Darcy Palder and the trouble with first impressions

On her second day in Hong Kong, Darcy Palder walked through a cafeteria and discovered that fitting in could be a rather complicated business. In the United States, she had grown accustomed to looking different from the people around her. Here, strangers could look at her and assume a shared language. Shopkeepers addressed her in Cantonese. Sometimes she nodded and tried to follow the context. Then she answered in English, and the resemblance stopped doing its work.

Palder had been adopted from China and raised in a white family, with an older sister whose appearance differed from hers. There had been no grand family announcement about the adoption. She had always known. The question strangers liked to ask - how her parents had told her - began with an assumption that did not fit her life.

That small mismatch makes a useful place to begin a profile of someone whose work has crossed journalism, political communications and Meta. A face, a job title, a party affiliation: each offers a quick explanation. Palder’s earlier writing gives the reader reasons to slow down.

A Facebook discussion, then a crowd

In November 2015, Palder was a junior at Jones in Chicago. Public school students were protesting threatened teacher layoffs and cuts to school programs. A discussion on Facebook among students, including Palder and Walter Payton senior Matthew Mata, helped generate a November 6 rally at the Thompson Center.

Organizers estimated that the crowd grew to between 600 and 800 students. Palder spoke about the prospect of losing the classes and teachers students loved. Her explanation was direct: the possibility of losing something had made its value suddenly clear. There was also a question of who could attend. She pointed out that students from some neighborhood schools had difficulty reaching the demonstration.

The setting supplies an early, concrete connection between a communication platform and public action in her story. The students had an immediate problem, a place to discuss it and a reason to assemble. Years before Meta appeared on her professional profile, Facebook was one of the places where that assembly began.

Learning the business of listening

At Georgetown, Palder studied government, with minors in psychology and journalism. It is an apt combination for work involving institutions and the people trying to understand them. She graduated in 2021; her university years also produced a series of reporting assignments about the practice of journalism itself.

In October 2018, she covered Bob Woodward’s visit to John Kirby’s Government and Media Relations class. Her account included Woodward’s insistence on the unglamorous mechanics of reporting: going to people’s houses, knocking on doors, listening. The celebrated investigation still required somebody to show up at the door.

One line she recorded deserves to be read slowly: “You don’t extract from people. You just listen.” Those were Woodward’s words, addressed to students. They also describe a useful standard against which to read the questions Palder would later ask in her own essays.

In April 2019, she reported on a Georgetown panel featuring Jim Acosta, Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Margaret Sullivan. The discussion concerned journalism, truth and public distrust. Among its subjects was the difficulty newsrooms had reflecting communities unlike the people who staffed them.

Her account made room for disagreement among the journalists, including different assessments of public confidence in the press. It also recorded their advice to students: study broadly, understand history and politics, and keep writing. The problems of representation were already present in her work before she boarded a plane to Hong Kong.

The visitor’s difficult question

During the fall of 2019, Palder studied at City University of Hong Kong. Her November essay began with words painted on the route to school: “Free Hong Kong.” The political movement was part of the everyday landscape, present in classrooms and conversations as well as in the streets.

Her program prohibited students from joining the protests. Palder also examined a hesitation of her own. She supported democracy, yet questioned her standing as an American visitor to intervene in a community whose future she would not have to inhabit. A local student described being busy with protesting; her own weekends could still involve beaches and hikes.

She left the conflict between conviction and outsider status visible on the page. The essay’s interest lies partly in its refusal to give the visiting student the central role in somebody else’s political struggle. Her peers would remain responsible for living with the outcome.

Another essay, published that December, revisited the stereotypes she had encountered growing up. She described schoolmates’ assumptions about her ability at mathematics and considered how prejudice could persist even when a stereotype sounded complimentary. Travel had given her more examples, rather than an easy geographical escape from the problem.

Read together, these pieces complicate the familiar promise that travel will make everything fall into place. Sometimes it gives you a better account of why things do not. Palder was willing to write down the discomfort while her conclusions were still forming.

“We never had a ‘talk’; I always knew that I was adopted.”

Darcy Palder, on a question whose premise never quite fitted

A trip still needs a plan

There was room for comedy in the semester, too. In her later account, Palder described booking flights to Tokyo and Seoul with a friend before they had sorted out accommodation or an itinerary. They walked 17 miles on their first day in Tokyo. By the end of her time abroad, she had visited 11 countries.

Spontaneity eventually met an assignment deadline in the Philippines. On a beach in Palawan, she discovered that the hostel’s Wi-Fi operated only during an evening window. A final paper required rather more attention than the view.

Her Hong Kong program was canceled amid the unrest, and she had to leave. Recalling the departure, she drew a distinction between her own ability to arrange onward travel and the position of the people for whom the city was home. The funny travel difficulties and the serious political questions occupied the same account. Neither canceled the other.

The politics of getting to campus

Back in Georgetown’s orbit, a bus proposal offered a more local reason to act. In 2020, Palder belonged to the student association’s Federal Relations and DC committee. She helped circulate petitions and explain proposed Metrobus changes to other students.

The stakes extended beyond student convenience. University workers and visitors also depended on affordable transport. A university-wide effort brought together students, staff and faculty. On April 2, the transit authority’s board approved a budget preserving the routes near campus.

The public feedback shifted sharply. Opposition to the G2 proposal rose from 50 percent of 255 responses on February 25 to 83 percent of 1,210 responses on March 9. Those are figures for the wider consultation, rather than a measure of any one campaigner’s influence. Palder’s part was specific: helping people understand the proposal and take part.

From a film credit to a reporting byline

Palder’s work also included documentary filmmaking. She, Leigh Bianchi and Candis Ferrell created the 2020 Making an Exoneree film about Jermane Scott. The project examined his case and his effort to challenge his conviction. Her name appears as one of three creators, a modest credit with a substantial subject behind it.

The film belongs alongside her reporting because it places an individual’s experience in relation to an institution with enormous power over him. A documentary also asks its audience for time: time to hear a person’s account and consider the sequence of events. That is a different task from winning attention with a single sentence.

At Foreign Policy, where she was an intern in 2020-2021, Palder accumulated both solo and shared bylines. Her work included an October 2020 report on Chinese American voters in Texas. She examined political differences within the community, including generational divisions and the challenge of parties reaching voters through the languages and outlets they used.

The article did not treat a demographic category as a finished political explanation. Community leaders and elected officials offered different views. For a reader of her earlier personal essays, the subject has a recognizable resonance: an outwardly tidy label contains people with varied histories and expectations.

In November, she wrote about criminal disenfranchisement, comparing restrictions on voting in the United States with practices in other democracies. Earlier that year, she and Jack Detsch had reported on lawmakers’ allegations of Egyptian interference in an American lawsuit. The range was wide, but the subjects shared practical questions about rights, representation and what governments do with their authority.

A different place in the conversation

In April 2021, the Democratic National Committee announced Palder’s appointment as press assistant. She was returning after an earlier communications internship. Her experience by then included The Hill, BBC News and podcast production at Foreign Policy. The move put her inside a political communications operation after work in newsrooms.

By May 2022, she was listed as communications assistant to Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. A delegation roster placed her among the staff traveling to South Korea for President Yoon Suk Yeol’s inauguration. Her professional work had acquired an international itinerary as well.

Her LinkedIn profile now lists Meta. Across those settings, her position in the public conversation has changed: student organizer, writer, filmmaker, press staffer, technology-company employee. The early essays remain useful reading because they preserve something a résumé compresses away: the questions a person asked before the next title arrived.

Return to the cafeteria. Palder had found a place where strangers could take one look and feel sure they understood her. Then she spoke. The story got more interesting.