Coming back for its 13th year, the annual Ubud Writers & Readers Festival has drawn its signature mix of writers, artists, travelers, and all-around interesting folk to Bali’s beloved little jungle town for five days of fascinating discussion, workshops, screenings, and the like.
But while there’s truly an impressive showing of thinkers and doers from around the globe in attendance at the festival (which runs through Sunday), at the very heart of this year’s programming are some truly badass females who are taking a stand on issues they’re passionate about.
Unlike last year’s more controversial focus around the anniversary of the 1965 Indonesian killings, this year’s festival paid homage to the Hindu philosophy, ‘Tat Tvam Asi’. Which loosely translates from Sanskirt to “I am you, you are me,” making it all about empathy.
While there are more remarkable women involved in this year’s programming than we can simply list, two of UWRF’s leading ladies that have really driven the festival and conveyed its theme full force are Korean American investigative journalist Suki Kim and Chinese-born Canadian pageant winner and actress Anastasia Lin, who doubles as an activist.
Suki Kim
Suki Kim, the first journalist to go undercover in North Korea has a lot to say—this became very clear from hearing her passionately speak during the UWRF press call on Wednesday and during her main program panel discussion, “Suki Kim: Undercover in North Korea.”
Armed with a book contract, Kim traveled totally undercover to North Korea in 2011, embedding herself as an ESL teacher in an evangelical Christian school where she taught 270 sons of the country’s elite, though she was neither really a teacher nor an evangelical. She literally went where no one else has gone before, documenting a side of North Korea that no outsider has been privy to—the only existing types of accounts out there of the closed-off country are interviews with defectors and Western reporters’ peek into the country while on government “propaganda tours.”
A big topic of discussion at her panel was the humanity Kim illustrated in her book, showing that even though her students were the creme de la creme of Pyongyang, the sons of the wealthy, they were still very much prisoners of the country’s surveillance set up and totally, inhumanely cut off from knowledge: 20 year olds were like eight year olds, Kim explained. “That’s what happens when you infantilize an entire population.”
Kim spent extensive time researching North Korea (ten plus years), made multiple visits to the country including this undercover investigation where she put it all on the line (imagine the worst if she had been caught), hiding USB sticks on her body, an SD card in her room, with her reporter’s notes buried deep in her lesson plans. However, the big slap in the face was when she returned to the US only to have her publisher categorize her book, “Without You, There Is No Us: My Time With the Sons of North Korea’s Elite,” as a ‘memoir’ rather than investigative journalism. This, she later realized was a sales tactic from her publisher.
“Now I wish I pulled that book,” Kim candidly said during the UWRF press call, adding that she “couldn’t win that battle” to get her publisher to cast off the memoir label.
The moment her book came out as a memoir, Kim said it ripped out all her investigation’s credibility, instead transforming her reporting into a story with a sexist spin, one “woman’s journey to find herself,” making her story all about feelings, rather than a groundbreaking piece of reporting from inside North Korea.
“If I were a white male, would this have ever been considered a memoir?” Kim quipped, underlining the the sexism, racism, and orientalism she’s been hit with since her book came out.
Anastasia Lin
“The moral of the story: find a good publisher. And that’s what I’m going to do,” Miss World Canada title holder, Anastasia Lin concluded during the UWRF press call after hearing Kim speak and getting asked if she, herself would consider publishing a book based on her own experiences.
Lin’s story and background is incredibly different from Kim’s but equally badass in its own right. While Kim is a journalist and uses her writing to reach people, Lin says her medium is definitely first and foremost acting.
Lin’s biggest moment on the world stage thus far—and what’s set her apart from your typical pageant queen—are her outspoken views on China’s human rights violations. Those very views had her barred from entering China for the Miss World Final and declared a “persona non grata” by the very country where she was born.
Lin is a practitioner of the spiritual faith Falun Gong, that the Chinese Communist Party banned from the country because of its popularity, fearing it as a threat to their power.
But other than trying to stop the oppression against Falun Gong followers, Lin has also spoken up for the many other marginalized minority groups in China, including the Muslim Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists, and Christians.
“My aim is not to put an anti-China slogan on the stage,” she previously said about the Miss World competition. “After all, it’s a beauty pageant. But I feel that my presence in that country alone would give people hope. The regime would show itself worthy of hosting the [2022 winter Olympic] Games by allowing me to enter China freely.”
While she said she hit the ice cream hard in a state of grief after getting denied a visa into China for the pageant, she definitely sees the good that’s come out all this, how much potential she has to make a difference and at least raise awareness.
In her panel discussion “Anastasia Lin: Beauty with Purpose,” Lin examined the ability of beauty and art to be platforms for change. Considering the attention she’s previously been able to gather, especially just on Twitter alone when she tweeted about the incident, using the hashtag #AfraidOfABeautyQueen, China better watch out for Lin.
Coconuts Bali is media partners with Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2016.
