Woman's Hour - Dr Shuping Wang, Cecelia Ahern, Selina Periampillai

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

Two decades ago, a public health official exposed how contaminated blood and plasma had led to tens of thousands of impoverished villagers and hospital patients being infected with hepatitis and HIV in Henan province, China. Today that story is told in a new production called ‘The King of Hell's Palace’ at the Hampstead Theatre. Jenni hears about that production and the story behind it from Chinese whistleblower, Dr Shuping Wang and playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. Author Cecelia Ahern talks about her new book Postscript; The Sequel to PS I Love You. British-born Mauritian cook Selina Periampillai describes the diverse cuisine of Mauritius and its neighbouring islands in her first cookbook, The Island Kitchen. And, we discuss the stigma that surrounds childhood sexual abuse.Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Ruth Watts

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to Thursday's edition of the Woman's Hour podcast. In today's programme, the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse finds survivors' fear being stereotyped if they report their abuse. Why? The King of Hell's Palace is a play about the whistleblower who exposed the spread of HIV and hepatitis C through contaminated blood in China. We hear from Dr. Xu Ping Wang and from the author of the play. And the fusion cuisine of the islands of the Indian Ocean. Selina Periampie cooks the perfect Maldivian tumour curry. Now, 17 years ago, Cecilia Ahern published a novel called P.S. I Love You.

It was made into a film with Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler and told the story of a young widow whose husband had died as a result of a brain tumour, but had left her a series of letters to be opened each month after his funeral. And now there's a sequel. In postscript, it's been seven years since Jerry died and Holly has a new relationship. But in the prologue to the new book, she looks back on her marriage. We were privileged to have not just one, but two goodbyes. A long illness from cancer, followed by a year of his letters.

He let go secretly, knowing that there would be more of him for me to cling to. More than memories. Even after his death, he found a way to make new memories together. Magic. Goodbye, my love. Goodbye again make new memories together. Magic. Goodbye, my love. Goodbye again. They should have been enough. I thought that they were. Maybe that's why people come to graveyards, for more goodbyes.

Maybe it's not about hello at all. It's the comfort of goodbye, a calm and peaceful, guilt-free parting. We don't always remember how we met. We often remember how we parted. Cecilia, why a sequel so long after the original? 17 years is a long time. It sure is. Do you know what? There were so many reasons over the last 17 years that I didn't want to write the sequel, but really only one good reason to write it, and that's because the story came to me and wouldn't go away. And it was in 2012, I had my second child and had gone to the solicitors to fix my will,

and if anything happened to me, who was going to be the guardian of my children? And it was in that moment I started thinking about the things that people do to prepare for the people that they're leaving behind. And I felt that it was a very natural sequel to PS I Love You um while PS I Love You was about I suppose a story from the perspective of those who are left behind and grieving I wanted to tell the story from the perspective of those who are preparing to leave um and I wanted I felt that was a kind of a lovely story to put Holly in, where she was going to be able to guide people and help people who were terminally ill, write letters for their

loved ones before they pass away. Now, it's set seven years after Jerry's death. How difficult was it to work out what Holly would be like seven years on? Yeah, I would say this is probably one of the most challenging books I've ever written because it was revisiting something I wrote so very long time, so long ago. And it was my debut novel and I was 21. And but I wanted it. I chose to write it seven years later because of that theory that, you know, every seven years we kind of, our bodies and minds change, you know, and we can almost, you know, our hair, we get new hair and new skin cells and all these kind of things. And I thought, well, okay, well, this is a new version of Holly.

I can't create her from scratch, but I can create this new, evolved, more mature version of Holly seven years later and I was able to kind of sculpt her in a way that I felt life would have sculpted her in the seven years since. So she has moved on, she has matured, she has a new job and a new love and she has said goodbye really to her grief until she's approached by this group of people who are inspired by her experience and they call themselves the PS I Love You Club and they ask her to help them write their letters and so she's kind of pulled right back in again to to a world that she said goodbye to. Why did you decide there would be a PS I love you club? Well I suppose my experience from writing PS I love you

