interest in reading or writing.

Shen: Before I could read. I distinctly remember pestering my parents all the time to read to me, all the time, the funnies or whatever. I particularly remember the Sunday funnies, because—don't ask me why, because I don't like the Sunday funnies now at all and I don't read them, but I distinctly remember it seemed to take forever. My mother would be washing the dishes and she'd say, "I'll read them to you later." I just couldn't wait. I'd be pestering and pestering. It's a really distinct memory of my childhood.

Biagi: How old were you?

Shen: It's before I could read, and I learned to read fairly early. I must have been four years old, five years old. I remember I did get read to every night before bed. Chocolate milk and I was read to. Often it was a babysitter if my parents were away, if I was going to bed early. But I was always read to, which is interesting, because my parents, after all, English isn't their native language. My father's dead now. But they were always much more comfortable in Chinese than English, ever since I knew them, and yet they would read these books in English, which I find very interesting. And there was always a fair amount of reading material around the house in the form of magazines, not necessarily novels, but in the form of magazines, periodicals, which, of course, were in English. So they obviously seemed to have read a fair amount in a language that was essentially foreign to them, which I find interesting.

Biagi: The books in the home, were they in Chinese or English?

Shen: They were basically in English. I didn't come across generally Chinese books at all. I actually wish there had been more Chinese books. My parents were not literary at all. This was not an Arthur Miller household, meaning the playwright. This was not where you would find the serious writers of the day, not at all. You'd basically find things like Life magazine, Reader's Digest, Saturday Review, Look. You remember the old Look.

Biagi: Sure.

Shen: Not the Saturday Evening Post, thank God. I couldn't wait to read those other magazines. As a teenager in junior high, I remember rushing home from school, and I couldn't wait to see what magazines had come in the mail just so I could devour them.

Biagi: So they were by subscription, so it was a regular thing.

Shen: Yes, it was a regular thing. Time, Newsweek. My mother still—her coffee table still, when I go home now, is piled high with Boston magazine, Time, U.S. News and World Report, the Kiplinger magazine used to be there, National Geographic. She must have been getting that since I was two. That kind of stuff.

Biagi: Did you visit the library a lot?

Shen: Yes, I did visit the library.

Biagi: Did you do it on your own?

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Shen: Exactly. What a great excuse. Reading is one of the greatest joys of my life.

Biagi: Still, today?

Shen: Yes. I just read a book on peppers. It's by Ahmal Naj, just out. I read a review of it in the New York Times Book Review, which I read every week. I may skip "This Week in Review," but I always read the "Book Review." Actually, only recently.

Biagi: Are you a subscriber?

Shen: Yes. Another very expensive item in California. It's about peppers. It's not a food book; it's about peppers. That's why I was so interested in these chili peppers. I've become fascinated by peppers and so have a lot of other people, because when you go to the farmer's market these days, you can find all these exotic peppers you could never imagine just four years ago. So I read very eclectically.

I just read that book—I didn't like it, either, it's been on the bestseller list for a long time in California, but I just became aware of it—Sabine and Griffin. It's actually letters exchanged by this woman in the Solomon Islands and this postcard-maker in London. It's one of the few books that's tactile as well as a literary experience, because the letters are really letters. The envelopes are taped to the page and the letters are in the envelope. Some of them are postcards and whatever. What I found out about the damn thing was, it took me ten minutes to read, the book cost $18, and there wasn't that much there. I went through it like a shot.

Biagi: So the novelty of it was the printing of it, do you think?

Shen: Yes, and there's a sequel out now, which I refuse to buy. I'm going to stand in the bookstore and read it. I figure ten minutes! Hell! There's supposed to be a third one coming out. It's a wonderful conceit, and it has about the density of the first chapter of some novel. In content, that's what it is. Yet there you are, this complete book taking up space on your bookshelf. I think I'll just give it to a friend as a Christmas gift. It's barely paged through.

Biagi: There you go! [Laughter.]

Shen: Very frustrating.

Biagi: You're a real book-reader.

Shen: Yes, I am. I really resent how much they cost.

Biagi: Did your parents have expectations of the way you would behave because you were a girl?

Shen: No. See, I have nothing on which to base it, because I don't have a brother, and I didn't really see them with other children, so I don't know. They may have brought up a boy entirely differently, but I really don't know. I don't remember them saying to me, "Girls don't do that." I played with girls and boys about equally as a child. I think my best friends as a pre-adolescent were girls. The family friends tended to be this mixture of boys and girls of varying ages, and I remember playing with boys as happily as I did with girls. As a matter of fact, I used to play house with the boys.

