CREATIVE NONFICTION 41WILLIAM WAN is the Washington
Post’s science correspondent.
He previously served as the
Post’s religion reporter, roving
national reporter, and China
correspondent in Beijing. He
was part of the 2010 Pulitzer
finalist team for the Fort Hood
shootings, has been named
religion writer of the year, and
has won international awards
for his investigations on human
rights abuses.eporters like to say their job is to comfort the af-
flicted and afflict the comfortable. And to some degree,
that’s how I saw it, too.
For more than a decade, I’ve spent my days wading through
the grim realities of the world—mass shootings, disasters that
decimate entire communities, atrocities quietly carried out by
authoritarian regimes. I’ve seen both touching kindness and
horrific cruelty and have tried to expose and make sense of both.
I once thought of my job as being not so different than that of
my father, a minister who spent his life searching the world for
truths and bringing words of comfort to the suffering. But these
days, I am not so sure.
From the time I was a young man, I had the goal of following
in my father’s steps and devoting my life to ministry and the
religious realm—or at least pursuing those topics in my writing.
I developed an expertise in the mystical and canonical, in the
concept of forces that could not be seen, much less proven and
measured by empirical method.R
WILLIAM WAN