NüVoices NüVoices

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 book Red 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!