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Shen: None, really, because I didn't pursue any. In high school I was very active in the Drama Club. I didn't pursue it. I was a deejay briefly for the college radio station.

Biagi: Rock deejay?

Shen: Opera. Classical music. That was very briefly.

Biagi: How briefly?

Shen: Probably one semester. I think it was defunct after that. The signal only reached around the campus. I didn't go out for any of the athletic activities.

Biagi: Would you say you weren't athletic or you just weren't interested? Were you athletic outside of school?

Shen: No, and I really wish I had been, partly because I wasn't very good at athletics. I tried to play tennis in high school and was so terrible at it. I wasn't good at athletics, and it wasn't particularly emphasized in my family. Now, of course, I'm telling my son how good it feels to exercise all the time, because I'm determined that he's going to exercise and enjoy it. No, I was not particularly athletic. I didn't start jogging until after my mid-twenties. No, I didn't go out for sports. I didn't go out for Glee Club or anything. I did try to go out for Glee Club, but they wanted people who could sing, not people who just wanted to be in the Glee Club. So it wasn't actually not for trying that I didn't participate in extracurricular activities. I stage-managed for junior show. I was one of two stage managers for junior show, but that's really about it. Nothing of note. I did not go out for any of the publications.

Biagi: In the summer, did you work in the summer?

Shen: My mom was a physician working in a research lab, and I worked in a neighboring lab on the same floor for two years.

Biagi: Doing?

Shen: Doing lab technician work, basically, as lab assistant.

Biagi: Preparing slides and things like that?

Shen: Yes. It was gastroenterology, so it dealt mostly with stools and excreta. [Laughter.] It was very interesting. You'd pull open the refrigerator. "Oh, what's in here?" [Laughter.] But I enjoyed it, actually. I enjoyed it immensely.

One summer I worked at The Window Shop, which was a gift shop in Harvard Square. One summer my parents sent me to Taiwan with a bunch of other Asian-Americans, hoping against hope that we'd come back being able to speak Mandarin and become more immersed in our native culture.

Biagi: Did that happen?

Shen: No. We all hated it.

Biagi: Really?

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Biagi: Has it helped, do you think, your interest in Asian culture?

Shen: Yes, because I had zero interest in Asian culture as a child. I actually rejected it, because it was such a white suburb I grew up in. The tendency would be to reject it, try to become more white. Going to Asia, for the first time I was surrounded by people who looked Asian, which was a great revelation to me that a lot of people actually looked like me. I just found it interesting. I've always liked to travel, anyway, but I just found it fascinating. There's a smell I associate with the Far East. It's kind of a dung smell. It's a smell of heat. I'm sure people who go to India, to where I've never been, have a smell that they associate with India. Well, there's a smell I associate with the Far East. I really like it. I find it appalling and wonderful. There is an appallingness about it, definitely, but I really like it. I like Paris, too, though. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Do you remember your first day at work in journalism?

Shen: You mean at a newspaper?

Biagi: Yes.

Shen: No, I don't remember the first day.

Biagi: What do you remember? What is your earliest recollection?

Shen: My first real newspaper job would have been as copy editor at the Chronicle. It was definitely something that I needed to get used to. I was certainly not a natural headline writer, so I remember a lot of headlines being rejected. Seemingly I'm never going to get this right. I remember having to sit for long periods of time, because it's a fairly sedentary occupation. I remember trying to get used to the hours, because my shift started either at one or 2:30 p.m. or at four, depending on the day, so I had to get used to that, and I had split days off, like Saturday and Wednesday. So I remember that more than I remember the quality of the work.

The work was hard. It was hard to give Bruce Colvin, who just retired (I think he lives in Larkspur and has for years), what he wanted. There's a real art to headline writing, and there's a real art to editing, although the editing I didn't find—when you're a beginning copy editor, they don't give you an investigative report story to edit. They're basically giving you jits and short wire stories, you know. So I didn't find the editing particularly onerous, and captions I could get the hang of, but headlines were tough. Headlines were tough. I enjoyed the work. I liked it.

Biagi: Do you have a feeling that you had a mentor at any time?

