NüVoices: Recent Episodes
NüVoices
The NüVoices podcast is hosted by NüVoices members Chenni Xu, Cindy Gao, Joanna Chiu, Sophia Yan, Jessie Lau, and Megan Cattel who explore the work of women in media, academia and the arts in Greater China, the impact of abuses of power, international and domestic politics, and their own personal stories. This podcast is wholly coordinated, produced, and edited by the NüVoices board.
In this two-part episode, we have Yi Chien Jade Ho on anti-gentrification activism in Vancouver's Chinatown and Judith Shapiro on environmentalism in China.
We are ending our spring 2024 season with a collaboration between NüVoices and four students from the University of British Columbia's Human Rights in a Globalized World class. Over the course of last semester, these students conducted interviews and tied their research into their coursework.
Part I (which starts at 1:25) is with Yi Chien Jade Ho, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria, about her anti-gentrification efforts and tenant organizing in Vancouver’s Chinatown. With students Vanessa Matsubara and Kylla Castillo, Yi Chien discusses her work protesting the Keefer 105 Project.
Part II (which starts at 21:26) is Dr. Judith Shapiro of American University on the intersection of social and political influences that shape environmental challenges in China.
In November 2023, both China and the U.S. pledged to work together to increase renewable energy sources and lower carbon emissions. But what are the unexamined effects of China’s environmental policy implementation? In this episode, students Jake Yuen and Ariyana Dina seek to answer these questions as they consult Dr. Shapiro’s expertise on China’s environmental movements and policy.
Many thanks to UBC course coordinator Gaylean Davies for working with us.
In the latest episode of our series focusing on Taiwan, Solarina Ho speaks with Tuhi Martukaw, an Indigenous policy advocate, journalist, community organizer.
Solarina and Tuhi delve into what it means to be Indigenous, what reconciliation and activism look like today, as well as the communities' complicated relationship with Taiwan politics and Taiwanese settlers. Tuhi shares her own journey of how she connected with her roots and addresses some common misconceptions. We discuss the history, politics, and political structures that impacted (and continue to impact) Indigenous communities across the island.
This week, we have prolific cartoonist and illustrator Kaitlin Chan joining the podcast to discuss her recently published graphic novel, 'Eric's Sister.' Kaitlin talks about why she wanted to focus a narrative on sibling relationships, family, creative doubt, and the importance of friendship and community. This episode was hosted by Megan Cattel and produced by Kyle Leung and Megan Cattel.
When Leta Hong Fincher’s book “Leftover Women” was first published ten years ago, it was considered a seminal work on Chinese feminism. The book outlines the structural discrimination, wholly reinforced by the government, used to demonize educated women in their late twenties and early thirties who remain unmarried. A decade later, and with Xi’s continual reinforcement of patriarchal ideals and traditional family structures, the book is more pertinent than ever.
This week on the podcast, host Jessie Lau speaks with Leta about why the book is still as relevant today and what has changed (for better and for worse) since the book was first published. Leta shares the book’s origin story and how she started researching ‘leftover women’ in the first place while pursuing a PhD at Tsinghua University. Jessie and Leta also discuss whether women in China are still facing the same immense pressure to settle down, get married, and have a family. Lastly, Leta outlines how she went about rewriting this latest edition and what topics she felt were important to include in the new preface.
Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate! To kick off the year of the dragon, we have the one and only Fuchsia Dunlop on our podcast this week. She discusses her recent book, 'Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.'
This episode is hosted by Lijia Zhang.
Thank you for your interest in our bimonthly, independent podcast. To support our editorial goals and help us keep producing podcast episodes, please consider donating through our Paypal page or becoming a Patreon member. We encourage listeners to send us feedback, questions, and connect with our podcast team at nuvoices@protonmail.com.
This week, NüVoices board members and co-hosts Jessie Lau and Lijia Zhang are in conversation with Wanqing Zhang, an independent journalist, to discuss China's feminist movement taking place online. Despite formidable challenges such as censorship, harassment, and societal pressures, these feminists continue to resist patriarchal norms, as revealed in Wanqing's recent in-depth feature **for Rest of World.
In the podcast episode, Wanqing shares the stories of women she spoke to regarding this latest wave of digital activism — taking place on Chinese social media platforms like Xiaohongshu. Lijia Zhang discusses how feminism in China has transformed since the early 2000s, and Jessie highlights the ongoing crackdowns on Chinese gender activism both domestically and internationally. Together, the three writers discuss how feminists are innovatively navigating recent periods of crackdowns and immense adversity.**
Everyone in our NüVoices community: happy 2024! To start the new year, host Solarina Ho delves into the new captivating documentary, "How to Have an American Baby" with filmmaker Leslie Tai. An exploration of a shadow economy catering to Chinese tourists seeking U.S. citizenship for their newborns, the film unveils the fortunes and tragedies of the mothers involved.
Leslie Tai, the creative force behind this documentary, is a recipient of the 2019 Creative Capital Award and an MFA graduate from Stanford University. Leslie's short films have graced prestigious platforms like Tribeca Film Festival and MoMA.
Solarina and Leslie engage in a thought-provoking conversation exploring the intricate dynamics of trust-building with the women at the heart of the film. Leslie shares the challenges of maintaining detachment in the face of personal and often harrowing stories. The dialogue also navigates the evolving landscape of birth tourism post-Trump and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, unraveling the tensions between these women and the adjacent American communities.
It has been more than half a year since a Facebook post referencing the Netflix drama Wave Makers sparked a wave of #MeToo revelations across Taiwanese society. In this episode, we trace the origins of the movement, what has happened since, and where things stand going forward with guests Darice Chang and Rita Jhang. Alongside host Solarina Ho, they also share their insights and perspectives on the attitudes and conflicts over #MeToo issues, feminism, the challenges that arise when competing concerns get in the way, and the intersection of #MeToo with the upcoming Taiwan election.
Darice Chang is a non-binary Taiwanese American writer, artist, activist, journalist, host, speaker, and filmmaker. They were featured in the Netflix docuseries “Midnight Asia” for their drag performance. As an activist they are concerned with intersectional trans-inclusive women’s rights, human rights, veganism & animal rights, consistent anti-oppression, climate change mitigation & ethical sustainable living. They are currently working on an independent documentary highlighting the gender non-conforming experience in Taiwan.
JhuCin Rita Jhang is an activist, podcast host, and teacher. She’s a project assistant professor at the Global Health Program at National Taiwan University and a long-time gender equity and tongzhi/LGBTQ+ rights activist. Her podcast show Z Green Party Z色派對 provides social commentaries on gender, sex, sexuality, and other social issues.
In this special collaboration with Ghost Island Media, host Emily Y. Wu discusses the importance of local and diverse perspectives when it comes to global coverage of Taiwan. Taipei-based journalists Silva Shih, Afore Hsieh, Wen-Yee Lee join Emily in this wide-ranging discussion.
Taiwan's upcoming election has become one of the most closely monitored events in decades, drawing the attention of foreign press members, international scholars, and think-tank or trade delegations. This heightened interest is reflected not only in the increased number of books published about Taiwan, spanning countries such as Denmark, Germany, and the U.S., but also in the creation of numerous high-quality newsletters dedicated to Taiwan this year.
As global attention on Taiwan intensifies, so does the significance of the work undertaken by domestic journalists. During a recent news forum hosted by RTI, the Chief China Correspondent of the New York Times emphasized the crucial role of local journalism, stating that the ideas shaping global news often originate from local reporting. In light of this, Emily Y. Wu, Silva, Wen-Yee, and Afore provide a glimpse into the landscape of local reporting during this period of rare foreign press attention and international curiosity focused on Taiwan.
Many thanks to our panelists, Emily, and the team at Ghost Island Media for partnering with us for this collaborative episode.
Have you ever been laughed at by family or friends when you tried speaking a new language? It's particularly disheartening when it’s the language your family speaks.
In this episode, we speak to artist and illustrator Pearl Low on the difficulties of finding safe spaces for language learning, especially for heritage language learners. Heritage language learners are people who have a certain language in their family, can understand it to a basic degree, but cannot speak it fluently. Learning a heritage language can be especially difficult because of the immense cultural expectations, lack of resources, and the harmful legacy of assimilation and racism in many countries (where speaking a foreign language could bring great prejudice or harm.)
Pearl knows firsthand the difficulties in finding an inclusive environment to learn your heritage language. That’s why they founded Cantonese Connection, a learning platform with resources to learn Cantonese in a way that feels welcoming and open — no matter one's familiarity with the language.
Join host Megan Cattel and Pearl as they candidly address the delicate experiences of navigating heritage languages within one's family circle, discuss the do's and don'ts of heritage language learning, and also try to figure out why Chinese language textbooks always feature a guy named Dawei (the businessman) in all their examples.
In this week's episode, we delve deep into the LGBTQ movement in Taiwan. Our guest, Wen Liu, brings her expertise as an assistant research professor at Academia Sinica, adding valuable insights into the history and evolution of queer rights in Taiwan.
Wen Liu and our host, Sophia Yan, explore the movement's origins, its pivotal moments, and the courageous individuals who paved the way for progress.
Furthermore, the conversation touches on the challenges that lie ahead for the LGBTQ community in Taiwan, providing a nuanced understanding of the ongoing struggles and areas that require attention and support.
This week, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, China reporter at Axios, joins host Joanna Chiu to dive deep into her latest book, Beijing Rules. In its pages, Bethany details China's sophisticated strategy of leveraging its economic prowess, manipulating both access and denial, to shape the behavior of individuals, governments, and companies globally.
Bethany illustrates how entities are compelled not just to avoid crossing Beijing's red lines, but also to actively support the CCP's interests. Joanna and Bethany discuss the exclusive reporting covered in the book, including China's interference in a Zoom memorial for the Tiananmen massacre and the misuse of the Sister City programs. The latter reveals how an initiative meant to foster exchanges between local governments has been exploited by Beijing to undermine US interactions with Taiwan.
Yet, as Bethany emphasizes, this situation isn't set in stone. With the right policies, democracies can safeguard their values while still fostering economic relations with China. She critiques the prevailing assumption that economic freedom and democratic freedom are one and the same. One suggestion is to put sanctions on Chinese companies that execute Beijing's authoritarian censorship.
Don't miss this compelling episode where challenging questions are posed about democracy's relationship with commerce in an increasingly interconnected world.
Journalist Clarissa Wei and chef Ivy Chen join us this week to talk about their new book Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation. According to host Solarina Ho, Made in Taiwan is both timeless and timely, and is more than a recipe book. It's a celebration of Taiwanese culture and its people through its unique culinary identity.
In this episode, we discuss how food fits into discussions around identity, common culinary misconceptions, Indigenous and Hakka influences, how Clarissa and Ivy designed the recipes, as well as the contrast between Western coverage of cross-straight tensions and the local mood and mindset. This episode is jam packed with a lot of behind-the-scenes tidbits and discussions of Taiwan's history and culture — make sure to tune in!
We're flying into fall with new episodes two weeks in a row! Scholar and author Julia Lovell is in conversation with host Lijia Zhang about her role as chief organizer of The Hidden Century, an exhibition currently on display at the British Museum until October 8th. The exhibition is the first of its kind to pay tribute to the creative expression and individuality of the Qing dynasty – an era usually more associated with foreign aggression, violence, and turmoil than culture or artistic expression. Lijia talks to Julia about how she curated the exhibit, specific artifacts on display, and changing perceptions of the Qing dynasty. The episode also touches on Julia's academic career.
About Julia Lovell:
Lovell is professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Lovell is a translator of Chinese literature, and has also written books such as The Politics of Cultural Capital: China's Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature and The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC – AD 2000. Lovell has also written articles on the topic of China for the likes of The Guardian, The Times, and The Economist.
Happy end of summer! We're continuing our Taiwan series with Yun-Ching Ko, campaign director for the Taiwan Innocence Project (TIP), the only NGO in Taiwan that's committed to exonerating the wrongfully convicted by providing legal services and working to reform the judicial system. In this episode, Ko delves into her work with host Sophia Yan and discusses cases she has worked on. Those interested in criminal justice won't want to miss this episode.
About TIP: "Taiwan Innocence Project (TIP) was founded in 2012 to address the issue of wrongful conviction in Taiwan.
We provide pro bono legal services for the wrongfully convicted, work to redress the causes of wrongful convictions, and support the exonerated after they are proven innocent. We also urge to reform the criminal justice system and seek institutional changes to prevent innocent people from entering a flawed legal process in the first place.
TIP only accepts post-conviction cases that claim to be innocent, either with flawed forensic evidence or severe due process violation. We also seeks to support our clients during and after exonerations.
We hope to create an open and dynamic space that can spur more public discussion and the exchange of ideas to resolve the problem of wrongful conviction. We hold training workshops for attorneys, ask experts from different disciplines to give talks, and hold campus tours to share the stories of the innocent people and to show documentaries about their lives.
In 2015, we officially joined the Innocence Network, and became the second member in Asia. In 2018, we, along with innocence organizations and activists from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, co-signed the “Statement of the Asian Innocence Movement Activists,” collectively devoting ourselves into addressing wrongful convictions in Asia."
Author Abigail Hing Wen joins NüVoices to discuss her NYT best selling YA novel, Loveboat, Taipei and its film adaptation Love in Taipei, based on the summer study tour that started more than half a century ago.
For the price of a plane ticket and about $400, diaspora students between 18 and 23 from the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere participated in the government-subsidized, six-week language and cultural summer program. At its peak during the 1990s, some 1,000 students descended onto Taiwan every summer to have fun, escape from parents, and connect with their roots. Nicknamed after the 1970s/80s American TV show for the lasting relationships that developed, attendees found deep and lasting bonds. There are other cultural study opportunities and programs for youths and young adults today, but the "Love Boat" as many knew it shrank and changed considerably over the last two decades along with the changing political tides in Taiwan.