17 years ago every country I travel to everywhere I go somebody shares a similar story with me about you know about I suppose they've either been inspired by PS I love you or something similar has happened to them

somebody they love has left them letters or left them a gift. And I know that it's one of those stories that when you hear, everyone opens up and shares. And so in Postscript, Holly is doing a podcast with her sister and starts speaking about her experience. And a group of people are listening to her and are inspired by her and I felt it was a very natural real thing actually for people who are terminally ill to be inspired by her experience and then naturally reach out to her and ask her to help them. So it kind of came from what I've been listening to myself for the last 17 years. You know there are people out there who have experienced these similar kind of PSA-Livvy letters

and have done other things in their lives to prepare for the people they're leaving behind. But why did you decide that she would be rather reluctant to become involved? I mean, she's really rather bullied by her sister into speaking about her experiences and then she doesn't really leap into wanting to be helpful to other people yeah i mean this is the new holly that i love because she says about herself that

she really felt maybe she was quite naive seven years ago and um and she is tougher now and she wants to kind of she wants to protect herself and it's about self-survival she doesn't want to go back to being this grieving woman again um she has moved on and feel stronger um and so she I suppose it's interesting to say she's bullied but she feels I like the honesty of her not wanting to immediately help people she's not an angel she's even though she knows these people really need her help she's also looking at how to help She's even though she knows these people really need her help. She's also looking at how to help herself. You know, does she want to be dragged back again? Does she want to be reminded of the past and re-experiencing the hurt?

And does she want to bring Gerry back into her life after being able to say goodbye? And so she's going through all of she's battling really with with whether to help herself or to help others um and so that's the kind of the tougher the tougher holly that we meet at the beginning of the novel why did you decide to have so many different generations who are facing death some of whom are very young with young children i wanted to um tell the story from so many different perspectives. So we have people who are terminally ill, those who have life-altering conditions, a man who's in remission

but is afraid, you know, that his tumour will return, so he wants to prepare something for his young children. And I wanted to show all the different ways and the different relationships that we have with people in our lives, the different ways that we can, you know, look out and prepare for the people that we love. So in the PS I Love You Club, there is an older woman who wants to look out for her husband after, well, not after her death, but her kind of condition is diminishing and she knows that she won't be there for him in the same capacity and so she wants to help him then there's a young

father who wants to to leave videos for his children there is a young mother who knows that who has a baby who's six months old and you know knows that she won't be remembered by her baby and wants to do something memorable and so I wanted just to cover as many different relationships as I could and show how different people cope in different ways and there is no you know blueprint to grief everyone has to experience it in a different way and I think I just wanted to show that. What does she learn about herself and her relationship with Gabriel? Well one of the things that I suppose I had to do when I was writing this was to go back and look at PSA Love You and almost study and analyze my own work to try and find the holes and the seeds that I could grow in postscript and

Holly is doing the same thing she's looking back over her experience and asking, well, was it all good? If I'm going to be guiding and advising these people, did my husband write the right letters? Did they always help me? Was it always the best experience? And so she's learning, I suppose, about herself that Gerry may not have written all of these letters for her, as she thought, that in a lot of, you know, she's learning from all these other characters that she meets that he wants to be remembered, that he doesn't want to be forgotten. And it's not just for her. And also that she's moved on in this relationship. And Jerry coming back is kind of a distraction. Can she can she still be in love with with a memory and a spirit

and still have a new relationship so she's quite torn between the past and the present you are incredibly prolific 16 novels several television series another film coming up and soon i think to have your third child. How do you arrange your days? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I am very disciplined and because I do write a novel a year, I have kind of found this routine or this, you know, I begin writing every January and my novel is due for May every year and I edit during the summer and then I publish in the autumn and um and so that's how I structure my my writing routine and um I still write long hand and um and love you know it sounds very uncreative when I

break it down into months like that but it's still I just love to create that little space for myself where I go into my own into my office into my own world and I just I escape into another world so it's it's um it's still something I absolutely adore and enjoy doing and it's it's my saviour. So you can write an entire novel from January to May? I can, yes. Cecilia Ahern, I am impressed. Thank you very much indeed for being with us this morning from Ireland, because obviously you're pregnant and didn't want to travel to London. But thank you very much for being with us. And the new novel is called Postscript. Thanks. Oh, it was an honour. Thank you for having me on. Now, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has published new statistics which reveal that 81% of survivors of such abuse feel they're stereotyped after they reveal what's happened to them.

Heidi Clutterbuck is a survivor who revealed what happened to her after her abuser died and now works to encourage others to speak out about their abuse. Michael May heads the London and South West Truth Project officers. Michael, why do victims fear being stereotyped? I think as a society, we are the people. And so victims and survivors have had experiences themselves of telling people what happened to them and then only being able to have that as their identity because people make assumptions based on things that they may or may not know.

