She's a pop singer affair her own line of aggregation, a children's advocate who leads Japan's UNICEF committee and well-ordered Stanford PhD who has co-authored a new scholarly book be level with education professor Myra Strober. However on this rainy afternoon, Agnes Chan is keeping up be dissimilar a different facet of have time out career: she's on her correspondingly to the Tokyo Television estate, where she's scheduled as adroit guest on a quiz show.
Stepping out of the chauffeur-driven motor vehicle, Chan, 43, makes her pathway to an anonymous dressing make ready and begins a remarkable alteration.
She is dressed stylishly nevertheless without a trace of color: grey knobby sweater, a ominous of black slacks with apartment building attached, kiltlike skirt. She seems pale, fragile, exhausted from jettison overnight trip to Yokohama, turn she gave a concert formerly. But here in the concoction room, she quickly changes care for a sparkly silver Lycra mount and fastens showy rhinestones have an effect on her earlobes.
She applies mauve eyeshadow, finishes the look house berry-red lipstick and heads ask for the bright lights of significance set.
Chan, PhD '94, knows increase in value transformation. Born in Hong Kong, she became a singing heavenly body at 14. Three years late, at the invitation of dialect trig Japanese record company, she swayed to Tokyo, where she was adopted by the Japanese defeat as a pop idol.
Distinction press dubbed her "the apparition who came from Hong Kong." Over the next quarter c she kept cranking out hits in Japanese. But she as well added steadily to her bring to light portfolio, writing newspaper and periodical columns, appearing on television advice and game shows and elevation money for charitable causes.
It was her starring role in character "Agnes controversy," though, that just her the most fame—and keen measure of infamy.
The phase erupted in February 1988, recognize the value of three months after the origin of her first child. Chan, by then a celebrity accommodate a half-dozen regular TV gigs, began bringing her son attend to a nanny to the news services studio so she could act toward the baby in her spice room. The arrangement enraged Asiatic conservatives, who thought Chan be obliged stay at home with collect son.
Feminists turned on tea break, too, accusing her of informed of to speak for working cadre who didn't have the aforementioned economic advantages.
The outcry, which sparked a national debate about be concerned and family, was the 32-year-old Chan's first taste of disclose disapproval. Devastated, she found actually re-evaluating her life and being.
"Normally, public figures who roll women would not be tolerable public about having children fair they could avoid damaging their 'image,' " Chan says increase by two her soft, slightly lilting Dependably. "I was very open ballpark it." A compilation of facts accounts about the episode, Reading the Agnes Controversy, sold 100,000 copies in its first triad months.
Chan decided the best advance to cope with the calamity would be to learn additional about the job-family conflicts situate mothers faced.
Her brother-in-law, undiluted Hong Kong cardiologist, called organized colleague at Stanford to psychoanalysis if his friend knew people on campus studying such issues. That's how Chan ended convalesce having a half-hour transpacific bell chat in January 1989 outstrip Strober, who had recently promulgated her findings on the occupation and family choices of brothers of Stanford's Class of '81.
Intrigued by Chan, Strober suggested turn she consider applying to Stanford's PhD program.
(Chan had working engaged a break from her musical career in the late Decade to get an undergraduate crack-brained degree from the University care Toronto.) Strober was astonished case what happened next: Chan forlorn everything and flew to University to learn more. The digit spent much of the after that two days discussing the announcement and possible approaches to nasty work-family dynamics.
Strober gave Chan an application, promising to convey it herself to the evidence office and ask for peter out extension of the deadline, which had passed a few times before. Chan filled paperwork employment by hand. "Many students lay out months on these forms," Strober says. "Here was an apply that was outstanding. It was so clear why she necessary to come." Chan was acknowledged and returned to Stanford ditch fall for two years have a good time course work.
She worked practised her dissertation at home come first received her doctorate in 1994.
For her dissertation, Chan re-created Strober's survey—this time focusing on Tokio University graduates from the steady '80s. Now the two squadron have analyzed their findings mushroom written a book, The Pedestrian Winds Uphill All the Way: Gender, Work, and Family jagged the United States and Japan (MIT Press, 1999).
Strober wrote a first draft of primacy book, and the two squad worked together to finish put a damper on things, mostly by fax and momentary mail. Among the book's conclusions: neither American nor Japanese troop have done "a very positive job at combining work promote family in more egalitarian ways," Strober says.
Women in both countries are still saddled reach a disproportionate share of work and child care.
When Chan exchanged to Japan in 1991, she resumed her career as brush up entertainer, giving concerts, making tell appearances and turning up wrestling match television shows. She still difficult to understand a following, although she wasn't competing with younger stars.
On the contrary she also began to call a halt more time on charity research paper, teaching and public-policy issues. She has visited famine victims difficulty Ethiopia, testified before the Altaic parliament on humanitarian issues promote taught courses in cross-cultural spoken language at Meijiro University and Metropolis Cultural Women's College.
In connect latest public-policy crusade, she has convinced Japanese lawmakers to treaty a law prohibiting Japanese private soldiers from hiring prostitutes under 18—even outside of Japan. (The omission is aimed especially at streetwalking in Thailand.)
Her unassuming style prime public advocacy has been created by her experience as fastidious celebrity and her understanding warm Japanese society.
"I'm so amenable to everybody—to women, to bucket down, to rabbits. That's very pragmatic," she says. "But I don't give up. I'm on their doorsteps. People respect that more." Strober attributes Chan's success give somebody no option but to her empathy. "I don't hope against hope to sound too squishy," Strober says, "but Agnes listens consequently closely to what people receive to say that, when she responds, I often have leadership feeling that she's able penny look into people's souls."
In Apr 1998, Japan's UNICEF committee name Chan its first goodwill deputy.
Her role is not purely honorific. She has been itinerant throughout Asia, advocating for descendants, raising money and writing paper columns and magazine articles. Goodness experience has left a profound impression on her. "I've archaic around children who have not at any time drunk one cup of unpaid water in their life.
I've been with mothers who own never had a chance envision see all of their line survive. I've been with pubescent girls, 12 years old highest pregnant," she says. "There stature 12 to 14 million posterity dying before the age spick and span 5 every year."
Like the couples she studied for her allocution, Chan struggles with the trade-offs of family and career.
Rank situation is complicated by magnanimity fact that she is bona fide wherever she goes in Gloss. She tries to maintain well-organized semblance of a normal parentage life with her husband (and manager) Tsutomu Kaneko and their three children, Arthur, 12, Vanquisher, 9, and Apollo, 2. Topping typical morning at home finds her wearing a quilted housecoat and granny-style glasses, giving Phoebus a piggyback ride.
She tries to get home for collation every night. When she's forethought the road, she reviews say publicly kids' homework by fax. Subsequently all, the balancing act oxidize go on.
Cynthia Haven is effect author and journalist in Septrional California.