YouSaid · the spoken record

Alice Mah

lines on the record: 34
first: 2025-04-23
most recent: 2025-04-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Know sadness or loneliness or disconnection. And then they read this and maybe in an unexpected way it opens up something different. It doesn't obviously fix anything, but it just sort of makes her feel, oh, it's not so bad or something to get something like that about it. So I don't know.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hope for readers from all different kind of backgrounds and walks of life to connect with the book. I think people who Have ever sought a boat Climate and the loss of environmental things that they sort of treasure. People who are migrants or who have a sense of disconnection with where they live, like maybe they might not be a migrant, but not in recent history, but might feel like they don't have roots. So there's a kind of a search for roots there that I think a lot of people can connect with. One person once told me that they read a book and it made them feel whole again when they finished reading the book. And I thought, oh, that is kind of what I am going for as someone who might sort of feel this sort of like.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is an imperfect step and that there's all this trouble and contamination and so on. So it's not that we should ignore that. We need to sit with that. But we also and myself and those who can look to see the joys as well and the gratitude as well alongside that.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of climate crisis, and it involves a huge amount of suffering and so on, and that we need to recognize that loss and not invent stories of hope that are Implausible or denying those realities, but I think I started to, that my search for an offering, which is ongoing, is not complete, but through the last section of the book, which is looking more towards thinking about possibilities to bridge those divides, to think about interconnection and small forms of healing are really about where can you find connection with other people, with plants and animals, with trees, with music, with learning, with positive action. And so it's the sort of incremental steps towards that. And yeah, I don't know. It's always with the recognition that”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think what I ended up reflecting on, this is a reflection partly on not just on an environmental writing, but on sociology as well. It's kind of like this narrow focus often on sort of damage or series of injustice, which are sort of problems which are very abundant in the world we live in and they're sensationalized often by the media. And if you look for just that, or if you see just that, or if you research that for a long time, then that can fill your mind. And it can all be true, right? But there's so much else. So it's sort of also the panning out and thinking, well, there's so much joy alongside that. There's things we can really appreciate. It's not that our whole world is destroyed. That's kind of, I mean, much of it is being destroyed.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know in academia, there's a lot of in any part of life, I think, in the modern world, there's elements of, or like when you go to the supermarket and everything's wrapped in plastic and everything shipped from somewhere else, you couldn't go through life often without, yeah, you could easily get sucked into this kind of guilt about virtually every step that you take. And so I never imagined that I would that that's even a productive thing to do, but I just said I thought being more grounded, more focused on”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if I've actually written them all down. I mean, I think I talked about, I mean, a lot of them come from kind of humility, I guess you could say, and about staying grounded, so staying close to family, having gratitude for what one has in life and one's family and connections being in your place, like where you live, not traveling all over the planet to do research or to follow consumption patterns, to try to live in more in accordance with my values. I think part of that was about”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People were kind of brought into climate anxiety through telling them terrible things about what's happening to the planet. And so instead of doing that, which is what some of my other work does, it was more about how does it feel to actually be kind of filled with this sense of grief and anxiety. And also, interestingly, what comes with that is of real love, like a love for our planet, a love for what we're losing. And so that's what I wanted to show is that kind of journey, not just to scare people or to, but more to What does it mean to live in times that are going through such ruptures? Shouldn't we think about different forms of knowledge, different ways of imagining features or past? Who says that any one way of seeing things is better?”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I began to think on whatever level it could be a spiritual level, it could be a material level. The hungry ghosts did and do somehow embody something about the experience of climate grief, of illness, like psychosomatic illness where illness shows up in the body through stress and anxiety. And I thought, actually, I'm not telling a story just about myself. I mean, I'm talking, this is a collective experience, and it's not even necessarily about the climate as such. I mean, a lot of people have heightened fears of anxiety due to wars and famines, and all these things are kind of entangled. So I felt it was an authentic story to tell because it coincided with Experiences that were felt. And I felt that by sharing. That it Bring people into thinking about climate issues through a different way because I think often.