Shen: Yes, I've had a number of mentors, not for sustained periods of time. I've had people I've looked up to, who have guided me in little ways. I wish I had been able to hold on to them for a longer period of time. And some of them weren't that good. [Laughter.]

Bill German, who is now executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, was one, simply because he gave me my first job at the Chronicle and basically gave me the chance to do a lot of stuff at the Chronicle. He's still a friend of mine. I had lunch with him a few weeks ago.

John Quinn at Gannett, he's been a mentor to a lot of people. I know people who would crawl through glass for John Quinn. He's an inspirational person. And Ron Martin, who was editor of USA Today while I was there and is now editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

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then he decided he really wanted to talk about it, and I was in Santa Fe. So I called in, and they said, "Can you fly back?" So they made all the arrangements. So I flew back to Washington, D.C. Santa Fe is not the most convenient place. You can't fly direct. You have to get to Albuquerque, which is an hour away, and then you can't fly directly from Albuquerque. You have to go through Dallas. I had to get from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, then from Albuquerque to Dallas, and then get from Dallas to Washington. The planes were late, the connections weren't perfect. So I finally got there about 8:30 in the evening. It took me all day to get back.

He was down in Windows, which was the restaurant at the time on the first floor of USA Today, eating, and he left a message with my very puzzled boss, the manager of the "Life" section. "What the hell is going on?" So I ride back with my bag in my hand, and I sit down and I order a bloody Mary, and he's having oysters. It was a nice meal. He talked with me about this Honolulu thing, and I said, "Why me?" He went on with this thing about they had been impressed with me.

Then I said the equivalent of, "Bullshit. I think you want a woman for this job, knowing Gannett, and I think you want an Asian. I think the only other Asian that's remotely qualified is a copy editor. I think basically you've only got me." He kind of smiled. I don't think he was used to that amount of candor. But to me it was crystal clear. Why beat around the bush? Yeah, I'm sure if I had not been Asian, why would they have picked me after less than a year at USA Today to go to Honolulu if I had not been Asian?" And a woman was part of that.

I think that being a woman has been much harder than being a minority.

Biagi: Professionally?

Shen: Yes, quite definitely.

Biagi: Why?

Shen: Because it's so male! I'm dipping into, in odd moments, a book about the history of AP [Associated Press]. It's so male, the pictures, the stories, everything, all these white males. It hasn't really hit home to me until lately. It's also hit home to me lately, I think, how much you have to give up if you really want to get to the top or to the very high echelons in any corporation. If you're running your own business, it's a different thing, a very different thing. But if you want to do it within an existing hierarchy, minority almost has nothing to do with it unless you're black. I'm talking about Asian. I don't know what it's like to be another minority. Being a woman has everything to do with it.

Biagi: Why do you say that?

Shen: Because if you just look around, I know a lot of talented, smart women, and they're not CEOs of corporations. They're just not. I know CEOs, and I know there are women just as smart and I know they're just as political and I know they're just as good at getting along with people, but they're just not there.

Biagi: Why aren't they there, in your view?

Shen: They don't get promoted at the right times, they don't have a mentor at the right times. Al Neuharth mentored John Curley. They may not get along now, but Al Neuharth mentored John Curley. I don't know this—it's certainly the case with me—they may be less goal directed from an early age than men are.

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Biagi: Do you see yourself getting married again?

Shen: Oh, no.

Biagi: No?

Shen: Oh, no, I really don't. I'm not philosophically opposed to it. I just think realistically it's not in the cards.

Biagi: But if you did, you would look for a relationship that was equal, do you think?

Shen: No. At this point, I think I'd look for Bill Gates. [Laughter.] He could just go off and do his own thing and just write checks. I think that's fine.

Biagi: You have to explain who he is.

Shen: Bill Gates is head of Microsoft. I think his fortune is now $6 billion. He's young enough to enjoy it. He's a thirty-six-year-old. I'm saying that somewhat in jest, but now, you know, I'm tired now. It would be great to have somebody just—I wouldn't have to worry about anything. I wouldn't even have to interact. But in reality, the most fun would be somebody who would be my equal. I certainly think an older generation age sixty-five CEO, unless they're very exceptional, would not do. It wouldn't be fun. Bill Gates, after all, is thirty-six. No, I don't know what either party is getting out of it in many of the coupled relationships I've seen.

Biagi: Do you see that different today than, say, twenty years ago, professionally? Do you see more couples who are equal or both working, or do you still see it staying the same?

