Profile: Chris Chan

Local television reporter brings with him six years’ experience covering Asian news out of Hong Kong and Singapore

By Arthur Lightbourn

Chris Chan Photo/Jon Clark

Chris Chan is a television news reporter with KNSD, 7/39, NBC, in San Diego.
He covers business and general assignment stories.
He’s also a man with a past.
We interviewed Chan, 36, in his Carmel Valley home which he shares with his banker wife, Maria, and their two children, Max, 8, and Kyra, 4.
When he was 22 and just after earning a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of Southern California, Chan packed his bags and flew to Hong Kong in search of adventure.
At the time (1994), while Los Angeles was experiencing an economic slump, Hong Kong, Singapore and much of mainland China were experiencing “the Asian economic miracle” with growth rates of 6 to 9 percent.
“And,” Chan said, “I wanted to be a part of that, but wasn’t exactly sure how.”
He also wanted to explore his family’s roots in Hong Kong.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in suburban Covina, Chan was the younger of two boys in his family. His father owned and operated a donut shop in South Central Los Angeles. His mom had been a radio announcer before she married.
“Both my parents were born in China and grew up in Hong Kong,” he said. “They went to the same high school and knew of each other, but didn’t really get together until they met in Los Angeles.”
Although as a youngster he no thought of becoming a broadcast journalist, he had an insatiable interest in watching world news on television.
“My parents taught me a lot of what was going on around the world, mostly about China and its history,” he recalled.
He also spoke both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese.
“And the first job I was interested in and the first job I g

ot within a month of moving to Hong Kong was as a news assistant at business news channel, which would later become CNBC Asia,” he said.
Rapid promotions and salary jumps were the norm in a then-vibrant and bustling Hong Kong and within a year Chan was promoted to producer.
He covered the British hand over of Hong Kong back to China and watched as Prince Charles sailed away on the Royal Yacht Britannica.
He was also dispatched to the Southern Philippines in 1996, accompanied by a reporter and cameraman, to arrange meetings with Muslim rebel groups in their camps on the island of Mindanao.
“One group, the larger group, [the Moro National Liberation Front] had made a peace treaty with the government, but there were still other factions who had not.”
Chan arranged meetings with both groups.
“It seemed like religion was not their motivating factor but it was the poverty they were in,” he said. “These people were much like any other teenagers and young men. We would turn on our camera and the soldiers would hold their guns and be very stern and mean-looking. And we’d turn off the cameras and they’d be laughing at each other and saying ‘Oh, you’re going to be on TV.’”
Their main business, Chan said, seemed to be kidnapping and ransoming.
“To this day, they [the Moro Islamic Liberation Front] remain defiant and remain a group that is against the government.”
The rebel interviews were aired on CNBC Asia, but not on CNBC in the U.S., Chan believes.
“The U.S. audience does not necessarily have an appetite for things going on around the world, unfortunately,” he said.
After three years with CNBC and wanting an on-air position, Chan returned to Hong Kong from Singapore and joined a local television station as a reporter.
“The beauty of being in Hong Kong was it’s a small city-state so that anything around us we would cover. I got sent on some great assignments like Taiwan’s largest earthquake in history in 1999, the arrival of Chinese UN peacekeeping troops in East Timor in early 2000 to quell the retribution violence following a successful independence referendum to secede from Indonesia, and Taiwan’s historic presidential elections in 2000.”
The East Timor assignment, he said, “was baffling to me that [pro-Indonesian government] militants would do such horrible things and leave behind such destruction for a group of people who were just trying to become independent.”
In May 1999, Chan married Maria Avila, a native of Hannibal, Missouri, of Philippi

ne heritage, whom he met years earlier when both were students at USC; and in March 2000, he hung up his flak jacket and returned to the States to begin a family.
Initially, he joined the on-line broker, E*TRADE, in San Francisco, to work as a reporter and producer on a proposed 24-hour financial news channel, but when the dot com bubble burst, the entire division was laid off in 2003.
Afterwards, moving to San Diego, he worked briefly with his brother in a financial services business “but unfortunately that didn’t take off as we had hoped” and Chan became a stay-at-home dad for his two young children while his wife went to work as a banker.
“That,” he laughed, “was an amazing experience, but very difficult.
“The amazing part was just being part of their lives. I don’t think a lot of dads have the opportunity to do that. And I’m not sure I would do it if I had a choice. It just happened that way and it was great to help them along and watch their minds grow and be a part of growing them.

“The frustrating part was that I was so used to being in control somewhat of everything that’s going on and when you’re a stay-at-home parent, to a certain extent it seems like you’re completely out of control and at the whim of whatever your child wants to do or doesn’t want to do.”
When his daughter was old enough to go to pre-school, Chan started looking for work in 2007.
“I went to a function of the Asian American Journalists Association where some reporters and a news director were looking at the tapes of recent college students and current college students evaluating them and giving them advice on how to improve and raise the likelihood of them getting a job.”
Chan showed up with his show reel which resulted in an interview with the news director of KNSD and his hiring as a reporter
“My very first story was the pregnant Giant Panda at the San Diego Zoo,” he laughed, followed by the more serious La Jolla landslide and the devastating October 2007 Witch Fire in Rancho Bernardo.
Chan also provides business reports on the current housing and economic problems with tips on how viewers can, hopefully, protect themselves and come out ahead.