The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Fall of a Chinese Pop Star, and Calvin Trillin’s Happy Marriage

Episode Date: January 22, 2019

For some years, Denise Ho was one of the most popular singers in Asia. A Hong Kong native, she performed the style known as Cantopop in mainland China and in foreign countries with Chinese émigré populations. But, as Ho told the staff writer Jiayang Fan, she began to have qualms about the often-saccharine content of the genre. “Is that all? Is that all I can do with my songs, my career—just for personal wealth, and all that?” She was one of the first stars in China to come out as a lesbian, which the government took in stride; but, when she took part in political demonstrations in Hong Kong, she was arrested on television and detained. Authorities began to cancel her concerts, and to block access to her work on the Internet in China. Her endorsements followed suit. “I expected to be banned from China, but I wasn’t expecting the government to react to it in such a way,” she says. “The main goal is to silence everyone—especially the younger generations—with fear.” Now Denise Ho is trying to rebuild her career as something unfamiliar in China: an underground protest singer. Plus: Kai-Fu Lee on China’s tech sector and the challenge it poses to Silicon Valley; and the longtime staff writer Calvin Trillin, who puts his happy marriage onstage in a new play, “About Alice.” “This play certainly would have failed Drama 101 . . . But you have to write about what you know.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Denise Ho was one of the biggest pop stars in China. She played stadiums. She was in movies. She advertised brands like Motorola and Eve San Laurent all over Asia. Denise Ho is a singer. of cantopop, which means that she performs in the Chinese dialect of Cantonese. At her peak, she was one of the top-selling female artists in Hong Kong and played all over mainland China and Taiwan,

basically any countries with a large Chinese emigrate population. That's staff writer Jayang Fon, who recently profiled Denise Ho. And then 2014 rolls around, and students and actors and actors, took to the streets to ask for a more democratic process, and Denise joined them in their fight for universal suffrage. The protests, which sprung up in various neighborhoods throughout Hong Kong, became known as the umbrella movement, and the umbrella was a powerful symbol because it was a tool that protesters used to defend themselves against the tear gas that police officers were spraying on them. Denise was arrested on national television and became an

enduring image of the struggle for democracy. Before the umbrella movement, Denise Ho was earning about 80% of her income from mainland China, where she is now prohibited from performing and where her music has been completely scrubbed from the internet. Now Denise Ho is trying to reinvent herself as something like a countercultural songwriter, all under the very watchful eye of the Chinese government. Here's Zhang Fan speaking with Denise Ho. So you grew up at Hong Kong and you moved to Montreal at age 11, and then you moved back to Hong Kong to pursue your singing career.

Did being away from Hong Kong for almost 10 years make you see Hong Kong differently? by the time you came back at age 19 or 20? Well, it was kind of, you know, a dream that I had, I guess, during the teenage years to, you know, maybe someday go back to Hong Kong. Because why was it important to you to go back to Hong Kong? Why did you harbor this? I didn't see myself singing, you know, besides Sylind Dion. or, you know, in French, or I didn't see myself having a career in Canada. And so I was really update with what was happening in the music and entertainment industry in Hong Kong.

My idol is this cantal pop diva Anita Muay. And she was some sort of a link between me in Hong Kong, I guess, you know, during all those years that I wasn't in Hong Kong. she was this very, very extravagant singer with all these costumes and she was amazing on stage. She had this showmanship that was incomparable to anybody else in Hong Kong or even in the Asian market

and that was what attracted me first. She was very socially aware. She took a responsibility to voice out her opinions whenever she saw something that she had to stand up for, namely when in 1989 the Tiananmen massacre. She was very in the very, very front. of the whole movement. Right. That was something that I admired. And also that influenced me a lot without me knowing, you know, unconsciously.

Cantonese pop songs and Cantonese singing celebrities are known to be very beautiful, very glamorous. And many of their most popular tunes are catchy and sometimes thought of as formulaic and quite saturn. But your songs have encompassed a much larger range of issues, everything from the lives of marginalized to even mental illness. I mean, you had this album called 10 Days in the Mad House. Why did you want to explore these subjects that are sometimes considered ugly? Why was that important to you?