Shen: No, I see more couples working simply because they can't maintain their standard of living without two incomes.

Biagi: At the executive level, do you see it changing?

Shen: Yes, but I think it's the people in their twenties and thirties now, because if you look at CEOs in their late forties and fifties, just a little older than I, most of them have non-working wives. Their wives have stopped working somewhere along the line, probably when the kids came or just at a certain point, they stopped working. Maybe it was one move too many and they just didn't want to pick up and find another job.

Biagi: So, essentially, men at executive positions—

Shen: Top positions.

Biagi: —that you might compete for the top positions, most of them have non-working wives?

Shen: I can tell you. Let's check off the ones I know.

Biagi: An inventory.

Shen: Yes. John Curley. He met his wife Ann when he was an editor and she was a feature editor at the same paper or something like that, so they met as fellow journalists, were married, have two grown children, and she stopped working somewhere along the line and sort of does

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Biagi: Why do you think that is?

Shen: I think it's a question of when you meet. By the time you're a CEO, usually your emotional choice has already been made. I think it would be just a total clash of hours, egos, and a lot of other things.

Biagi: And children?

Shen: Somebody's got to be willing to give. The fellow who was head of MCI, Bill McGowan, in Washington, D.C., recently died of a heart attack. He was married to an Asian woman. That's why I noticed it, because there was an article in Washingtonian magazine a few years ago about them. She had a very high-powered business on her own. She didn't work for a corporation. She had a high-powered business on her own, and, of course, he was head of MCI. They apparently had a very interesting marriage. But there are very few of those, really, really. In real life, there are very, very few. You look at your local community bank presidents. Look at the head of PG&E, Richard Clarke. The United Way board. Just look at them. You know?

Biagi: What's it going to take, then, if that is a goal for women? What's going to have to happen?

Shen: I don't know what the goal is, actually. The goal, I suppose, is to have a happy, fulfilling relationship. What you happen to do for a living doesn't necessarily have any bearing on that. Obviously these marriages work, or some of them work. My mother used to say, "You can't have two bosses." And she predicted that the marriage that I'm no longer in would have a hard time, because she always thought, actually, and she was right, I needed somebody who would be subordinate in order to have a successful marriage. My mother actually had a very clear idea, I guess, with me.

Biagi: So you don't think you could live in a relationship with another boss? Is that what you're saying?

Shen: I have a better chance of it now than in the past, but I don't see a lot of them available. [Laughter.] Not a lot of chance to try this out, you know.

Biagi: There goes your great theory. [Laughter.] Let's go back to when you first got married. Was there ever an idea that you would quit working once you got married at any point?

Shen: No. Oh, no.

Biagi: You always believed you would continue working?

Shen: Absolutely. It was never an option. It wasn't even the money aspect. That never really came into it. I just couldn't imagine not doing it.

Biagi: And even today, can you imagine?

Shen: Now I can, simply because I have a child.

Biagi: Let's continue a little bit with our list of questions. You did say that you never had the idea you'd ever stop working.

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Shen: No, except that I remember I did have an eight-year relationship with a fellow journalist, but our friends weren't other journalists, and we didn't talk about journalism. We happened to meet and our schedules were similar, luckily, but aside from that it was certainly no advantage and no particular bond. No.

Biagi: How about your work involved with press associations or other associations?

Shen: I've recently been more active in AAJA, Asian-American Journalists Association, simply because there's more of a bond there that I started to feel in Hawaii, frankly.

Biagi: Is this an active group here in this area?

Shen: Yes, it is, relatively. I've never been an active member of any other organizations. I belong to the Women's Forum West, which is a branch of the International Women's Forum.

Biagi: Which is?

Shen: It's a group of professional women. It's an international group. It has a very strong national presence in all the major cities. I first joined when I was in Honolulu. They have events. The last one I went to was—there's a book that's recently out, a photo book about prominent women, somebody's definition of prominent women locally. Belva Davis is in that book. There was a reception for the photographer. There was a co-sponsorship of the Women's Forum, Alumni Resources and a bunch of other things. I went to that. They sponsor various receptions. When Anna Quindlen was in town, she gave a talk to the group. I went to that. Charlotte Mailliard Swig had a reception in her Russian Hill apartment for the architect of the library, the new San Francisco Library. That architect is a member of Women's Forum, so there was a reception. I went to that. They have an annual Christmas party that I go to. They have retreats and an annual convention, stuff like that, that I don't go to largely because of time.