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think at that moment, I mean, that was 2018. And I said, I'm talking through the times of the climate crisis intensifying, all the media, of course, through the Fridays for Future struggles and the reports really percolating through the pandemic. So you have this real heightened sense of kind of, I guess, the dooms of our times. And I just felt like I really did feel that that story just kept staying with me and it kept bugging me.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I didn't know, just like I didn't know about team swooping, I didn't know about Hungary ghosts. I'd heard the word. I thought it had to do with addiction or about like a Buddhist sort of idea. But I didn't know that it was actually in a folk belief, this idea that if you neglect your ancestors, if you fail to sweep the tombs, then your ancestors could become hungry ghosts who unleash illness and ecological destruction on their descendants. So I thought, are they saying that my ancestors are going to, is that what happened? Are they saying that that's what happened to them? And if so, that's part of me.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a metaphor for illness for the climate destruction. And so it's sort of Deliberate. I mean, I think initially the way I had run into write it was perhaps a bit more academic, more about around the folk beliefs and making those the more metaphorical connections. But I think when I thought about writing and what felt really real to me, and that's why I went with it, is that when I got home to the UK after going to China, I did really carry the burden of stories of pollution, of illness, and of death with me. And I was especially troubled by this sort of moral tale that was told by one of the elders in the community about the neglected grave of my great-grandmother and how it was almost like our family had been cursed because we hadn't gone and attended to her. So I was really disturbed by that. And I think looking back, it was almost like they were sort of saying shame on you, shame on your ancestors. And I felt this kind of like almost like defensiveness about my ancestors.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in terms of academic work on the climate crisis and on pollution I mean, I have more or less come to the conclusion that the climate crisis is as much, if not more, a spiritual crisis as it is a material crisis. And yeah, I have heard environmental Writers and researchers say the same thing. I mean, it's something that we all grapple with in different ways. The reason I wrote about it in this way is I think I'm quite careful to talk about hunger gross in ways that one could. Read again like in the beginning, I could read it in different ways. So you could think, oh, I literally believed in hungry ghosts. I think that something has manifested and my grandmother, the great-grandmother's ghost is inhabiting me. You could take that reading. You could also take the reading”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was a real insight into the ways in which people have to live with such intense pollution. And many of them reported that they didn't really notice it. And I think one of the reasons why they didn't notice it is because their senses do get kind of desensitized through that exposure, but also because they have to get on with their everyday lives. So it's, yeah, it doesn't resemble I mean, I've done research in quite a few different petrochemical areas where there have been different kinds of politics around it, different environmental justice movements, different people resisting or struggling over that. We didn't see any struggles there, but in a way it was a more viscerally obvious sort of extent of pollution, just looking at And sensing what was going on.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there was still a living memory among migrant workers and among villagers, some of them remembered those lightes in the pineapples and sort of were Assad that they had been lost. But they still cultivated some of those foods and still ate them in the shadow of this very, very noxious petrochemical plant. And so, yeah, I do talk in the book about the experience of going with the researcher there through the petrophemical villages, which were just so... Full of heavy dust full of kind of acred chemical air. And it was just. Was very overwhelming. It was unlike anything. Experience before in terms of, I would say it's not even like a smell, it yeah, it gave me headaches by the end of the day of being there, I lost my sense of smell for the rest of my time so that during my time in China, I had no sense of smell. I mean”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think that's what's special about the ma village is that it's preserved. It's like a rice village. It's still like it used to be. But where I was doing research are these, or I guess what you'd probably say is a much more typical picture in a lot of rural China where the former agricultural uses have given way to industrial development. And so the villages that we were looking at were in the shadow of massive petrochemical industries, so industry, the industry that converts oil into Petrochemicals which go into basically making plastics.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the other thing to really highlight there is that this place, the whole region is known as the home of overseas Chinese and has this very long history of remittances and sending money back. And so that obligation is kind of written into the cultural history. And I think the translator didn't fully understand that history either because she didn't come from that history. And I think nor did we really because We were only kind of partially aware of that for so many generations have passed, whereas our parents generation were quite acutely aware of that and that might be why they didn't actually go back to China because it's Is a challenging kind of, I guess, confrontation in a way.