The whole journey started when I became 30, which was 11 years ago. And, you know, I had a great, well, according to me, I had a great career until then, awards and all that. I was starting to get onto that path of thinking, is that all? You know, is that all that I can do with my songs, my career, you know, just for personal wealth and all that? And so, yeah, that was when I started to think, you know, should I be doing more? You know, I just went to San Francisco last week. And I was really shocked when there were so many homeless people and I guess some of them

where, you know, they had certain mental illness. And, you know, they are just the taboo of every city. And, yeah, so back then I wanted to do this album talking about madness. Growing up, I mean, did you have any personal connection to, you know, either depression or anxiety, or did you have friends who experienced any kind of? Actually, no. Wow. No.

Was there a song in 10 days in the madhouse that particularly stood out to you or that, you know, is your favorite, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the first song, which is Qingsan Dai Ma, Thelma. Uh-huh. And it's about this girl who enters this madhouse, which for her is, you know, the society where there are so many different issues that seems very. sickening to her. I think there is this part of the lyrics

which is talking about you know people think that they are so strong and so normal and better than everyone else but you know it's just basically everyone is quite lost

in their everyday lives In that Inan In fact In fact In fact In that project In that project we went to

So many different people And I Interviewed this Doctor he said, you know, Hong Kong society is actually the biggest asylum. Wow. Yeah, because there are so many issues and problems that we just bury and hide and drawers and all that. But like, it's so, yeah, there are sicknesses everywhere.

In Chinese society, again, there's such value placed on decorum and your behavior and hiding things that you're not proud of or you think that society would not be proud of. And that really segues, I think, nicely to what must have been a great difficulty in being a celebrity with a secret because you were the first major female celebrity to come out as a lesbian and how old were you when you came out publicly? 35? 35 in 2012. Right.

And I know a good friend of yours, Anthony Wong, who's also a singer, had to come out. And it was, you know, all anybody could talk about it, you know, when that happened. What was coming out like for you? you know, how did you decide to finally do it? Well, to be honest, it wasn't a secret, you know, people knew. It was an open secret. They knew. I had all these songs, you know, talking about gender love and gender issues,

and which one of them was, you know, quite a success, you know, in the very much. mainstream pop culture. Rolls-Royce, right? All my friends knew and your family knew as well, right? Yeah, my family knew and even my fans, they were they were probably 99.9% sure of that fact. By and large, I think the response was positive, right? I mean, you tell me, how did the fans react?

Well, surprisingly, Beijing was fine with it. Right. You know, you just felt, you know, brands just observing. Right, they're very cautious. Yeah, they didn't ban you or anything, but they were very cautious. and but nothing, you know, from the Chinese government. They didn't say anything. And so it was, you know, it was good days.

And then 2014 rolls around and it's the umbrella movement. And it really stirred up a lot of tensions in society just about the political fate of Hong Kong. Right. And you were arrested on national TV and you were, I think, you know, the biggest celebrity to be arrested on national TV. How did that day unfold for you? Yeah, there was this very big protest for Hong Kong to have the right to vote for our own chief executive officer. Right. which is, you know, promised to us in the basic law.

It was written. We had the slogan that we, We want universal suffrage. And so the crowds, they started to gather all the public. It wasn't just, you know, the activists and the students. And so I decided to, you know, be one of the people representing this group of adults and me and one or two others. Were you aware of the tremendous risk that you were taking and how much it would cost your

career and your livelihood? Was that something that you thought about beforehand? Yes, yes. Well, I was aware, I guess partially of what might happen. The government they didn't listen, but we didn't think that they were that unreasonable. And we didn't feel that, you know, what happened afterwards, where, you know, students got jailed. How long did you spend in jail? Oh, me, it was just like 12 hours. Yeah.

It wasn't officially, you know, I wasn't officially in jail. Right. We were just detained. Right. Yeah. And afterwards, you said, you know, you partially expected and partially didn't expect. What was the most surprising to you in terms of the fallout in terms of what you didn't expect? Well, I expected my career to have, you know, changes to it.