In this episode, Abigail discusses the program and its history, her own experiences with the tour, the legendary stories and escapades that sprang from the students' experiences, and what it was like to make a film adaptation for a new generation of diaspora youth.
This week, we’ve reached the 100th episode of the NüVoices podcast! To celebrate, we’ve brought together hosts Megan Cattel, Solarina Ho, and Sophia Yan for a panel discussion with a grab-bag of topics – from geopolitical current events to pop culture.
We’ll be discussing the recent news of Coco Lee’s death, and the hosts share their favorite songs as well as what the singer meant to them. They’ll also dive into U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to Beijing during a time of worsening relations between the two countries.
On a slightly lighter note, the hosts also discuss the Netflix show Never Have I Ever about an Indian-American teenager and her family reconciling the two cultures and coming to terms with the intergenerational differences within the family.
We would like to take this 100th episode to thank all our listeners and especially our Patreon subscribers! NüVoices is a non-profit organization and we appreciate all your support – even if it’s just a recommendation of the podcast to your friends.
For the next half year leading up to the elections in Taiwan, we will be bringing you a mini-series focusing entirely on the island, from domestic politics to its relationship to neighboring China.
For this first installment of the Taiwan mini-series, host Sophia Yan speaks to Yu-Jie Chen, an assistant research fellow from Academic Sinica who focuses on Human Rights and International relations with a specific focus on cross-strait relations.
Not only does Yu-Jie provide listeners with one of the clearest, most succinct summaries of three hundred years of Taiwanese history, but she also delves into how political and personal identities on the island have changed in the past three decades. With cross-strait tensions worsening in recent years, what does the future hold for Taiwan?
Yu-Jie also explains how the ambiguity of the 1992 Consensus has caused the modern-day complexities in the region.
Taiwan is so much more than the occasional headline, so make sure you don’t miss this episode!
"Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes—younger ... brides being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men."
This week, NüVoices host Solarina Ho speaks with sociologist and assistant professor Monica Liu about her new book, Seeking Western Men,which explores the phenomenon of global internet dating and cross-border marriages, partiularly among middle-aged, divorced women in China. She discusses the grievances women in China have with society and their own failed marriages, and why some believe a better life exists through this route. But reality is often very different. Liu explains why, and how the experiences of these women challenge scholars and others to rethink conventional notions of race and class. She also shares her experiences as an academic doing research in China and how that has evolved over the last decade.
This week, NüVoices co-host and editor of the podcast, Megan Cattel speaks to Charlotte Ming and Beimeng Fu, two founders of the Far & Near Substack newsletter.
Far & Near aims to depict China in all its complexity by shining a light on the country's visual journalism and showing the human side of some of the biggest headlines coming out of the country. At a time where in-depth, on-the-ground reporting on China is becoming all the more stripped down, Far & Near is a much-needed glimpse into the everyday reality for people living in China.
Beimeng and Charlotte can sometimes spend up to 45 hours working on a single issue. The newsletter has covered topics from the residents living in the apartment blocks that were abandoned during constructions due to the real estate crisis, to the nation's outrage over the Chained Woman last year. During the A4 protests, they provided a guideline for foreign journalists to help protect the identities of protestors, which became a popular document used by newsrooms worldwide.
During the course of the episode, Beimeng and Charlotte talk about their work for the newsletter as both a labor of love and a much needed perspective from inside China. With more magazine and newspaper closures in recent days, Beimeng and Charlotte are determined to do all that is necessary to increase readership and make the newsletter a project for the long-term.
Chinese millennials are fed up with the 996 grind (working from 9 AM until 9 PM, 6 days a week) and are going remote. Office workers across the country are freelancing, consulting clients, and starting their own businesses from their laptops; some are traveling to neighboring countries and regions with cheaper living costs. To shed light on this trend, Jing Daily's senior editor, Crystal Tai, is on the podcast to discuss her reporting on this subject.
The rise of China's digital nomads coincide with a number of factors: first, the 996 work schedule. Then, the Covid-19 pandemic. Lastly, the cost of living crisis and widespread burnout from a competitive schooling and high-pressure work environments. Together with host Megan Cattel, Crystal discusses all these converging factors — and how many countries around the world are grappling with similar issues when it comes to overwork.
Today is the last day of #AsianHeritageMonth to shop for great books on House of Anansi and have 10% of book sales go to NüVoices! Visit this link to learn more: https://bit.ly/41uEsOX
Young people in China are fed up with the grueling work hours of 996 work culture (a 9 AM to 9 PM workday, 6 days a week) and are going remote. In this week's podcast episode, we talk with business reporter Crystal Tai about the growing numbers of Chinese digital nomads who are quitting full time corporate work for freelancing, starting their own businesses, and consulting clients from their laptops. With host Megan Cattel, Crystal discusses the TKTK
This week, NüVoices host and co-founder Joanna Chiu speaks to Canadian journalist and author Jan Wong.
Jan was one of very few foreigners able to travel to China during the Cultural Revolution where she talked herself into studying at Peking University before working as a news assistant in the New York Times’ first Beijing bureau. Back then, the “office” consisted of two rooms in the Peking Hotel, one for the journalist and one that Jan shared with the driver and an interpreter.
Jan Wong details how she then went on to hone her journalism skills at Columbia’s School of Journalism, eventually working as a business reporter for the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail. When an opportunity came up to work as a foreign correspondent at The Globe and Mail’s Beijing Bureau, Jan made it her mission to get the role. After landing the job, Jan describes what it was like reporting from China during the 1980s, a bubbling tension that eventually culminated in the Tiananmen Massacre which Jan not only reported on but witnessed from a hotel overlooking the square.
Joanna speaks to Jan about life as a student during the Cultural Revolution and her journey into journalism, as well as the advantages of being a Chinese-Canadian when reporting from China. They also delve into the current relations between China and Canada, and the alleged secret police stations that the CCP has been setting across Canada and the United States.
May is Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month in Canada and the United States! This month, we’re partnering with House of Anansi, Canada’s leading indie publisher. Throughout the month of May, 10% of book sales on HouseofAnansi.com will be donated to NüVoices. Check out their online shop to support independent publishing and our work too! Thank you so much to House of Anansi for partnering with us.
This week, Yaxue Cao, the founder and editor of ChinaChange.org, joins the NüVoices podcast. ChinaChange.org is an English-language website devoted to news and commentary related to civil society, rule of law, and human rights activities in China. She works to help the rest of the world understand what people are thinking and doing to effect change in the country.
Reports and translations on China Change have been cited widely in leading global news outlets like (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph) and in U.S. Congressional reports.
In this episode, Yaxue discusses her advocacy on behalf of leading Chinese human rights defenders and her own journey into this fascinating sector. This episode was hosted by NüVoices board member Siodhbhra Parkin.
May is Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month in Canada and the United States! This month, we're partnering with House of Anansi, Canada's largest indie publisher. Throughout the month of May, 10% of book sales on HouseofAnansi.com will be donated to NüVoices. Check out their online shop to support independent publishing and our work too! Thank you so much to House of Anansi for partnering with us.
Today, we have a special guest (and a worthy NüVoices ally) MIT Tech Review reporter, Zeyi Yang! Together with co-hosts Megan Cattel and Solarina Ho, Zeyi talks about China's initial reception to ChatGPT and all the uproar and suspicion surrounding TikTok. What are valid concerns surrounding the app and Bytedance? What are oversimplifications made by members of Congress and Western media? We touch on all this and more in this conversation.
About Zeyi Yang: As a reporter for MIT Technology Review, he covers technologies in China and East Asia. His work often focuses on the intersection of tech and social issues, particularly LGBTQ rights and immigration. He writes a weekly newsletter China Report that bridges the Chinese tech industry and readers in the English-speaking world. Previously, his writing has been published in Protocol, Rest of World, Columbia Journalism Review, South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, among others. He has received awards from the Asian American Journalists Association, the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, and the Society of Professional Journalists. In his spare time, Zeyi also works as a podcaster, translator, and fact-checker.
This week, host Megan Cattel speaks to science fiction and fantasy translator, Emily Xueni Jin, on the art of translation and the rise of Chinese science fiction.
During the course of this discussion, Emily explains her process of translating work, and the special relationship she develops to writers who are bilingual themselves. The result is often a collaborative process, as Emily herself explains, “In a way, you basically develop a voice for them in the English language. Which they, in turn, being bilingual themselves, come to inhabit as well.”
Megan and Emily also discuss the essentialization of Chinese science fiction, where writers are often expected to answer questions on Chinese political issues completely unrelated to their work. As Emily points out in the discussion, her community of Chinese science fiction writers are usually just "sci-fi nerds," telling universal truths about the human condition.
This is a fascinating conversation about the power of language and the role of a translator, not merely to translate words, but as a mediator between cultures.
About Emily Xueni Jin: an essayist, science fiction and fantasy translator, translating both from Chinese to English and the other way around. She graduated from Wellesley College in 2017, and she is currently a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale University. Her most recent Chinese to English translations can be found in “The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories”, the first Chinese speculative fiction anthology in translation produced by female and non-binary creators, and “AI2041: Ten Visions for Our Future”, a collection of science fiction and essays cowritten by Dr. Kaifu Lee and Chen Qiufan. She’s currently a columnist for Sixth Tone.
Trigger warning: This episode briefly mentions suicide at 01:15 and 15:45.
This week host Lijia Zhang speaks to Tania Branigan, current Foreign Leader Writer and former China Correspondent at The Guardian. In this episode, they discuss her new bookRed Memory, about the Cultural Revolution, and more importantly about the suppression of memories, and how a society comes to terms with a tragedy deeply rooted in its psyche.
In the course of writing the book, Tania spoke to people who were affected by this tumultuous decade in various ways. People like Zhang Hongbin, a man who denounced his own mother at the age of seventeen and is reckoning with this fact decades later, trying to make amends for what he has done.
Tania points out that Xi has begun dismantling the protections that were put in place after the Cultural Revolution and the parallels between that period and Xi’s rising cult of personality.
This is a riveting conversation about memory, intergeneraional trauma, betrayal, mob mentality, and a deep look into what we are all capable of as human beings.
(Red Memory was released in the UK on February 2nd, 2023. The US edition's release date is May 9th, 2023.)
About Tania Branigan:
Tania is the Foreign Leader Writer and former China Correspondent at The Guardian. Her writing has also appeared in The Australian and The Washington Post. Red Memory is her first book.
A Ming Dynasty courtesan who transforms into a zombie. A family of ghosts wreaking havoc on a local hot spring. Elite Hong Kong bankers who are secretly serial killers. Welcome to the world of Lindsay Wong's new short story collection Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality, a pleasantly grotesque series of "immigrant horror stories."
Lindsay joins Joanna Chiu and Megan Cattel to discuss all things writing, publishing, and why the horror genre attracted Lindsay while writing about Chinese women. She also shares details about why her memoir The Woo-Woo was deemed "unmarketable" by industry gatekeepers and how Lindsay's stories stray from the model minority myth, which still dominates narratives about Chinese immigrants today.
This episode is the free version publicly available on all our social media platforms. For an extended conversation with Lindsay, sign up to become a Patreon member at* www.patreon.com/nuvoices*. Membership is just $1 a month! Become a member today to get all of our previous and future bonus episodes. Help us continue publishing independent and ad-free content by subscribing!
This week we speak to Liza Lin, an award-winning journalist and technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal who has covered China for over a decade on topics ranging from digital surveillance to venture capital. Liza has reported on the acceleration of digital tools like facial recognition in China, tracing the initial large investments in this sector to its implementation by the Chinese government to oppress Uighurs in Xinjiang. This reporting is the basis of her book Surveillance State which Liza co-wrote with colleague Josh Chin.
In this episode, Liza also helps us understand how Covid sparked the deployment of more invasive technology and how it was behind the swift response by the police to quash the recent A4 protests.
The surveillance affects her work, too. Currently based in Singapore, Liza explains the difficulties of reporting on China from abroad when Wechat conversations can be cut off instantly if too many sensitive terms are picked up by voice recognition technology. Though this riveting conversation paints a bleak picture, the work of journalists like Liza offers a glimpse of hope. This is an episode you don’t want to miss!
About Liza Lin:Liza is an award-winning technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal who has covered China for over a decade. Her work has covered artificial intelligence, surveillance, venture capital, and more.
Note: As current events regarding Covid are rapidly changing, we want to acknowledge that this episode was recorded in early January 2023.In this first episode of our 2023 season, Dr. Jennifer Bouey, an expert on global health equity and security, is here to make sense of zero-Covid's sudden end in China.
Following the 20th Party Congress last fall, the signal from the top seemed to suggest that China would continue to stay the course on zero-Covid. Few could have imagined the sudden dismantling of the policy.
Days before the Lunar New Year, China reported nearly 60,000 Covid-related hospital deaths for the first five weeks of the current outbreak. But many experts believe that number is still low. As physicians in China told Reuters, they are discouraged from citing Covid on death certificates. Relatives of those whose deaths were related to Covid say the disease did not appear as a cause of death on official documents.
The number of deaths is also a lagging figure; one infectious disease model reported in the journal Nature suggests that the current wave peaked ahead of Chinese New Year in many parts of China, which means the number of deaths could surge over the holidays and beyond.
This episode was originally released May 29, 2021* Stay tuned for our new season starting on January 25, 2023! *
Learn more about Yilin's new upcoming book, The Lantern and the Nightmoths
Yilin Wang (she/they) is a Vancouver-based writer, editor, Chinese-English translator, educator, and cultural consultant who was longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. Her work engages with topics such as Chinese folklore, martial arts literature (wuxia), diaspora identities, gender expectations, migration, and cultural reclamation. Some of Yilin’s work translating the Chinese revolutionary feminist Qiū Jǐn’s 秋瑾 poetry was recently featured on NüVoices' website.
