Pacific People
Adventurers, travel-industry builders, and AAPI figures whose lives change how we cross the Pacific.
Portraits first. Each profile is a reported life, not a template bio: climbers and hoteliers, founders and chefs, writers who made diaspora feel like a place you can book toward.
Jimmy Chin
Climber, photographer, filmmaker · Free Solo / Meru
All profiles
The People archive
8 lives
Nara / The Global Soul
Pico Iyer
Oxford-born to Bombay parents; Japan since 1987. After the Santa Barbara fire he kept returning to Big Sur silence, then wrote Aflame.
Aman / Azerai
Adrian Zecha
Time correspondent who founded Aman on forty Phuket rooms, then kept building small—Azuma Farm Koiwai at ninety-three.
Grab
Tan Hooi Ling
Manual GPS with her mother in KL, then MyTeksi with Anthony Tan—Grab’s quieter co-founder, now on Wise and Sonova boards.
Momofuku
David Chang
Vienna, Virginia, kid who filled empty Noodle Bar stools with pork buns, then kept driving for dinner tips on CNN’s The Detour.
STARLUX Airlines
Chang Kuo-wei
The Evergreen heir who lost EVA and founded STARLUX, Taiwan’s first new major carrier in a generation.
Trip.com Group
Jane Sun
The returnee who turned Ctrip into a world travel company, then took China’s first online-travel antitrust bill.
TSMC
C.C. Wei
The Nantou engineer who inherited Morris Chang’s foundry and now has to put it in other countries without losing Taiwan.
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