Biagi: But you do enjoy it?

Shen: I do enjoy it, although there aren't a lot of people like me there. I don't see a lot of women who have very young children, and certainly not a lot of Asians. A lot of very successful women. I do enjoy them. I won't say I found any soulmates there, but I sort of enjoy it.

Biagi: What has been your relationship with unions or union organizations?

Shen: I was a member of the Newspaper Guild when I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, because it's not really a choice. But my activity consisted of having my dues automatically deducted from my paycheck. I really was not active beyond that.

Biagi: Were you ever in a situation where there was a strike taken?

Shen: There was a threat of a strike during one of the contract negotiations, and they actually got to the point where they were putting together strike committees and gearing up a kitchen and stuff like that. They called me up and said, "Choose a picket shift." I was kind of looking forward to it, actually, since I'd never experienced anything like that. I know now how horrific

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atrocities in the world are committed in the name of organized religion. The Spanish Inquisition, the Serbs and the Croats, the Mideast. I mean, most atrocities are committed in the name of religion. I'm very cynical. But I enjoyed Sunday school. I was brought up as a Methodist. That's one thing. What else would I consider?

Biagi: A point of view. Politically, you've already said you admire the—

Shen: I don't know Bill Clinton, and I think that what it takes to be a successful politician in this country basically strips you of your humanity. But certainly I would rather see a Clinton appointee to all the appeals and federal courts and the Supreme Court than I would a [George] Bush appointee. It's funny. I can't put my finger on a single specific issue, aside from abortion, but I can't—

Biagi: Civil rights, perhaps?

Shen: But it's not even—I mean, I don't like Jesse Jackson. His ego gets in the way of everything, I think. I'm a non-admirer of Jesse Jackson, but I can't stand Reagan.

Biagi: Were you affected in any way by the hearing last year, the Anita Hill hearing?*

Shen: I don't know if I was affected, because from the very beginning, I mean, I was convinced before the hearings ever started that she was probably telling the truth, and having listened to some of the testimony, my opinion of that has never ever wavered. Never ever wavered. She had no motive. I look to simple explanations, you know. The things that motivate human beings haven't changed. They tend to be hunger, greed, power, sex, passion. They're not that complex. When you look at it very simply, he [Clarence Thomas] had every motive in the world to cover up what he did, and she had no motive at all. If you just look at it in the simplest terms of what he had to lose and what she had to lose, to me, you don't make up details like that, and they didn't allow the testimony of other women who would have said that they also had problems with him, one of whom was an editor at one of the papers in the South, one of the North Carolina papers, I think the Raleigh paper. She was city editor there.

Biagi: Very interesting.

Shen: Yes. So it was not an isolated—I think the guy obviously had a pattern of this type of behavior that probably reached its most extreme with Anita Hill. I never wavered in thinking that she was telling the truth.

Biagi: Other political events in your life? You say you're a child of the sixties.

Shen: By that I mean that I have a deep cynicism about authority, I think. Because somebody is a CEO or a policeman or whatever, or the president, I'm not willing to take their word for it at all.

Biagi: You are authority in some cases and have been the boss. Have you been just as willing to accept that attitude among people who work for you?

Shen: I think I've been more accepting. I'll tell you an example. Certainly in thought, if not always in deed. The Stockton paper here was under threat of strike for a while. It has been off and on.

______________________ * In October 1991, Senate hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court focus on the charges by law professor Anita Hill who claims that Thomas had sexually harassed her in the past. Thomas is confirmed by the Senate 52 votes to 48.

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People would come in talking about the latest rock singers and country singers and TV programs and stuff like that. I would just be totally in the dark. The first week I arrived, there was some special cover story about some Farm Aid thing. I didn't know if it was political. It turned out to be some kind of concert, some Willie Nelson benefit concert. Stupidest thing in the world. You know. I just really couldn't—I really did not feel comfortable at all. And yet some of the people in that department were people who, if anything, were more literary than I. They were really members of the intelligentsia and they managed to function well in that environment.

