Tag: Asia

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It's been over four years since I moved to Japan, and I'm still baffled by the country's food sexism.

My first visit to Japan was a flurry of city lights, fresh sushi, and cherry blossoms in 2017. Between crying (joyful tears) three times in the Studio Ghibli Museum, and chasing down a cotton candy rainbow in Harajuku, I returned to the U.S. thinking, That was the best trip of my life. But on my second visit two years later, I started seeing the societal cracks I’d initially overlooked. While talking to a local near Tokyo’s Arakawa River about our favorite Japanese foods, I excitedly shared my love for strawberry shortcakes.

“That’s for women,” he replied.

I was stunned.

It’s been over four years now since I moved to Tokyo. My early ignorant bliss of Japan being a fantasyland—when it is in fact a very real place with very real problems—has long subsided. But my echoing bafflement over the country’s food sexism has remained and only grown over time.

Japan has a misogyny problem. In June 2023, the country faced international criticism for sending a male minister, instead of a woman, to lead a G7 meeting on women's empowerment. According to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Report (a way to measure gender equality across categories like economic participation, education, health, political empowerment, and more), Japan ranked 118th out of 146 countries. And despite electing its first female prime minister in 2025, which on the surface, seemed like a win for equality, it was a superficial victory: Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi ascended to power as a hardline conservative who championed traditional gender roles. She even voted against a woman becoming Emperor in 2021, echoing her political party’s stance on maintaining the country’s sexist male-only succession rule. The decision risks the end of Japan's 1,500-year-old monarchy, the oldest continuous hereditary dynasty in the world.

In a society built upon patriarchy (and actively maintaining it), these entrenched beliefs have far-reaching ripple effects that seep into the fabric of everyday life. Groping on packed commuter trains and notorious workplace harassment are just the tip of the misogynistic iceberg. From lingering high heel mandates to the negative social stigmas around showing cleavage, there are countless other everyday instances that feel like never-ending microaggressive daggers, magnifying the depths of the country’s prejudice and discrimination against women. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that this bleeds into the country’s relationship with food. It’s even unusual for women to be sushi chefs, due to false beliefs that women’s hands are too warm to handle raw fish and that menstruation can impact a person’s ability to taste.

As a professional food writer, I’ve long been privy to how sexism impacts dining culture. But in Tokyo, it’s something I’ve seen and experienced firsthand. Recently, while working on a restaurant guide, I pushed my normal ramen-eating limits by visiting 10 different shops in a month, continuously finding myself in a line of mostly, if not all, men. It’s common to see queues of men in business suits waiting for hot ramen throughout the city, but it was only after seeing it so often up-close that I picked up on—and felt—the stark gender imbalance.

Reading restaurant reviews in Japanese only further confirmed my growing suspicions. “This ramen isn’t good for women because it’s too big” was a common theme; or on the flip side, “This place is amazing! Even I, as a [mere] woman, can eat the whole bowl!!!” There was also a constant pattern of reviewers mentioning whether it was acceptable for women to dine alone at certain ramen shops, or if the ramen was “light” enough for women to eat.

The message across these reviews was clear: Women can have ramen, but it can’t be too large, or too fatty, and must be somewhere acceptable to the male gaze.

What I’ve seen for ramen is the same for sweets, but the inverse. Inside many dessert shops, a sea of women customers quietly sit and enjoy their cakes and other pastries, without a man in sight. The bare walls, minimal decor, and ambient slurping sounds of a standard ramen shop are replaced with detailed crown modeling and the clinking of tiny forks on floral porcelain plates. Lines of men in business suits are swapped with lines of women in dresses and skirts. While I have also seen men in these shops on occasion, they are often accompanied by a woman on what appears to be a date.

As an “outsider,” especially as an American living in Japan, I recognize it’s easier to notice and be critical of a culture that’s not my own. After all, the U.S. has its own sexist food norms, and is far from immune to toxic stereotypes around food. Remember Women Laughing Alone with Salad? Or when tall, bearded men were wrapping meat logs in bacon? Today, guys are slapping raw meat down on countertops so hard and so often that it’s become background noise on TikTok, all while the current administration uses MAHA and MAGA to strengthen the stereotype of meat consumption as a cultural symbol of “traditional” masculinity. The U.S. might have slightly greater gender parity with regards to desserts (even though they still lean more heavily towards women), but like many countries, we are not exempt from our own forms of food misogyny.

This is to say, Japan’s culturally-specific gendered relationships with food do not live in a void. There is home-grown food sexism in Japan, yes, but there are just as many beliefs that have developed via global influences, including its diet culture amongst women.

Despite the ongoing patriarchal stronghold, cultural shifts in food have also started to emerge here. There’s a rise in a movement called ramen girls (or ramen joshi in Japanese), where some women make a concerted effort to slurp down as much ramen as they can. Women ramen influencers have also attracted large audiences in recent years, like Satoko Morimoto, who proudly claims to eat more than 600 bowls of ramen a year and has amassed over 53,000 Instagram followers. More men are leaving the post-war “carnivorous” image behind and are embracing the sweeter things in life, too. Some refer to them as “herbivore men,” a term that can carry a derogatory image because of its outward rejection of old masculine ideals—but they persist all the same.

When I do witness a man enjoying dessert alone in a room full of women, or a woman dining solo going ham on a bowl of tsukemen—I think to myself, YES! To me, it’s a small, quiet act of resistance against gender expectations. There’s a lot of room for progress, but these small changes can have a snowball effect in changing not just Japan’s food culture but more widely, its entrenched national sexism. I believe anyone, regardless of their gender, should be able to eat ramen, little cakes, and whatever else they want, whenever they damn well please. The food doesn’t care, so why should we?

When I think back to my second trip to Japan, I always remember my chat with that Tokyo local. After he told me that cake was only for women, I asked him, “Do you not like shortcakes? They’re so good!” He looked away shyly. “I do,” he said, “but I don’t tell people.”

Wherever he is, I hope he’s more than just occasionally throwing down on the tallest, thickest slices of strawberry shortcake out there, fully owning his sweet tooth for all to see.

[post_title] => Let Men Eat Cake (and Women Eat Ramen) [post_excerpt] => It's been over four years since I moved to Japan, and I'm still baffled by the country's food sexism. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => japan-food-sexism-culture-ramen-cake-desserts-tokyo-eating-sanae-takaichi-soapbox [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 20:28:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 20:28:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10772 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 22, 2026August 3, 2026

Let Men Eat Cake (and Women Eat Ramen)

by Kiera Wright-Ruiz

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While reporting on climate change isn’t always hopeful, the women I've met along the way are forging a path forward for intergenerational resilience.

In the dim flicker of a kerosene lantern on a fog-wreathed houseboat, I watched Nazia Qasim’s reed-scarred hands pierce threadbare fabric with her needle, weaving colored abayas as her eyes fixed on Dal Lake’s silt-choked horizon, diesel haze mingling with the sour tang of rotting lotus stems, where vibrant beds once bloomed.

I’ve heard endless tales from Nazia—and Qudisa, and Bano, and their sisters—about how the lake’s relentless shrinkage has mirrored their own lives’ contracting. Yet the women have overcome: As the lake withers, under absent snows and dying streams, the water now polluted and undrinkable, they have found new work and purpose through their weaving. For hours last January, I watched their hands move in the lantern’s glow, transforming loss into livelihood. This sisterhood, which once thrived on an endless, ancestral bounty of lotus, water chestnuts, and fish, now scraps stitched tight, the women’s quiet knots a fierce stand against the fade.

As a climate reporter based largely out of India, I am often tasked with telling stories on the frontlines of disaster. I have crouched in Pampore’s parched Karewas at dawn, watching farmers Farida Jan and Snobar Ahad recount the decline of saffron, a visceral dirge for disappearing traditions I could feel in the cracked earth underfoot. I’ve seen women shoulder jerry cans under a merciless sun, irrigating wilted bulbs past cobwebbed government drip lines, turning the world’s most prized spices into frantic wagers against the sky, where one failed season means debt for entire villages. And in countless moments, I’ve watched with growing frustration how easily the world abandons the Global South, which disproportionately bears the brunt of climate change, and how rarely the countries most responsible seem to face the same consequences.

This work necessitates exhaustive fieldwork in fragile ecosystems, sifting through scarce data amid conflict, and confronting the grief of vanishing landscapes and livelihoods. But in my writing on the realities of climate change, I’ve also made a conscious effort to find stories of resilience, rather than just stories of despair. Stories that not only show there are still people who haven’t given up on the fight, but who have made a meaningful difference in changing the tides.

These changemakers are often women.

Perhaps because of this, my work has always felt inherently hopeful: Despite climate theft splintering families—stealing not just saffron yields and Dal Lake’s bounties, but the heartbeat of a country’s soul—these women persist as resilient guardians, weaving their survival with fierce tenderness from the shattered threads.

This has also made it all the more important to me that I get their stories right. As a writer, I prioritize women’s agency and consent, letting them narrate their own stories however I can. This approach shatters poverty tropes, spotlighting their resilience and innovation over the victimhood stereotypes that dominate mainstream coverage of rural Indian women. It also imbues my work with deeper meaning, in hopes that harmful narratives might begin to shift as more of these women’s stories are allowed to take up space.

Over the years, I’ve chased India’s climate fury, from Kashmir’s vanishing glaciers to Maharashtra’s cracked fields and Tamil Nadu’s drowned coasts. And the women I’ve met along the way light a fire in me: Their grit isn’t survival, it’s rebirth for a warming world.

“When I got married, nobody asked my choices,” Kamla told me on her daughter’s wedding day, now nearly two years ago. “Today, I ensure hers.”

The message was loud and clear: Economic independence is agency in a patriarchal script. And for Kamla, it had allowed her to reclaim this agency on her own terms, and to give her daughter a chance at a better life.

I first met her in early 2024, while reporting my story “A Farm of One’s Own” for The Conversationalist. Kamla is a farmer from Khajraha Khurd’s sunbaked fields, in parched Bundelkhand’s Jhansi district, Uttar Pradesh. She leads local farming techniques to combat drought, something that has helped pull families in the region out of poverty, proving climate adaptation thrives on female ingenuity.

In the days we spent together, I crouched beside Kamla as she worked, enveloped in the mud’s earthy scent. Her eyes were sweat-stung, her fingers plunged into the sun-warmed soil. As she crunched freshly picked beetroot, she explained to me how she uses neem traps to ward off pests amid erratic rains. Her father-in-law burst out laughing, teasing her for explaining farming to me like she knew anything at all.

But it was clear she knew more than he understood. When the global coronavirus pandemic rapidly swept across India, some of the most vulnerable, and climate-vulnerable, migrant women were robbed of their work, Kamla included. She not only found meaningful work in the aftermath, but self-reliance, trading callused hands for hoe and seed, wresting millet, broccoli, and lentils from her own organic farm.

Kamla’s resilience was magical to witness. I spent many days with her, seeing how she started her day, plunging into compost heaps steaming with kitchen scraps and dung, spreading the fertilizer across her garden. Watching her wipe soil from her weathered palms, spinach bunch in hand, I saw her rooted at last from laborer to earth-tender, peace in every leaf, life hers again.

In the afternoon, she tiptoed through the fields and quickly kneaded the dough for lunch and put it on the tawa, slapping it thin and golden and slathering the sizzling ghee, serving it with a tin cup of frothy chai brewed strong over a chulha fire. We ate together in the rows of a multi-cropped farm, the air humming with neem leaves. This wasn't just a meal; it was a window into resilience in motion, women and girls weaving nourishment from the land. Nearby, her great-grandmother sat cross-legged on the earthen floor, her gnarled fingers deftly cleaning a mound of fresh red chillies in the sun—plucking stems, wiping dust, and muttering local songs on the front porch of her house, a visual treat to witness a silent hymn to preservation in a world of fleeting harvests.

As we ate, I thought of these women, whose callused hands not only yield the wisdom and knowledge of saplings and sickles, but carry it forward, forging an intergenerational resilience against climate chaos that exists beyond immediate harvests, or even lifetimes—ensuring the next generation endures.

Over the years, I’ve met countless women enacting change like Kamla, often without credit or acknowledgement. In India’s northern Haryana state, I met Sunita Dahiya, a woman pioneering eco-friendly menstrual products, and training rural women to produce organic pads that decompose rapidly, slashing microplastic pollution and the burden of billions of plastic disposables in landfills each year. In north Kashmir’s Bandipora district, I met Phula Bano, who manages large herds of wild dogs, cattle, and horses through daily treks in the Himalayas, helping to sustain a low-carbon, resilient ecosystem.

For an early story for The Conversationalist, I also met the beekeeper Towseefa Rizvi—a living embodiment of sisterhood in action. As the first female beekeeper in Ganderbal district, Kashmir, Towseefa has demonstrated, again and again, how one woman’s rise can create pathways for others to join her. Within her community, she also demonstrated that beekeeping could be a profitable path, as well as a productive response to ecological despair. Today, she still trains and supervises village women in the tender art of queen-rearing and swarm management, and sells local honey through various haats and online.

When I visited her home in Bandipora district in north Kashmir, I saw apple groves dotted with buzzing apiaries in her backyard, as she coaxed her bees into new, modern hives. She viewed her bees as family, and over the years, dedicated herself to learning about the restoration of biodiversity, pollination of resilient crops, and climate vagaries.