Many times I've heard from victims and survivors that having told someone, they then are treated as though they're fragile, as though they are potentially a risk to themselves or to others, as though they're unable to cope with the daily stresses of life, and there's no evidence to support any of that. 81% is a lot of people who said they felt like this. And yet there is obviously evidence that many more people are coming forward. Why? Because the two don't seem to mix.

I think as a society we're moving into a much more open conversation that gives people permission to take risks that they haven't been able to take before. Because we are talking, as we are right now, about something that for many generations has been swept to take before. Because we are talking as we are right now about something that for many generations has been swept under a carpet, people are able to see themselves in the conversation. And because many more survivors have come forward and spoken with courage, it provides a great example to others that they can do so. Because when they do in forums like the ones that you're providing now, they aren't judged. No one speaks to them as though they are less than.

Heidi, how familiar does all that sound to you? Oh, very familiar. I think for myself, when... So my first port of call to report my abuse was to the police and unfortunately the response at that time was not good and there were a lot of stereotypes. How old were you when you did that? 40, the year I turned 40 and I think to give you an example of what that can look like within my details of my police statement I had talked about myself as a child in the third person and described the things that then had happened. And some months later, a police officer with

no understanding of trauma or the issues of abuse had then written a report where he had said, well, clearly she's unstable, clearly she's this that and the other and at the time because I was stepping into that avenue new I believed what he said to me and I thought oh gosh I am damaged it was only when I went and found other knowledge actually it's dissociation and actually it's a very healthy mechanism that your brain can do to keep you safe in trauma. And I think we need to unpick these sort of labels that are just because we need to have more conversation.

40 is not young to start talking about what had happened to you as a child. Why did you decide that you would only do it then? You hadn't done it before. A couple of things that happened. My perpetrator had died. I had actually gone to a police officer at 18, a family member. And because he was a family member, it was very difficult and it was hidden. Silence is one of the things that keeps victims from coming forward and upon the death of the perpetrator

and then knowledge of other victims I just thought this is too big a secret and actually I have to be brave and that's how I stepped forward. You also decided to speak to the Truth Project. Absolutely. They were very pivotal, actually, in me finding my voice. And at a time where I had an investigation ongoing and it had not a brilliant response, later on a much better response. And I was finding my voice. I was learning about what had happened to me and there was this safe place where at the very least I thought I can sort of add to the work

that's being done to create better understanding and their approach was amazing and I felt safe and it was the first time I think I actually shared more detail than I had done in my police statement. What had happened to you? I was sexually abused by my older brother from the ages of six to ten and which was awful and the issue is that you don't realise you're a victim until you're much older. At 13, I had a realisation as you're starting to get boyfriends and understand. I had a realisation that what had happened was wrong. And I then was just the silence that surrounds you. And especially with family dynamics, which can be very complicated.

It silenced me for years. Michael, why was the Truth Project set up? It's part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which is trying to uncover systemically and with clinical evidence how we fail to protect children. It does that in three ways. There's a public hearings project which is looking forensically at things that have happened, a research project which is trying to understand what we know and don't know and in the middle sits this truth project and

it's our invitation to any victim and survivor to come and tell us what they choose and it really is very much their choice not just in terms of, but in terms of what they tell us. Some people, as Heidi has done, tell us in some detail the abusive events of their lives. And many people come in and say, let's just assume that I'm not here because I wanted a day out. But you're making recommendations and these are the things I think it's most important for you. We will always find a way to use what they tell us. It will be fed into our research, it will be presented to chair and panel, so it can be considered. For me, I have a very personal take on why truth exists, and I think that Heidi touched on this.