In 2018, Yilin spent months travelling around China for research, leading to the launch of the #LiteraryJianghu Project to promote engagement with wuxia and related Chinese literary traditions.
Yilin chats with NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu about the fascinating themes and genres of their work, and about the day-to-day realities and power politics of being a creative writing and translation professional in North America. For further reading from Yilin on racism in Canadian literature, see her Carte Blanche essay here.
Recommendations:
Yilin: The wuxia series Legend of Condor Heroes, translated by Anna Holmwood and Gigi Chang and Grace Lau's debut poetry collection The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak.
Joanna: China: The Novel, by Edward Rutterfurd for an immersive narrative approach to learning about 19th century Chinese history, and Yilin's website!
As 2022 draws to a close, so must this season of the NüVoices podcast. But fear not! Before we sign off for a winter hiatus, we wanted to bring together our team to reflect on the past year. Joanna Chiu, Rui Zhong, Solarina Ho, Megan Cattel, and Saga Ringmar come together to discuss our podcast's highlights, our favorite episodes, and what we hope to achieve next year. We also delve into the anti-COVID lockdown protests that swept China late last month in response to the apartment fire in Urumqi that claimed the lives of ten people.
Lastly, co-host Sophia Yan gives a recap of 2022's major events: from the Beijing Olympics, China's aggression toward Taiwan, and the National Party Congress which solidified Xi Jinping's third term. Sophia also gives a glimpse into her latest project, How to Become a Dictator,a podcast series for The Telegraph.Please do check it out wherever you get your podcasts!
Thanks for listening and supporting us this year. See you in 2023!
This week, journalist Angela Hui joins the NüVoices podcast with board member (and occasional pod host) Lijia Zhang! Angela discusses the major inspirations behind her memoir, Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter. She writes that growing up in a Chinese takeaway — helmed by her parents — in the Welsh countryside was anything but peaceful. Angela was responsible for translating the menu, dealing with outrageous customers, and preparing orders for the usual weekend rush. Violent, racially motivated attacks were also not unusual, with some incidents ending in a physical confrontation (or her father wielding a meat cleaver). Angela also writes about her family history, trips to see relatives in Hong Kong, personal identity, and xenophobia in Takeaway. Listen for all this and more in our episode with Angela Hui and Lijia Zhang.
"Hello everyone, my name is He. It's spelled as H-E. Yes, it is my name, not my pronoun." Last month, Sydney-based comedian He Huang went viral with her 4-minute Australia's Got Talent audition. She joked about xenophobia, racism, and the pressure from family to settle down and get married. While these aren't unusual topics in the stand-up world, He's dead pan delivery and charisma won over viewers from just about every social media platform around the globe. We had the chance to talk to He about her career as a stand-up comic, her former life as a grad student in America studying public policy, and navigating sexism in the industry. He also discussed how she pokes at racial stereotypes with her work, clapping back at critics, performing in Western countries, and what her parents think about her stand-up. This episode was hosted by Megan Cattel.
This week, Sue-Lin Wong of The Economist discusses her new podcast 'The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping'. This eight-part series details the life of Xi Jinping — from his tumultuous youth during the Cultural Revolution, his early political career in Fuzhou, to his ascent as the leader of China. Sue-Lin talks about the challenges of creating a podcast about China from abroad, and finding sources to talk about sensitive topics such as internet censorship, surveillance, and more.
Sue-Lin and Joanna also recap the highlights from China's 20th Party Congress — including Hu Jintao's unusual exit from the meeting — and the political challenges Xi Jinping faces at the start of his third term.
This week, Sue-Lin Wong of The Economist discusses her new podcast 'The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping'. This eight-part series details the life of Xi Jinping — from his tumultuous youth during the Cultural Revolution, his early political career in Fuzhou, to his ascent as the leader of China. Sue-Lin talks about the challenges of creating a podcast about China from abroad, and finding sources to talk about sensitive topics such as internet censorship, surveillance, and more.
Sue-Lin and Joanna also recap the highlights from China's 20th Party Congress — including Hu Jintao's unusual exit from the meeting — and the political challenges Xi Jinping faces at the start of his third term.
"I think a lot of the ways that Chinese people are talked about are as these passive receptors of historical events, people that things happen to, rather than people who have agency in their own lives and who make decisions in their own lives... So I wanted to write a book that was about characters living through momentous, historical times, but I didn't want their entire personhoods to feel like they were defined by those times."
This week, we talk to Belinda Huijuan Tang about her debut novel, A Map for the Missing, which was recently longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel prize. Belinda talks about her writing and research process, and her focus on telling a Chinese story from a personal, domestic vantage point rather than a political one. This episode is hosted and edited by Megan Cattel.
About A Map for the Missing: "Tang Yitian has been living in America for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. Though they have been estranged for years, Yitian promises to come home.
When Yitian attempts to piece together what may have happened, he struggles to navigate China’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider, and his mother’s evasiveness only deepens the mystery. So he seeks out a childhood friend who may be in a position to help: Tian Hanwen, the only other person who shared Yitian’s desire to pursue a life of knowledge.
Reuniting for the first time as adults, Yitian and Hanwen embark on the search for Yitian’s father, all the while grappling with the past—who Yitian’s father really was, and what might have been. Spanning the late 1970s to 1990s and moving effortlessly between rural provinces and big cities, A Map for the Missing is a deeply felt examination of family and forgiveness, and the meaning of home."
In this episode of the NüVoices podcast, historians Arlene Chan and Melanie Ng chat with us about the first Chinese migrants who made their way to Canada in the 19th century. From there, Arlene and Melanie retrace the throughline of Chinese Canadian migration, from exclusionary anti-Chinese immigration laws to present-day sinophobia found in many Western countries today.
We also learn about Arlene's trailblazing mother, Jean Lumb, who played a major role in changing Canada's racist immigration laws.
Throughout the episode, we hear from Sheila, a Chinese immigrant in her 80's who came to Canada following the turmoil of WWII and the Chinese Civil War. Many thanks to Solarina Ho, who hosted this episode and Joanna Chiu, who recorded Sheila's riveting first-hand account of her immigration journey.
This week, veteran food journalist Clarissa Wei joins us on the NüVoices podcast! Clarissa was previously a senior reporter for Goldthread - a publication incubated by the South China Morning Post - where she created over 100 videos about Chinese food, culture, and cuisine. Now based in Taipei as a freelancer, Clarissa has recently reported on cross-straight relations between Taiwan and China for VICE, the end of Zero-Covid in Taiwan for The New Yorker, and the sustainability of food systems for her Whetstone Magazine podcast entitled "Climate Cuisine".
Clarissa's forthcoming book, Made in Taiwan: Recipes from the People, is expected for release in 2023.
On the pod, Clarissa talks about how she first got into food journalism, finding stories while backpacking in China, and her current freelance projects while based in Taipei. She also discusses her thoughts on authenticity discourse around diasporic cooking and her passion for elevating Taiwanese stories for international audiences.
This episode was hosted by journalist Solarina Ho, who is based in Toronto, Canada. This is her NüVoices podcast hosting debut!
We're kicking off our fall 2022 season with a special conversation between Emily Feng of NPR and Joanna Chiu, NüVoices chair and co-founder.
In this episode, Emily walks us through her hard-hitting reporting from the frontlines in Ukraine to a viral controversy surrounding her radio report on 螺螄粉 luósīfěn, snail noodles.
Emily also discusses the beginning of her journalism career in China—from freelancing, landing a job at the Financial Times, and eventually becoming NPR's Beijing correspondent in 2019, where she is still based today.
We also get a behind-the-scenes look at how Emily reported her Rough Translation episode on 丧文化, the sang subculture, which took the Chinese internet by storm last year. (Check out your podcast feed where we crossposted this episode on August 24th, 2022. A special thank you NPR and Rough Translation!)
We're proud to present our last summer cross post with NPR's Rough Translation! In this episode, host Gregory Warner talks to reporter Emily Feng about the rise of anti-work culture in China. While you may have heard about the term 躺平 or "lying flat", Emily delves into 丧文化, or the sang subculture, which embodies cynicism and defeatism in response to China's particular flavor of late-stage capitalism. Later in the episode, Emily discusses how the Chinese government is trying to stamp out the anti-work vibes by using an internet star to shift the narrative.
This episode is part of Rough Translation's special @Work series.
We're proud to present our last summer cross post with NPR's Rough Translation! In this episode, host Gregory Warner talks to reporter Emily Feng about the rise of anti-work culture in China. While you may have heard about the term 躺平 or "lying flat", Emily delves into 丧文化, or the sang subculture, which embodies cynicism and defeatism in response to China's particular flavor of late-stage capitalism. Later in the episode, Emily discusses how the Chinese government is trying to stamp out the anti-work vibes by using an internet star to shift the narrative.
This episode is part of Rough Translation's special @Work series.
This week we’re interrupting our summer hiatus to bring you insight into US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan the most senior elected US official to visit Taiwan in a quarter of a century. In retaliation, China has engaged its military in days of drills that escalated tensions to their highest in years.
What did Nancy Pelosi hope to achieve by going to Taiwan and can we say that the trip was a success? How will this visit affect China-US relations and what are the pros and cons of the vague U.S foreign policy towards Taiwan, the so-called “strategic ambiguity”?
To unpack all of this and much more, we talk to twin sisters Meia Nouwen and Veerle Nouwens.
Meia is a senior fellow for Chinese Defence Policy and Military Modernisation, and the Defence and Military Analysis Programme, at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a London-based think tank. She helps us dig deeper into what China’s display of force can tell us about its military capabilities and how far China has to go before they’re ready for a full-fledged invasion.
Veerle is a senior research fellow for Asia Studies and head of the Indo-Pacific Programme at the International Security Studies department of the Royal United Services Institute focusing on geopolitical relations in the Indo-Pacific region.
Sophia Yan, China correspondent for The Telegraph and NuVoices Board member, hosts this week’s episode.
This episode was produced by Saga Ringmar with help from Lauren Lau, our newest podcast team members! Big kudos for their first episode.
Hello from our summer hiatus! While we're away, the pod squad is thrilled to share episodes from podcasts we love and admire. This week, we have an episode from Self-Evident, a podcast for reported stories, personal histories, and participatory local events — all by and about Asian Americans.
Co-host and NüVoices board member Cindy Gao introduces today's episode. Thank you Cindy!
(Description below courtesy of Self-Evident*. Episode was originally aired on January 18, 2021.)
"*When producer Erica Mu moved back to her hometown in 2014, she said goodbye to a past life without any idea what exactly her new life should look like. Looking for the most grounded place she could find, she went to the local mall early one morning, turned on her tape recorder, and started talking to everyone she could meet.
As Erica made her way through this sprawling landscape of mostly Chinese businesses in one of the most East Asian cities in the country, she peeked into the dreams, annoyances, and love lives of dim sum diners, shop owners, security guards, young children, young parents, weightlifters, all-night partiers, and one very skilled harmonica player.
But as she grasped for some universal truth that would tie all the threads of the mall, Erica realized that the unpredictable, unresolved mess of everyday life is exactly what makes it something to treasure."
Hello from our summer hiatus! While we're away, the pod squad is thrilled to share episodes from podcasts we love and admire. This week, we have an episode from Self-Evident, a podcast for reported stories, personal histories, and participatory local events — all by and about Asian Americans.
Co-host and NüVoices board member Cindy Gao introduces today's episode. Thank you Cindy!
(Description below courtesy of Self-Evident*. Episode was originally aired on January 18, 2021.)
"*When producer Erica Mu moved back to her hometown in 2014, she said goodbye to a past life without any idea what exactly her new life should look like. Looking for the most grounded place she could find, she went to the local mall early one morning, turned on her tape recorder, and started talking to everyone she could meet.
As Erica made her way through this sprawling landscape of mostly Chinese businesses in one of the most East Asian cities in the country, she peeked into the dreams, annoyances, and love lives of dim sum diners, shop owners, security guards, young children, young parents, weightlifters, all-night partiers, and one very skilled harmonica player.
But as she grasped for some universal truth that would tie all the threads of the mall, Erica realized that the unpredictable, unresolved mess of everyday life is exactly what makes it something to treasure."
Hello from our summer hiatus! While we're away, the pod squad is thrilled to share episodes from podcasts we love and admire. This week, we have an episode from Time to Say Goodbye, a podcast about Asia, the Asian diaspora, politics, and international solidarity. Thank you to hosts E. Tammy Kim, Jay Caspian Kang, and (formerly) Andy Liu for letting us cross post this episode. Kudos to our podcast co-host Cindy Gao, for introducing this cross post and briefly emerging from dissertation work.
(Description below courtesy of TTSG. Episode was originally aired on February 1, 2022.)
"This week Andy talks with the director (Jessica Kingdon) and producer (Kira Simon-Kennedy) of the new film Ascension, a documentary about working life in contemporary China. Ascension has received critical acclaim and garnered major awards and nominations, including being shortlisted for the Academy Awards!
The film features scenes of quotidian working life in a period when the government has begun to promote the “Chinese Dream,” spanning textile and sex doll factories to etiquette school and social media influencers all the way to luxurious water parks and tropical vacation resorts. Together, these scenes raise provocative questions about China’s blindingly rapid development, the uneven pace of upward mobility, and whether China is an exotic outlier or a recognizably modern society, comparable with life in the US and other societies worldwide (all to music by Dan Deacon)."
Professor Lynette Ong joins us on the podcast this week to discuss her new book Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China. While in conversation with Joanna Chiu, Lynette discusses China's use of nonstate actors who minimize resistance during government land grabs, housing demolitions, and (perhaps most notably) tracking foreign journalists while conducting sensitive reporting in China. Who are these nonstate actors? How are they recruited and why are they hired? Lynette's research fills in the gaps, gathered as the window narrowed and closed for China's civil society in recent years.
