NüVoices

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 NüVoices board 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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. newspapers The Telegraph and 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 Woman column 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.” 

Like the podcasts at SupChina? Help us out by taking this brief survey.

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.