Her journey was also proof that true climate hope lies not in flashy summits, but more often, in one woman’s quiet and relentless work.

Centering hope in my reporting, of course, hasn’t saved me from the realities of writing about and from regions affected by climate change.

What started as whispers of women-led mangrove safaris while researching another story last year eventually evolved into a gruelling quest, marked by relentless weather delays and elusive sources. For months, I chased the story of Sindhudurg’s mangrove guardians—fierce women from one of Maharashtra’s pioneering women-led self-help groups (SHGs). And for months, I wondered if the story I hoped to tell would ever come to fruition.

Weather changes were unforgiving foes. Monsoons flooded coastal paths and stranded my sources with switched-off phones for weeks. Out of anxiety, I’d chase them via voicemail. Officials also proved phantoms as the network dropped along eroding coastlines.

It wasn’t easy to convince the women to entrust me with their stories; their promises fading with each storm surge and postponed boat trip. But visiting the coast and sharing chai in salt-lashed homes finally broke the ice last fall, and resulted in my final piece from the year, “Guardians of the Mangroves”, about how Maharashtra’s crab farmers are spearheading women-led coastal restoration amid local climate chaos.

Late in my visit, I stood with farmer Sonali Sunil Acharekar amid the hushed mangroves, her rough hands parting their roots in silent vigil, as cries of herons and egrets filled the skies. She paused mid-story about lost fish, her fingers sifting through the silty tides to snare a scuttling fiddler crab.

She grinned. “See? Even the birds know we’re guardians.”

I felt a spark of wonder that, despite rough weather nearly killing this story, I could still bring these women’s unbreakable strength into the light. As we enter a new year, I am ending the last with gratitude for their efforts, and the stories these women have shared. I hope, too, I continue to push myself to amplify excluded voices, to craft stories of climate hope that counter the despair-dominating headlines, and to show women as stewards of India’s Global South.

When we lose sight of hope, we risk nihilism that doesn’t allow us to see ingenuity amidst climate chaos—something women in the Global South have delivered time and time again, and something that has made me feel consistently hopeful in my work. While reporting on climate change itself isn’t always hopeful, there is always hope—and at the center of that hope are the women who bend, rise, and persist, their strength illuminating the fragile edge where water meets earth.

[post_title] => Planting the Seeds of Climate Hope [post_excerpt] => While reporting on climate change isn’t always hopeful, the women I've met along the way are forging a path forward for intergenerational resilience. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => hope-week-climate-change-resilience-action-profile-economic-independence-global-south-india [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 21:01:04 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 21:01:04 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9889 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 8, 2026August 3, 2026

Planting the Seeds of Climate Hope

by Aliya Bashir

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How women crab farmers along India's coast have linked their livelihoods to environmental conservation.

A soft current ripples near Jamdulwadi Island as 15-year-old Prachi Santosh Acharekar guides her canoe through the gnarled trunks of a mangrove forest.

The afternoon sun warms the surface of the water, revealing a familiar scene to local communities around India’s Konkan coast: clusters of mud-covered crabs, basking on branches.

As she approaches them, she slows her boat. Prachi, a 10th-standard student, doesn’t just see mud crabs: She sees her future. Her focused gaze and deft handling of the boat are part of her autodidactic training, a testament to a burgeoning passion that runs deep within the Acharekar family.

Prachi Santosh Acharekar navigating her canoe through the mangroves, a part of her crab farming training.

Champions of the Mangroves

In Achara village, where she lives, crab farming season typically runs from October to May. When Prachi is fully inducted into her family’s business in about three years, during this time, she’ll be busy with preparations, stocking seed, feeding the crabs, and folding boxes to safely transport them once they’ve been harvested.

All of it will also formalize her role in a grassroots movement, led by women from India’s coastal belt: In Sindhudurg, women fisherfolk have become champions in linking their livelihoods with environmental conservation. Through crab farming, they’ve created a strong incentive to protect local mangroves, which serve as critical nursery habitats for mangrove crabs. The benefits of this are both economical and ecological: Alongside generating sustainable income for the women, the mangroves’ preservation stabilizes shorelines and mitigates erosion, enhancing coastal resilience against the impacts of climate change.

At the heart of this enterprise is Prachi’s aunt, 55-year-old Sonali Sunil Acharekar, a proud entrepreneur and leading member of Konkansparsh, one of Maharashtra’s pioneering women-led self-help groups (SHGs). Like all women of this SHG, for her, the mangrove is not just an ecosystem, but a dynamic marketplace.

“Be it dolphin safari, trekking, birdwatching, or traditional fishing, we do it all at Konkansparsh,” says Sonali, sitting in a charpoy at her home, surrounded by a vast area of mangroves. “But crab farming is our speciality. It is something we feel deeply attached to.”

Sonali and other leaders manage the entire crab farming supply chain, from feeding and harvesting the crabs to selling them. The process is meticulous but straightforward. Crab seeds are carefully placed one-by-one into fiber boxes. Each box is then deployed within the protected mangrove territories of Sindhudurg district, which boasts 6,940 hectares of mangroves perfectly suited for farming. Sonali also feeds the small raw fish stock twice daily, in the morning and evening. Then, once the crabs are ready, they’re harvested, boxed, and sold.

Sonali Sunil Acharekar in the backyard of her home in Achara village.

Overseeing the entire operation in this way has significantly enhanced the women’s access to resources, as well as to the market. The payoff is also demonstrable, including as a sustainable model: Last year, the Acharekar family, a seven-member unit that works in tandem, generated an impressive 150,000 INR ($1,706 USD) from the sale of 180 crabs. They also earned an additional 130,000 INR ($1,466 USD) from running mangrove safaris.

“It feels so good to partake in the process,” says Sonali. “This year, we intend to maintain 200 boxes fully. More boxes mean more business and more business means more prosperity.”

Their success also reinforces a crucial ecological benefit: According to research published in the Marine Biological Association of India, mud crab farming is not only a sustainable—and profitable—livelihood, but an essential strategy for mangrove conservation, supporting the region’s climate resilience through ecosystem protection. The mangroves provide a conducive natural habitat for raising mud crabs, or green crabs, commonly from the species Scylla serrata, which are indigenous to the region. By breeding and harvesting crabs, and building and tending to crabs pens in mangrove creeks, the women have both created a financial incentive for the mangroves' protection and helped to increase the local crab population.

In coastal areas, crabs are considered an economically significant species due to their huge demand. The crabs themselves can also tolerate a wide range of temperatures and salinities without destroying local ecosystems. But over the years, sand mining, saltwater intrusion, and rising water temperatures have contributed to a declining mud crab population, and are just a few of the ongoing stresses and trends that fisher communities have dealt with, and that local SHGs hope to tackle.

A wild baby crab crawls on the trunk of a mangrove tree.

In other coastal communities like Kerala, Maharashtra’s neighboring state, crab farmers who once caught wild juvenile crabs and had plentiful stock are grappling with rising costs and dwindling returns, as crabs have become scarce and stressed. Their annual incomes have dropped by 50,000 INR to 100,000 INR (around $600 USD to $1,200 USD) due to poor water quality, causing frequent disease outbreaks, pushing many farmers to downsize or cease operations altogether, largely due to reduced harvests linked to environmental degradation.

Sustainable crab models in coastal communities in Maharashtra aim to address the pressing problems of overfishing, habitat loss, and food insecurity through long-term economic stability. But without such practices, crab harvesting may yield fleeting profits, triggering ecological collapse and harm to a region’s inhabitants.

In addition to boosting the economy, this is part of why the SHG’s endeavors have been such a great boon to the area.

According to Kedar Palav, Livelihood Specialist at Sindhudurg’s Mangrove Foundation, women-led groups comprising 40 women have been active in Sindhudurg district during the 2024-25 crab farming season. “Our aim,” he notes, “is to facilitate strong livelihood opportunities for the women.”

Sonali Sunil Acharekar (left) and her niece Prachi Santosh Acharekar (center) in conversation with Mayur Pansare (right), a Project Assistant for the Mangrove Foundation.

But even those with formal careers are drawn to the potential. Sonali’s 32-year-old son, Omprakash Sunil Achrekar, an engineering graduate, has embraced crab farming full-time; and Manish Tari, 22, an undergraduate in fisheries science, launched Manish Agro & Seafood with his father during the Covid-19 pandemic, specializing in vertical crab farming.

“We deal in red and green crabs,” says Tari. “A single piece per kilo can go up to 2,400 INR. It’s very lucrative.”

Navigating the Tides

Despite the economic potential, the journey is not without profound risks and hurdles. The most immediate occupational hazard, however, is theft.

“Theft of crabs is a big problem here,” says Sonali. “Sometimes diseases can spread in the backwaters, as well…A mortality rate of 20 percent is considered normal.”

It’s a challenge that has historically forced some farmers out of business. Samiksha Gaonkar, 50, from Pirawadi village, recalls being part of Sindhudurg’s very first crab culture group, which operated between 2014 to 2019. Despite each group member earning around 5000 INR per month, they were forced to shut down.

“Our crabs got suddenly stolen,” says Samiksha. “We could not keep a check on the thefts and then we had to pull out.”

Anagarajan Joshi, 58, a former crab farmer, at her friend’s home in Pirawadi village.

Another hurdle is the scarcity of crab seed. According to Palav, there is only one hatchery in India: the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Aquaculture (RGCA) in the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu.

Sanjeevni Santosh Mithbavker, 43, a member of the Vedoleshwar SHG, says crab farming has become more difficult as a result. “We lack seed,” she says. “If the supply of seed becomes easy, we can take this business forward.”

Despite the scarcity, Sanjeevni sold crabs worth 60,000 INR last season. But while business is “great,” seed still costs 25 to 30 INR for a single piece—makings it an expensive venture for the average crab farmer.

A Wave of Resilience

To counter these challenges, government and non-governmental efforts have actively focused their support on the most vulnerable communities, placing women at the forefront.

Government initiatives such as the Mangrove Conservation and Livelihood Generation Scheme, alongside international projects like Enhancing Climate Resilience of India’s Coastal Communities (ECRICC), have been instrumental in fostering local interest in Sindhudurg’s coastal villages, including Achara and Hadi. As part of the Mangrove Foundation’s intervention, women’s groups also receive substantial training and support, including expert talks, presentations, and hands-on workshops that offer extensive practical training.

On the ground, additional support comes from 34 Sagar Mitras—fisheries graduates who act as vital resources for the women. Mayur Vinayak Pansare, Project Assistant with the Mangrove Foundation, sees themselves in a family-like role. While they occasionally help fix issues, like crabs breaking through fiber boxes, he says, “It’s heartwarming to see these women coming forward and taking steps towards self-reliance.”

Sanjeevni Santosh Mithbavker, 43, mends nets at her home in Hadi village.

The financial assistance is also significant: The Achrekar family, for instance, received a substantial 90 percent subsidy from the Department of Fisheries and the Mangrove Foundation. Between 2021 and 2025, larger initiatives like the Pradhan Mantri Machi Sampada have backed an additional 124 fisheries projects, with women as a remarkable 60 percent of beneficiaries between 2021 and 2025, says Bahar Vithala Mahakal, Sindhudurg District Program Manager at the Fisheries Department.

This focus is clear across other programs, too: The Sindu Ratna Samrudhi Scheme saw a 70 percent rise in female beneficiaries in a single year, between 2022 and 2023.

Planting the Future

Women’s presence as crab sellers in Sindhudurg’s main fish market signals a generational shift in the industry: They’re taking center stage in an otherwise male-dominated marketplace. For Dakshita (who asked we only use her first name), her presence here is about more than selling her own yield—she’s also reclaiming a little more of herself.

“What is the need for middlemen when I can run my own business?” she says, waiting for customers.

Dakshita, 50, sells green crabs at the Malvan fish market in Sindhudurg.

In Prachi’s case, the journey towards self-reliance began slowly. She initially “harbored no interest in crab farming.” But witnessing her family’s dedication and serving as a guide for tourists through the vibrant backwaters transformed her perspective, converting her initial disinterest into a passion.

In the shifting tides of the Maharashtra coast, Prachi represents the strong voice of a younger generation, seamlessly blending tradition with science to carve a new path forward. For them, crabs are the ‘green gold,’ promising economic returns.

While elder members strengthen their place in the market, Prachi is now articulating a dream that links her environment to her education, which she plans to pursue further by studying Marine Science.

“By protecting the mangroves, my crabs thrive,” she says. “The mangroves in return protect my family from storms, erosion, and the rising sea.”

A view of a mountain village in Sindhudurg.

In the nearby pond, Prachi and Sonali have also started to plant new mangrove saplings. Other efforts at sustainability have only grown. In 2017, scientists visited the area and told local crab farmers that in order to have a better catch, they needed to maintain cleaner water. To boost women’s participation in local water and pond management, women farmers are now being trained to regularly flush water through the crab ponds for freshness, monitor water quality, and prevent overcrowding. Since then, they’ve seen the return of many new birds in the area, from cattle egret to common sandpiper and Indian pond heron.

The tides speak louder than people in Sindhudurg’s coastal communities, and for these powerful women, mangroves stand like guardians along the coast. The more they nurture the mangroves, the more the mangroves give back to them, too. It’s a quiet partnership in nature, this connection between crab farmers and the mangrove forests, and a small step in healing the Earth.