This episode concludes this season of the NüVoices podcast! Subscribe for exciting feed drops with affiliated podcasts this summer. Catch us in September for new episodes. Thank you for listening.
About Outsourcing Repression:
"How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression, Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of repression that reduces resistance and backlash, Ong invites the reader to reimagine the new ground state power credibly occupies. Everyday state power is quotidian power acquired through society by penetrating nonstate territories and mobilizing the masses within. Ong uses China's urbanization scheme as a window of observation to explain how the arguments can be generalized to other country contexts."
Nancy Wu, a masterful voice actress and audiobook narrator, joins the NüVoices podcast this week to talk about her storied career. She has narrated the “Avatar the Last Airbender” prequels by F.C. Yee and Michael Dante Di Martino, the "X-Men Mutant Empire" series for Marvel, and books by Amy Tan, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu and Sayaka Murata. You may also recognize Nancy's voice in the audiobook for China Unbound, written by NüVoices board member Joanna Chiu!
In this episode, Joanna and Nancy discuss the importance of diversity in the audiobook industry, preparing for a studio session, navigating accents, pronunciation (especially nailing those Mando/Canto tones), cultural sensitivity, and more. Nancy also discusses the challenges of being pigeonholed as a "Chinese audiobook narrator" and how BIPOC voice actors should be given stories that encompass more than just their ethnicities.
We welcome Elaine Hsieh Chou to the podcast to talk about her debut novel, Disorientation, which came out earlier this year. Her book is a hilarious satire on modern day college campus free speech wars, orientalism in academia, "yellow fever", the phenomenon of white scholars and translators devoting their entire lives to East Asian studies, and more. We talked to Elaine about a frequent topic of conversation in the NüVoices community: who has the right to tell whose stories?
Disorientation follows 29-year-old Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese American PhD student who is on the struggle bus to finishing her dissertation on Xiaowen Chou, a deceased, renowned Chinese American poet. After uncovering the dark truth of Chou's past, Ingrid's relationships with everyone she knows changes forever. From her academic advisor Michael, who specializes in Chinese art and poetry, to her fiancée Stephen, who is a translator of Japanese literature, Ingrid must confront "her sticky relationship to white men and white institutions—and, most of all, herself." (Source: https://www.elainehsiehchou.com/novel)
Megan Cattel (our steadfast editor) hosts this episode.
As we gear up for the summer season, the NüVoices podcast is revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the archives. This week, we have a conversation with board member Anne Henochowicz, who works at the intersection of literature and human rights. She has translated leaked propaganda directives and subversive Weibo posts, investigative journalism and poetry. She is currently the translations coordinator at China Digital Times and leads the NüVoices chapter in Washington, D.C. Board member Cindy Gao moderates this encore episode.
This episode originally aired on November 2, 2020, before NüVoices became an independent, womxn-run entity.
This week, journalist and former foreign correspondent Katie Stallard joins the NüVoices podcast in a special, live stream recording to celebrate the launch of her new book Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia and North Korea. Katie discusses her writing and research process, the significance and perspectives of WWII within these three authoritarian countries, and her analysis of Russia's current invasion of Ukraine. Joanna Chiu, NüVoices founder and board member, moderates this conversation.
ABOUT DANCING ON BONES: "History didn't end. Democracy didn't triumph. America's leading role in the world is no longer assured. Instead, autocrats and populist strongmen are on the rise, and the global order established after 1945 is under attack. This is the phenomenon Katie Stallard tackles in Dancing on Bones, as she examines how the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule...These three states consistently top lists of threats to US and European security, and yet the leaders of all three insist that it is their country that is threatened, rewriting history and exploiting the memory of the wars of the last century to justify their actions and shore up popular support. Since coming to power, Xi Jinping has almost doubled the length of China's World War II, Vladimir Putin has elevated the memory of the Great Patriotic War to the status of a national religion, and Kim Jong Un has invested vast sums in rebuilding war museums in his impoverished state, while those who try to challenge the official version of history are silenced and jailed. But this didn't start with Putin, Xi, and Kim, and it won't end with them. Drawing on first-hand, on-the-ground reporting, Dancing on Bones argues that if we want to understand where these three nuclear powers are heading, we must understand the stories they are telling their citizens about the past."
Today's podcast episode is a conversation with Axios' business reporter Hope King, where she covers everything from the markets, consumer trends, and big companies such as Tesla, Apple, and Google. Joined by NüVoices board member Sophia Yan, Hope talks through her recent stories on China's lockdowns impacting global supply chains and the surprising number of China's female self-made billionaires. Later on the in episode, Hope also talks about her career pivot from finance to journalism and growing up in various parts of the US as a Chinese American.
China's perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been what experts call a "checkered response". While Chinese authorities maintain they are neutral in the war and encourage peace negotiations, state media remains sympathetic to Russia, a significant ally for China.
Why is Russia an important partnership China? Why have Chinese officials declined calling the conflict a war or an invasion? Where is the Russia-Chinese relationship going and how will neighboring countries respond in the region? Luckily, we have Dr. Elizabeth Wishnick, a Senior Research Scientist in the China and Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Division at CNA and Professor of Political Science at Montclair State University, to break it all down. Sophia Yan, China correspondent for The Telegraph and NüVoices Board member, hosts this week's episode.
Graphic novelist and cartoonist Laura Gao joins the podcast this week to discuss her new memoir, Messy Roots: The Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese-American. When Wuhan, China captured the world's attention as the first epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Laura penned the comic strip "The Wuhan I Know" in reaction to the disgust and racism directed toward her hometown. The comic went viral and was featured in outlets like NPR, Huffington Post, and more. The comic became the basis for Laura's graphic memoir, released earlier this month.
A Wuhan native, Laura immigrated to Texas when she was four years old. Messy Roots is a wholesome and heartwarming tale of Laura's journey navigating their many ~strands and identities~ from being an immigrant, a Chinese-American, and coming out as queer in college.
This conversation was hosted by Megan Cattel (usually the editor of this podcast!) They talk about internalized racism, coming out (or not) to family, Laura's favorite childhood memories in Wuhan (involving water buffalo), and delve into some Eileen Gu/Nathan Chen discourse.
This week’s episode is a conversation with Hong Konger Karen Cheung about her memoir The Impossible City which was released in February 2022. Skillfully blending reportage and personal writing, Karen takes readers through the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China and the city’s massive protest movements in 2014 and 2019.
But The Impossible City is not just an account of Hong Kong’s harrowing moments of crisis and turmoil. It is also about the struggle to navigate the city’s housing market, the mental healthcare system, strained family relationships, and Karen’s search for belonging in the place she calls home.
This episode is hosted by Jessie Lau, fellow Hong Kong writer and journalist, NüVoices board member and editor of our online magazine NüStories! Together, they discuss Karen’s writing process, her connection to Hong Kong’s indie music scene, the ongoing gatekeeping and coloniality in Asia’s journalism industry, and mental health stigma within Chinese culture.
Happy Year of the Tiger to our listeners! Our first podcast of the year is with journalist and business trends researcher Crystal Tai. She talks about her work across East Asia, the challenges of working as a non-visible "foreign correspondent" in South Korea, and how culture can reveal geopolitical tensions between countries around the world. The conversation is hosted by Joanna Chiu, our intrepid founder who has returned from book leave!
Crystal has been based in South Korea and Hong Kong as a journalist since 2010. Just a few of her memorable stories include ones where she infiltrated a K-pop training academy to report on the behind-the-scenes of the industry; navigating the -30 C streets of Ulaanbaatar to report on Mongolia’s street style scene; and speaking to students and frontline workers during the 2019-2020 Hong Kong Protests.
Crystal's book, Honjok, co-written with an American sociologist, is a work of nonfiction that takes a look at South Korea’s fascinating new solo-lifestyle movement.
Our last podcast episode of 2021 features Shazeda Ahmed on Chinese cybersecurity, technology, and internet policy. Shazeda is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information and is joined by guest host (and DC board member) Rui Zhong. How are Chinese courtrooms utilizing AI? What is algorithmic discrimination and how are Chinese companies reacting? Rui also asks Shazeda her perspective on the big question: is the U.S. in a Tech Cold War with China? All of this and more in this season finale of the NüVoices Podcast.
Scriptwriter Shen Yang is the author of More Than One Child: Memoirs of an Illegal Daughter, which was just translated into English by Nicky Harman earlier this year in August. She joins this installment of the NüVoices Podcast with host Sophia Yan, where they discuss her turbulent childhood being shuttled between relatives and living in hiding as an "excess child" during China's one-child policy. This episode also covers the current state of family planning in China, Shen Yang's friendships with other fellow excess children, and the longlasting impact of the one-child policy in Chinese society today.
**Note: trigger warning at the 28 minute mark for graphic descriptions of domestic violence.
The second half of Gigi Chang and Shelly Bryant's discussion about translating Jin Yong's legendary wuxia series Legends of the Condor Heroes from Chinese to English is here! Guest host and NüVoices member Cathy Tai moderates the conversation.
First, Cathy brings listeners up to speed on the Condor Heroes and Jin Yong's significance to the contemporary wuxia genre and Chinese pop culture. From there, Gigi and Shelly discuss the challenges of translating a text accurately while taking into account readers' cultural assumptions and social norms, the male gaze in wuxia, and how non-Han Chinese characters are depicted in the Condor Heroes book series. If you missed part 1, please see the previous episode on your podcast platform!
In a special two-part podcast, Gigi Chang and Shelly Bryant discuss their work translating Jin Yong's legendary wuxia series Legends of the Condor Heroes from Chinese to English, a revered martial-arts and fantasy odyssey among Chinese language readers around the world. Guest host and NüVoices member Cathy Tai moderates the conversation.
In this episode, Gigi and Shelly talk about the challenges of bringing Condor Heroes to life in English (such as translating elaborate fifity-page fight scenes), wuxia's cultural significance of Chinese pop culture, and the life of Jin Yong—author of the Condor Heroes. Stay tuned for part two!
Sophie Richardson is the China Director at Human Rights Watch, a position she’s held since 2006.
She frequently testifies to parliaments around the world and is the author of China, Cambodia and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which examines Chinese foreign policy since the 1954 Geneva Conference. She speaks Mandarin, earned a doctorate from the University of Virginia and a BA from Oberlin College.
Sophie joins Sophia Yan, NüVoices board member and Telegraph China correspondent, to discuss human rights in China, what it feels like to be sanctioned by the Chinese government, and how HRW keeps its staff healthy mentally and emotionally healthy given demanding work.
Joanna Chiu's new book, China Unbound, details China's rapid international rise, and the ways Western nations have contributed to a state of global disorder. The book weaves historical and political context with Chiu's reporting across four continents.
Guest host Madeleine O'Dea, award-winning author of The Phoenix Years, speaks with Chiu, who chairs NüVoices, about how Western governments have failed to adjust to the reality that China doesn’t simply want to join the existing global order but instead re-shape it. The two also share advice on book-writing, and the characteristics of China-related storytelling from diaspora perspectives.
Clare Fearnley became New Zealand’s ambassador to China in 2018, cross-accredited to Mongolia. She was previously ambassador in Seoul, where she also oversaw Pyongyang, consul-general in Shanghai and head of the New Zealand Commerce and Industry Office in Taipei.
She has also been posted to the New Zealand Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva. While working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Wellington, she was director-general for north Asia, and has led international trade litigation, including cases at the WTO.
Ambassador Fearnley has arts and law degrees from the University of Canterbury. She is a Mandarin speaker, and studied at Beijing University and at the Beijing Languages Institute in the 1980s.
Clare joins NuVoices board member and Telegraph correspondent Sophia Yan to chat about New Zealand-China relations, how and why Asia piqued her interest early on, and New Zealand’s gender equality successes.
Barbara Demick is the author of Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town (2020), Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009), and Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo neighborhood (1996). She spent 12 years as bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in Beijing and Seoul and previously reported from the Middle East and Balkans for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Barbara has won many awards for her work, including the Samuel Johnson prize (now the Baillie Gifford prize) for non-fiction in the UK, the Overseas Press Club's human rights reporting award, the George Polk Award, the Robert F Kennedy Award, and Stanford University's Shorenstein Award for Asia coverage. Her North Korea book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was a press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Bagehot fellow in business journalism at Columbia University, and a visiting professor of journalism at Princeton University. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Yale College, and now lives in New York City.
Barbara joins NuVoices board member Sophia Yan to discuss her most recent book, Eat the Buddha, which tells the story of Ngaba, a town high on a Tibetan plateau that is one of the most hidden corners of the world, and near-impossible for foreigners to visit. Through the rich tales of those linked to this town, Barbara illuminates decades of intertwined Tibetan and Chinese history, and explores what it means to be Tibetan today — to preserve a culture, faith and language despite all odds. Barbara talks about navigating reporting on China, despite the challenges, imparts sage writing advice, and previews her next book in the works.
Recommendations:
Sophia: Read Barbara's books! Eat the Buddha; Nothing to Envy; Logavina Street. Also this fascinating New Yorker article from May that I just read (the issues take forever to arrive abroad) about cutting-edge research on using electricity to regenerate limbs.
Barbara: The Ministry for the Future, a science fiction book set in the near future about people trying to save the world from the ravages of climate change. I was reading it as the New York City subways flooded from the tail of Hurricane Ida.
Evan Osnos' forthcomingWildland: The Making of America's Fury, about how America is tearing itself apart with political polarization.
Yes, I know you'd say not exactly soothing bedtime reading. More cheerful listening to podcaster Mike Duncan's Hero of Two Worlds about the Marquis de Lafayette.
Self-Care Suggestions:
Sophia: Not looking at your phone and emails/messages the minute you wake up! Try setting a timeframe – say half an hour – or perhaps until your morning routine is over (ie brushing teeth, washing face, making/having breakfast. Look out the window, enjoy your coffee/tea/Oatly/delivered
Lotus Ruan conducts research and writes at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Her work focuses on the roles of government and private actors in shaping internet governance agendas and digital rights. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and Tech in Asia.
