12.13 | talking china in new york

I miss the days of just sort of feeling like you could create a community by talking in a sane and cheerful way to the world.
– Neil Gaiman

✉️ letter #47

One of the extracurricular activities I'm glad I managed to kick off consistently this year was events for the New York City chapter of Young China Watchers. Originally a thriving community of around 600 people consistently holding dinners and other events, it'd gotten a little wrecked during COVID.

I started out hosting a happy hour in June, followed by a picnic in August. In October, I put on our first talk - with the organizers of an indie publishing art book fair that featured hundreds of emerging Chinese artist/writers for the first time in America (they were scouted by the MET to add some of the works to a permanent collection and I can't be more proud of them).

And now in December, I've ended the year on a high note with a book talk with author Leta Hong Fincher and feminist activist Xiaowen Liang. It was a great night to discuss a topic near and dear to my heart, and to find China community outside of my old job.

Leta's seminal novel Leftover Women came out about a decade ago now, documenting the sexism of boom China when it came to women's roles in the world. It asked why, in this modern and supposedly "equal" era, was there so much specific propaganda pressuring women to get married by 27? When education is held up in such high esteem in the prevailing culture, why was Xinhua making jokes like, "There are three genders - men, women, and women with PhDs"?

Leta stumbled into the topic when she was researching home buying and real estate for her thesis - finding that a lot of the ambitious young women she met in the real estate industry were putting almost all their earnings into assets that were only in their husbands' names. She documented the inequality of messaging and the socioeconomic practices that kept women without personal financial security, no matter how much harder they strove.

Ten years on and there's more and different things to worry about. As women began to outperform men in universities, universities raised the admittance bar for women higher than for men. As domestic and sexual violence incidents began getting viral, courts made divorce harder. As the birth and marriage rate dropped, the government cracked down on overtly feminist messaging and the LGBTQ+ community.

But, as Leta explained and Xiaowen backed up with her own stories of Chinese feminist activists, a very critical cultural shift has happened since 2013 - women have wised up. Pandora's Box has been opened and women ten years on are more likely to to argue for their rights, to challenge conceptions of womanly appeal, and to see marriage for the trap the government has made it into. As the CCP gets more desperate to solve the birth rate problem, it'll be interesting to see if, instead of continually using the stick of humiliation tactics, they'll actually provide some carrots of... I don't know, making men actually enjoyable to marry?

Anyway, I'm pretty excited to keep this momentum going but I could really use some extra hands. If you know anyone in New York that might want to get involved with China-focused events, please let me know about them!

🎼 the soundtrack | Spitting Off the Edge of the World - Yeah Yeah Yeahs ft. Perfume Genius

🌱 the green light | an eco-focused newsreel

COP28, the global climate change conference, has now finished with what they're calling "an agreement that signals the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era." The fact that they were able to even make the declaration of this transition is a newbie for them, which I suppose is a good thing but doesn't really bode well for the rest of us all things considered. Like someone admitting the brakes need to be fixed as you're sliding down a mountain. Forbes has a surprisingly good breakdown on all the agreements that have been made, including a first ever climate loss and damage fund, explicit text on water security and ecosystems, the focus on a "just transition" etc. As they state though, "in the final accounting, much of the agreement feels like incrementalism. Against the urgency of the moment, and a year of record-breaking heat, small steps are not enough when giant leaps are needed."

• In its latest accounting, the International Union for Conservation of Nature finds that more than 44,000 species worldwide are threatened with extinction. Of these, nearly 7,000 face an immediate threat from climate change. [Yale E360]
• If you know anything about anything electric vehicles, you know that China's the biggest player in anything from supply chain to sales. It's probably no surprise that it's also way ahead in figuring out how to actually recycle all that precious metal in EV batteries. [Envirotec]
• The US has several federal climate disaster resilience projects, but they're all fractured and poorly coordinated. Is there a better way? [Bloomberg]

🪢assorted | food for thought from around the internet

• Sorry Moon, you've been anthropocenized. Apparently we've changed the moon's surface so much that it's entered a new geological era of human impact. Why does that sound so terrifying to me? [Live Science]
• We are about five to ten years away from being able to create an artificial human womb... meaning you no longer need to be a fertile lady to bear a child. What will that mean for feminism? [The Walrus]
• Europe is now protecting gig workers from being fired by algorithm and companies like Uber and Deliveroo now need to clarify how they are judging their employees in the first place. [WIRED]
• The Public Domain Review has a cool little advent calendar of several key works that will "enter the public domain" in 2024, including Disney's Steamboat Willy, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (a favorite of mine!). This means that these works are now fair game for anyone to make an adaptation of, one of the reasons why we have so many Sherlock interpretations. [Public Domain Review]

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

I flew from New York to Shanghai today, which included a three hour layover in London, and due to a pretty out-of-whack sleep schedule in the days preceding, I found myself absolutely unable to sleep for longer than a 20 minute nap the entire 18 hours I was up in the air. I watched a LOT of movies and sadly, most of them were meh. The only one I truly found spectacular was Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse.

It was as artistically masterful as the first animated Miles Morales Spider-Man film - even more so because now, not only are the variants each bringing a new genre to their character art, but they're bringing it to entire worlds too. I especially loved the cut-out zine style they used for Hobie Brown, Spider-Punk (video may contain some spoilers):

While asking about Christmas gifting, I found out from my brother that both his very young kids (3yo & 1yo) are very much into the Spiderverse. That's truly music to my ears.

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