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December 17, 2025August 3, 2026

Guardians of the Mangroves

by Aliya Bashir

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8525 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-06-05 18:35:51 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-06-05 18:35:51 [post_content] =>

We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift.

I once believed that the presence of a female leader signaled real progress—a sign that gender equality had taken root. As a girl growing up in China, I watched with admiration as women like President Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan and President Park Geun-hye in South Korea rose to the highest offices in their respective countries. Their success seemed to promise a future in which women’s voices would be equally heard, equally respected—that perhaps women might finally be seen as equals.

But as I began to study gender and politics more deeply, particularly across East and Southeast Asia, that initial optimism gave way to unease. Representation alone, I realized, does not guarantee change. Even more alarmingly, the symbolic presence of women in power can obscure the systemic barriers that continue to shape—and often silence—most women’s participation in political life.

Globally, this problem has proven surmountable. In Scandinavia, gender quotas and institutional reforms have helped elevate women to between 40% and 50% of parliamentary seats, reflecting not only a shift in numbers but a broader cultural embrace of women as political leaders. Similar gender quotas in Mexico—which elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, last year—have led to women making up 50% of seats in congress, after gender parity was enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2014.

In contrast, however, East and Southeast Asian democracies continue to lag behind—not only in representation, but in the structural support needed to close the gender gap. Japan, for example, despite being one of the world’s largest economies, has seen little progress in this area. Women occupy roughly 16% of seats in the national legislature—a statistic that reveals not just electoral imbalance, but deeper societal expectations about leadership, gender roles, and public legitimacy. As of April of this year, the percentage of women who hold parliamentary seats in India (13.8%), Cambodia (13.6%), Malaysia (13.5%), Sri Lanka (9.8%), and Bhutan (4.3%) remains even lower. And in China, there have been no women in the politburo since 2022, something the United Nations has flagged as a matter of great concern.

So, are women truly gaining power in Asia, or are they simply there to make politics look more gender equal?

Analyzing data from the Asian Barometer Survey suggests the reason women’s political participation remains low in Asia is as much a numbers problem as it is a cultural one. Founded in 1971, the ABS is a cross-national survey that aims to gather “public opinion data on issues such as political values, democracy, governance, human security, and economic reforms.” In a 2020 academic paper from the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Sarah Liu, one surprising finding from the 2010–2012 survey was how the gender of the interviewer affected women’s answers. Faced with female researchers, women opened up about their political beliefs. With male interviewers, many of them hesitated. This suggests a much deeper problem with Asia’s gender divide, rooted in women feeling both uncomfortable with and unwelcome in politics.

Across many societies, not just in Asia, politics is still seen as a man’s domain, where women are expected to support, not lead. But in East and Southeast Asia, where traditional gender roles continue to shape public and private life, this attitude is amplified. Even in modern cities, women are constantly told that politics is not their space. For me, it wasn’t that anyone said I couldn’t be a leader when I was growing up—it was that no one ever expected me to be one. And when women are constantly told that something isn’t an option for them, it makes sense that, eventually, they might actually start to believe it.

When women do step forward to lead, they also face a very different kind of scrutiny to their male peers. Their private lives are often judged more harshly than their professional ones, and given as much attention, if not more. When Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan’s first female president, critics focused on the fact that she was unmarried—as if being single made her unfit to lead. But when it comes to unmarried male leaders, no one ever even thinks to question it.

The media frequently contributes to this double standard. I remember watching coverage of Shoko Kawata, a 33-year-old woman who became the youngest female city mayor in Japanese history after winning her election in Yawata, Kyoto Prefecture in 2023. I was furious that the story’s focus was not on what she’d said in her speech, but on what she was wearing. Other reports also emphasized her love of tea ceremony and traditional kimono attire—while barely mentioning her actual policy goals. Her agenda had been reduced to its aesthetics: her clothes were that day’s headline news, while her policies went overlooked.

Even within political institutions, this bias persists. In Japan, a young Tokyo assemblywoman was once heckled by her male colleagues while speaking about the need for better childcare policies. This incident occurred in 2014, when Ayaka Shiomura, a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, was addressing how the government might better support mothers in light of Japan’s drastically decreasing birth rate. During her speech, several male lawmakers interrupted her with sexist remarks such as “Go and get married!” and “Can you even have children?” One of them, Akihiro Suzuki, later admitted to the heckling and publicly apologized. But the incident sparked widespread outrage, and served as another stark reminder of the entrenched gender bias in even the most formal of political spaces.

Fueling all this is the deeper issue that women are still expected to prioritize the family above all. This problem isn’t singular to Asia, but nonetheless, it feels especially pervasive here: Even in the public sphere, women are still trapped in private expectations. When a woman chooses public service, some see it as a betrayal of her “real” duty. The media asks, “Can she have it all?”—a question they’d never ask of a man, and one that has never been asked of a father.

These attitudes don’t just make the job harder. They make women question whether the space was ever meant for them. And in many ways, it still isn’t—something that keeps women out of politics, and keeps everyone, regardless of gender, chained to the status quo.

Yet, despite persistent challenges, women politicians in Asia have continued to make remarkable strides. President Tsai and President Park both shattered historical barriers to ascend to the highest levels of national leadership in their respective countries, proving that women are more than capable of leading. They also both drove meaningful social and economic change during their terms—even in systems not designed for them.

As the first woman president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen and her administration actively pushed for gender-equal policies, earning Taiwan the top spot in Asia—and one of the highest rankings globally—for gender equality. One particularly meaningful initiative was an amendment requiring companies with more than 100 employees to provide childcare facilities—helping to ease the burden on working mothers. Tsai also supported policies that loosened loan restrictions for women entrepreneurs and promoted female participation in the economy as a path to structural change.

Beyond legislation, she repeatedly called for dismantling gender stereotypes and encouraged women to participate in public life—raising both the visibility and legitimacy of women in leadership. Under her eight-year tenure, Taiwan’s economy grew steadily, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 3.15%, and even reached 6.6% in 2021—a rare achievement during global economic uncertainty.

Park Geun-hye’s presidency, meanwhile, offered a different but equally important approach to leadership. While her administration made more modest progress on gender-specific reforms, it recognized the challenges faced by working mothers and proposed expanding childcare services to support female employment. More broadly, Park’s role as a woman navigating a traditionally male-dominated political landscape was also deeply symbolic.

Under her leadership, South Korea expanded its global economic footprint by signing free trade agreements with 52 countries, including China and Vietnam—bolstering South Korea’s export markets and international competitiveness. These policy efforts, though not always framed through a gender lens, reflected a broader vision of national growth, with women as increasingly visible participants.

Tsai and Park’s contributions—each shaped by their own context—highlight the transformative power and potential of women’s leadership. For millions of women across Asia, seeing them in positions of power—on television, in parliament, in international headlines—continues to deliver an enduring message: women belong here. And their presence alone continues to inspire others to imagine what is possible when women are no longer the exception.

Change won’t come overnight. Cultural shifts take time. But every honest conversation, every woman who speaks up, every moment of resistance matters—so hopefully, one day, girls growing up in East or Southeast Asia will see women in power and think: “That could be me.” Not because it’s rare, but because it’s normal.

To achieve this, we don’t just need more women in office. We need political systems that respect their leadership, media that reports on their work—not their wardrobe—and societies that stop measuring women by outdated standards. We need women in Asia to not just be seen in politics, but truly heard.

[post_title] => When Will Women in Asia Be Seen as Leaders—Not Exceptions? [post_excerpt] => We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => women-leaders-asia-politics-tsai-ing-wen-taiwan-park-geun-hye-south-korea-government-gender-parity-equality [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 22:48:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 22:48:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8525 [menu_order] => 14 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 5, 2025August 3, 2026

When Will Women in Asia Be Seen as Leaders—Not Exceptions?

by Sun Youyang

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8378 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-05-13 19:09:37 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-05-13 19:09:37 [post_content] =>

How a company in Kanpur is giving India's flower waste a second life.

It’s a sweltering April afternoon in Bhaunti village, about an hour’s drive from the heart of Kanpur, India. Inside a large hall, shaded from the harsh sun, the air is thick with the scent of marigold and rose. Groups of women, dressed in bright cotton sarees and salwar suits, work with quiet concentration. Some sit in circles, carefully sorting flower offerings collected from nearby temples; others pluck delicate petals with practiced hands. At one end, a few women lift heavy tubs of freshly washed blooms, carrying them outside to spread on large sheets, where the sun will slowly draw out their moisture, preparing them for the next stage of transformation.

Inside the factory, 38-year-old Preity Mishra moves with quiet efficiency, neatly packing incense boxes with an ease that comes from years of practice. She first joined the factory seven years ago, after unexpectedly losing her previous job, where she had worked for nine long years. At first, Preity admits, she was hesitant. Preity, along with the other women, works for Phool, a company that converts flower waste into incense sticks, cones, essential oils, and dyes. “I thought it would be dirty work,” she recalls, brushing a speck of sandalwood dust from her sleeve. But her perspective quickly changed once she learned where the flowers came from. “When I found out the waste came from temples, I began to see it differently,” she says. “These flowers are sacred and offered in prayer. It felt like I was giving them a second life, which is noble work.”

Preity Mishra inspecting a box of incense sticks.

The story of Phool traces back to 2016, when Ankit Agarwal, a computer engineer turned entrepreneur, accompanied a visiting friend on a trip to Kanpur’s ghats along the Ganga River. It was the time of Makar Sankranti, an Indian festival marked by ritual river dips. Though the water appeared visibly polluted, devotees continued to bathe as part of the tradition. “My friend began asking me questions about the purity of the water, why people still took dips despite the pollution,” Ankit recalls. “I realized I didn’t have the answers. In the meantime, a huge tractor of flower waste came and was dumped into the river.”

That moment planted the first seed of what would eventually become Phool, which means “flower” in Hindi. “I returned to my job, but I couldn’t focus. I was working, but I wasn’t content,” Ankit says, sitting in his office in Kanpur. “I eventually quit and came back to research how this flower waste could be reduced or stopped entirely from polluting our rivers.”

India, with its countless festivals and year-round celebrations, generates a significant amount of solid waste, including an estimated 800 million tons of flower waste per year. As many of these flowers are grown using pesticides and insecticides, when this floral waste is dumped into water bodies, it begins to decay, producing a foul odor and contributing to serious water pollution—much like what Ankit and his friend witnessed in the Ganga River.

After he returned home to Kanpur, Ankit began crunching the numbers, calculating how many temples were in the region, how much flower waste was generated daily, and the scale at which it was being dumped. The results were staggering. According to government data, there are about 108,000 temples and mosques in India where flowers are offered every day, before being dumped in landfills or bodies of water, contributing significantly to the country’s water pollution and ecological damage.

A worker scatters flower petals on a plastic sheet to help them dry.

Ankit began reaching out to temples, hoping to convince them to hand over their floral waste so that it might have a second life. “It was difficult to convince them,” he says. “Flowers offered at temples hold deep religious significance, so naturally, there was hesitation.” The temples weren’t resistant out of indifference, but an abundance of caution. “They were sincere in their concerns,” Ankit acknowledges. “They wanted to know why I wanted the flowers and what exactly I intended to do with them.”

Once Ankit succeeded in securing the flower waste, he spent the next several months immersed in research, exploring different ways the discarded blooms could be transformed into something meaningful. “I spent around eight months studying how this waste could be turned into compost or used in other sustainable ways,” he says. Then, he had a breakthrough. “Incense sticks are usually made from charcoal,” he recalls thinking. “Why not try making them from temple flower waste instead?”

Ankit and his co-founder, Prateek Kumar, began operating out of IIT Kanpur, slowly putting their idea into action. Every day, Ankit would ride his two-wheeler to find a daily-wage laborer to help with tasks like sorting flower waste and basic processing. But the pair struggled to find reliable help—a new worker would show up each day, and rarely would anyone return, even when Ankit personally asked them to come back. It became clear that if the project was to grow, they needed a more stable workforce.

Then, by chance, a woman came to their office one morning looking for work, and Ankit offered her a day’s job. As with many others, he asked her to return the next day—and to his surprise, she did.

A group of women rolling incense sticks by hand.

While they worked side by side, he started a conversation. Could she come regularly? Could she help bring in other women like her? She readily agreed. “It would be better to come here and work with flowers,” she told him, “than to go to seven or eight homes every morning to clean toilets. Even then, we don’t always get paid—just some leftover food or old clothes.”

Ankit was struck by her words. The next day, they visited nearby neighborhoods together, and soon, 35 women had joined the initiative. He trained them, helped them get their Aadhaar cards for the first time, assisted them in opening bank accounts, and taught them how to use mobile phones—all small but powerful steps toward economic empowerment and independence.

“It wasn’t easy at all,” Ankit says. “But we conducted a three-day workshop to teach them the basics. I didn’t want them to remain stuck in the informal sector. I wanted to bring them into the formal workforce, with dignity, stability, and skill.”

A worker monitors one of the factory's machines.

This commitment is fundamental to Phool’s success, and remains an important part of their work culture. “When we established the company, one thing was clear: There would be transparency. That’s why you’ll see there are no walls in the office—just glass partitions to divide the teams,” Ankit explains. “We also made a conscious decision to ensure that the women working with us have a clear path to grow. That’s why we move them from sorting to incense stick making, and then to packaging—so they not only feel a sense of progression but also develop leadership qualities in the process.”