On this episode, Lotus joins DC chapter member Rui Zhong to talk about her research on Chinese app privacy, Apple's “Chinese operations equilibrium,” and why China's technology policy process is so challenging to navigate.
Recommendations:
Lotus: The Taiwanese television series The Making of an Ordinary Woman.
Rui: The video game Hades (Supergiant Games).
Self-care suggestions:
Lotus: Reconnecting with friends.
Rui: Omni Foundation classical guitar concerts.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Shunan Teng is the founder and owner of Tea Drunk in New York City, which specializes in heritage, wild, historical, and other famous teas. Every spring, she travels to the renowned tea regions in China and works alongside the heritage farmers to produce the most coveted teas. In this episode, Shunan shares her tremendous knowledge of tea with Cindy and talks about the teas and regions they come from, the production process and making techniques that differentiate the six major types of tea, and how to approach tasting tea to unveil its full complexity.
Recommendations:
Shunan: Audiobooks by online writer Yuè Guān 月关.
Cindy: TheIsraeli television show Shtisel,and the French television show The Bureau.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Kathleen McLaughlin is a science and labor reporter based in Butte, Montana, whose work has been regularly featured in the Washington Post and The Guardian; she was also the Beijing correspondent for Science Magazine. Her work has spanned fashion, pharmaceuticals, electronics manufacturers, and medicine. She’s also an alumni of the MIT Knight Science journalism fellowship. Her forthcoming book is Blood Money, a multinational investigation into the vast market for human blood plasma and its sociopolitical implications.
Kathleen and Washington, D.C., NüVoices chapter member Rui Zhong examined the state of science reporting in China in reference to current lab theories of the origins of COVID-19. The current discussions can be couched in both the government’s handling of HIV and AIDS and the recent CRISPR scientist controversy.
Recommendations:
Kathleen: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith.
Rui: Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons, by John Paul Brammer.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Sophia Yan is the China correspondent for the Telegraph, has covered the region for a decade, and is based in Beijing. Previously, she reported for CNBC, CNN, and Bloomberg, while based in Hong Kong and Washington, D.C., and has had stints in Tokyo and Honolulu. She received the 2020 Marie Colvin Award for her coverage of China, with judges noting Sophia's determination to "get to the truth, exposing cruelty, injustice, and the abuse of human rights despite all attempts to stop her.” When Sophia isn't reporting, she's tickling a different set of keys — on the piano!
Sophia chats with NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu about why there are so few foreign correspondents on the ground in mainland China, and whether we risk losing nuanced and immediate coverage of China. They also discuss what Sophia learned from her recent reporting trip in Xinjiang about the "new phase" of persecution against Uyghurs, forced factory labor, and how a Hilton hotel is rising in the wreckage of a bulldozed mosque. For their efforts, Sophia and her colleague faced violent obstruction from police and plainclothes thugs. Read her personal account about obstacles on the ground. Watch her Xinjiang documentary series here, and look for her new podcast series, Hong Kong Silenced, about the city's shrinking freedoms under the national security law that will launch on June 30.
Recommendations:
Sophia: The book The War on the Uyghurs, by Sean Roberts;Anna Fifield's portrait of Kim Jong-un, The Great Successor; a documentary on the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, The Dissident; and a book about meditation as self-care,Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Joanna: Megha Rajagopalan's Pulitzer-winning reporting on Xinjiang and the new report "No Space Left to Run: China's Transnational Repression of Uyghurs" from the Uyghur Human Rights Project and the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs.
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Yilin Wang (she/they) is a Vancouver-based writer, editor, Chinese-English translator, educator, and cultural consultant who was longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. Her work engages with topics such as Chinese folklore, martial arts literature (wuxia), diaspora identities, gender expectations, migration, and cultural reclamation. Some of Yilin’s work translating the Chinese revolutionary feminist Qiū Jǐn’s 秋瑾 poetry was recently featured on NüVoices' website.
In 2018, Yilin spent months travelling around China for research, leading to the launch of the #LiteraryJianghu Project to promote engagement with wuxia and related Chinese literary traditions.
Yilin chats with NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu about the fascinating themes and genres of their work, and about the day-to-day realities and power politics of being a creative writing and translation professional in North America. For further reading from Yilin on racism in Canadian literature, see her Carte Blanche essay here.
Recommendations:
Yilin: The wuxia series Legend of Condor Heroes, translated by Anna Holmwood and Gigi Chang and Grace Lau's debut poetry collection The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak.
Joanna: China: The Novel, by Edward Rutterfurd for an immersive narrative approach to learning about 19th century Chinese history, and Yilin's website!
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Sophie Beach is the executive editor of China Digital Times (CDT), an independent, bilingual media organization that brings uncensored news and online voices from China to the world. In this conversation, Sophie talks to Cindy about the genesis of CDT and its vision, the ever-evolving (and opaque) state censorship rules and tactics, and the necessity to amplify persistent voices of resistance of Chinese netizens.
Recommendations:
Sophie: Small Country, by Gaël Faye, and Yi Yi, by Edward Yang.
Cindy: The docuseries Sunderland ’Til I Die and episode 497 of the popular Chinese podcast Story FM.
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“China is angry. If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy," a Chinese Embassy official told Australian reporter Jonathan Kearsley at a meeting in late 2020. Kearsley wrote that the comment seemed like the strongest public indication from the embassy of how “toxic” the relationship had become between China and Australia. In the last year, the Chinese government has suspended beef and cotton imports from Australia, slapped an 80% tariff on Australian barley, and instructed Chinese students and tourists not to travel to Australia.
But Australia used to be one of the strongest supporters of forging closer ties with China. NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu, author of the new book China Unboundon Beijing's deteriorating global relations with Western countries, chats with former Australian diplomat Natasha Kassam on how Australia-China relations has hit such a low point and why diplomatic tensions seem to have impacted Australians of Chinese heritage the most.
Kassam is the director of the Lowy Institute’s Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program, researching Australia’s Indo-Pacific strategy, China’s domestic politics, Taiwan, and Australia-China relations. Before joining the Lowy Institute, Kassam was responsible for government policy on human rights and legal issues in China, and drafted the Australian government’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper.
Recommendations:
Natasha: The new bookThe Beijing Bureau; also, the Lowy Institute's interactive survey feature on experiences of Chinese-Australian communities where one in five said they were physically threatened or attacked because of their Chinese background in the previous year.
Joanna: An essay by Bobo Lo, Global Order in the Shadow of the Coronavirus.
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Dolly Li is an award-winning independent video journalist, filmmaker, and correspondent. She is the former host of an award-winning AJ+ (Al Jazeera) show, Untold America, as well as a co-founder of the digital publication Goldthread, which was a part of the South China Morning Post.
In this wide-ranging conversation with Cindy Gao, Dolly talks about video journalism and the power of visual storytelling, documenting multi-generational immigrant and Asian-American stories, and navigating her own evolving identity throughout her years living and working around the world.
Recommendations:
Cindy: The PBS film series Asian Americans and The Chinese Exclusion Act, this short video about Grace Lee Boggs, and the Netflix TV series Hip-Hop Evolution.
Dolly: Lot, by Bryan Washington, and this interview featuring Bryan Washington and Ocean Vuong.
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Shen Lu is a reporter with Protocol China and a cofounder of Chinese Storytellers. In this conversation, she talks to Cindy Gao about the misogyny and barriers Chinese women face in tech and politics, the dominance of social ecommerce, Chinese voices in social and political activism, and how cooking has helped her endure the pandemic and explore and express more of her own complex identities.
Recommendations:
Cindy: Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell, available on Netflix, and the column Beijing Lights, featured on the website of the Beijing-based Spittoon Collective.
Shen Lu: The movie Qiū Yuán 秋园 and this episode of Story FM, a popular Chinese-language podcast.
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Throughout the 10 stories in Land of Big Numbers,Te-Ping Chen — a founding member of NüVoices — sketches the interior lives of her protagonists, who live in (or are connected to) China: a man determined to strike it rich in the stock market, a migrant worker employed at a flower shop who is infatuated with a customer, and a government employee being stalked by her ex-boyfriend.
Inspired by her years living in Beijing and Hong Kong as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Chen drew upon her travels andthe remarkable lives of people she met to construct a world thatdidn't fit neatly into news reports.
The debut author speaks with NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu and New York chapter member Megan Cattel on her observations of modern China, the transferable skills of journalism to fiction, and advice on navigating the publishing industry.
Recommendations:
Te-Ping: Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeleine Thien, and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy.
Joanna: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, Invisible, by Paul Auster, and The Woo-Woo, by Lindsay Wong.
Megan: Notes of a Crocodile, by Qiu Miaojin (English translation by Bonnie Huie), I Was Their American Dream, by Malaka Gharib, and The Wedding Banquet, directed by Ang Lee.
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Jin Ding is the vice president of finance at the Asian American Journalists Association and the cofounder of Chinese Storytellers. She also oversees grants, awards, and emergency response programs at the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF). In this episode of the NüVoices podcast, Jin and Cindy talk about the importance and efficacy of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, how journalists can and should be supported in addition to funding, digital safety measures we should all adopt, and how sports and (identity) politics are intertwined.
Digital safety to-do list:
- How to dox yourself on the internet
- Doxxing training overview
- Data broker opt-out list
Recommendations:
Jin: Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Cindy: The Investigation on HBO; The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee; and Stray, a documentary by Elizabeth Lo.
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Jiāyán "Jenny" Shī (施佳妍) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and video journalist based in Chicago. Her first feature-length documentary, Finding Yingying, was the winner of the 2020 SXSW Special Jury Recognition for Breakthrough Voice, among numerous other awards during a virtual distribution season. The film was produced by Kartemquin Films and distributed by MTV Documentary Films. In addition, Jenny was named one of Indiewire's "20 Rising Women Directors You Need to Know in 2020" and also named to DOC NYC’s 2020 “40 Under 40” list.
Jenny and NüVoices board member Chenni Xu discuss her creative process, what it takes to be a documentary filmmaker, the emotional toll the film took (as well as mental health recommendations for filmmakers), and the story of Yingying and its impact.
Finding Yingying is available to stream in virtual cinemas around the world.
Recommendations:
- Last Train Home
- The Times of Harvey Milk
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Dr. Pamela Logan's latest book, Compassion Mandala: The Odyssey of an American Charity in Contemporary Tibet, chronicles her experience founding and running Kham Aid Foundation in the eastern Tibetan Plateau from 1997 to 2011. After the foundation shut down, she returned to the U.S. and now works as an aeronautical engineer. In this conversation, Pamela and Cindy talk about the elements of the development mandalas (Pamela’s development ideology) — education, healthcare, poverty alleviation, and heritage preservation and conservation. They also discuss the importance and scarcity of education in Tibet, the plight and resilience of girls and women located there, and what it takes to sustain philanthropic efforts in the long run.
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On January 9, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would eliminate self-imposed restrictions on exchanges between American and Taiwanese officials. Reactions have been mixed, with some saying a change in policy on Taiwan was overdue, while others warning that the timing of the announcement in the last days of the Trump administration means Taiwan will bear the brunt of Beijing's fury. Experts Margaret Lewis and Jessica Drun — both currently in Taipei — join NüVoices podcast host Joanna Chiu to explore this historic moment.
Recommendations:
- Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse, by Shelley Rigger.
- The Legislative Intent of the Taiwan Relations Act: A Dilemma Wrapped in an Enigma, by Lester L. Wolff.
- Toward a stronger U.S.-Taiwan relationship, by Bonnie S. Glaser.
- Pompeo’s 11th hour change in Taiwan policy does Taipei no favors, by Michael J. Green, Bonnie S. Glaser, and Richard Bush.
- Frozen Garlic, a blog by Nathan Batto.
- Ghost Island Media, a Taiwan-based podcast network.
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Rita Liu is a seasoned fintech executive who started her career at American Express, then spent nearly a decade at Alipay building its international business. During her time there, she formed partnerships across Russia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Canada. She joined Mode Bank as chief commercial officer in London in March 2020.
In this conversation, Rita and NüVoices board member Chenni Xu talk about the “war stories” of the beginnings of Chinese fintech, the future of fintech, and money and gender representation in the industry.
Disclaimer: Views represented are the personal views of the host and interviewee.
Recommendations:
Rita: The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony, by David Birch, and The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, by Saifedean Ammous.
Chenni: The works of Shirley Hazzard.
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Tiffany Ap is currently the China bureau chief for Women’s Wear Daily. In this episode for the NüVoices podcast, Tiffany and Cindy discuss the revival of the fashion and retail industries as China emerges from COVID-19 lockdowns, the meteoric rises of China’s ecommerce livestreaming and platforms, Hong Kong's retail domination collapse, and a sexual harassment incident hashtag that went very viral.
Recommendations:
Tiffany: Matthew McConaughey's autobiography, Greenlights; the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, Emily in Paris, and My Octopus Teacher; and The Biggest Bluff, by Maria Konnikova.
Cindy: Three documentaries: Sing Me a Lullaby, Then Comes The Evening, and Flower Punk.
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Tensions between the U.S. and China have ratcheted upward in the last four years of the Trump administration. Groundbreaking research from independent Washington, D.C.–based researcher Ashley Feng have shown that acts of "economic coercion" go both ways. Policymakers on both sides of the Pacific have increasingly used measures such as tariffs and investment restrictions against one another. After Joe Biden's election win, a decrease in tensions isn't certain. In this episode, NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu chats with Ashley about what all this means for ordinary people like students, scientists, and immigrants.
