About Me
The first thing that you need to know about me is that when I was 12 years old my mother asked me to define life in one word and I responded without hesitation: 'quest.' The second thing you need to know is that I am a half-Argentine, half-Norwegian born and bred New Yorker.
I graduated a year early from high school in the United States eager to see the world and I haven't looked back since. I spent the last decade studying and working in Europe - primarily England, France, Spain, Italy, and Ireland - before landing in China last year. Amidst my travels I have managed to pick up a BA (Hons.) from Emmanuel College, Cambridge in the History of Art, an MA from Columbia University in French Cultural Studies, and back again to Cambridge for an MPhil/PhD in Medieval European Literature.
Then I did what any reasonable person would do and put my diplomas in a drawer, jumped on a plane for China without a job, a home or speaking the language and began my career as a freelance journalist for a local magazine the following week. The rest, as they say, is history.
A childhood anecdote that best sums up my personality and my interest in journalism comes from the summer of 1988 and the last gasps of Soviet Russia. Through business contacts my parents had been able to secure us rare tourist visas into the USSR to see Glasnost in action, but as an eight-year-old girl I was far more interested in tales of Tsarinas and the missing Princess Anastasia. As foreigners we were not permitted to leave the hotel without an official Soviet guide with us at all times and on the first day as we drove around Leningrad (as it was still called) I said to our guide, 'Now tell me about these Tsar people.'
My parents gulped as they imagined me being hauled off by the KGB but the middle-aged guide smiled and told me about the Summer Palace. The following day we had a different middle-aged female guide and as I launched into a barrage of queries, she looked me square in the face and said slowly and pleasantly in her thick Russian accent, 'Ah yes, they told me you're the little girl who asks all the questions.' My parents were then convinced that the KGB would have a file on me for sure but the Soviet guide's appellation of me as the 'little girl who asks all the questions' has proved to be the truest throughout my entire life.
View / Download my CV [ Kristina_Perez_CV.pdf ]
