Neal E. Robbins – Brief biography
I was born in 1954 and brought up in the suburbs of Chicago. I studied Chinese and Asian studies at Washington University in St Louis, before I headed off to Taiwan to immerse myself in the language. After two years there, I went in 1978 to New York to Columbia University Journalism school. Imbued there with the ethos of journalism, I see being a journalist as a proud profession (though I am very disappointed by much of the industry).
On graduating, I won a grant for budding foreign correspondents that paid for an apprenticeship at the United Press International Hong Kong bureau. These years were my boot camp, but I survived, even met my wife-to-be, Susan Daruvala. In 1983 I joined the UPI bureau in New Delhi, a set of rooms in the then fading Ambassador Hotel. As we could order room service, I often ate chicken tikka massala and naan over the typewriters (and later computers) on which we wrote about those turbulent years for India.
After the birth of our son, I took a move back to the UPI headquarters in Washington, in part because he had Down’s Syndrome. I worked on the foreign desk, later transferring to the Chicago bureau, while Susan studied at the University of Chicago. I later became an assistant professor of journalism at Roosevelt University on the South Side. I loved teaching and set up a center to encourage minority students to go into journalism.
But Asia called. Frederick Yu, who had been my professor at Columbia, asked me to teach at the a new journalism school at Taiwan University. It was set up just after the end of martial law to educate a new generation as the country was feeling its way towards democracy.
In 1993, I came to London as a foreign correspondent for Taiwan’s mass-circulation China Times newspaper to cover Europe from the Taiwan perspective. When later Susan got a job teaching Chinese literature at the University of Cambridge, we moved to Cambridge, and with an unexpected family windfall, I decided to go into publishing myself. It turned out the be the greatest challenge of my life. In 1997 I launched a city magazine and later city and restaurant guides. Riding the waves of the growing digital revolution, I soon launched online. But, alas, in 2017, the company succumbed to the social media competition.
We still live in Cambridge, and now Susan and I have two grandchildren.