Ashley is a former research associate for the Energy, Economics, and Security program at the Center for a New American Security. Her research interests include U.S.-China trade relations, China’s economic policies, and China’s global economic footprint. She has previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Defense University, the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and the China Affairs office in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Recommendations:
A report co-authored by Ashley for the Center for a New American Security, A new arsenal for competition; China’s use of coercive economic measures, by Peter Harrell, Elizabeth Rosenberg, and Edoardo Saravalle; Economic statecraft and the revenge of the state, by Darren J. Lim; and Chinese perspectives on economic diplomacy, by Audrye Wong.
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Zhàoyīn Féng 冯兆音 is a bilingual journalist based in Washington, D.C., where she reports on U.S.-China relations for the BBC World Service. In this timely conversation, Zhaoyin and Cindy discuss the escalating tit-for-tat tactics that the two countries are deploying, the uncertain futures of journalists and exchange students caught in the middle, Chinese reactions to the recent U.S. elections, and the often-ignored and increasingly diverse Asian-American electorate.
Zhaoyin will be moderating U.S. Perspectives in Chinese, a Chinese-language event hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations on November 16, 2020. You can sign up here.
Recommendations:
Cindy: The documentary festival DOC NYC, and the movie Our Time Machine 时光机 (2019).
Zhaoyin: The popular Chinese-language podcast Storyfm; the Chinese-language long-form reading platform 谷雨办公室 (Guyu Workshop); the movie Boys State, available on Apple TV+; and the book Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, by Philip P. Pan.
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Today’s guest, Anne Henochowicz, works at the intersection of literature and human rights. She has translated leaked propaganda directives and subversive Weibo posts, investigative journalism and poetry. She is currently the translations coordinator at China Digital Times and a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel. She also leads the NüVoices chapter in Washington, D.C.
In this episode, Anne and Cindy Gao talk about the translator's relationship and responsibility to the original texts and their authors, the beauty and nuance of great translation, and the impact COVID-19 has had on the tone of online discourse and translated works.
Links to the translations mentioned in this interview:
- Tang Danhong, “Tarim, My Uyghur Friend,” China Channel, Aug. 2020, https://chinachannel.org/2020/08/28/tarim-uyghur/
- He Xiaoxin, “How Far Can I Go? How Much Can I Do?” China Digital Times, Aug. 2015, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/08/he-xiaoxin-how-far-can-i-go-and-how-much-can-i-do/
- Tang Danhong, “Chairman Mao Is Dead!” China Channel, Oct. 2017, https://chinachannel.org/2017/10/12/chairman-mao-dead/
- republished Jul. 2019 in Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/42693/print),
Translated poetry:
- Yu Xiuhua, “Mourning Li Wenliang,” China Digital Times, Feb. 2019, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/02/translation-a-poem-for-dr-li-wenliang-and-a-call-for-free-speech/
- Meng Lang, “To China, to the Bystanders,” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Jul. 2019, https://www.asiancha.com/wp/article/to-china/
- Also, check out Yu Xinqiao’s bilingual book of poetry, The Last Lyric, translated by Yunte Huang, at https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780998743837/the-last-lyric.aspx.
Some writing:
- "Huang Xueqin: 'To Resist Tyranny, Start Small,'" China Digital Times, Dec. 2019, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2019/12/huang-xueqin-to-resist-tyranny-start-small/
- "Of Rice Bunnies and Grass-Mud Horses," China Channel, Feb. 2018, https://chinachannel.org/2018/02/27/rice-bunnies-grass-mud-horses/
- "Finding a Common Thread: A History of Chinese Language," Los Angeles Review of Books, Aug. 2016, http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/common-thread-history-chinese-dialects/
Finally, some links to works by the authors mentioned during the interview:
- Yu Xinqiao: https://www.s
Beijing’s enactment of sweeping national security legislation in Hong Kong spurred fresh fear for the territory’s cherished freedoms as authorities sought to quash months of citywide protests. How have journalists, faced with a new reality, confronted this political shift? To help explore this question, Jennifer Creery, the managing editor of Hong Kong Free Press, stepped in as the guest host of this week’s episode of the NüVoices podcast. Joining her are Mary Hui, a reporter with Quartz in Hong Kong who covers geopolitics, technology, and business, and Phoebe Kong, a video journalist and the East Asia correspondent for DW News in Hong Kong.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald, with sound design by Richie Fowler.
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Yunnan Chen is a senior research officer for the Overseas Development Institute, a London think tank focused on international development and humanitarian issues. She joins Cindy for a conversation on China-Africa development finance, her own fieldwork in Africa, and Chinese identity while reflecting on being a member of the Asian diaspora growing up in the United Kingdom.
Recommendations:
Yunnan: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake, as well as the TV seriesQueer Eye, available on Netflix.
Cindy: All or Nothing, a documentary about the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, Cindy’s favorite team in the English Premier League.
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For years, Hollywood has been trying to reach Chinese audiences, but has yet to find a winning formula. The remake of Mulan, which cost $200 million, is projected to make only $41 million over the entirety of its monthlong China box-office run.
As U.S.-China tensions ratchet up, is there a future for movies that try to cross cultural divides and bring ordinary people together? Does politics play a role when Chinese viewers reject art from America? NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu turns to Rebecca Davis, a reporter covering China's entertainment industry, to provide much-needed context and insights.
Guest: Rebecca Davis is Variety’s China bureau chief, establishing the magazine’s first permanent outpost in the country in 2018. Davis covers all aspects of China’s entertainment industry, and has a special interest in the intersection between culture and politics in authoritarian systems. Fluent in Mandarin and French, she has a decade of experience in China, including stints at Agence France-Presse, the New York Times, and Le Monde.
Recommended reading:
- Chinese audience reviews of Mulan on Douban
- SupChina: Why Chinese viewers hate Disney’s ‘Mulan’
- Variety: China box office: ‘Mulan’ is no hero with $23 million debut
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
Support NüVoices and read its first newsletter on Patreon.
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This week’s bonus episode of NüVoices was recorded live from Beijing, where Anthony Tao had a conversation with Huang Chenkuang, a journalist and creative who runs the interview series Beijing Lights (published on the website of the arts collective Spittoon). They spoke in front of an audience at the bar Camera Stylo, which was — believe it or not — launching a cocktail named after Huang’s Beijing Lights.
For each article in the series, Huang interviews one person — often a stranger, and usually someone on the margins of society — and tells that person’s story. She has profiled housekeepers (“If I had to live my life again, I’d probably lead the exact same life”), blind masseuses (“Only a few know my full name here, they just call me ‘Number Five’”), fortune-tellers (“Now that all the good stuff I’ve wanted is finally here, it’s already too late, and I’m old”), barbers (“I wasn’t dreaming big, anyway”), and more, getting them to reveal personal details along with their misgivings, their regrets, and their dreams.
Among other subjects, she and Anthony talked about her methods, her interviewees, herself, and also this one guy who may have eaten human flesh. We hope you enjoy this episode.
(Huang has also written for SupChina in the past, on topics such as Li Wenliang and the “online wailing wall” and Chinese parents who lose their only child.)
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An executive order signed in July has indefinitely ended the Fulbright program in China and Hong Kong. What happened in the lead-up to the program’s cancellation, and where does the closure fit into the larger context of deteriorating U.S.-China relations? For answers, Sophie Lu (a Fulbrighter herself) convened a panel of scholarship recipients, who shared their Fulbright experiences and the importance of their research. They also discuss the fallout of losing such an avenue for educational and cultural exchange between China and the United States.
Guests: Megha Rajagopalan, international correspondent at BuzzFeed News; Hai-Ching Yang, senior corporate counsel for Coursera; and Julia Fan, co-chair of the Coalition for Adolescent Girls.
You can sign a Change.org petition to support the Fulbright program in China and Hong Kong here, and share infographics through social media here.
Recommended reading:
- The danger of a single story, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson
- A podcast, Seeing White
- The cost of ending Fulbright in China, by Eleanor Albert
- Donald Trump’s ending of the Fulbright programme in Hong Kong and China damages US soft power, by Scott Laderman
- Bring back Fulbright exchange programme with Hong Kong and China that Trump seeks to end, South China Morning Post
- Barring Fulbright scholars in Hong Kong and China will only hurt U.S. interests, by Amanda H. Schmidt
- Cutting off Fulbright exchange program further shrinks our world, by Denise Glover
- The Fulbright U.S. Student Program website
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
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Simone Tong is a chef and co-owner of Little Tong Noodle Shop and the newly opened restaurant Silver Apricot in New York City. Cindy sat down with her to discuss her life as a chef and restaurateur in New York during the pandemic, Chinese cuisine and identity in America, and the inspiration behind the food she cooks.
Recommendations:
Simone: Educated, by Tara Westover.
Cindy: The works of Grace Lee Boggs.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
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Shantha Bloemen is the founding director of Mobility for Africa, a social enterprise that aims to bring the electric mobility revolution to rural Africa. Having spent the last two decades working in international humanitarian and development assistance in Africa and Asia, she is now eager to put her experience into this venture, which she believes will improve the lives of rural women. Shantha is a keen observer of China's growing footprint in Africa. She is specifically focused on China's relationship with the UN and the multilateral system, and how China is changing the development and humanitarian model and forging new types of relationships that are transforming the South-South agenda.
In this conversation recorded in Johannesburg and New York City, Shantha and NüVoices board member Chenni Xu talk about South-South development, gender-equality-driven social enterprises, infrastructure in Africa, how to form meaningful partnerships, and renewable energy and sustainability.
Recommendations:
Shantha: Mrs. America on Hulu, and Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, by Jung Chang.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
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April Zhu is a freelance journalist and writer based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on gender, urban inequality, and China-Kenya relations. In this episode, NüVoices board member Cindy Gao talks to April about:
- How Nairobi is a city with a plot
- Why covering women's issues helps us understand power
- "Ecosystems" of violence in Nairobi's informal settlements
- Why the opposite of Sinophobia is not Sinophilia, but nuance
- What is missing in "China-Africa" discourse
Resources:
A lost ‘Little Africa’: How China, too, blames foreigners for the virus, Sinophobia spreads faster than the coronavirus, and A death penalty for the poor, by April Zhu.
Recommendations:
April: The Dragonfly Sea, by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor.
Cindy: The TV series What We Do in the Shadows, available on Hulu.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
April Zhu is a freelance journalist and writer based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on gender, urban inequality, and China-Kenya relations. In this episode, NüVoices board member Cindy Gao talks to April about:
- How Nairobi is a city with a plot
- Why covering women's issues helps us understand power
- "Ecosystems" of violence in Nairobi's informal settlements
- Why the opposite of Sinophobia is not Sinophilia, but nuance
- What is missing in "China-Africa" discourse
Resources:
A lost ‘Little Africa’: How China, too, blames foreigners for the virus and Sinophobia spreads faster than the coronavirus, by April Zhu.
Recommendations:
April: The Dragonfly Sea, by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor.
Cindy: The TV series What We Do in the Shadows, available on Hulu.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Izzy Niu is a freelance journalist and producer who most recently hosted the Webby Award–winning video series at Quartz called Because China. In this episode, NüVoices board member Cindy Gao talks to Izzy about her journey from China to the United States, a few of her media projects, including Loud Murmurs, a Mandarin-language podcast about social and political issues in American pop culture, and her evolving sense of identity and belongingness in her adopted home.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
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Qiàn Zhāng 张倩 is a cross-border creative entrepreneur who founded the tea brand The Pu'er Movement while at Harvard Business School, and currently serves as chief of staff to the global president at SharkNinja. Qian is an alumni of the famed Alibaba Global Leadership Academy, which was conceived of and now mentored by Jack Ma himself.
In this episode, Qian and NüVoicesboard member Chenni Xu talk about her time at Alibaba, what she learned from that cross-cultural bridge-building exercise, how her dual perspectives help give voice to the Chinese global citizen, and her time at HBS. The pair also chat about traditional Chinese medicine and non-allopathic modalities of healing. Qian’s mission-driven The Pu'er Movement seeks to fight rising divisiveness by fostering the exchange of perspectives, cultures, and values, one cup of pu’er tea at a time.
This episode was recorded on May 16, 2020.
Recommendations:
Qian: The book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haight, and two shows on Netflix: Madam Secretary and American Factory.
Chenni: Becoming, streaming on Netflix.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
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Journalism is a tough industry to break into, but expanding your multimedia and broadcast skills is a great way to enhance your versatility and job prospects.
For Chinese journalist Yuan Ren, who has worked as a Time Out magazine editor and a columnist for U.K. newspapersThe Telegraphand The Prospect, transitioning into broadcast media helped her fire up her creativity and experiment with creative storytelling.
In this episode, she shares her best tips and tricks for making the switch from print to digital journalism with NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu. The two also discuss what it is like to build a career in Western mainstream media as younger women of Chinese descent.
Yuan is a fully bilingual journalist who has written about science, technology, Chinese culture, and current affairs. Originally from Beijing, she began as the Around Town editor at Time Out Beijing. Yuan was a regular contributor to The Telegraph's Wonder Womancolumn on Chinese women and gender, and a monthly columnist for Prospect magazine. She is now based in London and works as a producer and reporter for Bloomberg TV and the technology show Click at BBC World — see Yuan's post on Twitter for a video of the latter. She also loves to make video blogs about traditional Chinese food and restaurants.
Follow Yuan for the latest in Chinese culture and food via YouTube and Instagram.
Recommendations:
Yuan: Get enough sleep and put your phone in a different room before bed. I like to track my sleep on my Garmin sports watch, which I have for running. Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer are all great apps for sleep and meditation (have it on your iPad, not phone), but many centers like the London Buddhist Centre offer live, guided meditations online. Staying active is so important, and I'm part of a running club — it's cheap and sociable, and you'll improve so fast you'll wish you joined earlier. There are lots of virtual races for runners, cyclists, and swimmers during lockdown, which you do solo but post results online. Strava is the social network for athletes worldwide.