And I expected to be banned from China. But I wasn't expecting, you know, the fact that the government would react in the such a way where they was they just the main goal is to silence of course everyone and to silence you know especially the younger generations with fear you know so much of your art is about bringing your music to an audience but in the wake of this political stance that you were so brave to take you've been banned from reaching the masses in mainland China. And there's just a contradiction there. I mean, so much of what you want to give to the world is your music. But because of politics, you are cut off from reaching 1.4 billion

people. How do you reconcile yourself with that particular reality? Yeah, being cut off, to be very honest, I guess that is the only thing, you know, if you ask, Is there anything bad coming out from this whole incident? It's getting the message to these people. But still, there are chances for me. As long as I am creative and I have my imagination, I can still get through to people, I can still get by. The New Yorkers, Jang Fon, speaking with Denise Ho, who was in Hong Kong.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Probably the thing that Donald Trump cares about the most or second only to the wall is China. With China, Trump has been telling the same story for decades. They bully the U.S. on trade, and American politicians never have the guts to stand up to them. And they're laughing at us.

They think we're so stupid, and our representatives are so stupid, that they can't even believe what they're getting away with. They take our money. And that's from all the way back in 2010. Now, within the last year, the president has imposed tariffs on consumer products and manufacturing goods, and he keeps threatening more,

and they do seem to be having some effect on China's economy. But whether this strategy works out, whatever the outcome of this trade war, our business correspondent Sheila Kolhatkar, thinks that it all might be missing the point entirely. Here's Sheila. One of the things I noticed when Donald Trump would go out and campaign and rant and rave about China was there was actually perhaps some truth inside the point he was making about that.

There is a lot of imbalance in our economic relationship with China. There is a significant trade surplus with China. There's been a tremendous amount of offshoring of jobs from the U.S. to cheaper countries such as China. Trump is being very reactive. He's looking at things that have happened in the past and responding to them. What he's not really doing is thinking about the future and the way things are evolving and where the economy is going. And there is a very powerful rising technology sector in China, and I don't think Trump has given it two seconds of thought. They want to rival Silicon Valley.

And they have managed to create a really vibrant, thriving technology sector. Having done reporting in China, I've done. I've learned firsthand that it's actually, it can be really difficult to understand what's going on there economically as an outsider. You need a guide, you need someone who's in there and can really translate and explain it to you. And someone who's in a really good position to do that is Dr. Kai Fu Lee. He's a trained computer scientist. He's worked for a handful of major American technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Microsoft. And now he runs a venture capital firm in Beijing.

So he's investing in the next generation of Chinese tech firms. I have 10 apps on my phone. I can show you. You'll be wowed by all of them, and they don't exist in the U.S. Can you tell us about what those apps are? I know WeChat is obviously one of them, but yet what are they? Sure. I'll give you maybe three examples.

So one is a consumer loan app. If you want to borrow money, open the app, and then the money zapped right to your phone. AI makes the decision. Wow. without any human intervention, and the default rates are dramatically lower than human loan officers. Another example is this company called VIP Kid, where a kid can get tutored today by, say, an American English teacher in a very high-quality curriculum. And, of course, the biggest one is the WeChat. And WeChat is the giant app, which probably consumes half of people's time.

You can connect your friends. You can conduct business in it. You can use it to buy movie tickets and call a shared ride. You can pay with it. And that payment in WeChat has essentially eliminated credit cards, which used to be the world's best way of paying. But now has become a dinosaur in China. There was this perception for a long time that Chinese tech companies

were struggling to keep up with their American counterparts. But Dr. Lee's point is that the Chinese tech sector has actually leaped ahead of the U.S. technology sector in a lot of important ways. One of the areas where they've actually jumped ahead is in implementing artificial intelligence technology. Dr. Lee has written a book about AI and the economic relationship between the U.S. and China called AI Superpowers. Actually, the top Chinese media company is a company called Bight Dance, and they're a media organization with no human editors. Oh, goodness.

