Chapter Text
She's had the reins of one of the world's biggest companies since she was a teen. Now, with both business and pleasure firmly in her hold, Asami Sato talks to us about perseverance, privacy and paralleling the Avatar.
It may be my umpteenth time venturing into Republic City's preeminent corporate enterprise, but it’s the first with the woman behind Future Industries herself.
My subject is running uncharacteristically late. An aide ushers me into the elevator anyway. The 15th floor office I’m shoved into to wait is spacious and well-lit, with an arch window that spans half of the outer wall allowing the late spring sunset to illuminate the room. The suite is sparsely but deliberately furnished, every element fit for purpose - no excessive tapestry or drapery, but there are two desks evenly covered; no more than three seats around a coffee table (a small audience for a president), but they’re of soft black suede, designed for comfort. I note this as I take a seat.
There's a strict scheme to the framework of this space (no woodwork that isn’t mahogany, no fabrics that aren’t black or red) but the elements that fill it (blueprints held in place by mugs and notebooks, a pair of heels leant against the sofa) are indicative of a more pliant existence. It’s only a few months that this tower has been the permanent Future Industries headquarters, but the office feels as if it’s been - not lived in, exactly - but made regular, willful use of for years. The dishevelment is not manufactured, but it somehow highlights the sleekness rather than detracting from it. A delicate balance of calculated elegance and almost vintage comfort. In other words, this office is a lot like Asami Sato: well-organized, warm, fashionably modest, good at its job and old for its age.
When Ms Sato does arrive, it’s in a flurry of apology. “I was just locking the shop up,” she says with a polite smile, indicating the direction of her private workshop as she takes a seat opposite me. She pauses to straighten the heels by the seat on the way. “I want to leave everything in its right place so I can really enjoy tonight.”
Tonight (of the day we are speaking) will be the presidential gala that marks the alliance between the new Earth Republic and the United Republic and celebrates the remarkable progress that the city has made in the restoration efforts since the dissolution of the Earth Empire. Future Industries has been at the forefront of this effort. Asami Sato looks tired but very genuinely pleased, in a way that makes you think she only lets herself feel pleased when she’s worn herself out.
These last few days preceding the celebration have been work non-stop, she tells me as she makes herself comfortable. I introduce myself properly and she does the same (“just call me Asami, I’m too exhausted for that.”)
“Go easy on me,” Asami says with a quirk of her brow, and I don’t know if it’s a reference to her tuckered out state or the fact that she’s giving me a more-than-just-business interview, a first for this private and altogether atypical magnate.
Asami Sato has the impressive distinction of being the youngest independent president in the history of our industry, but it’s a circumstance difficult to divorce from the darker details of her family and company’s past. Having lost his wife to an attack by a bending triad when Asami was only six, the now late Hiroshi Sato became involved in secret with the Equalist movement. His daughter, contrary to his wishes, aligned against him and with the newly arrived Avatar. When the revolution disintegrated following the overthrow of its leader, Sato was imprisoned for providing the movement with significant technological power. The task of navigating the professional fallout as well as the personal fell to Asami, a rather overwhelming prospect for any nineteen year old girl.
The above is all the detail she gives me; nothing she knows you or I wouldn’t already know.
It’s not hard to see why Ms Sato’s publicist warned me not to press this particular topic, but it’s not my interest today, not with the notion of renewal and restoration in the air.
It’s something Asami knows a lot about. “I’m happy working. I’m really happy designing, or even having meetings and doing administrative stuff, if it’s productive. But the really difficult thing has been translating that into a new - into the right image for my company. Because that’s what matters and that’s where we took a blow. You have to calculate every last detail if image is what you’re looking to rebuild.” She speaks with an unpractised candour, and I wonder if she purposely scheduled this interview at the end of her workday so she’d be loose enough not to fret about oversharing.
Before we continue, I ask her if she could provide any sample of her personal work to print along with the portraits taken earlier this week. “You are a tech magazine,” she acquiesces, waving me over to her desk (the second desk, bigger, to the side, and it’s apparent from the new proximity that this is for the science part of her work and the other the business.) It’s also easier to see that 1) there are several different projects spread out over this table and 2) Asami Sato really is a savant.