I'm catching up on Chinese TV dramas at the moment. Check out Douban (豆瓣) for ratings on documentaries, movies, TV, and books. When I miss Chinese TV, I get on Beiijng TV's website and watch live there. I also listen to Beijing Transport News radio via TuneIn when I go to bed!
Joanna: Have no shame about indulging in guilty pleasures like Netflix reality TV dating shows, and solo YouTube karaoke sing-alongs is a great way to boost your mood while in isolation. Join different journalist groups on social media to reach a supportive community. Poynter has collected a list of such groups, and don't forget to join the NüVoices Network on Facebook and follow our Twitter account @NuVoices.
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Megha Rajagopalan is an award-winning international correspondent for BuzzFeed News, based in London. In this conversation recorded on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in London and New York, Megha and NüVoices board member Chenni Xu discuss Megha's career trajectory from the U.S. to China, the Middle East, and beyond. This includes her award-winning reporting, her time on the board of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, and musings about the current and future direction of foreign correspondence and journalism in China. The pair also discuss whether the "golden age" of reporting in China is really over, their respective residencies in Beijing in the 2010s, and what has changed: from hutong food and beverage closures to more draconian measures taken by the government to censor civil society and the media.
Recommendations:
Megha: Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe, and Three Women, by Lisa Taddeo.
Chenni: FX/Hulu's portentous new show on the second-wave feminists, Mrs. America, and Peter Hessler's River Town.
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This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Mengwen Cao is a photographer, multimedia artist, and cultural organizer. In this conversation recorded during the first week of lockdown in New York City, Mengwen and NüVoices board member Cindy Gao talk about their process of co-creation with their subjects, recent works that investigate the in-between space of race, gender, and cultural identity, the emotional work we all have to do in our own homes and minds while in isolation, and taking abundant delight in greater representation, expression, and the myriad small things in nature and the everyday that bring us joy.
Recommendations:
Mengwen: Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, by Adrienne Maree Brown; How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell; and the film Rouge, by Stanley Kwan.
Cindy: A poem by Charles Bukowski, titled “The Laughing Heart.”
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This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
As racism and the COVID-19 virus spread simultaneously, Asian people around the world are finding themselves terrified to step outside — and not just because they're worried about getting sick.
In this episode, NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu interviews NüVoices co-founder Sophie Lu and journalist and author Jessie Tu, who both live in Sydney. All three have experienced the harmful effects of people conflating the actions of the Chinese government with Chinese citizens, and even with the East Asian diaspora as a whole. They discuss how Asians and allies can respond to a spike in harassment and hate crimes while coping with a health crisis at the same time.
Resources:
- Hate crime documentation for Australian Asians
- Hate crime documentation for American Asians
Recommended reading:
- Stabbing of Asian-American 2-year-old and her family was a virus-fueled hate crime: feds
- ‘I am not a virus.’ How this artist is illustrating coronavirus-fueled racism
- Exclusive: COVID19 racism banners sparking outrage among multicultural leaders
- Asian American feminist antibodies: care in the time of coronavirus
- Chinese-Americans, facing abuse, unite to aid hospitals in coronavirus battle
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Julia Voo is the research director for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center’s new China Cyber Policy Initiative. In this episode, Julia and NüVoices board member Cindy Gao talk about China's increased efforts to influence international technical standards, updates and challenges of the Digital Silk Road, how her Track II diplomatic work with the China Institute for International Strategic Studies contributes to mitigating cyber confrontation between the U.S. and China, and her time in Beijing as the head of the local Young China Watchers chapter, supporting a more diverse group of aspiring China experts.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Di Wang is a feminist researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She joined NüVoices co-host Cindy Gao in Brooklyn to converse about the LGBTQ movement that is underway in China. In this episode, they discuss some of the social and legal challenges that gay and transgender individuals face, the rights that are afforded to members of China’s LGBTQ community, and terms used by that community to self-identify as well as how they came about.
Recommendations:
Cindy: The book In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, by Michael Meyer.
Di: Endlings, a play by Celine Song.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Wuhan native Rui Zhong is a program associate for the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center, in Washington, D.C. In this episode, Rui and co-host Cindy Gao work through a timeline of the spread of COVID-19, discuss tactics employed by the Chinese central government to co-opt the narrative surrounding the outbreak, identify those most affected by the virus within China, and take a look at xenophobic responses toward Chinese people around the world.
Recommendations:
Cindy: Four Springs, a documentary by Lu Qingyi, and An Elephant Sitting Still, by the late filmmaker Hu Bo.
Rui: The movie Knives Out, directed by Rian Johnson.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Emily Weaver, a social impact and philanthropy consultant who was based in China for over a decade, joins Chenni and Cindy as their guest this week. She has worked with major philanthropic organizations, such as Jet Li’s One Foundation and the Clinton Foundation, and is a founding member of the China Philanthropy Research Institute and the China Global Philanthropy Institute.
In this episode, Emily provides detail on individual and digital gift-giving in China (as opposed to major contributions from large corporations or wealthy donors), the role women play in shaping the future of non-governmental and philanthropic work in China, and how the sector has changed since China’s new law governing foreign non-governmental organizations took effect in 2016.
For self-care, Emily recommends spending more time outside and taking some time to slow down. Chenni recommends yoga, baths, and meditation. Cindy recommends sending postcards and letters to friends.
Recommendations:
Emily: The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir, by Samantha Power.
Chenni: The movie Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig.
Cindy: Episode 690 of the podcast This American Life: “How Do I Say This?”.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Jessie Lau is a writer, editor, and researcher from Hong Kong who explores identity, human rights, and politics. Her writing has been published by The Economist, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, and Quartz, among others. In this episode, Lau speaks with Hong Kong-Canadian journalist and NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu about the generational divides and diverging opinions on the Hong Kong protests that have torn apart families. The episode also explores how the protests have made people reconsider what it means to be a Hongkonger and a member of the Hong Kong diaspora.
Lau is also the manager of the NüVoices London chapter and the editor-in-chief of the digital magazine NüStories, which aims to amplify minority voices. Previously, she was a Hong Kong and China reporter with theSouth China Morning Post. She divides her time between London and Hong Kong.
Recommendations
For self-care, Lau recommends reaching out to support networks regardless of their political expertise, and to learn more about the ongoing situation in Hong Kong, she recommends Lausan. Joanna recommends the Hong Kong Free Press and this list of journalists who cover the protests in Hong Kong, which was put together by Laurel Chor.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Muyi Xiao, the visuals editor at ChinaFile, is in the guest seat in this week’s episode of the NüVoices Podcast, hosted by Chenni Xu. In this episode, she talks about her previous work as a multimedia reporter at Tencent, the changing nature of the field of photojournalism, her fellowship at the Magnum Foundation, and her role at Chinese Storytellers, a collective that amplifies the voices of Chinese nonfiction content creators.
For self-care, Muyi recommends therapy (she has Skype sessions with her therapist in Beijing), and Chenni recommends daily meditation and the app Insight Timer.
Recommended reading:
Triple-chaser, by Forensic Architecture; Parasite, a film by Bong Joon-ho; and Married young, by Muyi Xiao.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Keisha Brown is an assistant professor of history at Tennessee State University and a fellow in the Public Intellectuals Program at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. In this episode, she explains the history of Sino-Black relations, tells the story of influential African-American individuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes and their ties to China, and the changing perceptions of race and identity in China.
For self-care, Keisha recommends being kind to yourself, and not allowing toxic thoughts of others to affect your own mentality. Cindy recommends therapeutic writing for yourself and outside the pressures of deadlines.
Recommended reading:
An interview with Hu Xiangqian; Samuel Fosso: Emperor of Africa; Bridging the gap: Blackness and Sino-African relations; Murals of North Nashville Now; The North Nashville Heritage Project; and Navigating the Pacific: 20th century Afro-Asian relations.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Xin Wang is a John Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and a Ph.D. student studying contemporary art at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. Chenni Xu and Cindy Gao joined her for a wide-ranging discussion on the state of contemporary Chinese art: who are the major players, what defines it, and where to find it. She also discusses her own career and experiences as an art student and professional.
For self-care, Chenni recommends yoga, and an awareness of the changing of the seasons as fall begins. Cindy recommends not shying away from traditional and non-traditional forms of therapy (writing, for example) and being open to talking about your feelings. Xin recommends taking ballet classes.
Find Xin on Twitter and Tumblr, and take a look at her article on Asian futurism.
Recommendations:
Cindy: This Is Football, available on Amazon Prime Video. Also: An interview with Hu Xiangqian and Samuel Fosso: Emperor of Africa.
Xin: Les Bleus: Une Autre Histoire de France, a Netflix documentary on the history of the French national soccer team.
Chenni: The documentary Diego Maradona, available on HBO.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Rachel Morarjee is the director of the Economist Corporate Network and a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. In this episode, she talks about the 30% Club, an organization dedicated to increasing the representation of women in high-level positions in the workplace, how to mindfully navigate modern work environments, and how her current work compares to her former experiences as a journalist.
For self-care, Rachel recommends committing to something small but actionable. In her case, she tries to meditate for 10 minutes every day. Alice recommends learning Esperanto for language geeks as well as yoga and meditation.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In this episode of NüVoices, Alice Xin Liu interviews Chenni Xu, corporate communications head for Alipay in North America and a board member and local chapter co-head of NüVoices in New York City. Chenni discusses her experiences navigating the corporate world, from Brunswick to Alipay and from Beijing to America. She stresses the importance of forming strong peer networks, finding mentorship, and ensuring that during a meeting you always have a seat at the table — but not as the note taker. In the recommendations and self-care section, Chenni touts the usefulness of a free meditation app, Insight Timer. Alice recommends a recent episode of the Wo Men podcast, “Cycling the Silk Road,” with Eva Yoo. If you’re enjoying the podcast, be sure to check out the NüVoices website for resources, community events, and more.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In episode 17 of the NüVoices Podcast, host Joanna Chiu sits down with Siodhbhra Parkin, the director of the new, nonprofit arm of SupChina, to discuss her work in the field of legal advocacy against domestic violence when she was based at an international non-governmental organization (NGO) in Beijing. The two discuss the inspiring efforts of anti-domestic-violence activists in China both before and after the passage of a new law that has made collaboration between Chinese and foreign NGOs considerably more difficult. Siodhbhra also reflects on her experiences studying law in China, and the ongoing importance of finding ways to support beleaguered Chinese rule of law advocates and activists. Siodhbhra is a graduate of Harvard University and the Renmin University of China Law School and is now based in New York. This week, Joanna joins her from Vancouver, where she works as the bureau chief of The Star Vancouver.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Episode 17 of the NüVoices Podcast is here! This week, Alice Xin Liu is joined by co-host Zhāng Líjīa 张丽佳. The two interviewed Zōu Shuǎng 邹爽, a director and playwright. As of 2018, she was made the artistic director of the Beijing Music Festival, following in the footsteps of legendary conductor Maestro Yú Lóng 余隆. She was recently nominated at the 2019 International Opera Awards in London in the Newcomer category for her work as a director. Coming from a musical household, Shuǎng had always been interested in performance art. The three dive into her past - first as a student in London, and her introduction to the world of opera as a director’s assistant. After returning to Beijing, she tried her hand at the formidable task of adapting European works of musical theater for Chinese audiences, the younger crowd in particular. Nowadays, she spends divides her time between the U.K. and China, working across different mediums, genres and cultures. In the self-care and recommendations section, Alice recommends the band “New Pants”, or xīn kùzi 新裤子 and their song I Love You, Wǒ Aì Nǐ 我爱你. Líjīa recommends City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran by Ramita Navai. To end this episode, Shuǎng recommends Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard and the album Sleep by Max Richter.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In episode 15 of the NüVoices Podcast, co-host Alice Xin Liu interviews the co-founder and lead singer of Xiao Wang 小王, Anlin Fan. Since she started the band with her best friend, Yuyang, just a few years ago, Xiao Wang has become a staple of the Chinese rock and punk scene. When Anlin isn’t tearing up the stage, she spends her time finishing her master’s degree at McGill University. Here, she discusses growing up in China, the Riot Grrrl movement, tips on starting a rock band, her work with Rock Camp for Girls in Montreal, and her take on feminism and intersectionality. This episode also samples Xiao Wang’s new demo, “Sonic Baby,” and provides new recommendations for self-care.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Recorded live at the Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival, this week’s episode of the NüVoices podcast features a discussion with two prominent science fiction authors, Tang Fei and Ji Shaoting. The episode was recorded as part of a series of five live SupChina events at this year’s festival. Tang Fei and Ji Shaoting are both titans in the Chinese science fiction world. Tang Fei is a speculative fiction writer and a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her story "Call Girl," which was translated by Ken Liu, appeared in Apex Magazine and was reprinted in Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014. In addition, she has authored several novels published in Chinese. Ji Shaoting, a former Xinhua journalist, is the founder and CEO of Future Affairs Administration, a professional cultural brand in China that helps aspiring science-fiction writers develop and produce their work. She is also the co-founder of guokr.com, a popular science explainer. Together with NüVoices co-host Alice Xin Liu, Tang Fei and Ji Shaoting explore the various challenges facing female Chinese science fiction writers, including widespread gender discrimination and expanding the market for Chinese science fiction works.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In episode 13 of the NüVoices podcast, co-hosts Alice Xin Liu and Sophie Lu interview Cate Cadell, a tech writer for Reuters who is based in Beijing. Cate covers Chinese tech companies with a focus on cybersecurity, AI, surveillance, censorship, and ethics issues. This episode focuses on the troubled relationship between the Chinese government, technology, and ethics. In particular, spurred by recent, disturbing news of a leaked Chinese government database that gathered data on women’s “breeding” status, the discussion focuses on how the state’s tech practices have impacted women in China. Next, co-hosts lead Cate in a round of Sophie's favorite game, "Pick your Dystopian Future,” in which players must choose their preferred dystopian scenarios. In this edition, the discussants consider which worlds are worse: One where CRISPR humans eat non-CRISPRs? Or one without memory, where people — like women — can be erased from history? The game ends with a reflection on what would happen to humans without gender and death. This episode also features Sophie’s “exit interview” as she prepares to depart Beijing for Australia. In the final segment, on recommendations and self-care, Alice recommends Leon Legothetis and The Kindness Diaries. Sophie suggests rewatching Mad Men to see men go through their own “Lean In” moment in the 1960s–1970s, with disastrous results. In closing, Cate recommends a new documentary called People’s Republic of Desire, which looks at the fascinating world of live streaming in China. For a deeper dive, check out these articles: - Discrimination against women in tech (by Cate Cadell) - Sex dolls in China (by Joanna Chiu) - Social credit system (by Mara Hvistendahl) - How automation will replace female labor (by Sarah Holder) - CRISPR babies (by Christina Larson)
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In the 12th episode of the NüVoices podcast, Alice Xin Liu and Sophie Lu interview Shuilam Wong, who goes by Shui, a comic artist who partnered with Jinna Kaneko to create the Hole in the Wall Collective with Jinna Kaneko. The two high school friends met back up in the city and decided to create their own indie zines (self-published magazines). We talked to Shui about being born in Tokyo and raised in Beijing and London (where she went to Camberwell College of Arts, and where she feels like she belongs to no particular place). We also discussed her artwork, which utilizes broad brushstrokes and a free-form sketch style to depict scenes inspired by a variety of characters in everyday life. Shui notes that her style is partially inspired by Old Master Q (老夫子), a classic Chinese comic. For recommendations, Alice recommends Sexy Beijing (www.sexybeijing.tv), and especially its star and producer, Anna Sophie Loewenberg, a precursor to all the badass females in her life. Sexy Beijing was a project that Loewenberg created with Jeremy Goldkorn and Luke Mines. Sophie recommends Woman World, a graphic novel published by Drawn & Quarterly and based on an Instagram comic about a world without men. Our guest, Shui, recommends yoga and a très noir French Pinocchio comic book by Winshluss.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
On the first episode of the second season of the NüVoices podcast, Alice Xin Liu and Sophie Lu are joined by Alex Li, senior editor at Vice China. Alex has a Ph.D. in gender and sexuality studies and a master’s degree in psychology. She is also the host of the gender and sexuality channel Biede Girls for Vice China. Alice was previously a guest on her podcast, Biede Girls Podcast, to talk about her bicultural background. Alice, Sophie, and Alex talk about the meaning of "queer," bisexuality, Vice China, Chris Lee (Lǐ Yǔchūn 李宇春) and Tilda Swinton, and representations of queer, bisexual, and gay figures in the media. Alex has written for Vice on Chinese female filmmakers. In the self-care and recommendations section, Alex recommends saying no to social requests, and reading fan fiction that has themes of “shipping,” which refers to when characters are paired up in relationships that did not exist in the original work. Sophie recommends In the Turn, a documentary about a transgender girl discovering herself through roller derby. Alice recommends New Seeds of Contemplation, by Thomas Merton, especially Sue Monk Kidd's introduction, as well as Janelle Monáe's fabulous bisexual performance at the Grammys and her feminist, queer album titled Dirty Computer.
