Join humanitarian leader Kathi Zellweger and veteran journalist Mike Chinoy for a conversation about Miss Kathi, Zellweger’s memoir co-authored with Chinoy. Drawing on their decades of humanitarian work and reporting in North Korea, Zellweger and Chinoy offer a rare and deeply personal account of delivering aid in one of the world’s most isolated countries. Between 1995 and 2019, Zellweger made 75 humanitarian trips to North Korea, including six years living in Pyongyang, where she served as director of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation from 2006 to 2011. Chinoy, a veteran journalist and former CNN Senior Asia Correspondent who has visited North Korea 17 times, brings decades of Asia expertise to the conversation as he and Zellweger reflect on the challenges, complexities, and human stories behind their work in the country. An Emmy, Peabody, and Dupont award-winning journalist, Chinoy is currently a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California.
Kathi Zellweger is a senior aid manager with over thirty years of field experience in Hong Kong, China, and North Korea. She was based in Pyongyang for five years (2006–2011) as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), an office of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before joining SDC, from 1978 to 2006, Zellweger worked in a senior post for the Catholic Agency Caritas in Hong Kong, where she played a key role in pioneering Caritas’s involvement in China and North Korea.
Mike Chinoy is a nonresident scholar at the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. Previously, he was a nonresident senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute. Before joining USC, he spent twenty-four years as a foreign correspondent for CNN. He was the network’s first bureau chief in Beijing, bureau chief in Hong Kong, and senior Asia correspondent. He also worked for CBS News and NBC News in Hong Kong.
“Kathi Zellweger has an extraordinary story to tell.
This book is a gift to the field of North Korea studies, and anyone who wants to get an unbiased, unvarnished, yet compassionate view of life for ‘average’ Koreans… a memoir that is as fascinating as it is readable.”
– John Delury, Senior Fellow, Asia Society, co-author of Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century
