Shownotes Transcript
Welcome to the New Voices podcast. I'm Joanna Chu, co-founder of New Voices and China editor at Rest of World. New Voices celebrates a brilliant woman shaping how we understand China today through their writing, research, artistic endeavors, and in-depth reporting. Today, we are joined by Emily Feng, an international correspondent for NPR.
For most of the last decade, she's covered China, Taiwan, and beyond, a job that has allowed her to crisscross the Asia Pacific, telling the story of China's rise and its impact on the region. We were also together in Beijing for some of the time, and the last time we had an in-depth catch-up with her was our last podcast recording 2022, so I'm very excited to catch up.
on what Emily has been up to the last few years. Her reporting has also let her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands and volcanic islands, write about girl bands and art. She's filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine, the top of a mosque in Shanghai, and inside a cave Chairman Mao once lived in.
Today, we'll be catching up with Emily and hearing about her new book, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom. It is an intimate, deeply reported investigation into the battle over identity in China, chronicling the state oppression of those who fail to conform to Xi Jinping's definition of who is Chinese. Welcome back to New Voices, Emily. Thank you so much for having me back, Joanna.
So I remember at that time we talked about your upcoming series, Blackgate, detention centers that jailed hundreds of Uyghurs. In 2024, you produced a free episode podcast series called Blackgate. What was the inspiration? Can you tell us a bit about how that project turned out?
Of course. So I've been reporting on Xinjiang and the mass detention and cultural genocide against Uyghurs there since 2017 or so. And I wanted to do a step back story because in all the news stories that I was doing, I think what was missing in this flood of terrible, terrible news was just how much it had changed people's lives completely. And I wanted to give people a sense through the power of audio what it's like to live through that.
like to have your family torn apart, to live under that kind of surveillance. And so this audio documentary, this series that I did for NPR's Embedded, let me dive really deep into one family saga about how they were separated, but also how they managed through...
against all odds, to come back together again and through their story, tell the bigger picture of what had happened to the Uyghurs and why China is detaining them and why it's central to their nation building project and central, I think, to building a Chinese identity, according to Communist Party dictates. Wow. Our listeners should definitely check out that podcast series. Last year, you also did a lot of coverage of the Middle East. How did you find the beat and what were the challenges?
I had this incredible opportunity after moving from Taiwan a couple of months ago to spend two months in the Middle East. So I was in Lebanon right after the ceasefire with Israel and Hezbollah. I was in Israel. I was in the West Bank, Palestine. I was in Syria right after the Syrian regime fell, the Assad family regime. So it was just been this incredible tour of the Middle East and of the Levant.
There were a lot of things that I loved about that region that I loved about China. You know, how warm people are, how amazing they are at telling their own stories, the hyper localness of these places. You know, it's incredibly diverse from a religious, linguistic, cultural, aesthetic perspective, but at the same time, how all these places are connected to one another and these regional ecosystems.
Basically, all the elements that I loved reporting from places like northwestern China, for example, I found that same joy again, reporting the Middle East, obviously about very, very different stories. So and you're talking to me just as I've come back, like two days ago from Syria. Wow. What was your trip like in Syria? What's Syria like right now? So it's the first...
two months after this regime that's been in place for more than 40 years in the hands of just one family, the Assad family, has fallen. I think that people are really optimistic, but that's relatively speaking. You know, the baseline for this country is just so, so low.
The atrocities that the Assad regime committed on its own people using chemical weapons, artillery fire, Russian airstrikes, it's leveled most of their own country and killed hundreds of thousands of people. There are still tens of thousands of people missing from Assad prisons that still have not been found, even though the regime is gone.
So things can't get much worse, which means that people are basically grasping on to any optimism that things will look better under the new interim government. And so I spent the last few weeks there documenting about how the country is changing, what dreams people have, how Syria can rebuild, but also...
realistically, the challenges that face this place, because there are many Syrias. It's a really, really diverse place. And unfortunately, that sectarianism was exacerbated intentionally by the Assad regime. So they've got big uncertainties ahead. Wow. Yeah, you've been all over the place doing such amazing work. And now you're based in Washington, D.C. What is it like after so many years abroad to return to America just in time for Trump 2.0?