Another important aspect, he shares, is supporting his employees in sending their children back to school. “We currently have 500 people working with us, and 490 of them are women,” Ankit says. “Around 60% of them have enrolled their children back in school. Our mission is to support all of them so that [over the next few years], 5,000 children return to classrooms. This is something we’re intentionally working on, even if we don’t speak about it publicly.”

As for the company itself, Ankit and his team remain dedicated to product innovation and exploring new possibilities with flower waste. Recently, the team even succeeded in creating sustainable “leather” from discarded flowers.

Workers dividing and sorting incense cones for packing.

Nachiket Kuntla, who heads the research and development division at Phool, believes this innovation could be a major breakthrough for the leather industry and the broader sustainable market. “We spent a good 7–8 years researching and experimenting with this idea,” says Nachiket. “We’ve now developed a product that is sustainable and matches leather in terms of texture, quality, and feel. We’ll be launching a pilot product in collaboration with a fashion brand by the end of this year.”

Phool’s journey is a reminder that sustainability doesn’t have to come at the cost of tradition—it can actually grow from it. What began as a simple act of questioning river pollution has now bloomed into a movement that empowers women, preserves faith, and protects the environment. As the world looks for other, cleaner ways forward, perhaps it’s time we ask ourselves: What else are we throwing away that could bloom again?

[post_title] => The Sacred Cycle [post_excerpt] => How a company in Kanpur is giving India's flower waste a second life. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => phool-kanpur-india-flower-floral-waste-temples-sustainability-water-pollution [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 22:50:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 22:50:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8378 [menu_order] => 18 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 13, 2025August 3, 2026

The Sacred Cycle

by Safina Nabi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8183 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-05-06 17:11:49 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-05-06 17:11:49 [post_content] =>

How South Asian rappers are honoring the diaspora—and hip hop’s roots.

Four gunshots and the sound of a cash register: In her 2007 hit “Paper Planes,” British-Sri Lankan rapper and singer M.I.A. (a.k.a., Maya Arulpragasam) interpolated these sounds between sharp lyricism that satirized Western perceptions of third world immigrants and the xenophobia that became especially rampant after 9/11. Against all odds, the world couldn’t help rapping along.

Later, the song would be named one of the top five best of the decade by Rolling Stone, one of the most-streamed of the decade by Apple, and the greatest song by any 21st century woman+ by NPR. Its success was as much due to its catchy refrain as it was to its unexpected content, especially at the time: The song was arguably the first rap song from the South Asian diaspora to articulate the increasingly politicized identities of South Asian migrants and second-generation immigrants to a mainstream global audience.

While the artist behind the song has since become a somewhat controversial figure, the impact of “Paper Planes” remains. And nearly two decades later, rappers from all over the South Asian diaspora have become a testament to the increasing globalization of hip hop, a subculture rooted in resistance, and its power as a language of global protest.

Founded in the Bronx during the 1970s, hip hop was born as a form of expression and resistance in Black and Latino communities, and as a genre, it’s only grown exponentially since. Throughout the 80s, as production and sampling technology became more accessible, hip hop began gaining traction on a wider scale, and eventually, was no longer limited to live performance, thanks to the popularity of shows like Yo! MTV Raps. By the 90s, it had broken into the mainstream, due to the meteoric rise of MTV, BET’s Rap City, and albums like Public Enemy’s “Fear of the Black Planet” achieving commercial success. This mainstream eruption of hip hop also coincided with South Asian Americans using rap to articulate their own immigrant identity for the first time—and now, in the streaming age, the subgenre has only boomed.

Last August, South Indian rapper Hanumankind, who spent his early childhood in Houston, Texas, went viral for his roaring hit “Big Dawgs,” a song about defying cultural stereotypes. The music video, which has over 218 million views on YouTube, features riders on motorcycles zipping around a “well of death,” a spectacle common in Northern India—the video at times feeling like an homage to the stunt driving in the controversial but iconic music video for M.I.A.’s 2012 hit “Bad Girls.”

Hanumankind’s success is the most recognizable contemporary example of the popularity and success of hip hop from the Indian diaspora, a success that feels inherently political due to the thematic explorations of his music. “He's able to use hip hop commercially to make himself successful, while also drawing on cultural and religious symbols that make his identity very much part of Indian and Hindu culture,” says Dr. Mirali Bulaji, a professor in race, global media, and nationalism at the University of Pennsylvania and co-editor of the 2008 book Desi Rap: Hip Hop and South Asian America.

With the myriad of backgrounds and identities that South Asian diaspora rappers have, the politics that they intentionally or unintentionally convey is dependent on not only the lyrical content of their music, but the way they market themselves. This is something Hanumankind is clearly conscious of: His visuals draw on Indian and Hindu imagery, while his music style feels distinctly American (he has cited Texan rap group UGK as one of his biggest influences). But this approach isn’t unique to Hanumankind. For his album “The Long Goodbye,” for example, British-Pakistani rapper and actor Riz Ahmed (who goes by Riz MC) released a short film that played as metaphor for the wrought relationship between South Asian Muslims and the rise of the far right in Britain. Although the visuals and lyrical content of hip hop for the diaspora varies, the thread that connects the genre is the use of cultural and religious symbols to inspire representation as a means of empowerment in the face of oppression, both for commercial reasons and not.

In an essay for Desi Rap, filmmaker and activist Raesham Chopra Nijhon writes that hip hop became a place for the broader spectrum of South Asian identity because it facilitated an accurate image of a more nuanced community than what mainstream Western culture had fabricated. As a genre, it offered a way for the South Asian diaspora to illustrate the nuances of racialization and how white supremacy functions in contexts independent from the racial dynamics that exist between white and Black people. The charged lyricism and dynamic cadences also offered a new way for South Asians, specifically in the U.S., to articulate their identity outside of the Black and white paradigm.

“It was a generation of young people who truly were looking for some way to express their identity, their angst about being othered, and finding ways to communicate that they were explicitly American yet global at the same time,” Balaji says.

It was these elements, along with similarities in the syncopation of both Punjabi music and hip hop, that drew Punjabi Canadian Taj Bhangu, who goes by the name Lioness Kaur, to become a rapper. “When the West really looks at South Asian music, they really just see it in this really cliched way and I feel like hip hop's such a great art form for bridging those gaps,” says Bhangu. Defying these cliches, she believes, shouldn’t be wholly dependent on its visuals, but also the music itself.

In an Instagram caption promoting her latest single, “Long Lost Brother,” Bhangu writes she wanted to fuse South Asian sonics with hip hop in a way that wasn’t orientalist. For her, this led to both a blending of sounds and culture: Most of Bhangu’s music intersperses exuberant strings with twangy sitar. In “Long Lost Brother,” this sitar doubles as the cyclical rhythm she raps over while she details memories of her childhood, with nods to both her Sikh Punjabi and Canadian upbringings: “Eating McDonald's, Roseborough Centre / Adventures and pulling pranks / Pulling Biji′s old crutches out / From under the bed.”

In her song “Politics at Home,” Bhangu further details her experience living in a joint family home, something common amongst South Asian families. Throughout the song, Bhangu talks about the misogyny that many Indian Canadians witness growing up, and connects the struggle her mother’s family faced going back home to the “pind” (“the village” in Sikh) with issues of class and the neglect of certain areas due to government corruption: “The pind could be the hood at times / They grinded to make it here, only to return / Put their dreams in an urn / They yearned for their daughter, my mother.”

Watching one’s mother deal with the loneliness and helplessness of generational misogyny isn’t an experience unique to the South Asian diaspora, but rather, a ubiquitous one—which is part of why her music has found a broader audience. But for those within the diaspora, Bhangu’s music articulates that emotional isolation in a way that is uniquely familiar, combining the linguistics of Western hip hop with South Asian instrumentals.

We see this use of more traditional instrumentals as a tool for blending cultures across the genre, including use of the dhol and chenda drums, traditionally played at religious ceremonies and cultural gatherings to bring communities together. Their exhilarating reverberation and almost unadulterated pace resembles that of the rapid yet succinctly meaningful rhythms fundamental to hip hop. In this way, the steady bass intrinsic to the sounds of both genres incites an intoxicatingly invigorating and empowering feeling that can be and has been used to rally and mobilize movements, political or otherwise. (Something producer Timbaland clearly appreciated in the ‘90s and early aughts, when he sampled South Asian instrumentals in multiple chart-topping hits like Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” and The Game’s “Put You on the Game.”)

Of course, the South Asian diaspora isn’t homogenous, and South Asian hip hop isn’t either. It encapsulates countless subgenres, from the Punjabi hip hop that inspires Bhangu, which uses both the language and traditional instruments like the sitar and the dhol; to Desi hip hop, which encapsulates a combination of influences from the South Asian diaspora, including that of Indian Americans.

Hip hop also isn’t the first or only form of protest music within the diaspora. South Asian protest music can be traced back to the independence movement during British colonial rule across the continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Stanford ethnomusicologist Anna Schultz, the kirtan, a call-and-response form of singing and chanting Hindu mantras, was crucial in prompting protests against British rule and leading to political reform. “Through performance, they [kirtan performers] use signs in finely attuned ways to bring politics and religion together so that they are just one tightly bound unit of meaning,” Schultz said in an interview with Stanford Arts.

What was once resistance against British colonial rule, however, eventually evolved into Hindu nationalism; and this evolution of revolutionary politics packaged into the commercialization of empowerment has not spared South Asian hip hop. For both genres of music, directly combating and even angering the systems that encourage whiteness, colonialism, and capitalism are central to their origins. But as contemporary identity politics prioritize the optics of representation, it's easy for rappers from marginalized communities to fall into the trap of using their art to partake in shallow representation politics rather than engage in the tangible interest of their communities.

The obfuscation of hip hop’s political roots isn’t unique to the South Asian diaspora; however, its rising popularity within the diaspora coincided with the broader genre more generally becoming an asset for the commodification of resistance politics, something that has affected South Asian rap and hip hop today.

Balaji notes that despite many South Asian activists and rappers proclaiming hip hop as their tool of resistance, many don’t seem to demonstrate it in action. Last September, for example, Hanumankind performed “Big Dawgs” at a venue in Long Island in which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was present, and was later pictured hugging him in front of the crowd. Modi has long been criticized for his Hindu nationalist statements and policies, barring Muslims from extensive citizenship and revoking the Kashmir region’s autonomous status.

While Hanumankind hasn’t been explicitly critical of Modi or his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in his 2021 single “Genghis,” the rapper, whose given name is Sooraj Cherukat, discusses the tribulations of street life in South India and attributes violence to the complicity of the Indian government: “But what you partying for? / We got issues in our nation 'cause there's parties at war / When our leaders aren't leading at the heart and core / And they tamper with evidence when you gon' file a report.”

Still, none of this has stopped South Asian rap’s momentum, or its resonance. The subgenre also feels especially powerful for many South Asians today because of its mainstream popularity—giving voice and a platform to a diaspora that has long suffered from intergenerational trauma amongst the many ramifications of whiteness and British imperialism. It’s also unlikely to die down any time soon. According to Business Insider, the rise of South Asian talent from all over the diaspora, and the increasingly popular mashup of South Asian artists making music over Western beats, can be credited in large part to the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Consequently, Balaji predicts the ever-increasing popularity of these streaming platforms, combined with the ability for anyone to create their own audiences on social media and the effects of migration on immigrant identities, will only lead to South Asian rap becoming an increasingly globalized genre.

“Artists in their respective countries are going to be able to articulate identities that are unique to their cultural and political circumstances,” says Balaji. We’re already seeing this today: Whether it’s Riz MC, Raja Kumari, or Yung Raja, rappers and artists across the diaspora are finding ways to honor their roots without straying from hip hop’s own.

Bhangu is one of these artists, merging the lyrical syncopation and metrical soul that is found in both hip hop and South Asian music, to give voice to being a Sikh Punjabi woman in Canada.

“I'm breaking a lot of barriers. As a girl, people don't really see that many female South Asian rappers, so it’s a shock for so many people,” she says. “But there are a lot of people who do support and dig deeper into the art and they feel heard.”

[post_title] => The Diverse Politics of Desi Hip Hop [post_excerpt] => How South Asian rappers are honoring the diaspora—and hip hop’s roots. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => south-asian-hip-hop-rap-desi-diaspora-global-music-genre-hanumankind-lioness-kaur [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 22:52:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 22:52:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8183 [menu_order] => 19 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 6, 2025August 3, 2026

The Diverse Politics of Desi Hip Hop

by Anushka Dakshit

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8093 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-04-02 21:03:11 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-04-02 21:03:11 [post_content] =>

How women artisans in Kashmir are reconnecting with an old tradition to weave new hope.

Every morning, as the sun rises over the old city of Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir, 48-year-old Rafiqa Ramzan steps out of her modest home and walks through the maze-like alleys of her neighborhood to catch the bus to work. On the way, she prays at the famous nearby Sufi shrine, Hazrat Makhdoom Sahib (RA), for her 17-year-old son's well-being and the stability of her job.