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reluctant here when you're saying, you know, what did they really want? I mean, I think the way that I write it is really to leave one's own interpretation. And I think you could very easily read what I've written from the perspective of somebody coming from one of these village hooses who would sort of read this situation entirely differently. But if you read it through, I guess maybe for want of a better word a Western perspective, then you might read things into it that might sound like it's like you said a shakedown.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To give red pelkets ourselves. So it was all kind of basically mediated and filtered through various kind of dynamics. So it wasn't that we didn't want to do what we were, both of us, like myself and my cousin, we were like, yeah, we'll do what we have to do to be in communion with these people, and especially my cousin, she just, it was so meaningful for her. It was her, you know, it was like coming back home. It was like an epiphany journey. It was very emotional. And she felt like she's finding her family here. And I think that was what ultimately the translator was trying to protect because she felt that by suggesting that maybe the villagers wanted something else might be kind of hurtful, perhaps, but they were quite insistent. And, you know, they probably have their own story. So I'm a little.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess some of the villagers, not all of them, felt that we, in addition to hosting a banquet for them, we should give them some red pockets. And they asked the translator for this, but they did translator didn't tell us until quite late in the game red pockets are small red envelopes that are filled with money and decorated with Chinese symbols or characters for luck and prosperity. Traditionally, it's actually elders at grandparents, parents, and other married adults who give red pockets to children and unmarried younger relatives on special occasions. My cousin and I were familiar with red pockets when we went there, but only in a Chinese Canadian context because we'd received gifts of red pockets from our grandparents called Lucky Money as presents, but we had never imagined that we would be asked”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the other thing to point out is that we knew that we had to come with gifts. We knew that much. And I need that much. But in terms of how the kind of communication happened as we arrived and who was there and what was communicated within the village, then we sort of maybe gave gifts at the wrong moment or to the wrong person or not equitably enough. And so this sort of whole chain of events occurred whereby”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think we could wind back a little bit in the sense that Think what made those cultural exploitations all the more heightened was the fact that we were all coming at it from different places of knowledge. And I think if I'd gone on my own, especially if it had been the first time anyone had been at this village, it would have been completely different. And it was very different for my cousin when she went for the first time for her was really about even just finding that that was our you know village, like verifying the facts because there are many many many villages that have our surname and so even just being able to sort of identify that. So in terms of that moment, I mean”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fact that it's absolutely impossible to reinsert oneself back into these structures. And while there may be many lovely things about them, really wonderful respect for nature and for each other and a really tight community and really amazing knowledge about the land at the same time there are Rules within society in terms of hierarchy and gender that I wouldn't want to return to at all. So I think I was pushing back against that. I wasn't just going to, you can't just, I think that's part of the mourning in the book because you can't just, there's something that's fundamentally lost or broken in that kind of rupture between the past and the present. There's no going back. But then, how can you reconnect in a meaningful way?”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Further, in terms of what it might mean and tried to put myself into the shoes, I suppose of different people, how they might interpret what those obligations are. And I think what I rubbed up against more so than the belief was more just that there are sort of gendered hierarchies as to who's allowed to participate in those. So for example, it's typically men who are, especially in that particular religion, who are meant to do the tomb sweeping. It's the male clan line. And so, yeah, there's a line in the book where I say, well, I wouldn't have been included. I would have been married off to another clan. So it wouldn't have even been my obligation. So throughout the book, I was sort of also grappling with like.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With it without spoiling the book. I don't know that I ever fully come round to the notion that that's absolutely what one has to do. It's more just a sense that maybe they're meant not necessarily in a purely material way, but more in a sense that we do owe our ancestors respect or offerings in a sort of way that is not necessarily set by a particular practice, but according to our own ethics, our own values or our own connections. So I started to unpack it a little.