There Is A World Elsewhere
by Alina Gonzalez '08
The year that Sarah Jackson Han '88 began her graduate dissertation at
Cambridge University on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale was the same year that
Tiananmen Square erupted in gunfire.
"I spent the whole of June 2nd to June 6th, 1989 hunched over my radio,
glued to the BBC World Service as one of my Dartmouth professors, the
journalist Jonathan Mirsky, was hauled off by Chinese PSB officers, beaten, and
finally released, whereupon he recounted his story to the world," Sarah
recalls.
Sarah suddenly knew where she belonged. The following week, she bought a
one-way ticket to Asia, and stayed in Hong Kong with a Dartmouth friend she had
met in the dorms.
After several frustrating months of job-searching, Sarah landed a position
with Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, which was setting up a
regional head office in Hong Kong at the time. She stayed with them for nine
years doing much of what she had done as executive editor on the D:
reporting, editing, and translating news from French to English.
"I loved it all," she says. During a visit home to Washington,
D.C. in 1992, Sarah met her future husband at a dinner party hosted by her
father, Thomas P. Jackson '58, and a stay that was supposed to have been brief
quickly became permanent. She married Ed Han in 1993.
But even though Sarah relocated from Hong Kong to D.C., her interest in Asia
- which began in 1970 when a journalist neighbor covered President Nixon's
groundbreaking trip to Mao's China - continued to flourish. In the years
following her marriage, Sarah went on to work for National Public Radio and
then Radio Free Asia, where she is director of communications.
At RFA, she oversees English language news content for and about the closed
countries of East Asia, including Burma, Cambodia, China, North Korea, Laos,
and Vietnam, where freedom of expression is restricted and media are tightly
controlled. RFA reporters cover news that government officials try to suppress.
It is then aired on short- and medium-wave radio, published on the Web, and
e-mailed around the world. Countless RFA stories have now been republished in
major media worldwide, including The Washington Post, The Guardian, The
International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, and aired on the BBC and
CNN.
Sarah's editorial interests include foreign policy, public health, arts, and
media. This past year, she worked on a major series of stories about mental
health in Asia, as well as a large-scale editorial project called "Women
in their Own Words," which comprises first-person narratives from women in
East Asia, who are underrepresented in the media except as vixens or
victims.
The work that this busy mother-of-two does daily is a true extension of her
greatest lifelong interests: media and culture. "I have always been
fascinated by the power of language, images, sound, and other cultures,"
Sarah says. Her exposure to foreign cultures was extensive because of her
upbringing in the nation's capital.
"Every year, new students from as far away as Australia or China or
Spain would appear, transported by their parents' jobs, and I would grill them
all relentlessly about what life was like in the countries they had left
behind," she says.
At Dartmouth, Sarah majored in English, edited The Dartmouth, sang in the
Decibelles, and continued to spend time on stage - just another manifestation
of her love of language and expression. Today, she jokes about the hole she dug
for herself by taking calculus as a freshman but says that most of what she
studied stuck with her and that she is "terribly grateful" for
her liberal arts education.
"I still re-read Emerson's 'Essay on Self-Reliance' and Donne's Holy
Sonnets regularly," Sarah says.
Her junior year, Sarah discovered an unquenchable thirst for Renaissance
literature and wrote her thesis on one of Shakespeare's late plays, Coriolanus.
Her passion for Shakespeare is as strong as ever and now dovetails with her
interest in Asian culture: She says she can't wait to take her children to a
production of Hamlet in Beijing.
Recently, Sarah was thrilled to discover that a Beijing publisher had issued
a new Complete Works of Shakespeare in simplified Chinese, and a first-ever
Complete Works in Tibetan. Sarah has already taken her two daughters, Gillian
and Genevieve, to productions of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, Much Ado
About Nothing, and The Taming of the Shrew. "They loved it all," she
says.
How does Sarah manage being a working mother with a lawyer husband who works
seven days a week? "It's a constant challenge," she says, "but I
learn so much from working with Burmese and Chinese and Uyghur colleagues that
I can hardly imagine any other life." She also keeps a reduced schedule so
that she can spend time with her two daughters, whom Sarah describes as
"madly curious" about everything and who enjoy learning about her
colleagues.
"This past week I watched my daughter's eyes grow wide as I described
the sorts of choices parents in many developing countries face every day,"
Sarah says.
"For them, the daily decisions aren't what to make for dinner, or
whether to buy a new water filter for the kitchen; it's which child gets to go
to school this month, and whether it's safe to leave the older children alone
at home while mum takes the baby out in search of clean water. We are so
fortunate in so many ways, but so few of us truly appreciate it."
A daily reminder of the disparities between countries such as the United
States and the developing countries Radio Free Asia covers flashes across her
laptop screensaver in the words of her beloved Bard: "There is a world
elsewhere." It's a line from Sarah's favorite Shakespeare play, and she
jokes that it could be her epitaph.
"No matter where you are, who you are, or where you live, there is
always, always, a world elsewhere, to be discovered, questioned, and
experienced," she says. Her greatest fear is that the internet,
television, and the advent of so many instant messaging devices "will turn
everyone in the developed world into complacent couch-potatoes who don't even
bother to read about new things, let alone visit new places."
Sarah Jackson Han and her family, players on the global stage, stand as
inspiring testaments to all that can be accomplished when people do stop to
realize that there are, indeed, worlds elsewhere.
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