Ramzan, a single mother, works as a katanvajian—a woman who spins pashmina (cashmere) wool—a craft she learned from her mother when she was just 10 years old. In her youth, she would often compete and spin alongside her friends in her locality, and remembers the soft background noise of the radio, filling the air with old Kashmiri songs and folktales. The job, however, wasn’t sustainable: She continued spinning in adulthood, making it her livelihood, but by her early thirties, the meager wages forced her to give it up. After abandoning her spinning wheel (called a "yinder" in Kashmiri) for over a decade, she only returned to her roots in early 2023 after joining Zaevyul.

Named for the Kashmir word for “delicate,” Zaevyul is a first of its kind artist-centric initiative that operates as a small factory, helping women revive and recreate the region's heritage pashmina shawls. Wajahat Qazi, a writer-turned-entrepreneur, created the initiative in 2022 as a for-profit social enterprise aimed at reviving the historic craft and providing dignified livelihoods to local artisans. Originally, Qazi distributed carded pashmina to women to spin at home, but logistical challenges prompted him to bring the entire production process in-house, something unusual within the industry. However, he soon found that the shift not only improved quality control, but also fostered trust among the women, many of whom come from conservative families.

“It was difficult initially to draw women to this proposition, but once they saw the workspace and the respect they were given, it took off,” he says.

Wajahat Qazi, founder of Zaevyul, providing instruction to a spinner. (Shoaib Mir)

Known as “soft gold,” pashmina was first introduced to Kashmir by the fifteenth century ruler Zain-ul-Abidin, affectionately called Budshah or Great King by his subjects. His reign left a lasting influence on the region's socio-economic fabric, one of which was inviting skilled artisans from Persia (modern-day Iran) to share their expertise with the local population. This included the rigorous techniques of spinning pashmina shawls, still practiced today throughout the region and the fashion world, from Brunello Cucinelli to Louis Vuitton and Hermes.

Over time, pashmina became synonymous with Kashmir's identity. And the women of the region have been an integral part of shaping the industry for centuries, as they are typically its leading artisans. But beginning in 2006, the craft became badly impacted by the influx of cheaper, machine-made imitations, degrading the market for hand-spun pashmina. According to Kashmir's Handicraft Department, there were an estimated 377,000 artisans in the region at the time, nearly half of them women. But as a result of the industry’s decline, dwindling incomes forced thousands of people to leave the craft and seek alternative livelihoods, Ramzan included.

"Before joining Zaevyul, I faced many difficulties,” she says. “I relied on my brothers, and seeing how everything is overpriced broke me inside. The thought of being a burden began to take a toll on my mental health. But by the Almighty's grace, I learned about Zaevyul, which changed my life.”

When she first began earning a living from spinning, Ramzan would take home 1500 to 2000 Rupees per month. The time and effort she invested in the labor-intensive spinning process did not match the meager remuneration she received, which also wasn’t enough to support her son. But now, at Zaeyvul, she earns 8000 to 10000 Rupees per month, and has found so much more than a higher income.

“Before, I would spin pashmina alone at home, but we share our joys and sorrows here,” she says with a smile. “This sense of community has started healing me from within and increased my productivity. Being here gives me a sense of empowerment like someone has given wings to a crippled bird."

Today, Zaevyul employs 40 people, including 30 women, who work as spinners, weavers, and administrative staff, all of whom operate out of a spacious, well-lit karkhana—a manufacturing house specifically designed for artisans. For Qazi, the entire process and purpose of Zaevyul is also multilayered.

“I was struck by the need to create something meaningful,” he says. “My focus turned to the handicraft sector, particularly pashmina, a craft historically sustained by a gendered division of labor—women spun and carded the delicate fibers, while men wove them into luxurious shawls.”

Meemah (who opted to go only by her first name), like Ramzan, also works at Zaevyul as a spinner, and similarly notes the financial stability the venture has given her, alongside improving her mental health and offering her a sense of direction.

“I have often been at the receiving end of the turmoil we’re living in,” she says. “There have been days where I used to feel entirely depressed…I wasn’t myself, and spinning pashmina takes patience. I had to stop. But after learning about this place and joining it, I have been helped a lot, both mentally and financially.”

She shares this as she meticulously spins her pashmina wool in its original white color.

“I pray that we get many more orders and that more women join us. It’s a relief to work in an office-like setting,” she continues. “This place is more than just a workplace. It's a place where we've met other women and formed a community. We're not lonely here. It's a 10-to-4 job with breaks for prayers, meals, and rest.”

Rafiqa Ramzan (in green) spins pashmina alongside her friends at work. (Shoaib Mir)

Zaevyul is especially conscious of honoring this work-life balance, and ensuring the safety of its employees. With approximately 700,000 troops deployed in the region, Kashmir is one of the world's most militarized conflict zones. The ratio of military personnel to civilians is particularly striking, with one soldier for every 30 locals, according to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a UK-based think tank. This makes everyday commuting for work a tedious endeavor. But Zaevyul provides transportation to alleviate this difficulty, relieving the potential stress it may cause for its workers. Every day, a bus ferries 30 women artisans from different parts of Srinagar to Zeevyul, located in the city’s outskirts.

"Given the political instability in Kashmir, it wouldn't have been possible for me to travel back and forth here without bus service,” Ramzan says as she boards the bus with other artisans to head home. “The environment here is safe, providing us all with a sense of security, for us and our families. Moreover, working here has given me a perfect work-life balance, which wasn't possible when I was spinning day and night alone at home."

Qazi notes that his employees’ continued “economic empowerment” is crucial to maintaining Zaevyul. Hand-spinning pashmina remains a labor-intensive process, and the wages must justify the cost. It also requires immense skill and patience for women who are typically largely responsible for the bulk of household work.

“If you’re not paying them well, it doesn’t make sense for them to dedicate their time to this craft,” he says.

The challenges, however, are manifold. The cost of hand-spun pashmina is significantly higher than machine-spun alternatives, limiting its reach. And while pashmina enjoys global brand recognition, the premium price of handmade products restricts its affordability. This has led to a decline in demand for hand-spun pashmina, which continues to push artisans out of the craft, some never returning.

Despite these hurdles, Qazi is committed to his vision of Zaevyul, continuing to operate on the principles of empathy, authenticity, and ethical production, all while reviving this pristine craft and creating a broader, positive socio-economic impact. It has certainly made a material and monetary difference to all who work there, but also offers them pride and dignity in the work itself.

Looking ahead, Qazi dreams of expanding Zaevyul. The current workspace can accommodate up to 200 women, but financial constraints remain a barrier. His next challenge will be to identify and connect with new markets, conscious consumers, and ethical buyers who are passionate about supporting marginalized artisans and craftspeople.

“Our premise is to revive the craft in its most authentic form and help more women and weavers,” he says.

Like the women he employs, for Qazi, Zaewuyl is more than a business—it’s a movement to preserve Kashmir’s cultural heritage while empowering its artisans, one thread at a time.

[post_title] => Threading the Needle [post_excerpt] => How women artisans in Kashmir are reconnecting with an old tradition to weave new hope. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => pashmina-kashmir-artisans-cashmere-wool-zaewuyl-collective [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:16:26 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:16:26 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8093 [menu_order] => 25 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 2, 2025August 3, 2026

Threading the Needle

by Shoaib Mir

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7604 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-01-01 11:27:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-01-01 11:27:00 [post_content] =>

How skincare has, and hasn't, changed across generations of women.

I have a distinct memory from when I was a young girl, of my nani, my maternal grandmother, opening her Ponds cold cream, with its white base and light green lid, and tapping it onto her face.

I’m still a child, maybe 10 or 11, and when she finishes, she offers the jar of cold cream to me, insisting I also start putting it on regularly to take care of my skin. As I scoop up some of the cream and begin applying it, my nani watches my technique intently, correcting me wherever she thinks I'm not being gentle enough. “Never rub your face,” she tells me. “It’ll make your skin sag and give you wrinkles.”

For as long as I can remember, I have associated my nani with that Ponds cold cream. It really was, and still is, such a key part of her everyday life. She still has jars of it in her bedroom and her bathroom so that it’s always on hand, and brings it with her whenever she leaves home. Yet despite her obvious brand loyalty, my nani’s routine has always been more about process than product. At a time when women were asked to be invisible, to put everyone before themselves, those five minutes spent meticulously applying her face cream each night were an almost rebellious act of self care.

Skincare in Pakistan, and perhaps across the world, has changed significantly since my nani’s days, and I’ll admit even I’ve given in to the hype, buying at least a couple of products with fancy ingredients on the label like “hyaluronic acid” and “AHAs.” But unlike my nani, I’ve always been far less meticulous with my skincare routine. Perhaps it's because these trends are still quite new to me, or maybe the routines themselves have become too complicated. But perhaps more than either, it’s because these products are only selling me an idea of self care, rather than actually fostering a habit of it.

Growing up, aside from what I learned from my nani, the concept of skincare was taught to me very differently. In fact, it wouldn’t be remiss to say that in South Asia, the importance of skincare starts from the womb. I remember, starting from when I was a child, the pregnant women around me were told to eat “white” foods during pregnancy so that their baby would have fair skin. Anything dark—coffee, chocolate—was to be avoided, out of fear that it would cause their baby to have a darker complexion. Despite these myths being completely debunked, they still form a critical part of skincare motivations for older South Asians today, and pregnant people often still receive the same advice.

It’s no secret that whitening has long been a major motivation behind skincare within many Asian cultures and amongst countless other cultures around the world. Despite global trends to push “fairness” out of advertising lingo, the underlying beliefs and colorism still persist, along with the dangerous ways people choose to realize them. This has been true for centuries: Some Renaissance era women would even wear leeches behind their ears to suck out their blood and leave them looking paler, which was considered more beautiful. As recently as the mid to late 20th century, many brides in South Asia would utilize a similar technique in anticipation of their weddings—again, to appear paler and “more beautiful.” Dr. Christine Hall, a GP and Aesthetics Doctor at London’s Taktouk Clinic, says that similar beliefs have long existed in Korean culture, too. “There is an age-old belief which suggested that darker skin tones mean that you worked the land, and so this was correlated to a poorer societal class,” she says. “As a result, most South Koreans did and still do prefer to avoid the sun and tanning—but the focus is on anti-aging, and not so much skin lightening or bleaching.”

As Dr. Hall notes, while some skincare practices have remained consistent across generations, it is the motivations and drivers behind those routines that have continued to shift. In a more extreme example, a recent T: The New York Times Style Magazine article reported that people are still using leeches for beauty treatments today—not for the sake of becoming paler, however, but “in an effort to refresh the skin and reduce wrinkles.”

It makes sense that as beauty standards have continued to evolve, our motivations for partaking in skincare would evolve with them. But, Dr. Hall argues, this isn’t necessarily always because women are trying to chase an ever-changing standard of beauty. After all, we live in a time where women are perceived very differently from the world my nani grew up in; and some of these shifts can also come from letting go of the societal pressures that demand women to conform to them in the first place. “Sometimes, the ideology of having perfect skin and being beautiful goes too far,” Dr. Hall explains, citing the extreme pressure many South Koreans, especially women, feel to maintain their looks. “This has resulted in a movement called ‘escape the corset’ where women are cutting their hair short and throwing away their makeup and refusing to conform to these unrealistic expectations.”

In some ways, the motivation behind the “escape the corset” movement—driven by self-empowerment and a woman’s right to look however she’d like—almost feels closer to my nani’s relationship to skincare than most of what’s sold to us today. One major reason for this, of course, is the overwhelming and unnecessary economy of choice fueled by capitalism, which depends on continuously moving the bar for “beauty” in order to keep us buying more new products. Beauty is now a multi-billion dollar industry, largely funded by women, and it’s only growing each year. This is also partially why, compared to previous generations, there’s been a global shift from more natural skincare—including a reliance on homemade DIY products—to lab-formulated, fancy-sounding multiple-step routines that can only be purchased in a store, and at a cost. “In Greece where I’m originally from, older generations always used natural remedies for many years,” shares Fani Mari, a freelance beauty journalist and content creator. Despite not being a fan of DIY skincare herself, she still incorporates some of these remedies into her skincare routine because they’re simple and effective—and connect her to her culture and the elders who passed it down to her.

For many young women, a similar influence has guided them through their own skincare evolutions, as well. Haniya Shariq Khan, a young college student in Lahore, remembers her own skincare journey with her nani very fondly. While her nani passed away five years ago, Khan shares that she and her mother still follow the same skincare regimen she taught them to this day.

As the wife of a landlord, living in a rural area, Khan’s grandmother endured grueling days of work for most of her life, and skincare was her reprieve. “She was expected to do certain chores, such as making lassi by hand, an incredibly rigorous activity, but she realized quickly that the leftover butter made for a really nourishing moisturizer,” Khan shares. As time went on, and her grandparents' financial situation improved, she continued to indulge in her skin, eventually buying new creams, including some from as far as London.

“I think honestly she was just very into beauty,” Khan says. “Growing up so poor, she had no shoes to wear if she outgrew them… [But] even as a little girl living in the tenements, she used to be crazy about fashion, about the latest hairstyles, and always had her own kohl and mirror from the age of about nine. So this was a hang up from her very deprived childhood: She was keeping her inner child happy by indulging in all these things.”

This relationship to skincare felt similar to my own nani’s relationship to it, even if it took a slightly different shape: So much of the motivation behind skincare for our ancestors was a way of indulgence and self care. While on surface level, this might seem shallow, or largely motivated by societal pressures, these individual experiences show a far deeper sense of well-being, and even treating one’s self, in a time where, for most women, this was largely inaccessible.