We're dealing with a group of people for whom silence was a prevailing part of their lives. Part of the commerce of sexual abuse requires silence. No abuse survivor has not been told that they mustn't keep a secret at some point. And truth for me exists as an opportunity to break that silence, to finally have your voice heard and recognised. And what are you learning about why it happens and the impact it has on individuals? So I don't know that through the Truth Project we're learning anything forensic about why it happens. I think that there's a huge amount of research that needs to be done to better understand what causes perpetration. But we are learning really for the first time

the lived effects in adults of what happened to them. And we know some of them, that depression, anxiety, the misuse of substances, the fear of intimacy, and especially around sexual intimacy. But we're learning, because we're hearing from so many people, we've had more than 4,000 people come forward already, that these aren't isolated instances, nor are they stamps, nor are they presentations that move across everyone. In each individual, it comes out differently. Heidi, how do you do your work now so at the end of my investigation operation

larkspur um guido lagori who was the former commissioner of the iopc he made a number of recommendations about how the police respond to vulnerable victims and they were good solid recommendations and unfortunately the way that works is that an email goes out and that's the end of it and I was horrified by that so I then wrote to a number of chief constables and said I will write you a training package I want you to understand how to implement these but alongside the lived experience and so that's what I did and the work has been going on for a year now and I travel across police forces and interestingly the same with the Truth Project. People's lived experience, there is knowledge in there and if we want to unpick how these issues sit in our

society, we need to look at those who have been the most failed. And I think there we will find a lot of knowledge that's usable. Just briefly, Michael, I know that later today, there'll be another report from the Independent Inquiry. What will it reveal? So the reporting to accountability and reparations is based on 15 days of public evidence given in a hearing. And it's looking at the ways in which children and adults who have experienced child sexual abuse find difficulty in accessing justice, criminal justice, or through the civil courts, even the way in which insurance companies fail to meet their needs. Insurance companies fail to meet their needs? Yes, I mean, we've looked beyond simply the scope of the legal process

as to how it's applied through places where people go to help. But why would insurance companies fail to do a proper job? Because they're part of the redress. So the report is looking at the ways in which those who have been affected by abuse seek redress. And that can be through seeking justice in a courtroom, but it can also be by seeking some sort of compensation for the harms that they have suffered, and insurance companies are involved in that. Well, Michael May and Heidi Clutterbuck, thank you both very much indeed for being with us this morning, and I must mention that there are links

to the Truths Project and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, and they are both on the Women's Hour website. Thank you both. Thank you. Now, still to come in today's programme, the fusion cuisine of the islands of the Indian Ocean. Selina Periampile cooks the perfect Moldavian tuna curry. And the serial, the penultimate episode of Blackwater.

Now, The King of Hell's Palace, a play which is being performed at the Hampstead Theatre in North London, is the story of how tens of thousands of impoverished villagers and hospital patients were infected with contaminated blood in the mid-1990s in the Henan province of China. Dr Shuping Wang is a specialist in hepatitis C. She was living and working in the region at a time when donating blood in rural communities was rather big business. She discovered widespread liver damage in the blood donors. Well, her investigations found Hepatitis C and HIV infection had spread as a result of the collection and then use of blood and plasma. Dr Wang became the whistleblower who revealed the

extent of the damage. Frances Yachu-Kauhig is the playwright. What was it about Dr Wang's story that made her want to write a play about her? I first met Xu Ping in Beijing when I was 17 years old at a hot pot restaurant and that was basically 20 20 years ago. And so as long as I've known her, I've known of her story. Xu Ping and my father worked together when my father was reporting on public health and AIDS for the U.S. embassy in Beijing. And so through my father, I knew that Xu Ping is considered a public health hero among a lot of scientists and health workers in Beijing and China as a whole and seen as a kind of Joan of Arc figure. And so this has always been in the back of my head that this would make a very compelling play. But for a long time, I didn't

think I had even close to the level of craft that was necessary to even begin to attack the play. And the way the Hanan officials were so literally trying to profit off the blood of poor people, off the farmers, was to me a very potent metaphor for capitalism in general. And as someone who's always interested in the theme of trauma and recovery, the reasons that the government officials were trying to develop the province to kind of put themselves further away from famine, chaos, cultural revolution was very compelling to me. And so I started to research the world more and more. Shuping, it's been reported that the Chinese government is pressing you to stop the play being performed. Why would they do that? Actually, for my thinking, they want to stop the show because they think the show can damage their reputation, basically.

And how are they trying to put the pressure on? First, I got a phone call last month. My relative called me and said, Oh, I got a phone call from China. State Security Department, the officer, went to there to ask a lot of questions and basically they want to stop the show. Frances, what's been your response and the theater's response by China's questions?

