Conversation: Hsiao-Hung Pai
By Jiaqi Kang
This interview was originally conducted via email in September 2018 and was published in Issue #9 “ECHO (替)”. Get it now on BLURB.
When I was fifteen, I discovered features journalism for the first time when I randomly picked up Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang at an airport — a moment that I would later pinpoint as the beginning of “phase two” of my journey towards the Third Space, the point where a diasporic person accepts the complex hybridity of their cross-cultural identity. As our editors describe in a conversation in issue three of sinθ “LIGHT (阴)”, phase two involves the pursuit of one’s ancestral culture (for instance, obsessively watching Wong Kar-wai films), in an attempt to make up for our childhood rejection of that part of our identity.
During this roughly two-year period of my life, I listened to a lot of angsty C-pop, read Taiwanese-British journalist Hsiao-hung Pai’s 2012 book Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants, filmed a documentary about
my 爷爷奶奶 in Taiyuan, and co-founded this magazine. Pai’s exploration of migrant workers in various industries across the country struck me with its ability to evoke a vivid image of life in, for example, Shanxi brick kilns
or in post-earthquake Sichuan. Pai deftly wove individual stories with large-scale surveys in a way that I had never seen before. She was fearless and independent, travelling alone and interviewing strangers.
One winter, I visited China with my family and decided to write a similar book, in the easiest way possible: by interviewing a bunch of kids my age about their life, and then trying to find some kind of thesis from that. I dutifully spoke to the children of my mother’s university roommates, who were attending elite Beijing and Shanghai high schools, as well as my cousins, and students at a local Taiyuan school. On the last day, I attended a family banquet in a restaurant and was served by a waiter my age, but was much too self-conscious about being a privileged foreigner to approach him with questions. I went home and spent hours transcribing the conversations I had, but the book ultimately fell apart, perhaps for obvious reasons. And while I eventually realised that roaming around a landscape talking to people about their lives was the fundamental part of any journalist’s job description, I am still grateful to Pai — or at least, the book version of Pai — for providing a role model to me when I needed one.
Hsiao-hung Pai was born in Taiwan in 1968 and has lived and worked in England since 1991, where her work often appears in The Guardian. Since 2008, she has published five books, which deal with topics from Chinese
immigrants in Britain to the rise of far right movements such as the English Defense League. Her latest work, Bordered Lives, published at the beginning of 2018, deals with the refugee crisis in Europe including revelations of abject conditions in asylum seekers’ camps.
JIAQI KANG: What are you up to in Italy right now?
HSIAO-HUNG PAI: I’m working on a book based on stories of migrant workers in Italy, in particularly agricultural workers. In looking at their working conditions and their place in society, the book will discuss what their labor and precarious status means in contemporary Europe.
JK: You grew up in Taiwan. What drove your decision to move to the UK? How would you compare your transnational experience with children born in a different country, or who moved when they were very young?
HP: I came to the UK as a postgraduate student in 1991. As I grew up in Taiwan and came to the UK when I was a young adult, my experience was, of course, entirely different from the second-generation, British-born Chinese. My own cultural and linguistic backgrounds were a disadvantage to me at first, being the barrier to mainstream employment in a society ridden with racial discrimination and prejudice. However, over time, people of my own background are also able to turn the disadvantages into strengths, to some degree, and make use of the benefits of living two cultural and linguistic worlds.
JK: What is your process in choosing topics to report? At what point do you feel ready to move on to another topic?
HP: The topics I’ve chosen have all been based on issues in which I have developed a strong interest. So in that sense, the topics came to me. Often, new ideas came during research for an earlier piece of work. Ideas might develop and then you decide to work on them. I usually did some preliminary research, to see whether it would work. Once you start working on a topic, you tend to carry on and let it develop… It might take two to three years to work on a topic — I like to just be flexible. You stop and complete the project when you feel you’ve reached a point where things will happen in their own pace… Only once I worked on two projects at the same time. It can be a good idea if it doesn’t involve too much travelling abroad. But the disadvantage is that you tend to get distracted…
It doesn’t feel like a career to me, but it’s more about doing things I love doing.
JK: What has been the most memorable moment of your career?