Based on most beauty ads today, it may seem like “self care” is still the main driver behind the skincare industry. But the onslaught of consumerism, and the increasing pressure to buy more and more, has turned it more sinister. As a culture, we’ve turned skincare into a necessity. Combined with the pandemic’s impact on our mental health, the pervasiveness and pressures of social media, and an overflow of information in the digital age, skincare has also become a compulsion. Children as young as 10 are now buying into the pressure of using anti-aging products. Capitalism has meant that the move away from the pressure to wear makeup hasn’t necessarily freed us from caring about our appearance. It’s only made skincare our new cult-like obsession, and makes me question whether we’ve learned anything at all.

The way we begin to counter this is by discerning and deciding for ourselves what feels right, not what we’re told will make us feel beautiful by a slew of constantly changing trends and ads that insist we have to buy absolutely everything. It’s by returning to why our grandmothers washed their faces, and reconnecting to skincare as an actual vehicle of self care. This is easier said than done, but some beauty enthusiasts are trying—and in the process, building a new legacy that seeks to find the balance in all of it.

Meraj Fatima, the founder of Her Beauty, a Pakistan-based skincare brand that launched last year, says her brand was inspired by her own skincare journey, and unlearning the skincare traditions of past generations that didn’t work for her. But in the process of creating it, something surprising happened: Her mother and grandmother were willing to go on this renewed skincare journey with her.

Fatima, who had Rosacea growing up, says her skin condition meant she had to figure out what worked for her and what didn’t amongst the various natural “totkas” (home remedies) her mother and grandmother had passed down to her. “One thing that differentiates me from my mom is my mom used natural agents to do skincare, like using lemon, which is terrible for your skin, or malai, which could soften your skin, but my kind of skin will react to it,” she shares. Today, her mother and grandmother are open to trying the products she recommends instead, and are some of Her Beauty’s regular customers.

Still, Fatima wants to be mindful of not eschewing old remedies or products just because something newer and supposedly “better” might be available. She always tells potential customers to start with what they have at home first, and not buy products unnecessarily—even if they’re her own. “I’ve seen my teenage cousins who feel pressured to use so many products without reason. And I have a daughter, too, now, so I keep thinking about what I want to pass down to her,” she says.

The work for younger generations of women, then, is one of both learning and unlearning: Seeing skincare as more than just a trend, but instead, as a practice. Or perhaps as a ritual for the self, or an act of rebellion, like it was for our nanis. Perhaps, then, rather than buying something new, we need to step back, and realize the Ponds already in our cabinet is already enough.

[post_title] => Why Our Grandmothers Washed Their Faces [post_excerpt] => How skincare has, and hasn't, changed across generations of women. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => generations-women-skincare-beauty-standards-pakistan-south-asia [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:41:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:41:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7604 [menu_order] => 32 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 1, 2025August 3, 2026

Why Our Grandmothers Washed Their Faces

by Anmol Irfan

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 6925 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-06-12 20:13:35 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-06-12 20:13:35 [post_content] =>

My Nai Nai dressed my Ye Ye every morning for over sixty years. The last time she dressed him was for his funeral.

Listen to this article on The Conversationalist Podcast. | 16:11 min

The coroner comes and goes. The Taoist shaman comes and goes. But the family stays. There are many things left to be done.

Nai Nai is gathering Ye Ye’s belongings, the clothes that he is to be burned with, his favorite shoes, the paper fan he’d use to cool himself with during sweltering Taiwanese summers. The coroner has told Nai Nai it is best to dress Ye Ye in his funeral clothes now. Before the body gets cold and hard. Their daughter, the shamanic authority of the family, doesn’t like this idea.

“If you touch him immediately after death, he’ll feel intense pain,” she insists. “We must dress Ba Ba without touching him at all.”

Nai Nai looks at Ye Ye, what would have been an exchange of knowing looks. Her husband says nothing.

The women compromise, agreeing to dress him quickly, skin touching skin as little as possible. But while the daughter rushes, Nai Nai takes her time. She straightens the collar of her husband’s shirt and checks that the waistband of his pants hugs his belly comfortably. She runs her fingers through his now sparse, white hair, brushing it tenderly. As if by instinct, she licks her finger and smooths the unruliest strands.

The daughter grows impatient. “Mom, you’re too slow. You’re hurting him. Just let me…”

Nai Nai does not budge. She rubs Ye Ye’s hands between her own, searching for something; feeling the familiar grooves of his palms and the veins of his wrist. She continues with their routine, carefully checking the seams of her husband’s trousers, the pair she steam pressed just last week. She moves on to his socks, stretching them with her fingers so they don’t restrict his circulation during the long journey ahead.

Suddenly, Nai Nai leaves the room, and returns with her husband’s favorite gold-rim glasses, the ones that always made him look so smart and charming, like a senator.

He’ll need these to see, she thinks to herself. She reaches over her daughter’s busy arms to place the glasses gently across Ye Ye’s face.

Later, Nai Nai will tell me over the phone how she leaned back, admiring her work. I savor every detail, wishing I could have been there, too. Instead, I will send him off over video chat. During the funeral, I wonder if my grandfather can hear me calling to him from across the ocean, whether my laptop can transfer my grief; if he knows his granddaughter’s heart is breaking.

Long before Nai Nai, Ye Ye was dressed by his mother. The only son of wealthy landowners in a small village in Jiang Su, he rarely had to lift a finger. When Ye Ye entered school, each morning, his mother would place his clean uniform at the foot of the bed, freshly washed of the stains he’d acquired the day before. As he got older, Ye Ye eventually dressed himself—although it wasn’t always a choice. While hiding from Japanese soldiers during the war, he was forced to go for days at a time without washing or changing. In the deafening silence each night, he dreamed he’d wake up the next morning to his mother’s gentle voice, back in his childhood bedroom, his clean clothes folded at his feet.

Ye Ye eventually found his way to Taiwan, where he met his would-be wife, a woman so beautiful a large portrait of her hung in the window of a photography studio in the neighborhood where he walked his beat as a young cop. At 30 and 22, respectively, Ye Ye and Nai Nai married; and of her many household duties and chores, Nai Nai made it a point to help her husband get dressed every morning—not because he asked her to, but because it brought her pride. Both she and her husband agreed: how a man dressed was critical to his career and reputation. So it was important he dressed well.

When they first married, it was the police uniform. Though Ye Ye was only a beat cop, Nai Nai thought it was crucial he looked presentable to his superiors, carefully steaming his uniform every night, gently folding it over the nice wooden hangers she’d purchased on sale. She was young; the only thing she’d ever steamed before had been the gown she’d worn when she snuck out of her mother’s house to compete in a local pageant at 18. Still, she did her best, and so did he. As Ye Ye slowly rose through the ranks, his uniform became adorned with new medals, and Nai Nai’s responsibilities grew. Soon, they had children, and she dressed them, too. But their morning routine stayed the same: The least I could do is make sure my husband looks good.

Nai Nai and Ye Ye. (Image courtesy of the author.)

Three kids later, Ye Ye left the precinct to start his own leather goods business. Nai Nai was supportive; their kids were getting older and household expenses were only growing. Together, they purchased him a good suit, one that cost a little more than they could afford, but that made him look smart and trustworthy. Nai Nai helped her husband into the suit every morning, and Ye Ye would smile and kiss her goodbye before heading off to work. When there were small rips and tears in the seams, Nai Nai would sew them back together after putting the kids to bed at night. She didn’t mind the added work. The silence of the night, interrupted only by the rhythmic hum of her sewing machine, became a familiar lullaby that belonged to her alone.

When the business took off, Ye Ye and Nai Nai bought a new home, and Ye Ye’s first good suit proudly gathered dust in the back of its largest closet. They hired a housekeeper. Because of this, Nai Nai no longer had to wash and tailor her husband’s clothes, but each morning, she would pick out a perfect suit for his scheduled meetings from a wardrobe filled with color.

The life they’d built made her proud, and she held her head high, always moving through the world with grace. Even when the business failed and the debt collectors came knocking, Nai Nai would take a deep breath, puff up her chest, and open the front door with a smile. She would walk to the busiest street corner at 6 AM every morning and sell homemade bento boxes to pay for the children’s school tuition, even more expensive now with her fourth child entering school. When Ye Ye had to go door to door begging relatives and neighbors for help, Nai Nai made sure he looked dignified while doing it.

The tough times passed, and the kids grew older, soon with children of their own. Nai Nai dressed them—dressed me—too, in one-of-a-kind sweaters she knit by hand so we never clashed outfits with anyone on the playground. Ye Ye’s daily uniform became a simple polo shirt and loose khakis, comfortable enough to play on the floor with his grandkids, but presentable enough in case Nai Nai wanted to snap a picture. As a child, and their eldest granddaughter, I loved to play lion, and Ye Ye would join me proudly, the two of us crawling around and roaring at each other like it was our own secret language. Nai Nai, meanwhile, would smile to herself from the living room couch, thankful she had time to mop the floors in the morning.

She would continue to dress him for the rest of his life, and after it. Even after her children had no longer needed her, and the grandchildren had gone to college, Nai Nai had never felt like an empty-nester, precisely because of this: Her husband had continued to need her, and to love her. And she’d been happy to be needed, and to be loved.

A week before Ye Ye passed, Nai Nai woke up in the middle of the night to her husband staring gently at her, the corners of his lips curled into a smile. With his dementia, Ye Ye often drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes alert and sharp, other times blissfully unaware.

“Still so pretty after all these years,” he said softly. “I feel content and at peace, I’ve lived a fulfilling life.”

“Aiya, it’s so late. Go back to sleep.” Nai Nai dismissed him with a wave of her hand as she repositioned her back, sinking deeper into their bed. But she felt a tightness in her chest as his words, too, sank in—something about them felt so final.

After a few moments of silence, Ye Ye tried again, this time with a hint of urgency: “There’s something I need to tell you.”

Afraid of hearing what might be her husband’s last words, Nai Nai shut her eyes even tighter, and let out a light, fake snore.

Ye Ye lingered for a moment before rolling away to face the opposite wall, where an old photo of his wife at 18, in her pageant gown, smiled back at him. He sighed. Unable to control herself, Nai Nai awoke from her fake slumber to smooth out the wrinkles of his pajama shirt with her wrinkled fingertips, memorizing the warmth of his body.

Nai Nai. (Image courtesy of the author.)

The next morning, Nai Nai would wake up before her husband, wash up quickly, and prepare his clothes, just like she had every morning for the last 60 or so years. And of course, she would dress herself, too, from a wardrobe that had changed just as much as her husband's over the years. When she’d first met him, she'd dress in her flirty floral dresses and her baby blue skirts with the ruffles; and as she got a little older, in her matching tweed skirt suits—always color coordinated with her husband’s outfit for the day, and embellished with a tasteful brooch or earrings from her collection. Today, she would wear her purple t-shirt and stretchy gray pants—a suitable uniform for a woman in her 80s with a day of cleaning and cooking ahead. She had no time or energy for jewelry now, but still put on the same rose-pink lipstick she’d worn every morning since she was 18, just to feel like herself. Satisfied, she’d turn again to their shared closet and begin her day’s work.

Dressing him for his funeral, Nai Nai knows it is the last time; the last time she will look at her husband’s face so closely, the last time she will smooth out the wrinkles of his shirt with her warm palms in a downward sweeping motion, the last time she will check that all his buttons are buttoned correctly. She wants to make sure she remembers it.

Nai Nai is calm and deliberate. Everything about this routine is familiar to her. Everything about his body is familiar to her. Every scar, every vein; and every thread that adorns it.

[post_title] => If Clothes Make the Man [post_excerpt] => What does that make the woman who dressed him? [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => clothing-nainai-yeye-grandparents-spouse-gender-roles-husband-wife-marriage-death-grief-funeral [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:07:40 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:07:40 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6925 [menu_order] => 55 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 12, 2024August 4, 2026

If Clothes Make the Man

by Vanessa Hsia

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5947 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-03-07 18:56:22 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-03-07 18:56:22 [post_content] =>

Meet the women creating new life from arid land in India.

It was a day of joy and relief for Kamla: Her daughter was getting married—and the night before, it had rained.

Far from a bad omen, the downpour had been ever welcome. Kamla is a farmer, whose livelihood is directly dependent on the land she cultivates, the land that gives her and her family a variety of vegetable crops to eat and to sell, like beetroots, tomatoes, beans, and chilis. For much of the year, however, the weather works against her: She and her family live in Khajraha Khurd, a village in the Jhansi district of Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh—an otherwise drought-prone region in India’s most populous state.

In Kamla's home that morning, preparations were being made for the wedding. Women were singing folk songs and cleaning the freshly picked vegetables from her farm to prepare meals for their guests. Young girls were making roti on the earthen stove burning with a wood fire. Other children were jumping in muddy puddles as cows grazed in a nearby pasture. The entire scene resembled a Satyajit Ray film, portraying their small, Indian village as a mosaic of intertwining agrarian lives.

Kamla was overjoyed. Because of the savings she’d earned through farming, she would be able to gift her daughter two heavy, embroidered sarees with matching glass bangles, heels, and bindis as a wedding gift. She wouldn’t have been able to afford them otherwise. “When I got married, nobody asked me about my choices,” she says. “But today, at my daughter’s wedding, I have made sure her choices are taken care of.”