It is a personal lie. Think of this as Facebook news feed on steroids. Now, I realize there are issues, concerns. But the average user time per day on that platform is 72 minutes, much higher than even Facebook in the U.S. In your book, you mentioned that a lot of the most important work that's been done up until now in AI has occurred in the U.S., but that in the future, the most important work is likely to occur in China. Why do you think that is? Well, the U.S. has invented the technologies, but this is not the age of Enrico Fermi, that a few scientists possess all the secrets from the rest of the world. So we've moved from the era of discovery or invention to the era of implementation.

And who will better implement depends really on two things. How many entrepreneurs and engineers, do you have and how much data do you have? In both cases, China is pulling way ahead of the U.S. There are some high-level figures in the tech world in the U.S. who have expressed concern with how determined and ambitious a lot of Chinese tech workers seem to be. Dr. Lee points out there's also a real cultural difference

between a lot of tech workers in China and those in the U.S. Certainly, China is in a very unique circumstance that many of the entrepreneurs, or actually many of the people, have had families that have been poor for 10 or 20 generations, and they carry the burden of, as a single child, having to support two parents and four grandparents in their future. So it is understandable why the work ethic is really incredible. while I think China has some work ethic advantages, so to speak, it is not the primary thing.

China has created an alternate universe that has completely different ways of starting entrepreneurial systems. Dr. Lee's point is that because intellectual property is not well protected in China, it is a very fiercely competitive business environment. While here, we may be spending money on defending copyright, and there are trade theft lawsuits. Over there, entrepreneurs and tech workers are just furiously working to stay ahead of their competitors. The even bigger advantage for Chinese tech companies is they have access to incredible amounts of user data

from all of their users within China. We talked about the Chinese app WeChat earlier. Imagine if Facebook, Amazon, Seamless, Venmo, and Uber were all in the same app. That's kind of like WeChat. It's a giant repository of data. about its users' friends, what its users buy, what they eat, where they go, how much money they spend. All collected in one place.

And that massive data can be turned into smart AI algorithms that provide a better user experience and helps the companies who make those software make even more money. One thing that makes China very different, of course, is the role that the government plays in business. The Chinese government is involved in the tech sector there in all sorts of ways that we would never see in the United States. They provide financing to companies. They can help companies build factories in areas where people might be living by just demanding that they move. I mean, they can really almost wave their hands and clear the path for these companies to expand or develop or come into being in the first place. The approach the Chinese government takes

is what I call techno-utilitarian. When a new technology like mobile payment comes out, U.S. will tend to debate it and have regulation, and then the products come out. In China, generally, they're allowed to go out while the government watches to see if there are issues. The government will tend to let new technologies grow faster and not worry as much about protecting the incumbent, the credit cards, the banks. Dr. Lee Down plays the Chinese government's involvement, which might have something to do with the fact that the private sector in China, where he works and makes his living, and the Chinese government are closely intertwined. I would personally believe and argue that the innovative business model thinking is the primary contribution in China. Working hard is secondary and then government is actually lower.

It certainly appears that our relationship with China is becoming much more adversarial. There's constant talk of a trade war. Trump's imposed tariffs on Chinese goods. there are constant threats to crack down on Chinese IP violations and cybercrime. Dr. Lee doesn't think any of that is going to slow down the explosive growth of China's tech sector. The thing is, let's say China ends up winning the technology race, and they end up dominating an AI. One thing we know is, AI, is eventually going to put a lot of people out of work. Not just factory workers, but all kinds of workers, truck drivers, accountants, people who work in banks,

even journalists. Ultimately, both China and the U.S. are going to be facing some real social upheaval as a result of all these changes. And Dr. Lee is worried about that. Well, it's a moral issue that keeps me up at night. It's not a business imperative. I worry that the technologies that we fund, they catch everyone by surprise. People aren't giving enough time to prepare for this shift in workforce. I think governments, if they react too late, they'll be forced to deal with it by just brute force means, like universal basic income. And if they only do that, then the massive number of people will not be starving,

but they're going to feel a loss of meaning. Some people question if we could roll back, but that's just not possible. The technology is out there, so I think it's incumbent upon us to figure out how to reap the benefits and use those benefits to solve the problems. And we need to be more global and willing to share the findings as opposed to keep them as the so-called competitive edge. The progress of humanity is a lot more important than any small competition one country has over another.

