NüVoices

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. 

(Note: the show Megan referred to at 21:30 is called Super Sketch Show 一年一度喜剧大赛.) 

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.