Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable.
You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Steve Hatherly, today with Yushan and Feifei.
Coming up, April 23rd is World Book Day, and this week on Roundtable, we're taking part...
In the celebration, today we're launching a special five-part series featuring acclaimed Chinese writers, each sharing a book that changed their perspective.
Today will be part one.
After that, once a week we see a story in the news that gets us all in our feels for better or worse, and we share our feels with you.
This week, citizens of Shenzhen complained to city officials about a couple of different issues where they wanted to see changes.
The city said nope sorry, deal with it.
Feifei will break it down in this week's soapbox.
Our podcast listeners can find us at roundtable china on apple podcasts.
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Roundtable podcast at qqcom.
Once again roundtable podcast at qqcom.
And now April 23rd is a special day because it is World Book Day.
It's a global celebration of stories, ideas, and the power of reading.
First championed by UNESCO.
This year, the spirit of the day stretches even further, with China turning it into a week-long celebration of books and readers.
Here at Roundtable, we're taking part two.
We're featuring five acclaimed Chinese writers, each sharing a book that holds special meaning for them, be it one that they've written themselves or one that has deeply influenced their perspective.
This segment is presented in collaboration with Apple Podcasts, and we'd love to hear from you too.
So what's a book that's been on your mind lately?
Share your recommendations and explore more from Roundtable China on Apple Podcasts.
Supported by the International Liaison Department of the China Writers Association, this special series connects readers and writers across cultures.
Now let's turn the page and hear about today's author and the book that they've chosen to share.
Yes, so today we feature the Chinese writer called Qi Jin Nian.
She's a really, really young writer from China.
She writes both fiction and nonfiction in Chinese.
And I think most of our listeners probably have heard about her novel, such as The iPhone Age in Chinese, Wu Meng Zhi Jing or The Ember of Time, Ping Sheng Huan.
Also back in 2007 it's actually what I've read about her before is when she published her first book Bed is the Tomb of Youth.
It's a collection of both short stories and essays from her about growth and youth.
And she published this book at the age of 16.
Goodness me.
Yes.
So she's been writing for a really, really long time.
It's amazing.
And recently she started to write and also translate all of her other books.
For example, she translated Foster, A Short Story by Irish author Claire Keegan.
And also she started to write non-fictions.
For example, a book she decided to share with us today.
And it's a recent non-fiction from her, from Qi Jingnian about traveling.
Let's check it out.
Hello everyone, I'm Qi Jin Nian.
Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time traversing the Hengduan Mountains hiking, climbing and walking long distances.
These rich experiences have all been captured in the book, Wandering the Hengduan Mountains.
For this book, it is not just a record of travel and scenery.
More importantly, it's about being on the road, the conversations and exchanges with companions.
When you share the same landscape with someone else, it can inspire entirely different thoughts and interpretations.
I find these moments of collision truly valuable because they cannot be replicated.
With different weather, different perspective.
Every moment and every journey offers a very unique landscape.
If I had to use one core word for wandering the Hangzhou mountains, it would be diversity.
It does not only refer to biodiversity, but also the diversity in ways of living.
Three years ago, I was like many of you spending most of my time in the city.
But it wasn't until I walked into the mountains and wilderness and experienced that sense of openness and freedom that I realized beyond our daily orderly routines There exists something wilder, something unstable, like a pendulum, yet capable of offering intensely vivid experiences.
So for me, the ideal state of life is like a pendulum, moving back and forth between the steadiness of writing and the expansiveness of trouble.
It feels in a way like a futile art, but also a deeply fulfilling way of living, thank you.
So that is the book Qi Jinlian decided to recommend to us and also to our listeners, called Hengduan Langtu in Chinese, which is wandering the Hengduan Mountains.
Where is that, by the way?
The Hengduan Mountains is a vast, vast mountain system in the southwestern part of China that it forms the longest, widest and most typical sort of north to south mountain range in China.
It covers provinces and regions such as Sichuan, also Yunnan, also Xizang.
So the reason is called hengduan, literally meaning cutting across.
It's a mountain system that sort of drops directly from the Qinghai-Xizang plateau right into a sort of more lower altitude and flatter regions in Sichuan and also Yunnan as well.
And also so because of this very dynamic geological structure feature of this mountain system.
It offers a very diverse when it comes to biodiversity.
You can see a lot of different plants and animals living on different altitudes.
And also at the same time, it has a lot of parallel mountain chains and deep valleys.
And also you can see three big rivers in China the Yangtze River, The Lanzhang River, which also later became the Mekong in Southeast Asia, and also the Nu River, which becomes Salwini River, in India, that they sort of run side by side for hundreds of kilometers.
So it's a vast, vast and very beautiful places to travel and also can be very challenging as well.
