Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello from New York and welcome to the New Voices podcast. This show celebrates the brilliant women shaping how we understand China today through their writing, research, and in-depth reporting. I'm your host, Chani Xu, New Voices board chair and comms consultant.
Today our guest is Chin Chin, author of Model Minority Gone Rogue, How an Unfulfilled Daughter of a Tiger Mother Went Way Off Script, which debuted earlier this year in Australia and New Zealand and was published by Hachette.
Hi, Chin Chin, and welcome to the podcast. Hi, Chani. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here. I ran to pick up your new book and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I guess to start, can you introduce your book to us? What is it about?
Yeah, it's my memoir. I wrote it about my journey of how I went from being the good Asian daughter to finding my own way and feeling lost and the messiness and all the different adventures that I had to get to where I am now. Can you tell us about this wonderful cover photo of you in a red sweater, purple skirt and green boots with an umbrella?
I think you're like eight or nine maybe and grinning. Can you just tell us the significance of this photo? Yeah, well, my mom must have dressed me. I mean, I don't remember having that cool a fashion sense. And then taking the photo, I have no idea why I have an umbrella inside. Maybe it was raining and I was about to go out. But yeah, little Chin Chin, I guess, feels pretty groovy that she's on the cover of a book now. So...
So as a backstory for our audience, actually, so New Voices founder Joanna Chu and I actually knew you when we all lived in Beijing together in the 2010s, when you were Lisa Chin, the former lawyer who was working at UNICEF Beijing.
Yeah, when we met, you knew me as Lisa and I had gone by Lisa for nearly 30 years. It was actually because of Lisa Simpson and I very much related to her. There's a part in The Simpsons where the school is closed because of a snow day and Lisa goes up to Marge and she can't handle it. She's so anxious because she loves school so much and she says, grade me, grade me.
to Marge and that was me I needed the validation I needed teachers to tell me how good I was I don't know whether that came from not just the culture but also growing up Asian in the west and
So when you were Lisa, can you describe your life to us? What were you doing as a child at the time? What kind of impact did your parents' expectations have on you?
Growing up in Australia, the first time I saw an Asian woman in a magazine, I actually cut out her picture and put it in my journal, stuck it in my diary. And I would look back and be like, wow, I didn't have the words for what it was like to not be seen, to be invisible, not just in the media, but feel invisible out of a sense of safety and invisible because I felt too scared to speak up.
fear shaped a lot of my decisions about what I was going to do professionally and also personally in relationships too, of who I needed to be and who I should be with. Yeah, I can relate to that. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about
that in terms of, well, both areas, like professionally and personally? Yeah, I mean, I can start professionally. When I started college or university, as we call it here, I reckon I did so many extracurriculars, people thought I had political ambitions, which was
actually not the case at all. I just thought I needed to tick all the boxes. It came so deeply within my DNA from the East that I was this Chinese woman that had the burden of a thousand years of foot binding and women not being able to achieve their dreams except to be an accessory to a man or produce heirs.
And then from the West too, that as a high achiever, I had to make the most of my good grades or my intelligence to somehow change the world. And when you put those two expectations together, plus the model minority, what are you going to get? I know I'm laughing right now, but it's really not.
That funny. I mean, just to go through that amount of pressure, like I felt that myself for sure, just going through the US education system and getting into a good college and... And not even realizing what was driving that, right? Yeah.
not questioning it. No, still, I mean, it's so formative. The way that you gain your parents' approval is by acing your exams, which is one of the lines in your book that really resonated with me. And can you tell us more about the pivots in your career? And now you celebrate the concept of a non-linear career, but can you explain to us what that means to you? It's very much like
a jungle gym rather than a straight line, like climbing up different ways and exploring. I started as a corporate lawyer and I was super unhappy and I, you know, I would look out the window and really want to be the window cleaner instead of looking at another contract review. And Teach for Australia had just started in the country. So I applied for that. I got in and I thought, great, I'm like really doing something different. I'm going to, yeah, just
move away from the corporate, the making money. But actually that in itself was its own kind of chasing status because even though I wasn't making money, it was like,
being a do-gooder teacher and trying to be like the Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds thing, which is clearly problematic. I didn't do a very good job. My students, a lot of them couldn't read. They had generational poverty. And I wasn't able to change their lives in the way that the program told me that I would be able to.
But the bar kept getting higher for me because I felt like, okay, I failed as a teacher. I spent seven years trying to do this law thing. Who am I without like a great job? So where did I go?
The H-bomb, right? Harvard. Yeah, it just kept going up and up. Yeah. I mean, Harvard was amazing. Like I got to study with some of the best minds and be in that environment. And at the same time, it is a huge pressure cooker. I was unwell. I went to see a counselor and the mental health counseling, the office was filled. It was full of students.
