New Horizons: Sarah Millard '89

When Sarah Millard’s parents sent her to Fay in the fall of 1986, they were hoping to give her some experience of life outside of their rural New Hampshire town. Little could they have imagined how completely Sarah would embrace the opportunity to immerse herself in the outside world. Arriving in Webster House as a very young seventh grader, Sarah’s dormmates quickly became a second family. She bonded with roommates Camille Cruz ’89 from the Philippines and Ingrid Cheang ’90 from Houston, and she quickly became best friends with a classmate from Japan, Risako Yamamoto ’89. “I was in this very multinational, multicultural, multiracial environment, and I was so young that it didn’t even occur to me that it was unusual,” Sarah recalls.

 

Her new friendships opened up a world of travel opportunities. The summer after eighth grade,

Risako and Mamiko Tateishi ’89 organized a trip for Sarah and other friends to visit Japan for three weeks. It was a fantastic experience that left Sarah determined to study Japanese in high school. The following summer, Sarah traveled to Curacao to visit Roshan Daryanani ’89. Sarah’s family also opened their home in New Hampshire to Sarah’s Fay friends, who hailed from so many different countries that her parents compared their weekend visits with friends to the United Nations. “They thought it was great,” Sarah recalls, “because it was exactly why they sent my brother (Tristram ’91) and me to Fay!”

 

Fourteen years later, Sarah is firmly settled in Shanghai, where she lives with her husband Louie Cheng and their three-year- old son, Colby. She left Staples in 2012 to work at PureLiving, which Louie founded. Recently, she started working as the Director of EyeMed, a U.S.-based company that offers vision care benefits, a form of insurance that is a bit of a novelty in China.

 

Sarah lives in a hundred-year-old lane house in downtown Shanghai, in a neighborhood that she compares to the quaint cobblestone alleys of Beacon Hill in Boston. The community is a sharp contrast to Sarah’s years in Boston, where she never knew or met her neighbors. “We know everyone in our lane, and they know us. Everyone looks out for each other and is so nice.” Public transportation in the city is excellent, and she and Louie commute to work on electric scooters. During her first few years in China, Sarah took advantage of all the opportunities for Inter-Asia travel, venturing to Cambodia, Thailand, Bali, Vietnam, and of course, back to Japan. When her parents visited, they toured all over China. “We would go and see all these different parts of China that I would never have bothered with otherwise,” she recalls. “It’s an amazing country for traveling, and it’s incredible how much there is to see.”

 

Sarah has stayed in touch with many of her Fay friends, most especially Risako, who travels up from New York to visit Sarah in New Hampshire when she comes back during the summer. “We’re on WeChat together almost every week!” says Sarah.