The venture capitalist Kai Fu Lee, the author of AI Superpowers China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. He spoke with staff writer Sheila Kolhatkar. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. My wife Alice doesn't want to go to Chinatown for Thanksgiving this year, Calvin Trillen wrote in 1996. Alice has changed, I told friends when I learned of her decision.

She's not the Alice we once knew. But then again, maybe she is. Now that I look back on those Thanksgiving meals, Alice and I and our two daughters in a Chinese restaurant stuffing down some particularly festive fare, like mince squab and lettuce leaves, maybe she was the one member of the family who was lacking genuine enthusiasm. Alice in this scene is Alice Trillen, and Calvin Trillen wrote about her for 40-some years

and dozens of pieces in The New Yorker. Alice was so much a character in Trillen's writing that after she died, he got condolence letters from strangers, readers who only knew Alice as a literary character. Still, he worried that his portrait of his wife was somehow incomplete, and after a few years, Trillen sat down and wrote a memoir called About Alice. And then, some years later, this year, in fact, Calvin Trillen adapted his memoir for the stage. My previous press with the stage was many years ago when I did a couple of what my daughters called One Ham Shows.

I stood on the stage and discussed a wide variety of subjects from childhood with my older sister, Sukhi the Oppressor, to a poem I was writing about George H.W. your Bush's know-it-all chief of staff entitled, if you knew what Sununu. Tonight there won't be a variety of subjects. Tonight is about hours. Bud Trillin, if you know Calvin, you call him Bud. Join me in the studio last week,

and it was a few days after the play started performances in New York. You've done something that's, I think, reasonably unique in literature in general, to describe a happy marriage. Literature in every language is filled with all kinds of dramatic, bad marriages and catastrophic marriages and lonely marriages. In a way to write about a happy marriage,

which you did in the New Yorker in many different forms, whether it was in your food pieces or comic pieces, you talk about her all the time. You were writing and portraying a happy marriage. It's true. At one point I said we might be on the Grey Line tour as the only happy family in Lower Manhattan. I guess it's a problem writing about it in the sense

this play certainly would have failed drama 101 because it doesn't have conflict and then resolve that and all that and it doesn't do that. It's just more of a kind of character study. And I guess there is a disadvantage, but you have to write about what you know about. I didn't know about anything else.

But anybody that knew your wife, Alice, in your presence only thought one thing. What did you do to deserve Alice Trillen? How did you possibly win her over? Let's be frank. Well, we originally met in a Monaco party. Monicle was a magazine, a doomed magazine of political satire.

And as its financial situation became nastier and nastier, the parties got larger and larger. I naturally folded. I saw Alice at the Monaco party, she was wearing a hat. I wasn't wearing a hat. I can still see her in the hat. A white hat cocked a bit to the side. I never owned such a hat.

After I'd heard about the effect it had had, of course I kept my eyes open for one. Then I did some detective work and changed a few engagements and showed up at a party a couple weeks after that that I knew she would be attending. I compared myself in the play to a lounge comic who is heard that there's a booker for the tonight show in the audience. She's the booker for the tonight show. Yeah, there was a constant banter about some of my favorite subjects. Do you talk mostly about animals? Well, I try to limit myself, but it isn't easy in New York.

You mean in New York, you run into a lot of animals that are just begging to be talking. And you fell in love right away? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you know, all these things never are totally smooth, but, yeah, I would say that I was smitten right away. How would you describe Alice to someone who's never read about her or someone who's never knew her? She was very outspoken.

I don't think I was ever in a group conversation where she was present, where she didn't have something to say. she wasn't one of the people who sat back. And she was firm in her opinions. Is this meant to be funny? Well, maybe mildly amusing. How about rye? I'm often described as rye.

