This is Talking Portraits show-Episode 42. I’m Tom Parish, your host, and today I am having a conversation with Maria Trombly.  Maria is an award-winning journalist and is currently the Asian Bureau chief and global technology correspondent for Security Industry News. She has quite an exciting background—born in the former Soviet  Union, raised and educated in America, served as a war correspondent in Chechnya and then returned to the US to cover another type of revolution: how the Internet is changing the way the world works.
 
In 2004 Maria moved her family to China and she is now based in Shanghai, reporting on tech issues and China’s evolving securities markets.
 
So here’s what fascinates me: What is it like—really—to be a Westerner living and working in a country the size of China—which incidentally is the 4th-largest country in the world, is the size of the US and has a population of 1.3 billion—and they are just now coming online and growing as fast as Silicon Valley grew in the '90s.
 
China is the biggest news story of our time and it is attracting entrepreneurs, visionaries and investors of all stripes—Maria is in the middle of it all.
 
This is the first of what I hope will be several conversations with Maria talking about what it's like to be an American journalist, a Western woman working and living in a rapidly growing China rich with opportunities and challenges. What are the myths and the realities? The food, the taxis, the language, the business customs—be prepared to be surprised and inspired.