It is hard to wrap my mind around the pace of change in the world. And that includes now my home country, which I haven't lived in in about a decade. This is my third full day living in Washington, D.C. So I think it's a little bit too soon to say what I think my my B and my life is going to be like here. But it's a very different place than the U.S. I lived in 10 years ago. And it's one that I think is more relevant.
relevant than ever to the issues that I've been covering in China. The U.S.-China relationship is back full force with these tariffs that President Trump has put on China and counter tariffs that China has put on the U.S.,
So I think there's a lot of material to dig into, but I feel a little bit like a foreigner in my own country. Wow. Yeah, definitely. I experienced a reverse culture shock going back from China to Canada. I did not give people personal space and I didn't say sorry all the time to Canadians. Are you getting some of that? Just not even journalistically that reverse culture shock?
We need to recalibrate what I pay attention to and what I care about. For so long, I was focused on what is happening outside the U.S. And of course, what does that mean for me as an American reporter? But my frame of reference was the entire world. You know, it wasn't like, why does this matter to the U.S.? And now that I'm more focused on covering American politics and the U.S.'s relationship with other countries, I've got to change my frame of reference a
again, thinking about, well, what does this mean in an American context? Yeah, just as a member of the public and, you know, a Canadian when Trump is threatening to take over Canada, I'm relieved that we have someone who understands China and cares about the world in D.C. right now working for
a major American outlet. And we've been asking many China correspondents who are now reporting on China, outside China, this question of what it is like to report on China from outside China. And your book started off in quite dramatic fashion with you thinking about that very question while you were in an immigration holding room in Beijing Capital Airport. Can you tell us a bit about that moment and whether your plans and your thinking have evolved since then?
That was, I think back in 2018 or 19. And it was during these massive anti-government protests in Hong Kong. And I was just getting stopped all the time, leaving Beijing airport and landing in Beijing airport. And I really felt like...
I saw the writing on the wall already. I mean, eventually I was basically expelled from China, but it was these airport stops that made me think, you know what, how am I going to report on this story in this country that I care so much about and that I love if one day I can't live and work here? And, you know, eventually I did have to do that. I moved to Taiwan in 2022. But it's a challenge that so many of us reporters covering China have to
deal with now. There are so many stories, though, about Chinese influence, about geopolitical rivalries, about global supply chains and technology investment that are happening outside of China, or they rely on information and data that's not necessarily housed in China. So that's been one way to do that story. And when I was based in Taiwan,
Obviously, the China-Taiwanese relationship is becoming more and more fractious, but that let me branch into covering Southeast Asia as well, where the China question of what role does China play in our economy and in our foreign policy is important.
I would argue, even more pressing than the U.S. questioning its relationship with China right now. And as an audio journalist, how do you balance the risk of talking to Chinese people now as an American journalist with the aim to make sure that global audiences still get to hear from people in China directly?
There's still a lot of leeway to do reporting in China, even with audio, with video. The red lines for what gets people in trouble are very unclear. That's what's risky because you never know what's going to get people in trouble. But that being said, there's a lot of gray space still in between those red lines where you can do cultural stories and historical stories, economic stories, even though that's becoming a little bit more sensitive to interview people on the ground.
I'm not going to lie, there have been many, many instances where we've had interviews suddenly denied or people pull out or request that their interview be redacted. Honestly, that becomes a question of just investing a lot of time because you strike out a lot. But eventually, if you push hard enough and you spend enough time trying to find someone who will talk to you, you will find someone. And that I think is still the beauty of China is there's still so many places and so many people that are still willing to talk to you as a journalist, even though they face risks. Mm-hmm.
Do you see any optimism that American journalists will be able to get more visas to report on the ground in China? Or will it remain limited kind of factors on both sides? And we'll kind of have to continue to find ways to innovate and tell these stories from outside China. Listen, it's early days of the second Trump administration.
So I don't know what their China policy is going to be. Different officials have said different things. The executive has taken a radically different approach than some of their NSC or congressional or cabinet appointees have taken. It could be that we see a rapprochement, like a warming up between the U.S. and China again. It seems that the Trump administration is actually starting to soften or even backtrack on some of the legislative or executive actions they took during their first term.
