The NY Times has a long profile Styles section on Wendi Deng Murdoch, media mogul Rupert Murdoch's third wife, who happens to be 38 years younger than his 81 years. Apparently her first words to Murdoch—during a town hall meeting in Hong Kong where Murdoch, still married to his second wife, was meeting with employees of Star TV—were, "Why is your China strategy so bad?"
The article touches upon on how she loves Tiger Mother Amy Chua (Wendi Murdoch contacted Chua to have her daughters meet Chua's daughters: "She was asking for advice like, ‘How do you get a child to practice piano for more than one hour a day?’") and how her valiant defense of old man Murdoch against a prankster with a cream pie during phone hacking testimony won her respect ("Until the cream-pie incident, she’d really been branded the classic younger wife with a tinge of racism and stereotyping" said one former News Corp. employee).
Overall, the article shows the incredible trajectory of a woman who came to the U.S. and had a first job at a Chinese restaurant in Westwood, California ("for $20 day and all the leftover soup she can eat") while taking night classes to a woman who now goes to Sabbath dinner at Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner's apartment (Trump says, "She loves the challah. She calls it ‘that bread.’"). And she's not above reminding her new fancy friends about her roots:
Like last year when she and [Arianna] Huffington hosted a party at Ms. Huffington’s Manhattan apartment to celebrate [Kathy] Freston’s newest weight-loss book, “The Lean.” Guests included Martha Stewart, Joel Klein and Harvey Weinstein. Because Mrs. Freston is a vegan, the caterers had assembled a meatless spread with tofu, quinoa and kale spun into elaborate hors d’oeuvres.
Ms. Huffington recalled a toast Mrs. Murdoch gave. “She said, ‘I grew up so poor in China that one day I aspired to have meat regularly,’ ” Mrs. Huffington said. “ ‘Now that I can have meat three times a day, Kathy tells us we can’t have any meat at all.’ ”
Well, she hasn't tried the vegan Subway sandwich yet!