Well, frankly, I'm not surprised because every time Xu Ping publishes something online about her experience with the Henan AIDS crisis, this happens to her friends, family, and colleagues back in Henan. So this is a pattern that she's experienced over the past 15 years or so since she left China, came to the United States. The theater, of course, wants to support Xu Ping and wants to support the story having the broadest platform possible. And so we are all just trying to help do what we can to amplify the story,

which has not been told inside China. And in fact, the officials who are responsible for spreading a rural AIDS epidemic have never been prosecuted. Shuping, how did officials respond to your concerns about this? Early time, there's no problem for them. When I found out this problem, I reported to local government and told him, I said, it's very dangerous right now, HIV spreading among the blood donor. Similarly, HIV spreading like hepatitis C. He said, really? I said, yes. Wow, you did a great job.

Our people will thank you in the future. I feel very happy. Then I began to say, can you report this to high level leader? Because in our country, it's not our province, it's not our region, how these things happen is whole China. After I report to the local officer, a couple weeks later, I go back, ask him again. I said, why I didn't hear anything you reported? He changed his attitude. He said, you think you cracked? I said, absolutely, yes.

If you not trust me, I will conform to Beijing. He said, can you write a report? I said, yeah, absolutely, I'll write a report. Then local government began to say, what are you doing? You make big earthquake for us. I said, what is earthquake? I said, it's true. And they have a big conference in Hunan province.

Then the high leader said, we don't allow the people to report this HIV spreading. We are unacceptable for this case. The second day, about 30 people sat in the same room. One guy said, the guy, how dare he can report this HIV spreading 56% to the central government? How dare he? When I hear what he talk, I know he don't know I'm a man or woman. When I stand up after he finish, he talk aloud. I said, I'm not man. You tell people I'm a guy. I'm a woman. I report this. If I didn't report, how do you prevent AIDS from people?

Frances, why was the Chinese government so determined to shut Xuuping up? It's not just Shuping. It's also many AIDS activists. Shuping is just one of many health workers, activists who are speaking up about AIDS. Yeah, I think that basically they worry about it. One is the power, first, I think. And second is the money. They lost money if reported this. So what happened to you subsequently? Because you're not in China anymore, are you?

Were you driven out or did you choose to leave? Actually, when I was in China, when that happened, I lost my job. They asked me to stay home and work for your husband. And they didn't pay me money. I lost my marriage. My husband was very stressed every day. They didn't allow him to do his job easily. It gave him a lot of difficulty. And so finally, I feel I want to have a job. I want to work. I don't want to stay home. So I began looking for a job in America. My mentor, my relative, told me, Shuping, I think you should go to another country.

Don't stay here anymore if you want to work. What you did, the good job, basically should reward you. It's not beat you up. So that's how I feel I have to live for another country. Frances, I know this is not the only play that you are producing about China, all with very prominent women in the leading roles. What's inspiring you to do a whole trilogy? I like to try to position my work as a writer as an intervention in the field. And so for these plays, this trilogy of plays set in China, I was trying to flow into what I consider holes in the canon of Western dramatic

literature. And one of the big holes is a lack of really compelling leading roles for female actors of East Asian descent. Another hole is that most stagings of China for the West seem to require a non-Chinese character that the audience is invited to follow through the world. So another one of my goals was to provide stageings of China that were all Chinese characters and did not require this outsider through which the audience could understand what was going on. All three plays are also actually about global capitalism and about the themes of trauma and recovery and about the cost of dissent, which is very great in China. And the consequences are often so much more intense and severe than we can often comprehend in the United States and in the UK. I was talking to Frances Yachu Kahig and Dr. Shuping Wang,

and the play The King of Hell's Palace ends at the Hampstead Theatre on the 12th of October. Now, if you've ever been to the Seychelles, the Maldives or Mauritius, you will know that the collection of islands off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean have an extraordinary range of wonderful cuisines influenced by France, Africa, China and India. And Selina Periampie has brought them all together in a book called The Island Kitchen, recipes from Mauritius and the Indian Ocean.

And today she will cook Moldavian tuna curry. Selina, the smell already is. I haven't started cooking yet. It smells gorgeous. Thank you. What do we put into the tuna curry? So, tuna obviously. Yeah, tuna obviously. Lots of coconut milk because coconut is very popular over in the Maldives. We've got some chilli, we've got some curry leaves in there, garlic and ginger, and then we've got spices of fennel, black pepper, turmeric, cinnamon. It's very fragrant. So what have you done so far?

Well, I'm cooking at the moment, so I've got the onions. We've got the onions going into a pan with some coconut oil. So in the Maldives, they use a lot of coconut oil. Coconut's everywhere, trees. So it's like in the dessert, it's in the food. So we use coconut oil as a base with the onions and then garlic and ginger in there as well. I've chopped up some curry leaves and some green chilli as well.