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really is literally understood. So the reason for it is to pay respects to ancestors who have become spirits and who occupy a place in the sort of, I don't know, after world or life where they need to be fed, need to have sustenance in that life. So that's why you would burn paper money and offer incense and foods. And so I guess I wasn't quite able to appreciate that that would be literally what people thought as a non-religious person. That's not to say that I would think of it as superstitious as such. It would more just a certain understanding of practice and religion that I hadn't encountered before. And I think in terms of coming to terms.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I should say that I never really thought of it as a superstition as such. I mean, it is the Tomb Seaping Festival is celebrated all throughout China across classes, across cultures. I think perhaps I just didn't. Think I didn't quite appreciate how literally it's understood, nor do I actually even know to what extent it's”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The turn of the 20th century. So, quite early on, so that also was around the time of the building of the railroad. So that's when a lot of Chinese migrant laborers came over both to the US and to Canada to build the railroads. And my great-grandfather was part of that boom, although he set himself up as a merchant who sort of serviced the railroad community in a small town in British Columbia using the strengths of clan networks and the money they'd made through the gold rush. But it was very much a segregated kind of community that grew up because they weren't allowed to integrate with the white settler communities.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My great grandfather was part of that migration, so he was one of the very early migrants in the late 1800s, went there on his own as basically as a teenager. And prospected and they weren't allowed to get the good gold claims, like I guess the white miners, they had to get the kind of scraps behind, but they still were able to make money from that and then they sent it back. So the idea was that they would make money and bring it back and bring that wealth back to China for their families. So he was part of that. And he then went back to China to marry and had an arranged marriage effectively with a wife who would accept an overseas husband. So they started their family. In China, and sort of did it as a kind of an international migration story already from”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, a large number of people from the part of China where my family came from in the south and Aryan and his Taishan, but also the surrounding regions for many decades in the 19th century left that area due to a whole range of kind of factors like famine, epidemics, extreme conflicts. The land was very much, I guess, not enough to sustain people. And they had those trade networks as well. And so a number of people from the same clans actually, sort of almost through word of mouth or through their kinship networks, began to hear tales of gold in North America. They called it Gold Mountain. Actually, they called that of all of North America initially to California and then northwards into Canada in BC and the Yukon.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way was a comedy of errors, of misunderstandings when I was there, but once I came back, I was just like, I owe something more. And it really intersected with the way I was thinking about pollution and about what we owe to future generations and past generations. And so just got at me”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To this village, and then I was just absolutely kind of blown away by what I found. Like it was, I was expecting it to be. I guess you could say maybe more modern, or I didn't accept that there would be tomb sweeping rituals that were expected of us. I didn't expect, yeah, I guess that the cultural systems had endured for so long. And I was particularly shocked and haunted, I guess you could say, by what I discovered about what had happened to my family in that time. And I think it was just discovering all the kind of terrible things that had happened. To our family Normal things, I guess death, illness, things around war and conflict. And this notion that I left from the village that we had this tremendous sense of obligation that was part of the way the client operated, that I just felt I didn't know anything about.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as it happened, I talked to my dad about that just before going and he said, oh, are you going to sweep the tombs? And maybe a lot of people know about tomb sweeping in China, but I had no idea. And I thought he was joking because he likes to joke. So are you serious, Dad? But he was serious and he'd never told me about that custom. So yeah, I went there and I hadn't actually been hoping to find anything other than just where I came from. But as it happened, I had a cousin who had just a few months before sought out the village herself kind of on a similar journey, but different. She has two Canadian or Chinese Canadian parents and she said that she'd really found this village. It was exactly the way it had been before. And she sort of insisted on coming with me, my postdoctoral research assistant and her husband.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, I was studying petrochemical polluted villages, maybe about a two-hour drive away from where I knew my ancestral village had been. And I grew up in Canada, and I knew I was half Chinese, and I'd read my grandfather's memoirs since I was the age of nine documenting and accounting for this village where they came from. But nobody in our family had been to this village due to war, revolution, communism, people leaving, my grandfather dying. So we just never been. And it had always been a part of myself that I just wanted to know about. And so I thought, well, we're so close. We'll just do it pop over and I'll see what it's like. I'll see if it's a rice village just like it used to be.”
2025-04-23 · Intelligence Squared · Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT