U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke will step down from his post as U.S. Ambassador to China early next year and return home to be with his family in Seattle, the Washington Post is reporting today.

Locke, a two-term governor of Washington and former King County Executive, is the first Chinese American to hold the Beijing job. He will be long remembered in China, as the Post noted, for a photograph taken even before he arrived in 2011 that showed him with his young daughter at the Seattle airport, wearing a backpack and trying to pay for coffee with a coupon. The image was a big hit on social media, and impressed the Chinese, who appreciated that Locke was a down-to-earth guy and far less reliant on publicly funded luxuries than their own officials.

Locke made headlines as ambassador in 2012 for his dealings involving a high-profile police chief in the southwestern city of Chongqing who sought refuge in a U.S. consulate, as well as a blind human rights activist who escaped house arrest and sought sanctuary at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Many believe Locke’s greatest achievement in China may have been cutting waiting times for U.S. visas to three to five days, down from 70 to 100 days when he took over, which, Locke said, “significantly increased Chinese business and travel tourism to the U.S.”