U.Ok. Labor Party candidate, born in China, writes about women’s non-public development: NPR

NPR’s Steve Inskeep interviews producers and U.O.K. talked to. Labor Party candidate Yuan Yang on what women face in her former home country of China.

STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: This summer in the U.K. In the election, Labor Celebration applicants side with Yuan Yang. She posted a video this spring, posing on a suburban boulevard.

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Yuan Yang: Just said a basic choice, and that is the pace of business. My title is Yuan Yang, and I am your Labor MP candidate for our new constituency of Earley and Woodley, covering Shinfield and South Studying.

INSKEEP: She describes her London suburb as filthy rich and numerous. It is home to many tech companies, global companies, which have attracted immigrant families – including their own families. He was born in China, to a family who moved to Britain when he was four. She grew up to be a journalist and returned to China for a time to file for the Financial Times. Taking sides between its democratic population and its undemocratic population. Do you return home and sometimes feel that we in the West, or in democratic countries, don’t fully know what we have?

Yang: Oh, totally. I don’t believe we fully recognize what we have, and it’s the same cliché that you don’t understand what you have until you start losing it.

INSKEEP: Now, Yuan Yang faces two heavy dates that make up the two aspects of his month. They have a collection coming out on July 2nd. “Private Revolution” tells the story of four women he met in China. She deliberately chooses to resist the reserve tour because of her alternative burdensome past – the elections being held on July 4. She has quit her job in journalism, and she is campaigning.

Yang: I was at a meeting recently – and I was answering questions from citizens. And one of them said, Yuan, the way you talk about the opportunity, it sounds like you’re optimistic. And I really considered this, and I think I’m positive through character, although I additionally recognize that my optimism – my hope for the renewal of British self-government – comes from exactly the opposite vision, which There is a trend of authoritarianism in China, the crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong in 2019 and beyond and the tightening of restrictions on what journalists can do and, I think, the situation from China to the outside world is extremely bad. .

And again U.O.K. I am coming. There is a whiff of untapped air in relation to our talent for writing, knocking on anyone’s door and asking them who they might vote for and what they remind the High Minister of. These are issues that may not be possible for activists and journalists to address in China.

INSKEEP: Yang is in her 30s, and that’s part of the story because she wrote her story about four Chinese women who were around the same day. All four were born around 1990. All four grew up as China opened up economically. All attempted to take away whatever choices a free population had. One woman, called Jun in the protected area, was born in a village so far away, it was a three-hour drive to the next paved road. The highlights of his month are painful. His father was seriously injured in a knife attack and his mother died while running into a coal mine. June Reminiscences wish to receive schooling.

Yang: I think there’s a thing that’s very depressing about having nothing to lose, and similarly for June, one of the alternate characters – and for their mothers, to a degree – an unknown month. The decision to make the jump comes from realizing that if they stayed on the farm, there wouldn’t be much left for them.

INSKEEP: June will move out of that village, get schooling and find tech jobs in Beijing. The stories of the four women reflect the attitudes of modern China as well as the new tightening of surveillance and restrictions on speech.

Yang: What I really wanted to do on this reserve was find out what it feels like to walk through these changes. You know, how they affect how you view your relationships with your society, with your children, with your family members, how you live in the past, how your friendships work, best of all. How do your friendships evolve as you all visit other cities? The very dark side of it was just like doing all this and playing out my pace with those interesting women, I also had in mind the safety of my interviewees and the censorship and surveillance over and over again. , The joy of it was more or less a mixture of satisfaction and playfulness and contemplation of the highly political scenario in which we were.

INSKEEP: What do these four stories tell you, first of all, about China and how it has changed over the last few decades?

Yang: There is optimism in the pace of growth. For most women, if they were born in villages, they were born into rural poverty, like my father was when he was born in the 60s. His people may have orchestrated the beginning of business growth – known as the post-’80s moment of reform and opening-up. When you’re more or less born into that environment, you’re born into an environment where everyone expects their people to do better – and more or less expects their people to do much better, in fact – in ways that weren’t Is it possible or not possible now…

INSKEEP: Yes.

YANG: …For the history of your society, because entire countries are being lifted out of poverty so rapidly. And so the community is conditioned to expect extra, to be inspired. And later, as those millennial women are joining the workforce and more or less entering the 2010s, they start the recession. You know, this is the other side of the story of optimism. It’s a story of mismatched expectations and what happens now is that your ambitions are some distance higher, your aspirations are probably some distance higher than what you’ll be able to physically realize, given the recession, I think part of the protection is that. In terms of accommodating the truth, and what the community tells itself to care about that truth.

INSKEEP: I’m inspired by the ambition of the women you profiled. As you describe it, the pace at school for a guy named Siyu is terrible. She is not in the habit of cramming that is common in Chinese-language schools, but she eventually teaches herself English and becomes a tutor. Am I right about this?

Yang: That’s right, sure, and it’s achieved through what I can only describe as very abrupt routes. Now, Seiyuu – I think she and the other three women who are the central characters of Protection have something in common, which is that they are idealists. I think they dream far beyond what is understandable, and they don’t really meet the expectations of their people – in many ways surpass them, in many ways completely the opposite. He almost confuses them by stepping in. Of course his people were expecting him. So I think Siu and Jun -, they’re a one in a million community, and but the conflict that they face and the way they respond to it, I think, they’re the epitome of character in the modern Chinese language. Many reflect parts and origins of the modern Chinese imagination, which seeks to transcend what has come before you and, in some ways, dream in extraordinary and idealistic ways.

INSKEEP: Yuan Yang is the creator of “Private Revolutions: Four Women Confront China’s New Social Order.” She is also the Labor Party candidate for Parliament in the UK. Election preparations are in full swing in a few days. thank you so much.

Yang: Beautiful. Thank you very much.

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