The only decorations in Catherine Shen's office at the Marin Independent Journal are watercolor drawings by her young son Benjamin, a few plaques, a few posters, and photographs of Benjamin. Newspapering and child rearing seem to be Shen's primary interests. When asked about her social life, she says, "What social life?"

In Novato, Shen is three-thousand miles away from her birthplace, Boston. She says that, as a Chinese-American, she feels as ethnically isolated in the hills of Marin County as she was growing up in Boston. The daughter of two physicians, she played with her parents' Chinese friends, but there were no Chinese children in her neighborhood. All of her schooling, through college, she was in a European-centered world.

In 1969, Shen graduated from Wellesley College. She left the East Coast to attend California's Claremont College for a master's degree in English. She worked briefly for several East Coast newspapers, and then returned to San Francisco, where she worked for a book publisher.

The San Francisco Chronicle hired her in 1974, where she worked for eleven years before she was hired by Gannett in 1985. After working for USA Today in Washington, D.C., Shen was named publisher of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. In Hawaii, among people from many different Asian cultures, Shen said she felt very comfortable. This period was, she says, the happiest time of her life so far.

Benjamin was born in 1989, and in that year Shen left Hawaii to become associate publisher of the Marin Independent Journal, where she was working when these interviews took place. Today, she and Benjamin live in San Francisco, and she commutes to work across the San Rafael bridge. Shen says she feels very much at home in The City's ethnically diverse neighborhoods.

Shirley Biagi
April 26, 1993