Farming is a path that has opened many new doors for Kamla, one she first chose to walk in 2020, when the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the imposition of a country-wide lockdown. In cities across India, migrants who worked as daily wagers—Kamla included—suffered the most, as their jobs were eliminated overnight. Their very livelihoods came to a complete standstill, and few to none could meet their personal needs, let alone those of their families.

At the time, Kamla was working as a construction worker on a site in New Delhi. After the lockdown was announced, she stuffed her things into a sack and started the journey back to Bundelkhand—where she was born and raised—along with her three children and husband. Without employment, the couple had to exhaust all their savings simply to return home.

Once in Bundelkhand, Kamla was desperate for work. She was not alone: During the pandemic, Uttar Pradesh experienced one of the largest reverse migrations in India. More than 3 million workers returned to their villages from the cities, many of them living below the poverty line—and for women freshly out of work like Kamla, their options were especially limited.

Even before the pandemic, women had been at a disadvantage. According to the dozens of people that I spoke to for this piece, women in India often work more than men, keeping households and raising children in addition to some form of employment outside of their homes—all while being paid less than their male counterparts. In cities, women frequently worked as concrete mixers, diggers, stone breakers, and brick haulers; climbed unstable scaffolding carrying bricks; and were exposed to pollution at their work sites—as were their children, who they often brought to work because there was no one at home to provide childcare. Despite these women doing equal (if not more) work, the people I spoke to estimated that a male laborer usually makes up to 500 Indian rupees (US$7) a day at a construction site, while a woman only makes up to 300 (US$4).

This disparity in pay and promotions, along with regular sexual harassment, a lack of maternity leave, and the absence of toilets, are all an everyday reality for most working women in the informal and unorganized labor market in India. These factors are predominantly driven by patriarchal norms, as well as social, economic, and cultural restrictions, and often feel impossible to avoid. Overworked and underpaid—and now facing a global pandemic—many women didn’t want to migrate to new cities where they would again be forced to compromise on the health, hygiene, and education of their children, or to continue living without community support. With a pandemic at their doorstep, there had to be another option.

Luckily, at home in Bundelkhand, women like Kamla had access to a resource they did not have in the cities: land. Many of their husbands were in possession of inherited land once ripe for farming, but long abandoned in the past due to drought.

Historically, farming in the region had been a challenge. For the past several decades, Bundelkhand has faced a crisis due to uncertain rainfall patterns, causing severe crop damage and sometimes total crop failure. If they could revive this land, however, it could be a tremendous opportunity for financial security. Putting their heads together, these women regularly met three or four times a week to share their household and financial troubles, brainstorm ways to address their issues, and identify how to achieve their financial goals. Farming quickly became one of them.

Kamla expressed an early interest in farming for two reasons: She wanted a sustainable source of food for her family, and she wanted a fair way to earn a livelihood. This is why, in 2022, she decided to join the Basant Mahila Farmer Producer Organisation, a collective of about 3,000 women entrepreneurs across forty villages in the Jhansi, Mahoba, and Lalitpur districts in Bundelkhand. The program was founded in 2020 by ActionAid India through Work4Progress India to create and promote more livelihood opportunities for women, especially those pushed to migration due to the effects of climate change.

The majority of farming-related policies and programs in Uttar Pradesh are not women-friendly, but Basant aimed (and aims) to change that. Rajendra Nigam, a district coordinator at Basant, tells me, “We trained women like Kamla to produce organic seeds, and they successfully produced seeds of wheat, groundnut, pea, and urad (black gram), which are always in high demand in the region.” Through Basant, Kamla learned how to grow her own organic vegetables and fruits, how to prepare cow manure as organic fertilizer, and how to grow multiple crops on the same land in a year. Soon after completing her training, Kamla also received about eleven types of vegetable seeds and some farming tools, spray machines, drums with which to prepare fertilizers, and material for farm fencing to continue farming independently.

“I came back from Delhi tired and empty handed,” says Kamla, who in the past often hid her face in front of local village elders as a mark of modesty and respect when in the presence of men. Now, she fearlessly calls herself “an organic woman” who has successfully and continuously grown vegetables and grains on her 1.5 acres of land since 2022.

It wouldn’t be the only skillset that Kamla gained from Basant. The program isn’t just about teaching women the skills necessary to begin farming, but also to give them the financial literacy and independence necessary to make financial decisions of their own—in India, a realm traditionally dominated by men. To that end, Basant has worked as an intermediary between the government and farmers to educate the latter on various insurance protection plans and credit opportunities specific to their work. These local solutions, according to Khalid Chaudhry, an associate director at ActionAid India, contribute to helping women reach financial independence, some for the first time. And Kamla is just one of many women benefiting from it.

Deva. Photo courtesy of Aliya Bashir.

“I didn’t know how to grow home-grown food. It felt like a dream,” says Deva, a mother of three sons, who recently began farming a “nutrition garden” on her 1.5 acres of land. She decided to join Basant after she’d seen some women in her community benefit from it, and was particularly interested in learning about the cultivation of various vegetables and fruits, what plants to grow in what season, how to prepare manure and a compost pit, and how to save her produce from pests. Before long, she could do all of this herself.

“Now, I teach women to prepare organic manure, pesticides, and fertilizers at a very low cost by using the material usually available on our farms,” she says.

Prior to returning to Bundelkhand in 2020, Deva worked for three years in the brick kilns of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Now, she grows organic beetroot, bottle gourd, tomato, fenugreek, cucumber, brinjal, and other vegetables, and is able to sell them at fair prices compared to commercial farming. In addition, she hopes to begin selling her organic manure in the market to better maintain the soil health of other local farms.

Equipped with so much new agricultural knowledge, Deva has become an advocate for nutritious food in her village, and takes great care with her family’s diet, always feeding them a variety of fruits and vegetables. In 2022, she was also able to purchase six chicks and four goats from her earnings.

“Earlier, we would always have less availability of food. But now, we are not only having chemical-free food, but also eggs and chicken and dairy at home,” she says.

Her care has proven profitable: In a recent harvest, Deva earned a profit of 66,600 Indian rupees (~US$800) by cultivating a wide variety of vegetables and fruits in her garden. When she was working as a manual laborer, she wasn’t able to save anything—but now, she hopes to give her grandchildren the good education she couldn’t afford to give to her children before them.

Kamla has similar hopes and dreams. Although she couldn’t afford her elder daughters’ education due to limited financial resources, she is determined to pay for her youngest daughter’s schooling, and farming has allowed her to save more money than she could have ever imagined when she was working in construction. “In Delhi, we would work for almost ten hours a day and would earn 20,000 Indian rupees (~US$240) per month,” Kamla says. “The place is very costly to live in—around 15,000 (~US$180) would go into rent and other expenses. Saving a few thousand rupees was difficult.” In comparison, in the past three months, Kamla has sold 30,000 Indian rupees (~US$365) worth of eggplants alone; the cost for cultivation for which was just 5,000 rupees (~US$60).

“We are expecting the eggplant production to increase three times in this season,” she adds.

Over the last few months, Kamla has sold 80,000 Indian rupees (~US$965) worth of produce through multiple vegetable cultivation, growing high yield vegetables like beetroot, bottle gourd, chickpeas, and cucumber simultaneously. The overall expenses were 13,000 Indian rupees (~US$155), which meant a profit of 67,000 Indian rupees (~US$810), much of which she has been able to put into savings.

“I grew up with the thought that a woman can’t have big dreams,” she says—but still, she’d always refused to give up on them. Customs and tradition taught her that only men have the capability to manage food security in a rural Indian family, and she’s already proven this doesn’t need to be the case. “My family is very happy with my farming work,” she says. “When I am busy on the farm, my husband not only takes care of the children, but also helps in preparing meals.”

This domestic bliss feels prescient. One of the founding members of the Balant program, Laxmi Devi, chose its fitting name upon its founding: In Hindi, basant means happiness and prosperity. With their new skillset, Kamla—and Deva, and so many other women—seem to have found just that.

[post_title] => A Farm of One's Own [post_excerpt] => Meet the women creating new life from arid land in India. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => india-women-farmers-basant-bundelkhand-farming-agriculture-climate-change [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:40:16 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:40:16 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5947 [menu_order] => 61 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 7, 2024August 4, 2026

A Farm of One’s Own

by Aliya Bashir

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 6581 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-02-07 19:39:54 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-07 19:39:54 [post_content] =>

An interview with the writer-director of "Astonishing Little Feet," a short film about the first documented Chinese woman to come to America.

The first documented Chinese woman to come to the United States was told it would be temporary.

Just 19 years old (or 14, or 16—reports vary), Afong Moy was brought to America not as an immigrant, but as a curiosity, sold off by her father to a ship captain who promised he would return her on his next voyage back to Canton in two years. Moy's father wouldn't be the only one to capitalize off of her: Arriving in New York in 1834, Moy's main purpose would be to help two American merchants, the Carne brothers, sell "exotic" goods—essentially acting as a living mannequin, singing traditional songs, demonstrating how to use chopsticks, and, on occasion, walking for short distances on her bound feet as a way to solicit interest in the brothers' imported Chinese wares.

She would never return home.

Moy would go on to become incredibly famous—so famous she eventually met then-President Andrew Jackson while touring around the country. She would also die in obscurity, no record of her existence after 1850. Very little is known about her today, and even less about how she might have felt about her new life and exploitation. But a new short film seeks to capture a glimpse at both: Astonishing Little Feet, written and directed by Maegan Houang, reimagines what Moy's first experience "performing" for potential investors might have looked like—and the result is harrowing, an uncomfortable exploration of complicity, curiosity, and the history of Asians in America.

Below, we spoke with the writer-director about her film—the title pulled from surviving advertisements that bill Moy as the "Chinese Lady" with "astonishing little feet"—and the importance of not looking away from an ugly past.

The Conversationalist: How did you first decide you wanted to do a film about Afong Moy?

Maegan Houang: I was reading The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee, and there’s one line in it that mentions her. I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. It really struck a chord with me—I felt so connected to the idea that the first Asian woman most people in the United States saw was there to help someone else sell goods, just because she seemed particularly exotic and strange. I immediately thought there was a movie there.

From what I’ve read, it seems like Afong Moy was treated as a “good” herself, as a commodity. I only knew the bare minimum about her before watching your film, and then I went down my own wormhole. What struck me is how young she was. Some reports say she was as young as 14—so to even call her the first documented Chinese “woman” is a misnomer.

She was between 14 and 18—max.

What resonated most with you about her story?

It was what you just said, that she was a commodity. That she was commodified to help other people make money, because she was such an interesting, exotic object. To me, there’s no way there’s not an element of hypersexualization there, which was really resonate to how I felt growing up. For context, I’m half Asian, and I grew up in Michigan, where there were mostly white people at my school. I grew up being perceived as Asian; I also grew up understanding that I was being seen as different—but no one was explaining to me why. To me, that’s a deficit in our education as Asian Americans. I think it’s easy to blame the system, but I think it’s our own parents, who are immigrants, who really don’t—understandably—know the history of the country they moved to, and the history of how Asian Americans have been treated, and therefore have no reason to tell us. So we’re thrown into a system where we don’t really understand all this context and all this history.

In high school, when I was being really hypersexualized and sexually harassed, as many young women are, there always seemed to be a layer of cruelty, of dehumanization. I didn’t understand it, and I felt like it was my fault. As anyone who’s a woman of a minority, we all understand that there’s no one reason for everything. I can't sit here and say it's a hundred percent that I'm Asian. I don't know. But I think what I wanted in this film was—if other people know her story, maybe they'll better understand their own context as young women in our country. Because there’s no way that kind of introduction to Asian women—which continued throughout the 1800s with P.T. Barnum, with different circus acts [including Moy]—doesn’t impact our present day understanding of what and who an Asian American woman is.

Obviously, my life is not nearly as horrific as Moy's. I’m not trying to create a false parallel of trauma, because I actually really despise that. But at the same time, I think it's really important to know that there might be things about our existence and the way we're treated that really have nothing to do with us, so we don't internalize them. And that's why I wanted to make the movie, and why I wanted it to be hard to watch. Because the other thing is, I don't think there's anyone watching the film, including myself, who kind of doesn't want to look at her foot.

I was going to ask—you made the decision to show Moy's bound foot. Why give in to the curiosity of the viewer?

I think we're all ultimately quite complicit in the systems of exploitation and capitalism of even our own bodies and people. As a filmmaker, it was instinctual to some degree. But also, people feel bad at the end of the movie, because they did participate in it. I think that's fine. It's okay to feel bad. It's okay to have to question your own role in the way that we live our lives. I'm not trying to create a false equivalency. Objectively, things are better than they were then. You and I are not people who were trafficked from Asia to make people money.

It's not that our experiences are equivalent, but it is shining a light on the historical origins to certain narratives and how they're baked into Western and American culture on some level. Even though it's not nearly as bad, or as surface level.

Yeah, totally. I do believe in historical consciousness. It was only forty years ago, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. That's not very long ago.

Talk me through what was important to you in portraying the other characters in the film, especially Captain Obear and the Carne brothers.

