Radio
I will never forget the day when I uttered my first words on the radio back in 1985 as a 15 year old freshman at Northfield Mount Hermon school. I was awful!  But I loved it anyway.  Little did I know then that WNMH would be the spark that would ignite a career.  Most of the clips in this section are from my late teens and early twenties so have a bit of mercy (and a sense of humor!).

WNMH: I will not deny it, I was an obnoxious and arrogant putz on the air at WNMH.  While I don't sound very appealing, the experience at WNMH allowed me to get comfortable in front of the microphone at a relatively young age. I've archived a bunch of my early shows as well as some that also feature my then high school girlfriend Abbe (who I wonder how she could have put up  with me given how obnoxious I sound on the radio!).

International Community Radio Taipei:  A few months after graduating NMH, Abbe and I ventured off to Taiwan with Alex Graf to study Chinese.  While in Taipei I picked up an internship at the leading radio station on the island (back then) which just so happened to feature English news and American top 40 music.  Back then, I wanted to be a DJ but they didn't have an internships open on their music side so they put in the newsroom where, once again, I found my calling.

National Public Radio:  After I came back from Taiwan in 1990, I went to USC for one miserable semester.  I was so unhappy that I dropped out the first chance I could and told myself "if this is college, then forget it, i'm done!"  I then took four months to produce the first nationally syndicated radio program about Asian American life.  Asian American Perspectives was made available on the NPR satellite syndicate in 1990 something for which I made no money but thoroughly enjoyed producing.

Metro Radio News AM 1044:  I was 20 years old, living in a rat/roach infested apartment in Hong Kong's Wan Chai district, working 6 overnight shifts a week and making barely enough to cover rent -- and I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT!  Ahh, to be young and just starting out.   Better yet was the news I broadcasted.  Back in that incredible summer of 1990, I will never forget one of my headlines: "The TASS news agency reports that the Soviet Union has ceased to exist..."

The BBC Chinese World Service:  Thanks to the kindness and generosity of Mary Wang I was given the break of a lifetime.  Mary is a longtime family friend who also ran the Chinese BBC World Service in London in the 80s and 90s.  She gave me the chance to spot report from California and to report from throughout rural China for the 10-part "Postcards from China" series.  The work I did for the BBC in the early 90s still stands as the high point of my journalist achievement.

KPFA: () In 1993 I took a sociology class at UC Berkeley on homelessness.  The class required a final project at the end of the semester.  While my classmates opted for the standard 30 page paper, I decided to produce a 30-minute radio documentary that aired on Berkeley's Pacifica radio station KPFA.  This documentary is meaningful to me as it marks my last piece of independent journalism before I joined the ranks of corporate media entities like CNN, CNBC and the AP.  I am very proud of this work and encourage you to take a few minutes to listen.

The E*TRADE Financial Network (ETFN):  My time at E*TRADE Financial marked a turning point in my career when I transitioned from a pure content 'creator' to a content 'manager.'  Additionally, at E*TRADE the requirement was to be truly cross-platform by building media for web, television and radio.  The audio clips in this section are highlights of the kinds of shows that I created that would be distributed on national radio and in streaming audio on the E*TRADE website.

KAZN AM 1300: ()  AM 1300 is Los Angeles' largest Mandarin language radio station.  In April 2005, LA 18's former weather presenter, Wang Jingjing, was also a talk show host at the station and invited me on her show to talk about how her Chinese listeners could better adapt to their new homeland in the United States.  It's about an hour long interview done entirely in Chinese.