PODCAST #56: Helen Wan, "The Partner Track"

March 27, 2014 • By Megan Shank

Photo: Anna Campanelli

Helen Wan is the author of The Partner Track, a novel about a Chinese-American woman navigating corporate America and questioning the sacrifices she's asked to make to achieve her American dream. Wan speaks with Asia Co-Editor Megan Shank about race and gender in the workplace, being an outsider and how to live an authentic life.

Megan Shank

Megan Shank is a freelance writer and translator, Mandarin Chinese tutor, and Asia co-editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Most recently, she served as managing editor for East View Information Service’s The Current Digest of the Chinese Press.

Shank’s work has appeared in Newsweek International, The Daily Beast, Prospect, Ms., Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, Miller-McCune, Archaeology, The San Antonio Express-News, CNN.com, The South China Morning Post, The American Lawyer, and Global Journalist, among others.

Shank wrote a chapter for Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (University of California Press, September 2012). Her writing is also featured in the first edition of McGraw-Hill College’s Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Women (March 2010). She has worked as a researcher and translator for ChinaVitae.com and has made guest appearances on NPR and Pacifica Radio and spoken at the Asia Society. She has blogged for the Huffington Post and Ms. and reported for a short documentary film about Chinese youth and pollution produced by Pearson Education.

Working with Newsweek International and a Hong Kong partner, Shank helped establish Newsweek Select, the Chinese-language edition of Newsweek. As a senior editor, she trained Chinese and Western reporters, edited Chinese and English-language pieces, developed new sections, translated Chinese copy into English for the New York office’s review, and orchestrated a pan-Asian Newsweek foreign editions conference. During her spare time, Shank co-wrote, produced, and co-directed the Shanghai-staged play Impulse and used proceeds to create a scholarship for a Chinese woman in the arts.

During her six-year residency in China, before her years at Newsweek Select, she performed with a Chinese jazz group, recorded cartoon voices for a Japanese educational company, taught kindergarten, and coached a high school girls’ basketball team. As Shanghai editor at Ringier AG, a Swiss media company, Shank produced the biweekly Shanghai City Weekend, the quarterlies Parents & Kids and Home & Office, and the annual Shanghai Bar & Restaurant Guide.

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