Maybe we might see more access journalistically between the two countries. I also worry, though, that journalistic access is so low on the list of priorities for either country's government that it might get kind of lost in all of the bigger geopolitical conversations happening between the U.S. and China. But I do think, well,
Life is long and it's an easy win for both countries to allow more of their journalists to work and live in the U.S. and China. Definitely interesting times. We will be back shortly.
Thank you.
Everything going on, hearing from well-informed China experts from a diverse number of backgrounds is more important than ever. You can give a one-time donation by visiting our website, www.newvoices.com. And you can also find information about upcoming events like our new pitching and writing workshop series that we're launching.
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So just now we were talking about how us as individual journalists could do our work in such a polarized time. And now I want to talk about your new book, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, because it features a group of ordinary Chinese people trying to run against the grain in China. Congratulations on the book coming out. What inspired you to write the book? Thank you so much. It's unreal to see this book. It's been alive in my head, obviously, for years. But to see it come out into the world and to see real people like you reading it,
I started thinking about the book, as I mentioned, when I was sitting in that Beijing airport holding cell. And I really put pen to paper when I moved to Taiwan, when I was forced to leave China, because I needed a way to process my time in China, not only for personal, selfish reasons to kind of justify to myself that this high pressure time that I'd spent there, all the things that I'd done to my personal life to justify working in China, that that like meant something.
But also, I realized looking back at all the work that I'd done in China over the last couple of years, there was this central theme running through it. All the stories that I liked the most were about ultimately this theme of identity. What is Chinese? Who gets to be Chinese? And why that matters to how the Communist Party runs the country. And the format of the book, which is
interlocking profiles of people, characters who I felt like really exemplified different aspects of this theme of identity. I chose this format because I think there is such a dearth of not just writing, but cultural production of
like what life is like in China. Part of that is the fact that China is increasingly isolated from the rest of the world and the US has cut off a lot of its cultural ties with China. But also China is so hard to access. You know, as we mentioned, if you talk to people, they could get in trouble. If you spend a lot of time with them,
Someone might report you and, you know, send public security officials to stop the interview, even if the person is willing to speak to you. It's really hard to get to know someone as an interview subject and spend time with them and humanize them. And so much of my work, my ambition in my work is to make people human to other audiences, to make them seen by people, even if they don't speak the same language or live in the same country. So I wanted to do these profiles and I wanted to do this book so that even
even stories that seem really, really foreign, they're happening in China to people you're never going to meet, feel like people you would want to meet that could be your next door neighbor and whose experiences and joy and sadness and
is something that an American reader could relate to. Yeah, and as someone who, I haven't been inside China for five years and reading the book made me feel like more updated. Like I was hearing people's stories again on the ground and like reading in a book length is so much more than what you can get
from listening to a radio show of yours or a shorter article and it made me feel like less out of touch. You did an amazing job. Thank you. It reminded me a bit of Out of Mouth's Shadow by Philip Penn, where he did put together a series of profiles to challenge the stereotype more than a decade ago that Chinese people were politically apathetic. Did you have any inspirations while you were researching and figuring out the format of the book?
I am so flattered that you mentioned Out of Mouth's Shadow because that was totally one of my inspirations in writing the book and how I wrote the book because I think that Phil Pan did such a beautiful job capturing the texture and the rhythm and color of life in China during a moment of great change.
And I don't claim that my book does it as successfully as his, but I wanted to achieve that level of literary journalism, basically, making people realize, you know what, like the stories that happen in our real lives, all around us to real people can approach the level, the pathos of fiction. And we don't even have to make any of this up. This is happening in the real world. And to get people to appreciate that, even if they're not necessarily interested in China. Mm-hmm.
Was it in your mind that you felt that maybe with the lack of many journalists on the ground and some of the interior looking pics of many countries that it was important for readers to really understand a variety of Chinese people's experiences?
Absolutely. I'm sad that I might not have an opportunity to do it again, but I had this amazing opportunity to do it. And I wanted to write the book to reflect that. But I'm glad that you felt like you could connect to these people as people and get a sense of their interior world, because that was exactly the goal of the book. Yeah. So it sounded like these are people you met during the course of your reporting in China, but you conceived of the book and
finished writing it while in Taiwan. Were there any challenges of doing this where maybe access to those sources was harder?