HP: It doesn’t feel like a career to me, but it’s more about doing things I love doing. The more memorable were the moments when I knew that something I did had made a difference to someone’s life, or some people’s lives… That’s when it’s most rewarding. For instance, once I managed to take a child into a refugee reception centre in France, where he eventually got through the system and has now been offered a work contract by the centre where he lives… But of course, our own personal help or “charity” work is not sufficient and it doesn’t change the bigger picture. I hope that some of my work can contribute to changing ideas and influencing people…
JK: What were some ethical issues you encountered when you went under- cover to research sex workers? What are the differences between undercover reporting and interviewing the people you are writing about?
HP: There are many difficulties in reporting and writing about individuals and social groups that suffer from exclusion and marginalisation. The most obvious is that the lack of resources and social power of these groups often mean the lack of access for journalists. Higher levels of irregularity and frequency of change in people’s lifestyles, as well as the higher risks involved in situations of potential exploitation, often make it harder for journalists to obtain information and provide realistic reporting. When I was researching the working life of migrant women in the sex industry for the writing of a book titled Invisible, I started with three main ways to get close to the people I was writing about: 1) introduction by previous contacts in the sex industry and other related industries; 2) talking to special interest groups, campaigning and community organisations; 3) door-to-door visits to sex industry premises. Method One was limited because it was selective (with
previous contacts introducing me to their choice of contacts and workplaces). Method Two was particularly difficult, as the social stigma attached to sex work made it hard for institutions, even service organisations, to reach migrant sex workers. In the British Chinese communities, for instance, sex workers are subject to a great deal of contempt and discrimination and sex work is treated mostly as a taboo subject, an open secret. Working with “double illegality” (both without formal immigration status and in an illegal environment as many of them don’t work alone as sex workers), most Chinese sex workers rarely and are unlikely to access services available out there or even those offered to them. Campaigning and sexual health organisations therefore find it next to impossible to reach them.
Method Three was the most effective as it turned out, although I did have several doors slammed in my face when trawling Soho. I happened to meet several friendly women with whom I became acquainted and visited regularly. Over two years, I followed their life stories, be them workers, madams or maids. One of them was Beata, a single mother from Poland, who became the central character in the book. However, Method Three has serious limitations, too. The interviews and meetings I’d had with people were mostly structured, mainly because they had limited amount of time to talk and many of them didn’t feel completely free when talking to me at their work.
When I arranged to meet people outside their work time, I was always aware how precious their spare time was, and a couple of hours each time was all that I was usually given. The situations I found myself in were mostly managed and well-controlled — for instance, meeting in a café or their places of residence. When meetings happened in the workplaces and when unplanned incidents occurred, such as when customers became rude or when there was a dispute, I would be asked to leave immediately. I was treated and talked to as a journalist. In this way, I remained an observer and a listener — and I was only able to hear what they chose to tell me at the given time.
Over time, I became convinced that I’d never understand what really goes on behind closed doors simply by conducting interviews and visits. I’d never find out about the nature of sex work conducted by migrant workers and the extent of exploitation experienced by so many of them by simply “observing” from the outside. When I was told about wrongdoings of employers, I was not able to gather concrete evidence simply by listening to those victimised. When means were exhausted, the idea of adopting a participatory approach came to me in conversations with migrant workers. I discussed the idea of subterfuge with several colleagues, and came to the conclusion that working undercover would be a necessary means to an end. When the case of public interest was justified, I started out my undercover assignments. Cases of public interest in journalism, according to BBC’s editorial guidelines, includes exposing crimes, corruption or injustice, disclosing significant negligence, or protecting the public’s health and safety.
The ethics of subterfuge emerged as a much more contentious issue when I agreed to work on a documentary with Nick Broomfield. When he approached me and when we decided to visualise working life of migrant sex workers into a film, ethics were always debated and many questions asked. The use of “spy glasses”, with a camera in the middle, is not an easily justifiable practice, as it involves going into someone’s living space and filming it without their knowledge. Our justification was public interest: migrant workers’ exploitative conditions to be documented were of a large-scale problem, across the industry; the documentary aimed to highlight the causes. Public interest, following all broadcasting guidelines, is the must in justifying any practice of subterfuge.
JK: The undercover experiences you write about in your book, Invisible: Britain’s Migrant Sex Workers, and which were featured in the Channel 4 documentary Sex: My British Job (2013) were the same ones, though you used different pseudonyms. How did you juggle the two missions? How would you compare your own, text-based reporting with the film medium — especially because in the latter, the director Nick Broomfield becomes the primary narrator, whilst you are both a character that he observes and a first-hand storyteller filming through your glasses? What are your thoughts on the way that the Mandarin was translated into subtitles in the film? — it was highly generalised and left out a lot of details, which would’ve affected non-Mandarin speakers’ comprehension.
