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Audrey Choi
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Korean-American Audrey Choi has been chosen to join U.S. President-elect Barack Obama¡¯s transition office. The 40-year old is the only person of Korean descendent on the team. Choi will be in charge of the economic advisory committee due to her former job as chief of staff for the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration.
Choi, who grew up in New York, graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude and studied East and West German feminist literature as a Fulbright scholar at Georg-August University in Gottingen, Germany, from 1988 to 1989. She worked as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in the unified Germany from 1991 to 1995. In 1996, she applied to the White House Fellows program and was chosen as special assistant to the Federal Communications Commission chairman. At the tender age of 30, she became domestic policy adviser to vice president Al Gore and chief of staff for the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House. In 2000, at the age of 32, she was chosen as one of the 100 People to Watch by the monthly Washingtonian.
She has an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and has been working in investment banking sector at Morgan Stanley, being in charge of micro financing and female human resources development.
It is that impressive resume that got her the job on Obama¡¯s transition team.
Choi says the person she most admires is her mother Choi Sook-nyul (69), author of the novel ¡°Year of Impossible Goodbyes,¡± which she wrote in response to ¡°So Far From the Bamboo Grove,¡± the book by Japanese-American writer Yoko Kawashima Watkins that portrays the Japanese as victims at the end of the Japanese occupation of Korea.
Born in Pyongyang, Choi Sook-nyul went to the United States to study after the Korean War. She met Choi Nung-ho, who was a graduate student at New York University, and the two got married. After her husband died in 1980, she raised her two daughters alone. Both went to Harvard.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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