You were born and raised in London to Mauritian parents. Yeah. How did they come to be here? I think when mum and dad moved over in the 70s, like a lot of my other family as well, I think just to better work opportunities, and they started a life over here, and then had me and my sister.

So we kind of grew up in London, but we would always go back to Mauritius every year on our summer holiday because we've got loads of cousins and families still over there. So what did you learn about Mauritian cuisine from your parents? Oh everything like my used to used to be poised over in my mum in the kitchen when I was little and she used to make these amazing sweet potato cakes filled with coconut and sugar or like warm purries filled with sugar inside and I could still just think about them right now and just remember the times when she used to make that and I think that kind of inspired me into food later on

in life just watching my mum cook. So why did you choose when you have a Mauritian background to choose a Maldivian curry to cook today well today I because I traveled around Maldives Seychelles these islands after I'd learned so much about Mauritian cuisine but I wanted to see the similarities the differences on the islands and this is one dish that I love cooking at home. And it's quite simple, very homely, and lots of people love to eat it. Really easy to make. So I just wanted to share that with you today. Now, the Maldives are, if I get my geography right here,

closer to India than the other islands, which are very close to the African coast. What's the main influence there as far as the cuisine is concerned? With Maldives, I'd say you've got the south of India, Sri Lanka. So you can see through the food, they use a lot of chilies, a lot of coconut and tuna. So they eat coconut three times a day or tuna three times a day. Fresh seafood is abundant with a day fresh seafood it's as abundant with like all these fresh seafood so and the spice you can really taste those flavors of spice

from the South India influence and the Maldives so when I was over there it has the kind of similar flavors now are you cooking the tuna in with the onions and the garlic no tuna doesn't need long to cook it'll need like about three minutes or so it doesn't take long so that will go into the sauce at the end so i'm creating the sauce at the moment so i've got the garlic ginger and the onions all together can you smell the the chilies and the curry leaves is there great you're making me very hungry just sniffing away here so i'm going to add in the spices next so i've done some ground spices we've got four spices that go into this we've got turmeric for that beautiful

yellow color we've got some ground fennel in there ground fennel seeds and some cumin as well in there and some black pepper for that bit of heat that peppery heat. And they're the four spices that we add in there. So it's not going to be very, very spicy, is it? Do you know, surprisingly, it's not like blow-your-head-off kind of spicy. Good? Yeah, it's very, like, fragrant, and I think a lot of people, when they try it, it's quite a fragrant dish. But when you're in any of these islands,

there will always be a pot of chillies or green chillies or pickles on the table. It's such like an island tradition on the table. You'll have like pickles and chutneys. So you won't just have one dish, but so many other dishes to share. But you see, you can choose to eat those. But I wouldn't necessarily choose to go for the very hot ones. What's the culinary history in Maururitius which is obviously closer to africa yeah i mean you've got um it's so diverse it's such a melting pot of uh so you've got um

from the french and the british that came over to rule um on mauritius and then you they brought over well you have the indians chinese african people who used to come and work on the sugarcane fields. And with them, they would bring their traditions, their cooking techniques, these spices, these ways of making certain dishes. And then they became localized onto the island. And then the Mauritians kind of added a bit of spice here, added a bit of extra, you know, Creole kind of influence in there. And so you've got, like, Chinese dumplings

that you can see on street corners in Mauritius, but you've got, like, samosas that are very Indian or, like, briyanis and things, and dal puri, which is, like, one of the national dishes. So it's quite a mix of dishes. Well, I suppose that applies across the island because different people would have come there for different reasons and brought their own culinary history.

Yeah, I mean, you've even got French as well. You'll find a lot of really fragrant, light French stews, things cooked with fresh tomatoes and thyme and parsley, which you wouldn't quite expect to see in Mauritius, but you do find people cooking these in their homes. Now, we know madagascar is very famous for its vanilla how important is vanilla in the cuisine there oh yeah because i mean um you have there's so much vanilla there and they use it a lot of um i mean sometimes they