Biagi: They separated their job from—

Shen: Yes, or they were able to integrate it better. For example, the woman who was—I think she was TV editor then, she's now managing editor for the "Life" section, Susan, she's married to a lawyer and she had a toddler. She now has two or three. She's very smart, a very wonderful woman. I really liked her. She managed to edit TV. You know what I mean? Mike Clark is the movie critic for USA Today, a wonderful, literate man, wonderful to talk to. The same with Sharon Peters, who at the time was one of the food/entertainment topics editors. She married a diplomat, went to Bogota and Beijing, divorced that diplomat, came back to USA Today, and is now in her same job. This is all in the last six years. Also a very literate, very, very thoughtful, very, very smart woman.

The people who work at USA Today are extremely smart and very varied, and some of them are very bookish, and they manage to put out this product that is this deep [measures an inch with her fingers], but very informative. I think if I'd stayed another six months, I think that would have gone away, but I was just thrown there and it took a long while. I was really, really unhappy.

Biagi: If you had to reflect on the changing role of women in your lifetime, what would you say about it? How has it changed, and do you think there's more evolution to come?

Shen: That's a hard question for me to answer, because my mom worked full time my entire life with her. Frankly, most of my mother's friends, the families we knew who were Asian, and those were our good friends, the wives also worked in at least half the cases. So my role models really were of working mothers. The ones that didn't work, I didn't notice any big difference. I really didn't. I was not really aware of these agonies that women seem to be going through now. I'm sure people felt them, but they weren't as overt. People are always agonizing now. I didn't see it at all, and yet it must have existed.

I don't think women's roles have changed all that much. I think most women are working because they need the money. I don't think they particularly enjoy their work. I think they'd probably rather stay home. This is the majority of women I'm talking about. I think a lot of career women would rather do things differently or work fewer hours, and can't. I don't think the role of women has changed a hell of a lot. I think the women are still buying the diapers, and even if the men are cooking, the women still have to make sure the refrigerator is stocked. I think in a family the person who's responsible for hiring the people to clean the house, it's the woman. I don't think those roles have changed that much except in a few cases. In those few cases, it's people without children. Once you have a child, I think almost every family that I know falls back into more or less the old pattern. The difference is that neither of them is home most of the time. But the pattern of who is responsible for what remains the same.

I don't think there has been a huge change. I don't think there really will be. I don't see it in society. It's very surprising to me, a great polarization and a great conflict in the country about

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I think her name was Kathy, actually, from Atlanta, came running down the stairs and said, "They've shot Martin Luther King," and ran to turn on the TV set. She, being from Atlanta, of course, was very interested. That is my experience of the King assassination.

[John F.] Kennedy, I was a junior in high school and I was in French class. The news came on over the school loudspeaker system, and they canceled the senior play that I was scheduled to go see that night. Robert Kennedy, I was in my summer job at the gift shop in Harvard Square. I was about to leave for it, and my mother had morning TV news on, the "Today Show," or something, and that's how I heard about it. But aside from the first shock and the first feelings, no, it did not galvanize me into anything in particular.

Biagi: If there were any pivotal political events in your life, what would they be?

Shen: No, I can't—political events.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Biagi: Continue with your thoughts about politics.

Shen: I've only recently begun to actually follow and read political coverage in depth. Part of the reason is that I was so disgusted during the [Ronald] Reagan years, it would incense me so much that I couldn't bear to read it. I literally could not bear to read it. I still have somewhat of that same feeling, but it's not as bad. So it's only fairly recently that I've become much more aware of specific legislation, specific candidates. Ever since I've been eligible to vote, I have voted, and I've made sure I was a reasonably well-informed voter. But I have not at all been interested in politics, and I have not followed it and not followed legislation, no. I really can't think of anything.

Biagi: Outside of the realm of politics, then, pivotal events, if you had to enumerate two or three?

Shen: That did what, though?

Biagi: That changed your direction or your ideas, whether they be books or people, experiences that you could pinpoint.

Shen: Boy, I'd really have to think about it. I can't think of these seminal events. I don't think of my life in those terms. I can remember specific books I've liked and loved. I can't remember a single event or a single person making a huge difference in my life. I really can't. No.

Biagi: Over the years, is there a writer or reporter whose work you've most admired? Or several writers whose work you have most admired?

Shen: That's an easier question for me, but I have to winnow it down a little bit. I mentioned Paul Theroux. There are not a lot of reporters I've actually admired on an extremely consistent basis. I've been intrigued by Edna Buchanan, but I don't read the Miami Herald.

Biagi: Are you a mystery fan?