She reaches into a drawer and hands me a folder across the desk. “These are all the earliest designs for the wingsuits I made for the airbenders,” she says. “They’re super easy to follow, and it wasn’t a company project so much as a personal one. I’ll get them sent to copy for you.” Then she offers me tea and I leaf through her work as she makes it herself from an electric kettle.
I note down what she says about the project: it functioned as a diversion from her ‘real work’ when she needed a break; it was nice to have a reason to visit Air Temple Island again (her home for a while; Team Avatar’s base); materials was the most challenging aspect of the design. I watch as she prepares the tea as methodically as if she were drawing up a blueprint. She is dressed in her business best, blemished only by a few ink stains on her hands, hastily rolled sleeves and the goggles pushed back in her hair from her time in the shop. Not as immaculate as the photos might tell you, but in the flesh, Asami Sato is disarmingly beautiful.
Unique professional responsibility aside, there’s no doubt that youth and beauty and talent have played more than a small part in the interest behind the woman since Future Industries fell into her care. When I ask why she has disclosed so little of her personal life over the years, she gives me a wry smile. “I don’t know if I’ve had much of a personal life to speak of! And we didn’t get this company back where it is by sitting around - I really have been working more than anything.”
“People wanted to know what I thought of my father,” she says (though she doesn’t tell me, either), “and why I didn’t hand all this off to someone who knew what they were doing, and what someone like me was doing single, or whatever else. But I don’t know if my private life as it actually existed would have interested them.”
And as it exists?
Her lips purse before setting in a smile. “I am very fortunate to feel the most successful and most unfearful I’ve felt in years,” she says, so earnest that I don’t want to press the question any further. “I have my city back and friends and the luxury of evenings off, and that’s all I want.”
So what does the CEO of Future Industries do with her free time? “You know what, I think the reason I’ve been able to work as much I have is that I really do love my work. I’m tinkering in my shop at home a lot of the time, too - it’s relaxing, it makes for good alone time. I like alone time. Driving is good for that, too. If you ever need to clear your head, go for a drive along the bay and into the mountains at night.” She jests that she “came out driving”, and makes it sound charming. “I’m actually teaching Bolin to drive right now.”
That’s Bolin the mover star/former pro-bender, whom she counts as a longtime friend. (The Fire Ferrets, the team that once consisted of Bolin, his brother Mako and the Avatar, was sponsored by Future Industries - and Asami’s considering sponsoring again, “even though I have no idea who’s on those teams anymore.”) “I’m not a recluse, despite what the press will you. I do love spending time with my friends, I just don’t have a horde of them. You can’t go out alone, and I like that some nights, so I’ll take friends out for dinner if they’re free.”
I ask after her acquaintance with the Air Nation. She corrects me on the term acquaintance. “Tenzin’s family are the only family I’ve known in years. I know people might think it’s a more formal relationship through Team Avatar, but they’re my friends. I was there when we rescued the first new airbenders from Ba Sing Se. There’s a room for me on Air Temple Island.”
“Everybody I know is busy so the nicest thing we can do sometimes is sit and hang out. I try to see everyone regularly - Mako and I meet for lunch since Chief Beifong’s new headquarters are just down the street, and Korra stays with me when she can’t be bothered to cross Yue Bay again after work.”
At this point, as at a couple of other points of our meeting, she takes a pen, book or sheet of paper from the desk and stores it away. I recall what she said about leaving everything in its right place. I suspect that Asami, like many scientists-turned-businesspeople, prefers not to have outsiders looking after her workspace. The neat side of her desk is extra neat: a Future Industries table clock, a tray of the most essential drawing equipment, a holder of identical pin-sharp pencils, car keys, hand lotion, a tube of lipstick - all in a row. Pinned above these is a sketch of the Republic City skyline and a mini calendar with the dates drowned by neat handwriting. My eyes alight on the photo next to these: Asami Sato and Avatar Korra - close and close-cropped, stunning, formal dresses and easy smiles. Unless you’ve been camping out in the spirit wilds for the last few months, you’ll know of the nature of the chatter following this duo. For me it might suffice to say that it’s for a lesser journalist to speculate. Asami catches my gaze. “That was Varrick’s wedding,” she says, without a hint of anything else.
