Neal E. Robbins

I was born in 1954 and brought up in the suburbs of Chicago. After a very rewarding year as an exchange student in Venice, Italy in 1971-72, I studied Chinese and Asian studies at Washington University in St Louis before heading off to Taiwan to immerse myself in the language. I went in 1978 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 joined the United Press International Hong Kong bureau and 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.

I later worked on the foreign desk, later transferring to the Chicago bureau and taught journalism at Roosevelt University on the South Side. But Asia called. I was asked me to teach at the new journalism institute 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 and later moved to Cambridge. I decided to go into publishing myself. In 1997 I launched a city magazine and later city and restaurant guides. But, alas, in 2017, the company succumbed to the social media competition.

Over the years, my work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor and The China Times (Taiwan), and with National Public Radio and United Press International.