Kristie Lu Stout

Early life and education

Stout was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a European American father and a Han Chinese mother; as a result, she was raised in a partially Chinese-speaking household. Her mother was born in Taiwan to parents from Guizhou.

Stout grew up in Cupertino, California and graduated from Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California, where she was a founding member of the Lynbrook Speech and Debate Club, and worked as a model in her teens. She studied journalism as an undergraduate at Stanford University, writing for The Stanford Daily and KZSU. In the early 1990s, she traveled to China in order to learn Standard Chinese at Tsinghua University, freelance for the South China Morning Post, and worked at Sohu. In 1996, she started working as an editorial intern at Wired, and before 1997 she graduated with a master's degree in media studies from Stanford.

Career

In 2000, a senior producer for CNN invited Stout to work as a "television and dotcom reporter" after listening to her give a speech about the internet in China at the Foreign Correspondents' Club, Hong Kong. Starting from 2001, she hosted the daily World Report which earned her a 2006 Asian Television Award as Best News Presenter or Anchor when it was still called CNN Today. She occasionally also hosts the talk show Talk Asia. She previously hosted CNN's technology program Spark, their daily "Tech Watch" segment, and the monthly program Global Office.

Personal life

Stout lives in Hong Kong with her daughter, Arabella. She is married to the Malaysian Chinese attorney Seung Chong.