Come join us for the in-person appearance of two speakers who have traveled from Taiwan and Switzerland for a US book tour, and we are their first stop. Mike Chinoy, who spoke to us via Zoom last session about Taiwan, is co-author along with Kathi Zellweger, the subject of their book, Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea.

THE AUTHORS 

Mike Chinoy is an American journalist who, along with his co-author Kathi Zelleweger, will be speaking to us live as the first stop on their book tour of the United States. Last year, via remote video, Mike addressed the prospects for China’s increasingly muscular efforts to take over Taiwan. He has reported on many of the most important geopolitical events in Asia since the mid-1970s, including the death of Mao Zedong, the rise of China, the Hong Kong handover and developments in Taiwan, Thailand, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, North Korea and elsewhere. Mr. Chinoy spent 24 years serving as a foreign correspondent for CNN, serving  as the first bureau chief in Beijing, from where he reported live during the Tiananmen Square crisis. He also worked for CBS and NBC in Hong Kong. In addition to receiving an Emmy Award for reporting on Tiananmen Square, he received a Peabody Award, a Dupont Award, and an ACE Award.

He has also covered North Korea extensively, traveling there 17 times since 1989. In1994, he became the only journalist invited to accompany President Jimmy Carter on his historic trip to Pyongyang and was the first journalist ever to file live TV reports from North Korea.

Mr. Chinoy is a consulting editor of the Taiwan Strait Risk Report, a monthly newsletter that quantifies fast-moving geopolitical risk on the Taiwan Strait.. He is also a Nonresident Scholar at the University of California, San Diego’s  21st Century China Center. Previously, he also spent 15 years as a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute of the University of Southern California. From 2006-2009, he was a Senior Fellow at the Los Angeles-based Pacific Council on International Policy, focusing on security issues in China, North Korea, and Northeast Asia. He is the author of six books. Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea, was  described by former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan as “an unrivaled account of heartbreak and heroism in the world’s least understood nation, North Korea.”

He has a degree in Chinese Studies from Yale University and a Master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Taipei, Taiwan.

Kathi Zellweger

Kathi Zellweger is a senior aid manager with over thirty years of field experience in Hong Kong, China, and North Korea. She was based in Pyongyang for five years (2006–2011) as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), an office of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before joining SDC, from 1978 to 2006, Zellweger worked in a senior post for the Catholic Agency Caritas in Hong Kong, where she played a key role in pioneering Caritas’s involvement in China and North Korea.

She also managed the Hong Kong–based KorAid Limited, a nonprofit she established in2015 to focus on serving children in institutions and people with disabilities in North Korea. She has made 75 trips to North Korea and has the longest continuous history of humanitarian engagement with the country of—literally – anyone.

Zellweger is affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)at Stanford University in California and is  a Non-resident Fellow at the European Center for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna.  She holds a master’s degree in international administration from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont.

In 2005, Zellweger was presented with The Bishop Tji Hak-soon Justice and Peace Award from a South Korean foundation established to promote social justice, peace, and human rights. In 2006, she received the honor of the Dame of St. Gregory the Great from the Vatican for her work in North Korea.

THE BOOK

Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea is the remarkable story of Swiss aid worker Kathi Zellweger, whose history of engagement with a secretive, isolated North Korea over nearly three decades is unprecedented in its scope, access, and humanitarian impact.

One of the first book-length accounts in English by an aid worker operating on the ground in North Korea, Miss Kathi chronicles the story of a woman who has lived out her commitment to the poor and most vulnerable—undaunted by the tensions and threat of conflict perpetually looming over the Korean peninsula.

For many North Koreans, Kathi Zellweger—a native of Switzerland—was the first foreigner they had ever met or even seen. Playing a central role in the early years of international relief efforts in North Korea was a lonely job, as Kathi addressed the humanitarian needs of a suffering people largely ignored by the world because of their citizenship. She befriended local doctors, nurses, and caregivers; negotiated with suspicious government officials; overcame international doubts about the diversion of relief supplies to the military; and, over a period of years, spearheaded an effort that provided food, medicine, and development aid. Ultimately, her efforts saved the lives of thousands of people—most of them children.

As one official in Pyongyang emotionally declared to her during a visit in the late 1990s, even though she was in no way a missionary, “Miss Kathi—you are the Mother Teresa of North Korea!”

There will be a book signing with a Barrett’s Bookstore representative on-site after the meeting at the entryway table.