I'm leaving China... for SupChina!

I’m thrilled to announce that as of today, I’ve joined the amazing team at SupChina as their Chief Marketing Officer. And as part of that role, I’m moving back to the United States.

Words cannot express how precious this time in China has been for me these past two years. I’m extremely thankful for my experience at RADII reporting on youth culture here. It gave me the opportunity to meet and work with so many awesome people – interviewees, collaborators, and co-workers.

As a close to this chapter, I figured I’d list some of my favorite projects with RADII:

YUNNAN TRIP: We booked a week-long whirlwind of a content generation tour of Yunnan in November 2020 to find stories from lesser known parts of this country. During our time there, we:

• Filmed an interview with Brian Linden of the Linden Center to learn more about his life story and creating sustainable rural tourism in the region.

• Rocked out at our china.wav event with Yeti Out & Dada Kunming.
• Somehow managed to fit in a whole host of things besides, one of which was visiting the largest flower market in Asia, which I documented in this short video:

• We launched a very, very good list of the 100 movies you should watch to understand what's going on in China.

I’m still working through watching everything, but the list (curated by Jake Newby, Bryan Grogan, and their many awesome and incredibly knowledgeable friends) has introduced me to some of my favorite Chinese films.

• We were the media partner of the Feast Festival in Shanghai, where we helped shine a light on some of the most interesting aspects of modern Chinese cuisine. I got the opportunity to present a fun trends recap for the public – I called it “What’s on Young China’s Plate” and you can watch it here if you want to know what the 00/90-后 are eating/drinking and why:

• We illuminated and illustrated several important conversations Young China was having around “involution,” LGBTQ+ pronouns, and “Chicken Parenting” which got widely shared and a lot of praise.
• I got to participate in a video with our staff writer Lu, a pilot for a series that unfortunately we chose not to continue, but I thought was super fun. We ate fried chicken while talking about how much China loves fried chicken.

There’s also several projects not released yet but that I devoted a lot of time and energy to, and I’ll be excited to premier them here when I can. A special thank you to team members Thana, Siyuan, Lu, Miranda, Mishi & Sabina for collaborating with me on them.

On the marketing task list side, my scrappy little team and I managed to pull off a multitude of partnerships and events, while also quadrupling our follower count across our social media platforms in my short time running RADII marketing.

I gravitate towards people who can’t be anything but themselves, and I’ve been lucky that the people who I’ve had the privilege to manage are that winning combo of authentic, hilarious and hard working. ILU Greg & Mavis!

I now plan to bring my energies to New York City for SupChina, which is exciting to me on so many levels! Not only do I get to continue doing the work that appealed to me when I started at RADII – to foster more nuanced conversations about China with the rest of the world – I’m going to be doing it with people I’ve long admired for their skills and extensive China experience.

Some initial dots on the radar that get me giddy:

• The Serica Initiative with the China Institute that is giving out grants to young philanthropists that strive to drive positive change through Sino-American collaboration. If that sounds like you, you can apply to the grant here.
• The upcoming Red Paper 2022. I read this religiously every year, as should anybody who wants to know what’s going on in China. You can check out last year’s Red Paper here to see what I’m talking about.
• The Women’s Conference, which I’ve jealously observed from afar all these years and will finally have a chance to attend in 2022. Just check out the insane lineup of speakers they’re able to get.

There’s so so so much more to talk about, but I’ll save that for the upcoming year. In the meantime, I'll end this just with another note of gratitude. When I left Beijing in 2019, I never expected to return to working in China, and I never expected to return to working in the United States either. Now come 2022, I will have done both, but in the best case scenario for me possible.

I don't know how I got this lucky, but I promise I won't take it for granted.

A version of this appeared on my LinkedIn first, but I decided to replicate it here just for posterity's sake.

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