I've decided that rye means almost funny, but that's fine. If you think it might be rye, right is fine. I'd settle for rye. Right. Well, what did you think? I think this is very funny.

Did you do? Yes, I do. One of the funniest things you've ever written. Gotcha. I think I should handle the jokes around here. She loved beautiful clothes, and she liked travels in beautiful surroundings, but she had a sort of a contempt for people

who spend their lives getting more material things and money than you could use. She had a phrase for that. She always said, they lack a sense of enoughness. And I wrote about something. called Alice's Law of Compensatory Cashflow. Now, this is a very important theory,

and I think people need to hear it very carefully, because it's very important to grasp. Alice's Law of Compensatory Cash Flow holds that not buying some luxury you can't afford is the equivalent of windfall income. So if you say, well, we didn't get that stereo set so we could use that money to go to Martinique, and so then the other person in the household

sort of pats his pocket looking for his wallet where that money might be. At a certain point, the Trillen household enters your writing. Alice becomes not merely a human being in this world, but also a kind of literary character

in the work of Calvin Trillen. When did that begin? And was she on board with it right her way? She was all right about it. I mean, partly because it wasn't very serious. I mean, I used to do this series, U.S. Journal. I went someplace every three weeks for a story for The New Yorker. And at one point, I realized that I could write a lighter piece, comic relief for me, more than the readers, by writing about eating.

But I talked to Dr. Seligman today. He said that when you're in there for your checkup, you wait 180 pounds. And I think that that's... sort of got so pretty soon Alice was the person who told me not to eat that much. But given the fact that this is a long distance call, do you think you might be in violation of some federal law on interstate appetite impairment? If so, my community service sentence would be supervising your diet. It doesn't have to start tonight.

Think of tonight as Marty Grau, followed by a very long lent. Have a nice dinner. Alice Trillen in life was a much more substantial person. than just the person who told you you're eating too much. She said, of course, that she came across in my stories like a dietitian in sensible shoes. I was giving a speech once, and I was asked, is Alice in the audience?

And what did she think of that description? And she stood up, and she didn't say anything, she just took off these fantastically expensive-looking shoes and held one of them up. They weren't sensible. They were not sensible at all. They were not at least sensible. And I guess that's one of the reasons I wrote the piece in the New Yorker when you called and said,

were you interested in writing a piece about. Right. That Alice, who had had lung cancer many years before, had what essentially was a, not a relapse so much, but the physical effects of the surgeries and radiation weakened her capacity. to recover and she died in 2001 around the time of 9-11. Right, that night. And we talked about your writing about her eventually. I didn't ask right away.

No, it was a few years later. Were you wary of writing about her again in a period of loss and grief as opposed to the happiest days of your marriage? Yeah, if you had called right away, I think I would have said no. but I saw it, I think, as an opportunity to expand on or actually sort of correct some of the stuff I'd written about her. I wanted to write about her as a real person, a substantial person, and had a lot of not just accomplishments, but wisdom and things to say. For a long time after I found out that I had cancer, I loved hearing stories about people who had simply decided that

They would not be sick. The thought that my children would grow up without me was ridiculous. I simply had to be there, not being there, was unacceptable. I also knew that some unacceptable things happened. You got condolence letters, not merely from your friends and family, but you got loads of condolence letters from people who knew her from your pieces. How did they react to her death? Well, most of them made me cry, and oddly enough, most of those were from people who only knew Alice from stories.

There was one particular line that said, I look at my boyfriend, and I think, well, he love me like Calvin loves Alice. I was sort of surprised at those letters. I finally said they may not have known her, but they knew how I felt about her. And they got that from this sort of sitcom treatment, which surprised me. When I'm asked by young people how they might go about linking up with someone with whom they're likely to enjoy a long and happy marriage, I tell them, wander into the right party. That's what happened to me. But thank you so much.

Thank you, David. The New Yorker's Calvin Trillen, About Alice, is running a theater for a new audience in Brooklyn. We heard Jeffrey Bean as Calvin and Carrie Paff portraying Alice. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour this week. I hope you enjoy the show, and I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.