Yeah, and what really defines this region is its dramatic terrain.
Because at the top stands Mount Gonga, the highest peak in the range at 7,556 meters.
And also nearby, the Tiger Leaping Gorge.
I think in Chinese it's called Hu Tiao Xia.
Along the Jingsha River is one of the most famous canyons in the world.
And the mountains are also dotted with basins and also lakes.
But they are geologically active as well.
The landslides, mud flows and earthquakes are relatively common, as this is one of China's major seismic zones.
Qi Jinyan, author of the book Wandering the Hengduan Mountains, where she wandered forth.
Three years.
It also, it's the place she's born in.
Wow.
In Sichuan province, sorry.
She wrote and published her first work at the age of 16.
At 20, she had already completed her first novel.
And she has been recognized over and over again for her works.
That book, by the way, Wandering the Hung Duan Mountains, went on to receive recognition in 2023.
That was with the Daofeng Book Award for Annual Travel Literature.
And then later in 2025, it was honored with another award.
The essay award at the 11th Sichuan Literature Prize.
An impressive human, not just a great author, but just an impressive human being.
And also on an impressive mountain system in the world, the Hengduan Mountains as well.
Unbelievable.
Please do check out that book.
This segment was presented in collaboration with Apple Podcasts, and we would love to hear from you too.
So what's a book that's been on your mind recently?
You can share that with us, roundtablepodcast at qq.com.
Share your recommendations and explore more from Roundtable China on Apple Podcasts.
Hear ye, hear ye.
Please gather round.
It's time for the soapbox.
You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Steve today with Yushan and Feifei, and it is time for this week's edition of The Soapbox.
It's our segment where we find something that happened somewhere in the world and it makes us feel something good or bad.
We identify those feelings with our company therapist, and then we share them with you in a structured and organized fashion.
Just kidding about the company therapist, although sometimes I feel like we need one.
And they may feel like they need one in Shenzhen because there's a bit of controversy happening down there between the city and the citizens.
Yeah, recently there are actually two stories happening in the same city.
Well, i think they can be sort of very similar in the theme.
For example, the first one is about the shenzhen bay park.
It's a big, big urban park in Shenzhen and they recently received a lot of complaints coming from residents about insufficient lighting at nighttime.
So, instead of installing more lights from the park authorities, the park explained that the reduced illumination was a deliberate mistake.
Science-based policy to protect migrant birds.
So this is why they said no to their residents.
So the residents are complaining, like when they go to hang out in the park, go jogging or dancing or whatever it is they're doing, that it's too dark in there.
That's a reasonable complaint, I guess, because safety issues maybe, or you just want to feel comfortable at night in well-lit places.
But this is all about migratory birds.
Yeah, because Shenzhen Bay Park, apart from being an urban park, it also sits on the East Asian Australasian Flyway.
It's one of the nine major global migratory bird routes.
So every winter, tens of thousands of birds would stop here during their epic journeys from East Asia or between East Asia and Australia.
And so artificial lights would disrupt their resting and migration rhythms.
So that's why in actually in the year 2023, Shenzhen decided to implement a very strict nighttime light environment standards, meaning that they would only provide basic lighting at very crucial places like core entrances, transport noose or main walkways.
But for areas that's crucial for these birds, they will be kept dark or softly illuminated, with very warm and low disturbance yellow lighting.
Oh, so it's all about making it comfortable for the birds.
But a little inconvenient for humans.
At the cost of the comfort birds.
For the humans.
Okay, that was the first story.
By the way, that Shenzhen nighttime light policy, is that all over the city, you mean?
Or is that just within the park area?
Within the park area.
It's also because of the mangroves, you know, by the coast, the city that enjoys.
Okay, so that was the first one.
What else happened in Shenzhen?
The second story is also about birth.
It's actually from a middle school called Baoan Middle School in the city of Shenzhen.
A senior student.
He is preparing for the Gaokao, the very high-stakes college entrance exams in China.
And he complained to his principal about.
A different kind of disruption is about the chirping of coals.
It's a protected black bird with bright eyes that's very common in that region.
And the sounds can reach 80 decibels, which can be a little bit abstract for us to understand.
So I also have this clip. of the bird chirping called the cold.
Yes, you can see.
That sounds beautiful to me.
Yeah, yeah, actually.
But maybe for senior students, high school students under a lot of pressure preparing for the exams.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Ron, can we play that again if it's possible?
Because I want to put myself in the shoes of this young man.
Okay, I'm trying to study.
Gaokao's coming.
I feel stressed.
Shut up, bird!
Okay, I get it.
I get it.
So he complained?
He complained to what?
Have the bird removed?
He complained.
He wrote a letter to his school principal describing that it is a torture to hear quote unquote this noise and asked the school to remove the bird's nest.