Every day reporting in China felt like it could be my last, to be honest. And so I approached it with this mentality of trying to get as much as possible in case I couldn't go back and get it again, which is indeed what happened. I would say moving to Taiwan actually was this blessing in disguise. I mean, not only did I love living there, but also it gave me finally the mental relaxation and space to write this book. And
As you read the book, the structure begins, you know, the first part is in mainland China, and then it goes to border regions. And then the book ends in Taiwan and the US. So being in Taiwan actually shaped the stories in the book itself. And I realized that a lot of the themes I was looking at in China, I could understand them better if I also put them in the Taiwanese context. Yeah, I think similarly, when I was in China, I was trying to collect things. I had no book idea, but I brought my notes with me.
And even now, like so many years out of being in China, there are some stories that still stick out to me that I often think about those people. Out of the profiles in your book, which story stuck out to you the most? I think that the stories about the Hui Muslims in the titular chapter, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, stuck with me the most. Not because they ended up being the backbone of the book, but because it was just such a joy story
and often a very sad process, but such a joy traveling around those parts of China, meeting the people who would eventually become characters in the piece. One of them, I didn't end up meeting until I'd finished the book because he now lives in Southeast Asia. But it was just very, very special being able to connect all these pieces from China to Southeast Asia, and then to
hear these voices in my head again and revisit these experiences as I was writing in Taiwan. And also, these stories about Northwest China, you know, a lot of these characters were in Ningxia, Gansu, Qinghai. They're beautiful areas in China, and they were some of the best reporting trips that I had. They were places that were just so different from Beijing and Shanghai and coastal eastern cities.
Those trips really got me thinking about, well, what is China? How are these boundaries defined? How are these different groups of people part of the Chinese nation building project? So I would say, although they're not a majority of the content of the book, reporting those stories really got me thinking about the main questions that undergird the book. Right. And just to backtrack on the theme of your book, it stresses Chinese identity. Why is that so important? Why should people care?
Obviously, it's a personal question. I'm a Chinese American. I've been thinking about identity for a while. I think a lot of the criticisms I got from people in China or Chinese state media in China were the fact that I had the split identity. People wanted me to choose one or the other, and I was never quite critical or favorable enough for either side. But on a bigger level, I think that even, and I write this in the book, I think even if you don't
You don't have a personal stake in this question of identity. So much of the Communist Party's policies about national security, about foreign policy, about strengthening the country, and the increase in political control that we've seen domestically, all of that stems to this
much more homogenous idea of what China should be. You know, it should be Mandarin speaking. Ideally, everyone acts like a Han Chinese person and they share the same Communist Party values that political control radiates out from the center and is applied consistently all the way to the borderlands that the Qing Empire added during imperial conquests
And I think those ideas about like, well, people must be Chinese from the inside out also motivated a lot of the terrible detention campaigns against ethnic minorities and against Uyghurs that we talked about at the start of this episode. So I found these threads of identity justifying and rationalizing so much of the policies that I was reporting on and that people criticize China for outside of China and that have shaped our
for better or worse, foreign policy with China and the U.S. So people need to care about this and understand what the underlying dynamics were from the mouths of Chinese people themselves. Yeah, and it affects the safety of Chinese Americans if the Chinese state wants to wrap them up as inherently Chinese, even if you've never been to China, that you are somehow Chinese and somehow under the authority of the Chinese state.
Right. And that's the issue that I get in my last chapter is the Chinese diaspora. How are they facing this challenge of a Chinese state that increasingly claims them, regardless of their immigration background, personal beliefs, personal identity, personal politics, increasingly links them to this Communist Party government, even though they also might be living in countries that are also viewing them with suspicion?
And unsurprisingly, there's been a lot of division among diaspora communities about what their stance should be. And that fascinated me as well. And one of your stories is about an accidental Chinese TikTok star, if not a star, someone who went viral on TikTok. It's quite timely given all the news about a potential TikTok ban in the U.S. How do you think understanding Joe's story could help outsiders understand China's censorship system better?
So the TikTok star that you're talking about is a scooter thief named Joe Lee T. And he went viral because he just kept stealing scooters and going to prison.
And he gives this jailhouse interview where he's like, you know what? It's fine. I like being in jail. It's a comfortable place. I don't want to work. That's why I steal scooters. And like, he basically just has this really, really in your face, unapologetic ownership of not wanting to be part of this, like, you know, work hard capitalist system that China has embraced economically. And he goes viral because of that. It touches a chord, touches a nerve among people who are fed up with working so hard in China and not really seeing results. Yeah.
And unsurprisingly, plot spoiler, he's censored when he comes out of prison because it's not a message that the party thinks is a healthy message for society. And through his story, I explore both the hard and the softer, more subtle ways that
the Communist Party censors content. It doesn't just remove content. It also creates its own content and puts it out there seemingly organically. So when I was in China, I never felt like I had a dearth of cultural material to watch or listen to because...
there was so much stuff being produced. It was just highly, highly controlled. You had this illusion of creative diversity. It was very, very sophisticated. And I think that that is an important aspect when you think about Chinese social media and how people engage with it.
On one level, it's not black or white. Just because TikTok, for example, is an app owned by a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing, that doesn't mean that it's censoring every single thing that goes up there. But also when you're looking at what is promoted and what's not, I mean, that ultimately is someone deciding. It's a subjective decision. And
If you're a user, do you want someone in China making that decision for you? Who knows? Should it be the U.S. government who decides for you whether or not you can access that app? I don't have a good answer to that either. But these are ongoing questions that I get to from the perspective of one guy in southern China.
Have you been following the TikToks refugees going to Xiaohongshu and other Chinese apps and talking to Chinese people and seeming to not care about censorship and trying to even bring up human rights issues and comments and being warned by Chinese users to basically be quiet? It's so odd to, you know, this is what has transpired. Like, how do you view all of this?
It reminds me of when Clubhouse came out. My colleagues have been covering this migration to Little Red Book or Red Note, whatever they call it in English. I was in the Middle East when all this happened. But it really reminds me of that moment of optimism when Clubhouse came out and it wasn't censored in China at first. And like all these people around the world and in the U.S. and China were meeting and having long conversations well into the night on Clubhouse about human rights and democracy and like doing these online salons.
I think that was the best, most beautiful part of this migration to Sehungshu, which is there's always a hunger to get to know people between the two countries, which I love. But also, like, you know, don't be naive about these platforms and the invisible regulations that pen them in. Yeah, I feel like especially if you're Chinese American and have plans to go to China at some times. And yeah.
Looking back at your stories and the way you reported on them, is there one you feel you wish I told a story differently? Like you can go back to China and ask more questions or that you would want to update in light of any recent developments for these people? I am so curious about how all of these people and these themes have developed in the time that I've been gone. You know, I haven't been in China for almost three years at this point. So I'm
I would say this is still an up-to-date book. The issues are relevant, but so much has already moved on as well. So, I mean, I'd like to update all of the chapters if I could. Yeah. And I'm curious particularly about, you spoke with a female human rights lawyer. Would you call her a human rights lawyer, Yongbin? Yeah, she would call herself a human rights lawyer now. Where is she now? Like what is her status as a lawyer?
I think that you'd have to ask her. I do know, but I'm not sure she'd be comfortable sharing. Yeah. Would you say generally the situation for defense lawyers in China is more or less the same or getting worse or uncertain? It's over. That was a beautiful period of time when people could use the law to really advance civil rights. Because on paper, it does protect so much of the human rights that those people were fighting for. And they got results.
And I think that those tactics no longer really work. But we've also seen like massive protests against zero COVID, people filing legal complaints themselves. If things are over for defense lawyers, what do you think about young people and their willingness to speak out and try to test the lines to express themselves these days?
there is obviously still dissent and resistance and pushback. I wouldn't call it massive though, and it's extremely fragmented. The challenge is to connect all these people and that's not happening because of surveillance and intimidation. And so I don't want to say there's no resistance at all. There's actually so much given the risks. It's really, really admirable to see. I just don't think it's been on a scale that has been able to achieve any kind of
societal change. But people are still, you know, people stand up for themselves in China. People are resilient and they do what they can in the space that's been given to them. And we talked a bit earlier about the tech rivalry between China and the U.S. and
In recent weeks before we were recording in early February, DeepSeek came out and people in China are very excited about it, very proud of it. And previously, you know, people like Jack Ma, Alibaba, like there was that sense that China was clamping down on tech giants. They were becoming too powerful. But there seems to be state support for these new Chinese startups. Like, do you have a sense of how this might evolve or change the story in China?