Shen: Yes, I am. But from what I have read about her, I read the first book she wrote and I read the long profile of her in the New Yorker and a shorter interview she'd done in connection with

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Biagi: The last question may take a little thought, and that is the question of ethics, because journalists tend to be concerned about ethics these days a lot. Have there been any landmark ethical decisions that you've had to make professionally about whether to run a story, whether to edit a story, how to edit a story, whether a story or series should run or not that you can remember?

Shen: No. The ones that are more recent tend to be the ones that come to mind, and they have to do with fairly, at this point, common newsroom dilemmas, which is naming of rape victims, naming of other kinds of victims in certain circumstances. It's interesting, because I was at API [American Press Institute] in mid-September. They have an annual Curtis Memorial Invitational Seminar, and this one was about privacy. They had a panel that originally was going to include Arthur Ashe, but he had a heart attack three days before. So the panel was down to Marla Hanson, who was the model who was slashed in New York, and Patricia Bowman, the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape. They talked about victims' rights and about what they went through. I think it's made me a more compassionate editor, to tell you the truth.

Biagi: What was your point of view before that?

Shen: A little more cynical. I generally would always come down on the right to publish, and it's a judgment call. There is no right or wrong. Journalists basically operate in a kind of gray area; certainly editors do. It is a judgment call. I missed the Maria Shriver/Michael Gartner program last night. Now I think I would think twice about some photographs, some accident photographs, some funeral photographs. The news value is not in question. If there was no news value, there would be no debate. [Laughter.] Of course they have news value. Of course they have circulation. Of course! But that's not it.

The question is, do you weight a victim's feelings and rights at all? And if you do, where does it end? Because it can lead you into impossible situations. Remember that case—this is in Gay Talese's New York Times history also, which is also about that Nazi who was revealed as being Jewish and who committed suicide the day before or the day after the story came out. He had threatened to. There's the far end of the spectrum. I don't know. People have different opinions. Many papers will not routinely use pictures of funerals, period, or photos of accidents. A lot of readers have called us about a photograph we ran of a car accident where there was a body bag on the ground and maybe a foot sticking out of it. A lot of calls about that. Child victims. Well, you do run their names when their parents are famous or they're celebrities in their own right.

Biagi: Is there any situation you've found yourself in where you've had to make a decision on these issues?

Shen: No, and if there has been, it's not difficult. I haven't faced a sticky decision about unnamed sources. I have not faced a sticky decision where I felt that somebody's livelihood or safety would be in jeopardy. No. Mostly there are decisions you make where you know somebody's going to get pissed off, and that's a different kind of decision. No. I may be missing something entirely, but I really can't think of any.

Biagi: The last question. What's your overall opinion of journalism as a profession for women?

Shen: It depends on the specific jobs you're talking about, I think. My feeling about journalism as a profession is that it demands a lot for relatively little payback, except for some people. And you weight that. I think you really have to like what you're doing, and then it's a wonderful profession.

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Shen: In eighteen years, I think it's going to be an entirely different profession. In eighteen years, it is going to be different, Shirley, and I don't know what I'd tell her. I think it's going to be much more electronic than it is now. The act of gathering stories, of analysis, whatever, is going to be the same, but how you do it and how it's disseminated will be very different. I think a reporter's job will basically stay the same. I think everybody else's job will change radically, just radically.

I was thinking last night about something you asked me. You asked, what will newspapers be or do for people? I said they'll do analysis. The other thing—and I feel really strongly about this—that they will do, and if they don't, they really won't survive, is to create a sense of community. I think nothing else can do that. If anything, TV does the opposite. Or maybe it creates a global community; it doesn't create a community of Marin or a community of Oakland or North Berkeley or whatever.

I think newspapers have the ability to bring together a very local common shared experience, which is very difficult to come by these days in the kinds of households we live in, because you don't go to town meetings, you don't spend the hours from seven to nine in the evening at communal events. We're much more isolated in our households. So in a way, the only shared community event a lot of us have is opening a local paper. To the extent that people want and need that feeling of community, and I think they do need it, I think that's why people join the Moonies or whatever, newspapers will have a very important place. That has almost nothing to do with analysis or fact-gathering or anything of that. It has to do with saying, "The people of Fairfax today are going to have to deal with a sewer problem," and, "The school lunches at the Ross schools today are going to be turkey on toast." It has to do with stuff the New York Times couldn't be bothered with. But I think that's important.

Biagi: Let's stop.