This podcast was edited and produced by Jason MacRonald.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In the 10th episode of the NüVoices Podcast, Alice Xin Liu and Sophie Lu interview Anete and Silvia — members of the all-female improv group Beijing Broads! Comprising participants from seven different countries and six different first languages, the group has been performing for over two years. Alice and Sophie learn to improv with the infamous "sex with me" gag. They also talk with Anete and Silvia about supporting the charity Educating Girls of Rural China (www.egrc.ca), about comedy in China — especially for women — and how to get women to believe in themselves so they can perform more comfortably onstage. For recommendations: Alice recommends Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness, by Dr. Qing Li, who describes a Japanese practice that has become a popular remedy for stress in the West. Sophie recommends re-watching old movies and calls for a takedown of the movie Miracle on 34th Street, where a single mother is vilified. Silvia recommends saying "You're good enough" to yourself repeatedly and overtly, and believing it. Anete recommends the "just start" attitude to sports, whether it is hitting the gym or something else. This podcast is wholly coordinated by the NüVoices board, with production by SupChina. All opinions of guests and presenters belong to the individuals alone and do not reflect the views of NüVoices. Follow the activities of NüVoices on Twitter at @nvvoices.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In this episode of the NüVoices Podcast, Alice Xin Liu and Joanna Chiu are live from New York! Following a heady and successful launch of NüVoices' first North American chapter, they reunite at the SupChina offices in Brooklyn and interview one of their idols: Jiayang Fan, staff writer and de facto China correspondent at The New Yorker magazine. Alice and Joanna interview Jiayang about her immigrant background, long-form magazine writing (especially her piece on Yan Lianke, "Forbidden Satires of China"), the impact of her male, white predecessors, and the field of Asian-American writing. For recommendations and self-care, Alice recommends UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center (which also produces this excellent podcast), Joanna recommends "How to Rock Your Broadcast Appearance" by Sophia Yan, published on NüVoices, and Jiayang recommends that women writers — and all writers — keep a nightly journal, or that we spend 15 minutes on the voice audio app on our phones “talking to ourselves.” Jiayang also recommends the Netflix show Kim’s Convenience.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In the eighth episode of the NüVoices Podcast, Alice Xin Liu, writer and translator, interviews Eleanor Goodman with guest host Lijia Zhang, author of Socialism Is Great! and most recently Lotus, and board member of the NüVoices Collective. Eleanor is the noted translator of Wáng Xiǎonī 王小妮, a poet who has been associated with the Misty Poets (朦胧诗派 ménglóngshī pài) but who is so much more, having penned 25 books of published poetry. Currently a research associate at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University, Eleanor has many accolades under her belt, including a stint as a resident of the M Literary Residency Programme in Shanghai and the winner of the 2015 Lucien Stryk Prize. She is renowned in the literary translation world as one of the foremost translators of Chinese poetry into English. Her own book of poetry is Nine Dragon Island. In this episode, Alice and Lijia ask Eleanor about her translation of workers' poetry, Iron Moon, and about her experience writing her own poetry. In addition, Eleanor reads from her poetry collection and her book of translations of Wang Xiaoni. For self-care, Lijia recommends dinner parties, Alice recommends reaching out for help in times of crisis, and Eleanor recommends setting a daily page count of writing and academic work, and stopping when it is reached.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In the seventh episode of the NüVoices podcast, co-hosts Sophie Lu and Joanna Chiu interview author, journalist, activist, and NüVoices Collective editorial board member Lijia Zhang. But first, a reminder that the New York launch of the NüVoices Collective is happening this Thursday, November 1, at an event in Brooklyn, featuring Leta Hong Fincher, Rebecca Karl, and Lu Pin. Also, a important reminder that the deadline for submissions for the NüVoices Collective print anthology is coming up, December 1. See our website for more submission details! Lijia Zhang was a factory worker who made parts for rockets before she sought freedom through literature. She taught herself English, became a leader of factory workers during the 1989 protests in Nanjing, and eventually became an award-winning journalist and author. Her works include the memoir Socialism Is Great! and a collection of oral histories called China Remembers. Her most recent novel, Lotus, tells the story of a young migrant who turned to prostitution; the story was inspired by Lijia's grandmother’s deathbed revelation of being sold to a brothel. As Lijia describes it, Lotus is “not a Chinese pretty woman.” Writing in English, Lijia has found creative freedom and uses her strong literary voice to tell stories of China’s “little people” (小人物 xiǎorénwù) — those of the disadvantaged class who live on the margins of society. She seeks to bring to light many social inequalities while also telling the stories of Chinese people with humanity. You can learn more about her work in an upcoming episode of the BBC World Book Club podcast. She is currently researching a new book about China’s left-behind children. For books and self-care recommendations, Lijia loves Sketches From a Hunter’s Album, by Russian author Ivan Turgenev, and living a well-balanced life. Joanna suggests another great book about political activism in China, The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China, by Madeleine O’Dea, and sleeping more. Finally, Sophie recommends CIRCE, a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey from the perspective of the witch Circe, and going to a great drag bingo.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
On the sixth episode of the NüVoices podcast, co-hosts Alice Xin Liu and Sophie Lu interview Karoline Kan 阚超群, a writer and reporter based in Beijing, currently working at the New York Times. Starting this autumn, Karoline will be the Beijing editor for China Dialogue, and her debut book, the memoir Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Love, Loss, and Hope in China, will be published by Hachette in March 2019. In this podcast, the piece that Alice mentions is “The Unwelcome Villager” in Roads and Kingdoms. Sophie mentions “My Father” from the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel. They talk about Karoline's writing, the personal essay genre, oral histories, sitting down with your family to tell their story, and how to get a book deal! For self-care and recommendations, Alice recommends the Awkwafina song “My Vag,” plus her emotional opening monologue for Saturday Night Live; Sophie recommends Travels Through Dali: With a Leg of Ham, by Mei Zhang; and Karoline recommends the as-yet-untranslated My Father's Generation and Me (我与父辈 wǒ yǔ fùbèi), by Yan Lianke.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In the fifth episode of the NüVoices podcast, Alice Xin Liu and Sophie Lu are joined by screenwriter Joan Xu. But first, Joanna Chiu announces the launch of the revamped NüVoices website, as well as online magazine NüStories, and the New York launch of the NüVoices Collective, in an event featuring Leta Hong Fincher, Rebecca Karl, and Lü Pin, moderated by Joanna, on November 1. Joan Xu is a budding screenwriter based in Beijing, working most recently on a forthcoming web series The Circle 御姐的星途. She frequently works in the action-adventure genre on China-Hollywood co-productions. Joan holds a BA in government and economics from Harvard College and an MA in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago, and will be hosting events for the Harvard alumni community in Beijing. For recommendations and self-care, Alice recommends Why We Love by Helen Fisher, and leaving the house; Joan recommends Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, as well as “KinderCoach”; and Sophie recommends getting friends together for a brunch whilst rallying your best and worst qualities. The book Joan references in the podcast is A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In this fourth episode of the NüVoices Podcast, Alice and Sophie are joined by fellow NüVoices board member Christina Larson, a longtime science and technology reporter on China. The three discuss technology and bias, ranging from the State Council's social credit system from 2014 to how artificial intelligence mirrors the gender biases in China and the world, and why reproductive issues for a strong economy seem to fall on the shoulders of women. At the end, for self-care, they recommend The Calligrapher's Garden, by Hassan Massoudy, The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman, Mark Manson's “Fuck Yes or No,” and sleep.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In this third episode of the NüVoices Podcast, Alice Xin Liu is joined by Sophie Lu, a board member of NüVoices who works in the cleantech and environment space. Sophie will be a rotating co-host with Alice and Joanna Chiu for future episodes! Our guest this week is fantasy writer Mima, known in China as Qima 七马 (she says she picked that name for her Chinese readers because “it looks like a man’s name…Of course, I don’t like that”). Her fantasy novel The Legend of Strangers 蝼蚁转 is a road adventure told in a style that melds Quentin Tarantino’s quirky violence with Miyazaki whimsy. Although untranslated (for now), The Legends of Strangers is the first in a series of six novels. Right now, Mima is working with Youku, one of China's biggest video-streaming services, scripting the novels into a hotly anticipated Web series. We expect her to be the next George R. R. Martin. NüVoices has just launched an official WeChat account, which you can follow by searching "NüVoices女音" on the social media platform, and a new website will be launched in September, so watch this space! This podcast is wholly coordinated by the NüVoices board, with production by SupChina. All opinions of guests and presenters belong to the individuals alone and do not reflect the views of NüVoices. Follow them on Twitter at @nvvoices. On a final note, we’re co-presenting, with the local arts collective Spittoon, an event in Beijing on Tuesday, August 28, called Spittunes, in which musicians and poets collaborate to create special musical pieces inspired by the poet’s words. Check it out if you’re in town! Three pairs of poets/musicians will be taking part, including SupChina’s very own Anthony Tao.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In this second episode of the NüVoices podcast, hosts Alice Xin Liu and Joanna Chiu interview Yuan Yang, the Beijing-based technology correspondent for the Financial Times, on how #MeToo has gained momentum in mainland China despite online censorship and university officials reportedly putting pressure on students to stay silent. Since Luo Xixi wrote on social media in January about how her former professor tried to rape her, many others have shared their stories and the movement has spread beyond campuses in recent weeks to the NGO, the media, and the art world. Even a high-ranked Buddhist monk has been accused of sexual misconduct. Joanna and Yuan share insights from their on-the-ground reporting, and the trio discuss ways the #MeToo conversation has been different in China compared with in Western countries and to what extent the Chinese leadership might see the popular movement as a threat. In the future of this biweekly podcast, Alice and Joanna will continue to explore the work of women in media and the arts in Greater China, the impact of abuses of power, international and domestic politics, and their own personal stories. Their guests will also, occasionally, be male. NüVoices is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. This code of conduct applies to all NüVoices events and spaces, including the website, podcast, and communities both online and off. Read the charter here: https://nuvoices.com/our-charter/. This podcast is wholly coordinated by the NüVoices board, with production by SupChina. All opinions of guests and presenters belong to the individuals alone and do not reflect the views of NüVoices. Follow them on Twitter at @nvvoices. The Chinese #MeToo cases discussed in this episode have also been covered on SupChina: Zhu Jun, VM Xuecheng, Lei Chuang and others.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Alice Xin Liu and Joanna Chiu interview two Chinese women who work as news assistants for foreign media in China. News assistants are sometimes dubbed "researchers," though they really are journalists who rarely get the glory of a top-of-the-page byline like foreign correspondents, despite doing much of the journalistic legwork.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.