even add it to uh savory dishes so i've had it with like with fish or like chicken before it's very you know add quite a little bit of it because it's quite overpowering but it's something I wasn't familiar with adding it into you know I think vanilla in desserts but yeah and it's nothing like the vanilla that you find here they're like three times the size, glossy brown, full of seeds and so amazingly fragrant. And yeah, it just is this amazing flavour. I mean, you do get it sometimes here in yoghurts and things which are flavoured with Madagascan vanilla. I know ingredients such as breadfruit and cassava feature in a lot of your recipes. How easy is it to get the ingredients that are needed

to cook the recipes that you've put together well i've done in in my mind i try to make it as easy as possible and more accessible for people to make this food at home i mean i grew up here in london so it was everywhere i had access to so what would you find in local supermarkets? Maybe an Asian supermarket, you might find these spices. So it's not too tricky to find ingredients that I've included in the book. I mean, cassava and breadfruit, you can still find them in Chinese or Asian supermarkets if you have a look. So they are, you know, it's introducing people to these kind of flavors of the Indian Ocean. So where are you with the cooking of the curry? I cook it so well.

I've put in a very large cinnamon stick because we love cinnamon. You know, they will have them in the back gardens and on the islands and they will just literally break off a bit of the bark or curry leaves and just add them into like the food. So I've added in like a cinnamon stick in there and i've added the coconut milk as well so believe it or not this is kind of near towards the end of the dish it's very quick it's very quick to do it's really really quick to do so i've just made the base and the sauce and at this point i would add in my tuna steak and then let that simmer for about three, four minutes.

Yeah, make sure that's cooked because I'm hoping to taste it. And I do prefer tuna cooked through. Sometimes I eat it raw, but cooked through in a curry will be really good. And I'm going to taste it during the cereal. Now, Selina Pallian-ierre has placed in front of me the most delicious curry I think I've ever tasted. The sauce is

really quite a bright yellow. Lots of little green herby bits in it. Perfectly cooked tuna. But what's interesting about it, Selina, is it's got a slightly sharp flavour to it and a slightly sweet flavor at the same time how does that come about we've got the sweetness from that coconut milk and then i've

added a zing of lime in there to finish it off so it kind of balance it out a bit and then you've got the underlying chili heat and all these like wonderful flavors of the spices so it's delicious and so quick to cook yeah yes so really quick to cook it took no time at all and i was talking to selena periam pille about the most delicious maulavian tuna curry and her book the island kitchen recipes from mauritius and the indian ocean we had lots of response from you about the question of child sexual abuse. Someone who didn't want us to name her says, I'm now nearly 70 and was sexually abused horribly by my older brother when I was 10. He also bullied me mercilessly. At the age of 50, I challenged him. It was not planned, but he denied

it all then and since. I'm a strong and resilient woman, but it haunts me every day. And I want some resolution, but know this will never happen. I wonder how many older women are in my position and are tormented now and probably for the rest of their lives. Thank you. A painful listen, but also positive. Nick said, My wife and I are both survivors of child abuse and we've both benefited from getting in touch with the Truth Project, the early support we received through them and the subsequent interviews that took place.

We just want to say that the police officer that handled our complaints was totally unaware of the existence of the Truth Project and was surprised when we told her about it. So there's still lots to do in that regard. And Sarah said, timely discussion about how survivors of abuse, mainly women, are labelled and stereotyped. The account of a police officer writing that a survivor was unstable in his report simply for recounting her abuse in the third person as a child still happens. And then on the King of Hell's Palace and the problem with gathering blood in China, Alison said,

It takes a lot of guts to show any dissent against the Chinese government. We're lucky here in the UK that we can speak out against the abuse of money and power that our politicians frequently display. Now, tomorrow, as Strictly is back on television for its

17th series, Jane, we'll be discussing dance, ballroom, katak, modern, jazz. She'll be asking if it's ever too late to learn, finding out the history of some of the dancers and why movement can make you feel good. She'll be joined by the head Strictly

Judge, Shirley Ballas, and the professional ballroom dancer, Curtis Pritchard. Now, if you want to join in to learn a few moves, please do and do send us your photographs. That's Tomorrow with Jane, two minutes past 10 from me for today. Bye bye. You're Dead to Me is a new history podcast for people who just don't like history, or at least people who forgot to learn any at school. In each of our episodes,

I'm joined by a top-notch comedian and an expert historian to rummage through the most fascinating things you should know about the global past. You'll learn about Boudicca, Captain Blackbeard, Harriet Tubman, the Spartans, the history of men's and women's football, and so much more. To fill in the blanks in your historical memory banks, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody.

Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.