NüVoices

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-strait 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 Island Nation, 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. 

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We're proud to announce our new podcast producers who've joined our team! Saga Ringmar (@saga_ringmar) is our new senior producer and Lauren Lau (@laurenflau) is our new associate producer. Learn more about Saga and Lauren at nuvoices.com 

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 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. 

TIME STAMP, SPOILERS FOR DISORIENTATION BEGIN AT: 33:20
 
We welcome Elaine Hsieh Chou (pronounced "Shay-Chow") to the podcast to talk about her debut novel, Disorientation. 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 (pronounced "Chow"), 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 pod 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.