Columbia College Today

A journalist’s life often involves immersion in one’s subject and surroundings so that the finished product is clear and believable. For Alisa Tang ’96, a reporter for the Associated Press in Bangkok since 2002, the immersion was easy; she had the presence of a family that includes more than 60 first cousins to help her transition into Thailand’s culture, which was familiar yet different from her life in the United States.

Alisa Tang ’86 takes a ride while on assignment on October 27 in Phang Nga province in southern Thailand (with Sutin Leebamrung, behind her) to see land under dispute between Muslim fisherman villagers, such as Leebamrung, and a resort developer. Villagers say the land has been under dispute for years, but Leebamrung and others recently were served with eviction notices on homes they rebuilt after the tsunami.

Photo: Sakchai Lalit

Tang’s assignments have included stories in the country’s Muslim-majority south as well as covering the spread of bird flu and the 2004 tsunami that devastated many cities in southern Thailand and Indonesia. As a member of the AP team that won two awards for its coverage of the disaster, Tang saw the terrible state in which the tsunami left Thailand’s beaches as well as the beauty of the natural environment, clear of commercialism that had crowded the area.

Tang says her tsunami reporting experience was unforgettable and that images of “countless bodies on the beach, the scraped and bruised children I met who survived though their parents perished, and the lovely sunshine and calm turquoise sea that was the backdrop for the destruction of twisted metal and cars and razed resorts” stick with her more than a year later.

Tang’s career in journalism begain in 1998, when she did clerical work for The New York Times’ foreign and metro desks before moving into business graphics. She wrote her first articles for the Science Times and Sunday Business section. Tang left the Times to work for The Belleville (Illinois) News-Democrat, where she started as a business writer in 2000 but quickly developed a preference for writing about social topics, such as race and religion. She believes working for a paper in “Anytown, America,” gives journalists a better “perspective on the views of a population whose vote affects the world.”

Her career may seem a far cry from her time at Columbia, where she was a pre-med student, although a reluctant one.

“I was struggling and stretched,” Tang says, “to satisfy my parents as a pre-med student, yet really wanting to pursue the humanities — a stereotypical Asian-American parent-child battle.” Upon graduating, Tang worked in neurobiology for a couple of years but decided it was not for her. Soon after, she landed the entry-level job at the Times.

Tang is from Red Bud, a town of 2,900 in southern Illinois. As the child of Thai-Chinese parents, she “grew up speaking Thai, eating Thai food and taking off shoes before entering our very Thai house.” After attending a St. Louis boarding school with only 60 students, the move to New York was an opportunity for Tang to grow in a city she describes as “a Technicolor polyglot.”

At Columbia, Tang developed interests and made meaningful connections that she still nurtures. She keeps in touch with her freshman roommates, Genevieve Connors ’96 and Monica Darer ’97; Darer lived with Tang until late October, when she moved to Barcelona. Tang says she enjoyed her time as a member of the Columbia Outdoor Orientation Program, participating as a freshman and later as a trip leader.

With a career that has spanned cultures and continents, Tang’s views of the world have altered greatly and continue to evolve. “New York and Bangkok can make one just as provincial as Red Bud can, but the combination has truly expanded my horizons.”

ALUMNI UPDATES

Alisa Tang ’96: Living, Learning, Growing