I think it goes to show that the story is not as simple as the U.S. has been insurmountable technology-wise over China, right? Like there are some things that the U.S. is better at, that China is better at. There are individual companies that buck the trends that we use to characterize the industry in either country. And so it's not...
It shouldn't be about US versus China. It's about really enterprising smart individuals who are making gains on the cutting edge. And the idea of the cutting edge is we don't know what's next because it's never been done before. Yeah. And since last year, China has had this internet meme, the garbage time of history, describing how pessimistic Chinese people have been feeling because of the slow economy and politics and everything else. And your book is about individuals who...
like, you know, aren't giving up. They are kind of pushing back in different ways. What kind of message do you hope the book can give to the world about those who are in China? That they are people too. They don't live sad, flat existences. They go through the same dramas and happinesses and tragedies that everyone around the world does. And just because it's this big country that you might never go to, that the U.S. has these tensions with,
It doesn't matter. You know, the stories there matter. And they're just as interesting and gripping, I think, as the stories you might find in the Middle East, which get much more news coverage, despite population-wise being so much smaller than China. You know, the weight of China matters. And it doesn't just matter on an economic or geopolitical level, but they should also matter on a human level. I mean, we should care about the humanity that exists out there. Sure. It's an amazing book. It's so timely. It makes me think about so many things. Where can people find your book?
They can order it off Bookshop. They can get a Kindle copy off Amazon. You can order it off Barnes and Noble if you want. I think they're doing a discount right now. Ideally, you can go to your local bookstore and find it in print. And yeah, it should be everywhere. And if you're not in the US or I think if you're not in the US, you would have to order the Kindle version. I'm sorry. I do know that it's being sold in print in Taiwan as well. Oh, in translation or English?
in English. That's amazing. We will put up links in our show notes and on our website. Congratulations again. And I'm so excited to see what you cover in the coming year. I'll be bookmarking your links on NPR.
Moving on to recommendations and advice for our listeners. Again, in such a polarized time, what ways do you think young journalists who want to pursue a career in China, what kind of approaches would you recommend that they take to try to establish a career writing or reporting on China?
study the language, but also have an open mind about how you cover China. You don't necessarily need to be there to cover China. There's the trade story, there's the technology story, there's the environmental story. So there are so many ways where you could start reporting on something completely unrelated to China, but find China a big part of your being. And
I hope more and more of people who cover even American politics understand and speak Mandarin Chinese because it also opens up a wealth of content that you can tap and people you can talk to who are part of the stories you're covering. Yeah, and I've seen stats on how the number of American students enrolling in China studies or Asian studies has totally declined recently.
Yeah, it's a bad trend and I hope it reverses. Yeah, me too. Yeah, when I was a student, I studied Mandarin because my family is from Hong Kong and I
I was so glad I took those courses because it's so important to obviously know the language before you want to report on a place. And as an editor, basically one of the questions I ask is like, do you speak Chinese? Can you talk to Chinese people? It's actually what I ask a lot of freelancers. So definitely it's great advice. Any other skills that they should master? Audio reporting, if people want to get into your line of work, what would you suggest? Listen, if you want to...
Right? Read as much as possible. If you want to do audio journalism, listen. Obviously, you can focus on the nuts and bolts, but often like so much of the craft comes from listening to how other people do the same stories that you're covering. Reverse engineer what they're doing and learn from that. And you'll develop a really good ear for what makes a good story and also how to craft that story. That's great advice. And on to recommendations of cultural content, books, arts, movies, TV shows, what are you consuming currently?
