Wo Men Podcast

Have you done lots of shopping on Double 11? The reason we ask is that 11/11, also known as Singles Day, has become China's biggest online shopping holiday and become the Chinese retailer equivalent of Black Friday in the west.

Is Singles Day still a culture phenomenon in China where if you have not participated, you feel you would be left out? I have heard some people have started to lose interest this year as they feel the shopping rules have become quite complicated. Do you feel the same? Do you use shopping as your retail therapy? This is an encore episode in which Yajun and Jingjing discuss the "buy buy buy" culture in China.

This week, we have a special guest — who for the purposes of the recording we're calling "C" — who bravely came forward to share her deeply sad personal experience of being a victim of sexual assault when she was just 4 years old.

Through discussing this horrendous experience, this episode looks at the underlying problems in some rural and undereducated areas in China, where gender inequality is a manifest of some purportedly "patriotic" values. It also examines how some criminals can take advantage of the concept of "面子 mianzi" (face) and a pervasive family shaming culture to cover up their actions.

Life is not always fair, particularly in a dramatically changing society such as China. While many children from one child families in China enjoy the undivided attention of their parents, others need to fight for themselves to achieve a better future.

Cai, our anonymous guest for this episode, was given a faulty vaccine shot as a small child in rural China that caused her to contract polio. For a while she was in critical condition and half of her body was paralyzed.

Her illness led to her being almost abandoned by her family. As the eldest of four, in the eyes of the family Cai's debilitating disease meant she could no longer bring them any value. Even as she began to recover, she was constantly reminded that she owed the family due to the costs involved with her treatment.All of this could easily have become yet another tragic tale of an unwanted girl in China. However, Cai was determined to forge a different narrative. She moved to Beijing and supported herself by working various jobs without seeking any support from her family. At the same time, she pursued a course of self-study, sitting a series of exams over the course of ten years. She built a successful language education career and landed a job in the Danish Embassy. Today, she works as a project manager in a technology mobility company.

Her story is inspirational, but also sheds some light on the struggles that many young women face in rural China.

Have you ever thought about the true price of your morning cappuccino? It's more than the five dollars you pay at the cafe on the street corner.

The global coffee industry is worth 100 billion USD and rising. But the huge industry profits from the second-most traded commodity in the world are not trickling down to the people who grow the beans. Coffee is extremely sensitive to weather conditions and this year's drought in the Mekong region — worsened by climate change — has hit the area's plantations badly. This has combined with intensive coffee farming practices to lead to environmental problems such as soil depletion, deforestation and biodiversity loss.

What are the social and environmental costs of coffee plantations in the world? How is climate change effecting coffee growing in the Mekong region? What does coffee mean to ethnic minority people in area? And what can we do to make the coffee industry greener and farmers more resistant to environmental risks?

Karoline Kan shares her experiences reporting in Vietnam's Central Highlands and China's Yunnan province, where some harbor ambitions of the area becoming Asia's coffee production capital yet numerous coffee farmers are struggling to make ends meet.

This is an encore episode originally released November 2, 2018

Annie recently changed her Chinese given name from Yating (雅婷) to Yiling (奕绫) based on the instruction of a part-time fortune telling master (who incidentally holds a full-time job as a private equity investor). Even though Annie has a well paid and highly regarded job and is in a loving marriage, she was bothered that this may not be what she wants and felt confused as to where her life was going. A new name, the theory goes, could potentially free her mind and soul and allow her to be a "free horse" (she is born in the year of the horse) to pursue what she wants.

She is not alone. Many Chinese seek comfort and assurance from fortune-telling masters, who don't only serve as a kind of prophet, but also to some extent play the role of psychologist. Amid the myriad pressures of modern life, many Chinese are turning back to traditional superstitions and beliefs, and fortune-telling and fengshui businesses have boomed over the past decade.

In today's episode, Annie talks about her name changing experience and how it has fed into a process of self-discovery.

On the latest Wǒ Men Podcast, we are joined by feminist activist Zhang Leilei, who has played an important role in numerous feminist campaigns in China, including raising awareness around sexual harassment and gender equality.

Zhang's journey as an activist began when she was in university. Now aged 26, she has been a prominent figure in China's rising feminist movement. One of the most influential campaigns she led was using her body as a moving advertisement on metro trains in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, after her requests for public educational posters on public transport were repeatedly rejected by the authorities.

We are thrilled to have the opportunity to interview Zhang Leilei and share her stories with all of you.

Jocelyn Ford, a reporter, filmmaker, and educator, has dedicated her life to covering rarely-covered female-centric stories.

She pushed the Japanese Prime Minister's press office to build the first lady's room in the building in the 1990s. She was one of the first reporters in Japan to cover the topic of WWII comfort women and forced the Japanese government and the public to face up to this issue. She was the first bureau chief of Marketplace in China and has shed light on rarely-discussed Tibetan gender issues by producing the documentary Nowhere to Call Home.

For this episode of Wǒ Men, we talked to Jocelyn Ford about her work and her views on how women can break the social norm of male dominance and make a difference.

"Choose the battle and win it!" as she puts it.

The teaser trailer for Disney's live-action movie Mulan has sparked a lot of discussion on Chinese social media since it was released in early July. The one-and-a-half minute teaser drew hundreds of thousands of comments on Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

Many netizens say they are "satisfied" with the appearance of the first Chinese Disney princess, as well as the settings, costumes, and make-up from the teaser, while others are not so happy with the rewriting of the story and the loss of some characters from the 1998 animated movie such as the little dragon Mushu.

So what do Chinese audiences care about most when it comes to a Hollywood-produced China story? Why are people especially sensitive over the appearance of the actors who play the leading Chinese characters in overseas films? And what skills could China's film industry learn from Hollywood to attract young audiences to traditional stories?

This is a recording Jingjing made when she attended an event in Los Angeles in October 2018 called SlutWalk.

Slut Walk is a movement calling for an end to rape culture, including victim blaming and slut shaming of sexual assault victims.

She interviewed a sex worker who attends SlutWalk every year calling on people to respect women for who they are, not their profession or how they dress.

Slut-shaming is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. When China's #MeToo movement was at its peak last year, there were several high-profile cases (including one involving an influential author, Zhang Wen) that forced everyone to take a long, hard look at the culture of shaming women.

Today, with Chinese women, and men, becoming increasingly woke on the issue of gender quality, this is a conversation worth continuing to have.

Would you be able to ride a bicycle for eight months along the ancient Silk Road through 13 countries, while interviewing tech companies and hosting workshops along the way? Eva Yoo, an international cyclist and writer, just accomplished exactly this feat — and she's the subject of our latest podcast episode.

Born in Korea, Eva has worked in five countries and speaks four languages. Rather than enjoying a nice job in Shanghai, she decided to challenge herself by taking a bike trip from Shanghai to London.

In this episode, she shares the danger and joy that she experienced during the trip and what she learned about China's ever-expanding Belt and Road initiative along the way.