And not only that, I remember receiving an email from the university and an alumni had suicided. And that started a conversation about how we dealt with mental health issues. Instead of aiming for education minister in Australia, I'm like, no, I'm going to go back to my roots and really learn more about the country of my birth. I was born in Guiyang, in Guizhou, and I went there without having a job, but I
this ambition or this zeal to study more Chinese and connect with people who looked more like myself, like you. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We all went there with maybe similar purposes, but UNICEF was another kind of beast of bureaucracy and very interesting because I also...
learned about it through my consultancy work. It was also a place where the majority of people that worked there were Asian, were Chinese women. One of the first meetings that I went to with 12 or 15 people all sitting around the room
And at one point I realized, wow, there are no white men in this meeting. Like that is incredible. Oh, that's true. Yeah. China for me, what wasn't just an awakening in terms of getting close to my roots as a Chinese born Australian, it also helped me with learning and discovering more about my sexual side. In Australia, probably similar to the States,
Chinese and Asian women are exoticized, fetishized. In Beijing, actually, it was the place, maybe it was the people that I met as well, but there was this sense of exploration and adventure that I was able to do. At that point, I had decided I wasn't going to sleep with any white men anymore or date them because...
I'd only found white men attractive growing up. In Beijing, I was able to become more free. Yeah, I cut my hair short. I was mistaken for a boy. I explored and was open about my queerness. You might remember in Beijing, I had so many journalist friends. I loved that they were writing and reporting on issues. And it was something that I...
didn't know I could do or I had muted my ambitions about that. I always wanted to be a writer. Already I was writing a lot. I was journaling a lot. There was one point because when I first got to China, I didn't have a job. So I was kind of wandering around doing a lot of traveling and doing a lot of journaling. And so when I came back to Australia and I had some time off,
That's when my dreams of trying to write my story down came back.
So when we knew you at UNICEF, you were still on that trajectory of like trying to achieve something like who knows what that was. And then six years later, I realized through a LinkedIn post that you'd become a librarian in Canberra, had published a memoir, and that you would change your name. So it was a triple whammy. When did you or how did you break away from your former self? Hmm.
I mean, shi ku and ren, like to eat bitterness and to endure, are just two of the major hallmarks of being Chinese, right? Yes. And getting away from that to come to another way of being is really difficult and it's still ongoing. And I can't ever completely say goodbye to her. She's still there, like the ambitious girl
people pleaser, diligent, overachiever that acts out of duty and obligation and wanting to impress and get the gold stars. And at the same time, what was my ambition for? I thought it was to...
get rich or change the world or save the children. But no, it's to try and discover what it means to be me, this person in this Asian woman looking body, trying to find acceptance and equanimity and love. And day to day, that could look anything like
meditating in the morning, going for a walk or crying because things are hard and feeling my feelings or jumping on my mini trampoline.
or hugging a tree or going to my like more quiet job where the most dramatic thing that happens is you know in the reading rooms there's someone that's not following procedure because they've brought a coffee in rather than bottled water only like no I mean librarians jobs are so much more than that but you know like the the stakes are a bit lower.
Perhaps because of now what I've been through and I talk about some of the crises that I went through in the book, there's more of a sense of compassion and
empathy and humility I have for her, why she had to be that way. And I can take her along on the journey and it's being able to harness that energy because there is so much that she was able to give me through her striving that I can now use in a different way. Coming up, Chin Chin talks about her decision to reclaim her original name and her first writing experience.
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Just to get back to the beginning, can you tell us a little bit about the reclaiming of your name to Chin Chin, which is the name that you were born with? My name Chin Chin, in Chinese, it means it's 勤奋的勤, which means diligent. My father gave it to me, one, because, you know, being a good communist, we all have to be diligent.
But two, he wanted to be a writer. And that was the name that he wanted to use if he ever wrote a book. Because the book was getting away from the model minority myth, I almost felt forced or compelled to not go by Lisa anymore. Because Lisa was the person when I was still internalizing those scripts. And it was only
halfway through or towards the end of the book writing process that I realized I had to reclaim my Chinese name, even if it might have been one, more difficult for people to pronounce and two, harder for the publishers because they had to go and change a lot of the marking material.
I think this journey was really about you becoming your true self. And in that sense, it was a double manifestation in a way because your true purpose also coincided with your book writing and publication. And I just, I think that's like so fortuitous that, you know, you quote unquote, like succeeded in that, but just very happy for you. Thank you so much.
Yeah. And can you tell us more about your writing process, like how you got started on that? Well, I mean, that feels like so long ago now, but it was it was during COVID. I mean, I guess we can't talk about being Chinese diaspora without talking about COVID. But yeah, it was the like the rising rage and the grief of seeing how I was actually being treated.
because of this pandemic and not just me, but people who look like me, literally women getting killed, old grannies being sucker punched. So I channeled that rage into writing and that's how the first one of the chapters came and the title came. I think the first writing, it was hard, but it wasn't that hard because the publisher told me when I sent it to her,
It sounds like you're trying to write to get an A+. Oh my gosh, yeah. So what I thought was hard was actually me just trying to impress her. And by the end, I think I had like seven rewrites. She said, it sounds okay, now you're writing as if your heart broke open. And so those last rewrites were the hardest when I had to write to the bone, as writers call it.