HP: Yes, my text-based reporting was entirely different to Broomfield’s film, which was made at the end of my book project. It was Broomfield’s idea to turn me into a character, to which I reluctantly agreed. His reason was that it would make the story more intimate and closer to the audience. Broomfield put together a story that he wanted to tell, through his selection
Many in the Chinese community in the UK don’t want to talk about the workers, because of their own class prejudice and their own wish to presen themselves as the “model community” of footage and editing. Clearly, many details were left out. I’d have included more details about the women’s conversation about work conditions and the impact of immigration controls. Yes, sure, the translation was generalised and some cultural references were probably left out.
Many in the Chinese community in the UK don’t want to talk about the workers, because of their own class prejudice and their own wish to present themselves as the “model community”.
JK: You previously worked with Broomfield to make Ghosts (2006) about the Morecambe Bay disaster, where you did not feature in the film — could you talk about that experience as well?
HP: The first part of Ghosts, where the Chinese workers were living in Norfolk and worked in factories, was based on my undercover research at the time. I also contributed in terms of building local contacts and other relevant research, for instance, in Liverpool’s Chinese community as well as the migrant workers’ community in Sussex.
JK: You’ve written a lot about Chinese workers, both in China and in the UK, and the circumstances in which they live. What do you think are some issues with representing China and Chinese people to a Western audience? Have you ever been accused of self-orientalism or of misrepresenting people in any other way?
HP: No, I have never been accused of “self-orientalism” or misrepresentation –I don’t write about “crazy rich Chinese”, or the “ants-like, hardworking Chinese people”… Many in the Chinese community in the UK don’t want to talk about the workers, because of their own class prejudice and their own wish to present themselves as the “model community”, whereas the truth is, many in the Chinese community are badly exploited and under-represented.
Many of the leaders of the British Chinese communities would rather treat these tragedies as none of their business…
JK: Did you see a difference in the reception of your work in the West and in the East, where you published a Chinese language book, Hidden Army of Labor?
HP: There is positive and negative reception among both Western and Chinese readers. And there’s apathy and indifference in both.
JK: What kind of apathy and indifference?
HP: For some, it’s the suffering of the Other… and somehow the suffering feels far detached from the readers…
JK: You reported on the rise of the far right in the UK for your book Angry White People, and this was a really different demographic compared to your previous work and your own experiences. In what ways did you feel that your “outsider” status affected your reporting?
HP: The idea for Angry White People came from my canvassing door-to-door in council estates in Dagenham years ago when the BNP was still strong and growing. I don’t think it’s a different category from my previous work, because racism affects us all, even though the Chinese community leaders don’t like to talk about it. As an “outsider”, I understand and empathize with people who have suffered from racism and want to do something about it…Therefore I gave a lot of space in the book to racially victimised communities, as well as people who organised to fight back.
HP: I cannot compare the two because I don’t know much about the case of Chinese American communities. But in the British Chinese communities, I have met people who internalise racism from white Britain, so much that they became blind to the racism from which many British Chinese are suffering.. You see that well in the aftermath of Dover tragedy and the Morecambe Bay disaster. Many of the leaders of the British Chinese communities would rather treat these tragedies as none of their business…
JK: Is there a future for investigative journalism?
HP: These days, cutbacks to resources for investigative journalism in national media have meant that we are seeing less and less work that brings injustice to light and challenges the powerful.
JK: It’s interesting that you say Chinese community leaders avoid topics like racism, when across the pond, Chinese-Americans tend to be more vocal. In recent years, whether their cause is justified or not, some Asian-Americans have attempted to remove affirmative action policies in universities because they feel that it harms their own children’s admissions. Why do you think there is such a contrast between the actions of Chinese immigrants in Britain versus the United States?
JK: How do you think this can be improved, if it can be improved at all
HP: To be honest, I have no idea how things can be improved for investigative journalists, apart from trying to get individual funding for your work and struggling on your own… The system doesn’t work in your favour. It’s dominated by media conglomerates have no interest in the future of investigative journalism.
Original interview by Jiaqi Kang. Print design by Elisabeth Siegel. Banner by Jessica Peng. Medium article re-uploaded by Natalie Cheung.
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