So you know he calls it.
The free spirits can fly back to nature, but also, at the same time, he can prepare for his exam in silence.
In another story, that's the background music of Snow White waking up.
Like that exact bird?
Yeah.
How beautiful that can be.
It's kind of...
Amazing that you know that.
But what did the principal say?
Well, the principal, of course, refused.
But he said he wrote back to the student and he wrote I understand your urgency but I cannot agree to remove the bird's nest, not because I lack sympathy, but because I hope you can understand that the ultimate goal of education is not to make the world adapt to us but to teach us how to live with it.
The principal saw a teaching moment and took advantage.
And also to a higher notch, that he invited university researchers to give science lessons about birth, to teach students to understand.
You know, you can't just remove their homes, as simple as that.
He also gave earplugs to the student, right?
Yeah, and also installed alternative earplugs, nesting sites.
That's sort of luring the birds away.
But instead of just physically remove their nests, the principal built alternative birds nests yeah, not birds nests building an alternative nesting sites to attract birds to build their new nest at this, at those areas.
Okay, so these two stories had Fei Fei feeling a certain kind of way.
You ready to share?
Yes, and here is my soapbox.
We've grown used to a world that functions like a nap.
Customized, frictionless... and then perfectly tuned to our convenience.
And then here is when a dark park becomes a problem, and a birdsong become a noise.
And for decades we've been smoothing out these kind of edges of the natural world, paving over anything that doesn't serve us and convinced this is the progress that we want.
But in reality, we aren't the only ones who need the night or the space to sing.
And this could be a hard lesson for us to learn that coexistence requires restraint.
The night is supposed to be dark and the world is supposed to have sounds.
So for us, that feels like a inconvenience.
But maybe the problem is on us.
We've lived in these controlled, curated environments for so long that anything unfiltered feels wrong.
We expect silence, order, Predictability as if the planet itself should adapt to our preferences.
But nature was never designed for our comfort.
It isn't a backdrop.
It isn't a setting that we can mute or adjust.
It's alive, it's indifferent. and it doesn't owe us a quiet or light or ease.
So here is a question that I want to end my soapbox with is for us to think over.
Have we become too fragile to live in this nature?
Hmm.
So you agree with the park that told the citizens... Deal with the darkness.
Too bad.
These birds need this place.
It's part of their global, almost, migration.
Yeah.
And you agree with the principal that said...
Sorry, here's your headphones.
I'll try to build a place for the bird to go, but I can't guarantee it.
And you need to learn to accept this.
I 100% support them.
Yushan?
I think I'm also on the side of supporting it.
The habitat of these birds, animals or the way that people live with or use the word coexist with the world, I think, is finding that kind of balance.
And now I think it makes so much more sense that I went to a park that I thought that was out of maintenance.
The lights were so dimming.
You would think that, wouldn't you?
It's a dangerous place.
Or the city's trying to cut back on electricity at night.
Maybe save a little money there, sure.
But now I feel so much more comforted.
And maybe it's not like mainly because of that, but that is a good thing for the birds, then I think yeah, why not?
And also I would give another example when it comes to mosquito bites.
You can think about.
When you're stepping into a very woody area with a lot of trees and grasses, you've got a lot of mosquito bites.
And it's also very natural for people to complain about this kind of mosquito bites.
But also it is how nature works.
You step into the wild, you will be bitten.
I was with you up until now.
Right.
I think you lost me there a little bit.
It's still a city park.
It's still a place that was constructed for the comfort of human beings that live in that neighborhood.
It's not like. this park was in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
But you will get bitten by mosquitoes.
And I think that can be a more extreme example when it comes to the inconvenience that I want to point it out is that when you try to coexist with nature, it will be inconvenient and it will be very uncomfortable from time to time.
And there are ways for us to deal with it.
When it comes to the mosquito bites, there are different repellent that we can use on our body and there are different technologies to lure away these mosquitoes.
This doesn't necessarily mean that we need to kill them all.
So that's the point.
I don't think the murder of thousands of birds was the solution offered by the citizens.
They just wanted some brighter lights.
But yeah, when you install some of the brighter lights, that means the results for this birth can be devastating.
You never know.
Well, what about the student then?
Well, the students, I think it's natural for him.
We've all been through this Gaokao procedure.
We know how stressful that can be.
But it's also how you deal with stress.
He can move.
Yeah, you can put on earplugs.
Just go to a different room in the school.
What's your problem?
Close the window.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, I'll be wrapping the show now.
That'll do it for today's round.
I'm Steve.
Shut up, bird!
And that will do it for today's roundtable.
I am Steve with Feifei and Yuxuan.
We thank you very much for being with us today.
We hope you enjoyed the show.
We did.
Have a great one.
And please do join us again next time.
