Harvard College '98
BA, East Asian Studies
My interest in Asia stems from my family background. My mother is Vietnamese and my father is African-American, and a veteran of the war there in the 1960s and 70s. I did not grow up speaking Vietnamese, so I was drawn to the Vietnamese language program at Harvard and studied Vietnamese for four years, and Japanese for one year. I’ve spent the last 22 years in real estate private equity in the U.S. and Asia with firms such as Goldman Sachs and the George Soros Funds.
EAS was central to my chosen career path. After graduation, I went to work for Goldman Sachs in their Asian Real Estate Principal Investments Area. I worked for Goldman in Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Japan. I ultimately relocated to Tokyo, Japan with Goldman, and ran their portfolio management division in Asia overseeing a real estate portfolio of $4 Billion in AUM (assets under management). I studied Japanese language while at Harvard, and that obviously was directly useful in Japan. The broad reach of my studies of Asian history at Harvard helped orient me within the cultures I was conducting operations in. I also studied Vietnamese language while at Harvard, and that helped me on some private equity office development projects in Hanoi.
I remember the department very fondly, especially Vietnamese professor Binh Nhu Ngo, Professor Tu Wei Ming of Confucian studies and Chinese intellectual history, and Professor Hue Tam Ho Tai, who served as an advisor on my thesis. I would strongly encourage anyone with even a remote interest in Asia to study within the department.
Nester Clark is currently working as Managing Partner and CEO of Jade Hill Investments, a Houston-based real estate investment group with partners in Tokyo and Sao Paolo.