March/April 2009
Alumni Profiles
Na Eng ’98 Wins Emmy for Capturing the Plight of the Poor
By Kim Martineau ’97J
Na Eng ’98, ’99 SIPA at work, with her Emmy cheering her on. Photo: Kim Martineau ’97JTax policy is not a typical ingredient for award-winning television. But in a documentary for PBS, Na Eng ’98, ’99 SIPA looked at how unfair taxes hurt the poor, driving choices about what they eat and how they live and impacting their chances of ever rising out of poverty. The disheartening portrait she paints in Taxing the Poor, which aired last April on the news magazine NOW on PBS, won her a 2008 Emmy for business reporting.
Poverty is a topic that this 33-year-old journalist knows something about. Her father was killed in the Cambodian genocide, and she and her family were forced to flee to a refugee camp in Thailand before immigrating to the United States.
To this day, Eng’s mother is slightly mystified by her daughter’s success. “She really didn’t know what the Emmy was,” Eng said. “I had to spell it for her. I told her, ‘Just believe me. It’s a really big deal. It’s good for my career.’”
While violence racked Cambodia, Eng’s family settled in St. Paul, Minn., where relatives had already relocated. Eng was 5, the youngest of seven children. Through a progressive church in St. Paul, Christ Lutheran, she developed a commitment to the social good and found an outlet to explore the world.
Through her church, Eng went on trips to the zoo and learned to paddle a canoe — luxuries her mother couldn’t afford to provide. She also embraced Bible camp and community service projects. “She was really quiet but personable,” said her youth leader at the time, Pastor John Van Sant. “She took a lot of things seriously.”
She might have been a social activist and not a journalist if not for a documentary she watched one day in high school. She still remembers the title, The Global Assembly Line; the film offered a behind-the-scenes look at sweatshops, and Eng was mesmerized. “That’s what I want to do with my life,” she remembers thinking. “I want to tell stories about social justice.”
Eng, who majored in history and sociology, pursued that goal with single-minded focus, even while working odd jobs such as nannying to supplement her scholarships and financial aid at Columbia. She worked as a reporter at WKCR, and for a sociology class, “The Immigrant Experience” taught by Barnard professor Robert Smith, she produced her first documentary.
With a borrowed VHS camera, Eng interviewed her mother and other Cambodian refugees. “I’d just hit the record button and hope for the best,” she remembers.
Her second attempt at movie-making took her to more challenging terrain: Haiti. A new prime minister had risen to power, and Eng wanted to find out whether democracy was working in this troubled, tropical nation. With a Henry Evans Traveling Fellowship provided by Columbia, she flew there the summer after her senior year.
Kathleen McDermott, associate dean of academic affairs at the time, remembers being concerned about Eng’s safety. But Eng was not worried. Thin-boned and just under 5 feet tall, she insisted she’d be fine. “I’m so small no one notices me — I’m under the radar,” she told McDermott, who is now the associate v.p. of global programs.
The documentary didn’t pan out, Eng says, but footage she had captured of a peasant family helped her win another grant, this one a Fulbright. After finishing her master’s at SIPA, Eng flew to Zimbabwe using the Fulbright money to tell the story of a girl coming of age in a country ravaged by AIDS. That piece aired at film festivals in Harare (Zimbabwe’s capital) and New York and launched her career. Eng landed a job working for NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and a year later helped produce a PBS series with Bill Moyers on the Chinese in America.
At Now on PBS, where she has worked since 2002, Eng’s documentaries take an intimate look at how policy shapes people’s lives. She has documented the plight of cotton growers in Africa who are unable to compete in the face of American farm subsidies, and Iraqi refugees who are desperately seeking asylum in the United States. She’s now working on a segment about renewable energy. Harnessing the power of the sun and wind is a promising idea, Eng says, but how do you make it work on a massive scale?
Making documentaries requires the skills one would expect — reporting and writing. But it also demands patience and meticulous organizing, what Eng calls acting as “a glorified wedding planner.” You learn to expect the worst: “If it rains, if something breaks, if someone’s not available …” she says, trailing off.
For a producer in a high-stress profession, Eng comes across as remarkably calm. Her secret, she says, is anticipating glitches. “It’s like a crossword or a jigsaw puzzle,” she says. “It’s challenging every day, but if you look at it in the right way, finding the solution is fun.”
Watch Eng's award-winning documentary