I watch so much television. I also read fiction now. I don't read nonfiction. This has been a big change for me starting the pandemic. I used to only read nonfiction, but I just decided I am a better nonfiction writer if I read fiction. And one of the joys of being in Taiwan was I started thinking so much more about
the pan-Chinese, pan-Asian connections in Southeast Asia with Taiwan being part of the mix. And one of the best books that I read last year on this was called The Gift of Rain. It's by a Malaysian writer named Han Tuan Eng. And he writes historical fiction. So it's about World War II. It takes place in Penang, which people should really visit if they ever go to Malaysia. It's so fascinating, so beautiful, and the food's amazing. But he writes with such emotion and pathos and like,
It could be a beach read, honestly. It also was highly educational. So I loved that. And all my friends know that I'm obsessed with science fiction. One of the best sci-fi books that I read in the last couple of months is called Calypso. I think that it challenges the genre of science fiction. It's written entirely in epic verse. So think like the Iliad or the Odyssey with some other themes of journey, of immortality, of what's the right word? Of transformation, right?
But it's about a space journey out to another world that they're trying to terraform. And the big questions about, well, what makes us human and what is the divine that it brings up in this sci-fi book, which was written in epic verse. It's fantastic.
Wow. And for me, you mentioned fiction. So I would like to recommend maybe a companion book to yours by one of our past podcast guests and one of actually the co-founders of New Voices, T. Ping Chen's Land of Big Numbers. So it's fictional stories that all together also give a really interesting view on Chinese society. That was out in 2021, but I recently reread it and really enjoyed it. The stories are so good. Yeah. In conjunction with reading yours at the same time, I thought it was really complimentary.
And I'd be remiss to shout out that I recently joined, actually it's been a year, I've joined another media nonprofit, Rest of World, a global publication that challenges expectations about whose experiences with technology matter. I've been really enjoying it and everything you said about covering China outside China, that's basically what we try to do in an authentic way and be
People ask why, why rest of world? Well, it's a corporate catch-all term using the West to designate everyone else and companies use it to lump together people outside wealthy Western countries. So I'm very excited to be part of a team devoted to covering away social issues and technology. And China's impact intersects outside Silicon Valley. And you can read us at restofworld.org.
Congratulations on the new job. Thank you. Yeah, it's really fun. And I feel like I'm part of like a China news team outside of China. So it's been almost 15 years of a career continuously covering China and now we're almost half a bit outside China. So definitely it is possible.
On to self-care, a special New Voices segment where we talk about how we are taking care of ourselves these days outside of work. I will go first. Mine is a reminder to take your PTO days if you're fortunate enough to have them and try not to check your work messages during your time off. What are your recommendations for self-care, Emily?
I have been very bad about self-care over the last two months. I have not had a single day off since November, but I am trying to take vacation time. It is so important to space out vacation and, yeah, to take time off. I...
I feel like I shouldn't be giving advice when I don't listen to myself these days. But normally, I think I said this the last time too, exercise is so important for me to clear my mind and to reset emotionally. And I can't wait to get back into that now that I am living in one place. And I think that being able to enjoy things that are completely unrelated to your day job is important. Like our jobs can be so consuming and it's great.
if you love your job and you care about doing it. But it's also okay not to care sometimes and to consume frivolous content and to read fiction and like watch TV, which is what I do. Yeah, that's great. And you're just going to remind me to take my next call outside of...
my house and do like a walking call because sometimes that's the only way you can fit some self-care into a busy work day. Thank you so much, Emily, for joining us. It's been fascinating to talk about what you've been working on and best of luck with the book launch. Hope we get some rest before then because I'm sure I won't be the only one wanting to talk to you all about it. And I'm so excited to have people read your book and talk about your book. And thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you.
You've been listening to the New Voices podcast with me, your host, Joanna Chu, and our guest, Emily Feng. Our producer is Wayne Kwong, and our editor is Rebecca Liu. Music is by April Ju. Follow us on X, New Voices, Instagram, New Voices underscore network, our group on Facebook.
and read our magazine stories on newvoices.com. You can also find all of our past podcasts there that you can listen to. And New Voices is a nonprofit now, so please support our activities via Patreon or PayPal. And our patrons are invited to play an active role in our community to receive special bonus episodes and suggest podcast guests to us. Thank you, and until next time.