Jia-Rui Chong knew she’d had enough of school after earning a graduate degree at Oxford. “I missed the real world too much,” she said. But upon her return, she faced a particularly difficult job – covering the aftermath of 9/11 for Newsweek. “That was definitely a trial by fire,” Chong said. Eventually she moved to Los Angeles and found a job at the Los Angeles Times, covering infectious diseases and transitioning to write about veterans’ health, the subject of her Zócalo panel. Read more about Chong below.
Q. What do you wake up to?
A. Power 106, because it’s the only English language station that I get reception in my bedroom. But I think Big Boy is hilarious. I get all my pop culture from him.
Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. Power 106, and KCRW when I’m driving in [to work]…. I have CDs people have made for me and they’re in my car. I don’t know what half the songs are called but I like them.
Q. What’s your favorite word?
A. Palimpsest.
Q. What do you find beautiful?
A. Honesty. Things as they are.
Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Curious about everything.
Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. I didn’t know. That was the problem.
Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. A mojito.
Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. I buy a lot of shoes, because I have to walk a lot and I can’t stand being uncomfortable.
Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. China.
Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. A doctor.
Q. What would be your death row meal?
A. Pizza.
Q. What is your favorite holiday and why?
A. Thanksgiving, because I really love football, and because it’s just about getting together and eating a lot.
Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?
A. Going to the zoo with my best friends, and my mom pretending that we were all her children.
Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. I don’t know that I have one. I write a lot about earthquakes, and I’m kind of ready to let everything go.
Q. What promise do you make to yourself that you break the most often?
A. That I’m going to be patient.
Q. What should you throw away but haven’t been able to part with?
A. I have a lot of clothes from the time at which I went out a lot clubbing in L.A., and I have not given up the idea that I might wear them again.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you’d most love to have a beer with?
A. Mark Twain. I think he’d have an interesting perspective on the absurdity of modern life.
To read more about Chong’s panel on veterans’ healthcare, click here.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.