I dive on the mention of Varrick. She’s happy to be forthright about the man’s hand in her past missteps, likely because her company is far out of those woods at this point, and because “nothing touches Varrick, anyway.” Her tone is resigned, but not truly affected. “I’m not jumping to work with him, but I’ve wiped the slate clean. I’ve gotten this far by learning, and the only way to learn and grow is make your mistakes. So maybe I’m better for it in the long run? I should thank him!” It’s a joke, of course, but it’s almost paradoxically polite.
This attitude is emblematic of her grander outlook on the last few years: it’s been tough, but she came out tough. (Though you’d be hard pressed to find a softer-spoken CEO.) Arguably, no challenge has been tougher than that of turning around her empire’s image.
According to Asami, the greatest opportunity to transform the public perception of her company came when Future Industries was contracted by President Raiko to help redesign the infrastructure of the city following the Harmonic Convergence spirit vine crisis. She claims she shaped her life around this project for a while. At my request, she describes the undertaking at length, slipping far into the technical at times and then catching herself with an apologetic smile. “Anyway, it’s civic, you know. So it’s like giving back to the city, to the community. Like atonement. That’s how people end up seeing it, whether they know it or not. And that’s a much better way to get back through to a consumer than saying, ‘hey, you can trust me, I’m transparent.’”
I ask her if uncertainty on the image front is what resulted in her shrouding her personal life in mystery - after all, wouldn’t publicising her contribution to Team Avatar have helped relieve some of the worry that she was harbouring sentiments similar to her father’s? She frowns. “I think people will assume the worst if you say, ‘look at me, I’m doing this’ - they’ll know you have an agenda. I have to let our work speak for itself because it can’t lie.” She avoids my eyes as she says this, finally taking her goggles out of her hair and sweeping it back into a ponytail. Instantly, she’s older. “With Team Avatar, that’s me helping my friends. I don’t want to point an arrow to it and use a part of my personal life like that. It’s not charity work just because I provided material help. It’s not a political statement just because I’m a nonbender. I didn’t say a word to a reporter about it and there were people happy to decide, she’s trying so hard, she’s overcompensating or she’s just a token. So can you imagine how much worse it would have been if I did dress it up?”
She explains this patiently, with a kind of wisdom. It leaves a deeper impression on you than if she had related it with force, and I remind myself that this woman who rethroned the most powerful business conglomerate of the city in three years is only twenty-two.
I inquire if what she has just described was the philosophy behind her reticence when asked about the statue of Avatar Korra in the park renamed for it. The project was funded by Future Industries but she provided almost no comment of her own at the time. Maybe if she’d tried to explain what she was doing, it would have been taken as an attempt to erase the last vestige of anti-bending sentiment from her name, by literally building up the Avatar?
The question upsets her composure more than the last, but she recovers quickly. “That - wasn’t really my thinking behind it. I didn’t have an agenda other than I thought that Korra deserved it and President Raiko agreed. I don’t think it would have been my place to run a commentary over it because Korra wasn’t there and it wasn’t for us to dictate what her identity should be, or encourage speculation about her future, even if we did want to honour her. We opened it with the new roads and the spirit wild tours by the airbenders because all of those things were Korra’s doing in a way, you know? It was a good way to play it, since people had been so off about the spirits before and it was important to Korra to see them integrated. Anyway - I’ll talk about it now, because she’s back. But at that time I just felt it wouldn’t have been respectful to my friend. It was about letting what she had achieved speak for itself.”
Still: isn’t it rather poetic that a non-bending industrialist helped not only realize the Avatar’s vision for the world but sustain the world’s vision of her, here in the very city where technology had not long ago finally escalated the case against bending?
She smiles her truest smile so far before I’ve even finished posing this last notion. If in her reserved, eloquent nature Asami Sato appears deceptively matured most of the time, there are certain moments, split-seconds, where the widening of her eyes or the colour in her cheeks make the opposite true.
“Well, I think,” she declares, “that anyone who thinks the idea of bending and of balance - the Avatar’s role in keeping balance - precludes modernity or technology or whatever you wish to call it, is mistaken about how the world works. Maintaining balance isn’t about keeping the world as it is, but figuring out how every new component of it will coexist, and that includes electric cars no less than it does the new spirit portal.”
“It isn’t just the Avatar’s responsibility - it’s all of ours. I’m doing my part through this,” she gestures across the desk, “because it’s what I know best.”
Asami Sato is twenty-two, but she’s smarter than you.