Seeing
A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China's Most Influential Television Journalist
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In the tradition of Katy Tur, Jane Pauley, and Peter Jennings, Chai Jing shows us the power of television news and the complex challenges of reporting in China.
After becoming a radio DJ in college and a TV interviewer at 23, Chai Jing is thrust into the spotlight when she takes on a position as a news anchor at CCTV, China’s official state news channel. Chai struggles to find her role in a male-dominated news organization, discovering corruption, courage, and hope within the people she meets while honing her talent for getting people to reveal themselves to her.
In eleven propulsive and deeply felt chapters, Chai recounts her investigations into SARS quarantine wards, a childhood suicide epidemic, the human cost of industrial pollution, and organized crime, while looking back at her growth as a journalist. Chai Jing shares the philosophical and emotional complexity of the ethical challenges that are always present in such revealing reporting, while she also finds hope and purpose, time and again, in the vital and intimate stories of her interviewees.
This candid memoir from one of China’s best-known journalists provides a rare window into the issues which concern us most, and which face contemporary China and the whole world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gripping debut memoir, Chinese TV journalist Chai fights to find the truth—and her own voice—as she covers stories on topics including youth suicides and pollution in a country determined to hide bad news. Born in 1976, Chai fell in love with stories as a child, and took a brief radio reporting gig at 16. Later, she began working for state-run CCTV as a host and reporter. Here, she mixes episodes of sexism and censorship from higher-ups with accounts of her professional triumphs. In the book's most moving sections, Chai recounts her interviews with victims of domestic violence imprisoned for killing their husbands ("During their interviews, the women all said, ‘The final night, he was especially strange' "), which helped bring about China's first restraining order laws. Elsewhere, Chai details how returning to her home province of Shanxi to discover the coal industry had transformed the sky into "a burnt wok covering the earth" moved her to report on pollution throughout China despite pushback from her superiors. Though the prose is sometimes rocky ("Sleeping at night, it was quiet in the mountain; so quiet that it was hard to sleep"), Chai's pursuit of truth in the face of adversity is deeply inspiring. Budding journalists and readers looking for a window into a changing China will be riveted.