Right. And also that you just have to write about your family and all the raw things that you went through with no censorship, right? Because you can't censor yourself. It's part of the writing process is that you need to just break open into your heart and imagine that those people aren't even alive. I think I read that somewhere that you can't write as if your parents are like looking over your shoulder and alive. Then
How about your publishing experience? I think a lot of our readers have questions about how did you find your agent or publisher as a first time writer with no past journalism experience? Absolutely. I was a I am a first time writer. I didn't have any contacts in the industry and I didn't have social media and I didn't have publications. It came out of necessity.
My intuition that I had to contact someone called Benjamin Law and it turned out I Googled his email and it turned out that he was a book scout for Hachette.
That sounds a little nuts, but also disclaimer, I was trying to send out my manuscript to agents. I was, and getting rejections. That's a normal part of the process, I guess. So it was only until Benjamin Law, who is a Chinese Australian, specifically employed by Hachette to source out more writers that they wouldn't have been able to find otherwise, that I was able to get a contract signed.
And my book is the first through that scouting partnership. That's amazing. And the other one is financially, how did you support yourself through this writing process? In Australia, the average income of writers each year is about $13,000.
So absolutely, that is a very real question of how was I able to have the time? I had savings. My partner was working some of the time while I was doing this. And also there's a very real acknowledgement of privilege, like privilege.
I have to thank my parents for instilling in me savings. Like, right. I guess some of my white friends are just like, how do you have so many savings? It's like, how do you not? How can you spend so much just frivolously? Yeah, yeah. That's the Lisa part talking. And you also bought a home like early on in your career. Is that right?
Uh, not too early on. I mean, my mom wanted me to buy a house as soon as I was a lawyer, right? But yeah, I was, I had an investment property. I wasn't paying any rent. I didn't live in New York.
for example, which helped. Okay, so we have to move to Canberra's answer to this. But no, I mean, I love what you said about writing out of love rather than fear. And I think also living life that way is so kind of admirable and what we all want to achieve, but it's so hard.
Oh, we are all on the journey. I am definitely not there, Jenny. Like, yeah. And finally, what's your biggest takeaway from your book? Well, I wrote it for anyone who is feeling...
Just desperately unfulfilled and trying to numb that feeling with work or tech or sex and drugs, which is how I used to do that. And that pressure to be the good Chinese daughter that we were all shaped to be.
So the takeaway is there is nothing wrong with you for being like that. I mean, that's actually very much part of the programming. And at the same time, there is a part of you I know that wants to be free and can act from a place of what you really want to do, not what you're expected to do.
Okay, so now we're going to just move into recommendations and I'll go first.
So I've just read Emily Witt's new book, Health and Safety, A Breakdown. She's a New Yorker writer and reporter, and this book depicts her experience in the Brooklyn rave scene with lots of drugs to get through the 48 hours of partying, like both pre and post pandemic and her own journey through a relationship
similar to dickhead but you have to read it it's like really crazy and then in the middle of all of that getting a job at the new yorker so she obviously was highly you know able to function uh and partying on the weekend so i really like that book um what about you
Yeah, I mean, where do I even start? I recently finished House of Kwa by Mimi Kwa and it's actually in the States now. It's about a Chinese-Australian woman and she says...
It's like Crazy Rich Asians without the rich. But yeah, her three generations from her granddad was very wealthy and one of her ancestors started off in the Forbidden Palace working for the emperor to her present day of being a biracial Chinese Australian woman growing up in regional Australia.
Great. And then a new voice of special segment is on self-care. Mine is actually taking inspiration from what you're saying. I want to make more time to meditate. I used to do five minutes a morning using Insight Timer. And so this is purely aspirational. Like I just want to go back to that routine. I think it really set a tone to my day and I'm missing that in my life. But what about you? Chani, if you need an accountability partner, I'm all here.
Oh my gosh. Okay. Yeah. That's amazing. I will WhatsApp you right after this. So what's your self-care tip? Well, right now it's spring in Australia. So I, maybe something that you could help me be accountable for is I want to hug a tree a day. Oh, I love that. Yeah. I mean, trees give us so much chi and they're alive and they've grounded. They
They've got so much roots, but they're also reaching up and enjoying the sunshine and they mold to their environments. I love trees and I need to befriend more of them. Oh my gosh, I love that.
Yeah, I always look at, I try to look up on my phone to the nature around me and I think touching them is just the next step. I think it makes sense. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that, Chin Chin, and thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me on, Jenny.
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