Sometimes, I think we over-intellectualize, or—it's not a real word, but—evil-ize people, trying to prescribe more evil intention to certain things that I fundamentally don't think is there. All of them just want to rise in class. And it has an abhorrent result. But none of them think they're a bad person. None of them think they're doing something wrong. They're just operating within the rules of our society and our system. I was happy when I would screen it and people would laugh at certain things because that shows a discomfort with the absurdity of the past; we can't imagine being that way. But I think people were. So I wanted them to be realistic, but hopefully inspire people to think about the parallels that we might still have—which is also why I wanted to show the foot from their point of view, because sometimes, when you finally get what you wanted, it's really horrible, but it doesn't change the fact that you wanted it. And that's an uncomfortable space.

So much of what you're talking about is complicity and capitalism; that if you're conditioned to believe that this is the only way to succeed in life, then you become blinded by what you're sacrificing morally or otherwise in the process to achieve it.

Yes.

Which, going back to the choice to show the foot—I do want to discuss the very intense and visceral scene of the unwrapping in a second, but first, I was really struck by your choice to switch back and forth between perspectives in the film, almost as if we're both being perceived and also the perceiver.

In early screenings, I actually got notes from people that it should be more in her perspective. And I was so bummed out by that note—because that's the easy way out. Because if you're aligned with her, you are like, "I'm aligned with the victim, I'm aligned with the person being oppressed." And I think that's trauma porn, a little bit. If it's fully from her perspective, we get to feel okay, and I think that's dishonest.

It was interesting the extent to which this note would mostly come from men. I'm like, why do you need me to spell this out for you? Why is that something you need?

That's interesting, given the scene where her foot is being unwrapped—there are very obviously a lot of parallels to assault, to rape. It feels like a rape, I think, to the viewer. And that felt very intentional. I wanted to just talk a little bit more with you about your decision to approach it that way, and her translator Atung's place in all of it as the one who actually unwraps her foot while the other men watch.

All he does is unwrap her foot, and it feels like assault. I would imagine that's what it feels like to her.

Yes.

It's horrible, but it's also obviously what the men want to see, and then they're also a little bit stunned by it. With the translator, he is trapped. He just has to do what they say—this is how he eats, this is how he lives. Now, it's not enslavement, but it's imprisonment through capitalism, it's imprisonment through just needing to survive. So he doesn't want to do it, but it's what he has to do. Those are just the terms that you accept sometimes when you immigrate to a new country where you're a minority, and they're unpleasant, but they're also just reality. Unfortunately, people don't really stand up to power—but he tries. She tries. Meanwhile, [the merchants] aren't doing their own dirty work. They're observing it.

The voyeurism of it was really striking to me.

Not to be lame, but I'm a student of Hitchcock. And his whole thing was that everyone has a dirty little mind. I was trying to play with that idea, which, again, doesn't work if you're only in her perspective. You have to feel like, oh, I am sort of drawn in to this act, but I know I shouldn't be.

I really loved that the film was in Cantonese, and how that added another layer to her isolation within it.

My family is from Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese.

Mine, too.

It's really painful because Cantonese is the oldest spoken Chinese language, and when going back thousands of years to characters that we don't know how to read anymore, it's Cantonese that helps guide you, not Mandarin. It's also accurate—they would've spoken Cantonese.

It's also another way of feeling othered, being disconnected from the language around you. She couldn't speak English, which means she couldn't understand what was being said if it wasn't translated for her.

A lot of people say, well, women didn't have agency [back then], and that's something I just don't agree with. Women had agency within the confines of their circumstance, and they did employ their agency however they could. It's a myth that we have about women in the past, that they're just sitting there while things happened around them. Moy is deploying whatever agency she has. It just may not work, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't have it and that she doesn't try to use it and that she doesn't feel proud of where she's from in her culture. I imagine her dad was like, you're going to go show people what China's really like; that she was told she was going to help educate Americans. That he told her some kind of fable, because that's what people do to survive. And ultimately, she met Andrew Jackson—which, there's no way when that was happening, she wasn't like, "I'm a badass." That's just the reality of power. It's better to be an oppressed person with status than to be an oppressed person without it.

What do you think Afong Moy dreamed of?

I think she dreamed about home. There are moments even I dream about this, and I am obviously born in America, but I still dream of going back home. It's not to live there, but it's to touch and feel the culture that I don't have as easy access to. It's why I would want to go get dim sum, or why I would want to get Hong Kong breakfast, or—my family's also Vietnamese—why I sometimes just really want a bowl of pho. And I imagine in that time period, all those kind of home comforts, particularly food, would be so out of reach and so inaccessible that I would probably, if I were her, really yearn for some of those things.

On the flip side, I also think if I were her, I would dream of other types of fame, of success within the system that she's trapped within. Or freedom, which in that situation, might have been someone marrying her. I don't know.

Of course, we can't know. I was just curious what you imagined when trying to get in her headspace.

No, no, I love that question. It's so interesting. I mean, you just try to think how it would feel to be so far from home, and so poor—and disabled, which is a whole other thing. Women with bound feet were trapped in their houses basically, because they couldn't really walk. It was a status thing, and people were proud of it, but it's still really fucked up. We've tolerated a lot from the way men have tried to disempower us, and she really embodies a lot of those longstanding trends.

It feels fair to say Moy wasn't just commodified for her ethnicity, she was also commodified for her disability. Although there's overlap between the two.

Yeah. Well, it's clearly stemmed from a fetish in Chinese culture that it was more attractive to have a really small, tiny foot, to the point where everyone was maiming themselves—or each other, with the help of older women—to achieve this strange fetish. You could argue foot binding in China was also a commodification of women, because you're making women into an object that's appealing to men. I think it's a pretty abhorrent custom, in that it limited women's ability and mobility to do so many things. Now the tricky thing is not exceptionalizing or exotifying that custom as morally better or worse than other customs that other people have done to women in other cultures all around the world. It's disgusting, but I also would argue that there's a lot of disgusting things we do to ourselves to make us interesting to men that we'll all look back on in different ways, to different degrees, that become more or less acceptable depending on what's in fashion. You could argue weight loss and disordered eating is a different version of self harm and mutilation for men. Or attempting to stay young. And some people hurt themselves to do that.

I was going to say, binding feet in an attempt to keep them as small as when you were a child—could also be a means of sexualizing youth, in an extreme way.

Yeah, totally. I just view it as another norm that was really brutal, but that still has parallels to norms that we live in at the moment.

What else do you hope people take away from the film?

I just hope people think about Asian Americans in history, and how that pertains today. And also their complicity within a capitalist system of exploitation, and not in a self-flagellating way. There's a bit too much of that in our current society, and I don't think acting out of shame for the past or the present is going to resolve how our system works. We have to shine a light on things that are horrible, but also have empathy for ourselves, and for people in the past—that they're doing the best they can because of systemic factors instead of trying to look at everything so individually. That's not going to be how any of our current crises get solved. Climate change, for example, won't be solved by one person. It's going to require and necessitate collective action to fight back against the system that we live in, and it's going to require sacrifice from a lot of people that don't want to sacrifice, and questioning why do we place some lives above other lives?

I don't know. Those are just the things I thought about while making it, but I'm also fine with people taking away whatever they want, because I do think as artists, we aren't able to really control how our work is interpreted, and we have to let that go. White men love the movie, actually—I get the most compliments from white men, weirdly.

But I mean, I made it for us. People are like, "Who did you make it for?" Other Asian American women.

You can stream "Astonishing Little Feet" on Vimeo here. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

[post_title] => What Did Afong Moy Dream About? [post_excerpt] => An interview with the writer-director of "Astonishing Little Feet," a short film about the first documented Chinese woman to come to America. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => afong-moy-first-chinese-woman-america-astonishing-little-feet-short-film-maegan-houang-interview [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:49:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:49:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6581 [menu_order] => 65 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 7, 2024August 4, 2026

What Did Afong Moy Dream About?

by Gina Mei

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5880 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-05-18 17:06:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-05-18 17:06:31 [post_content] =>

Under international criminal law, apartheid only applies to discrimination based on race. A new open letter argues it should apply to gender discrimination, too.

In March of this year, a group of over 100 Iranian and Afghan women signatories published an open letter calling for the end of gender apartheid. The purpose of the letter was threefold: to raise awareness of what gender apartheid is, and how it's affecting women in Iran and Afghanistan; to encourage public statements and policy responses condemning these regimes; and to expand the definition of apartheid under international law. As the letter explains, currently, under international criminal law, use of the word apartheid is limited to race; but for years, activists around the world—and more specifically, in Iran and Afghanistan—have been using it to describe extreme, gender-based persecution, and the regimes that perpetrate it. The letter makes the case for why it's time we update the word's definition on the global stage.

Below, we spoke to one of the people behind the campaign, human rights lawyer Gissou Nia, on the letter's longterm goals, its challenges, and why language matters when it comes to gender persecution and apartheid.

How did the open letter come to be? How did you get involved?

The open letter came about with a core group of Iranian and Afghan women signatories. The genesis of this is that women's rights activists in Afghanistan and Iran have been using the term "gender apartheid" for years to describe, essentially, a system of subjugation and oppression that they are being repressed by. [But] when I spoke to some of these activists, not all of them had actually been aware that gender apartheid is not currently a crime under international law. Gender was not a part of that definition.

Apartheid, as defined under international criminal law—whether it’s a part of crimes against humanity or not—only applies to racial apartheid. So, [we] thought, why don’t we just change the definition? There have been incredible legal academics and jurors who have [already] been working on this, like Karima Bennoune, and what we wanted to achieve with the campaign is to supercharge [their] efforts. It’s an unbranded campaign—so there’s no one organization attached to it.

I’m curious what differentiates an apartheid regime from other forms of gender discrimination.

It’s a great question. One of the main things that people have asked is how is this distinct from gender persecution, let’s say. With gender persecution, which is a crime against humanity as defined under the ICC Rome Statute, that’s a more broadly defined crime. There may be some instances of something that you could charge as gender persecution that would amount to gender apartheid, but gender apartheid describes a certain type of treatment. It really focuses on the structures. The word “apartheid” comes from the word “apart” in Afrikaans, born out of the historical experience of South Africa—but it’s really about keeping one group separate from another. Here, you could say that [it’s] men subjugating and dominating women for purposes of entrenching power. I think that’s the distinguishing factor. Certainly, that would amount to a case of gender persecution, as well, and we’re not saying that it’s either/or—we think these are all complementary. In the case of race, we have both racial apartheid and racial persecution; so there’s no reason that we can’t have gender apartheid, as well.

I’d also say that gender apartheid, as opposed to gender discrimination, is much more extreme. Certainly misogyny and patriarchy exist everywhere. There are gender discriminatory laws in many different countries, including in the US. But a gender apartheid regime is something that’s quite distinct and different. It basically is saying that women are not worth a man. In the case of Iran, a woman’s value is worth half that of a man, legally. So they’re removed from public spaces. That’s why in Afghanistan, women and girls are not allowed to be educated, [why] they’ve been taken out of employment. The Taliban recently said that Afghan women cannot work for the UN in Afghanistan. So it’s essentially the removal of women from public spaces and from public life. And that’s enshrined in the law: You are formally not worth a man, and we are going to repress you, because that’s how we’re going to keep this regime in power.

When you say their value is less, how is that defined?

So, for example—I’m a lawyer, so this one for me is especially grating—if I was to give testimony in a court in Iran, my testimony would be worth half that of a man. I also wouldn’t be able to travel outside of Iran without the permission of my husband or my male guardian. I couldn’t ride a bike, I couldn’t go to sporting stadiums. I would be barred from certain types of higher education. Women do not have equal capacity, inheritance, divorce, marriage rights—anything that relates to the family, they’re unequal. And, of course, there’s the mandatory hijab laws, which we know sparked the outrage over Mahsa Amini’s murder.

For this particular campaign, why did you choose Iran and Afghanistan specifically? There are other countries where, arguably, [gender apartheid] would apply.

Because we were campaigning [and] were successful in removing the Islamic Republic from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Obviously all of that came about because of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran after Mahsa was killed at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s morality police. There were a lot of Afghan women activists that wrote me after that and were congratulating me. [But] Afghanistan was still on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. True, the Taliban is not formally recognized before the UN, so the representative is from the former government and basically doesn’t represent anybody. Nonetheless, they’re still there.

And it really struck me, that while we’re speaking about Woman, Life, Freedom in Iran, and while there’s been such a global outpouring of attention and action and policy engagement and energy, right across the border, our Afghan sisters are dealing with a horrendous situation, of which the globe is exhibiting some form of paralysis, and a lack of direction on how to improve their circumstances.

I think a lot of Iranian women who are championing women’s rights have been thinking about our Afghan sisters, who we’re tied to through shared borders, shared culture, and in some cases shared language. These issues are interlinked and they’re not separate, and so we’ve been keen to do some joint activism. It’s something a bit new in terms of campaigning, and certainly once the law is adopted or as discussions continue, there may be other women that choose to engage with it who feel that they’re living under gender apartheid regimes. This was a campaign that Iranian and Afghan women came together to launch, but it doesn’t preclude other groups of women wanting to [sign] or get involved with this advocacy or get behind this mission. Anybody can sign, and support. But the number of gender apartheid regimes in the world is actually pretty few.

How many people have signed it so far?

I haven’t checked lately to see what the tracker is, but it was something like 5000.

Can you talk me through the three chief demands the letter makes?

So basically, the [three demands] are the way that we envision [passing the law] would happen. I’ll just walk you through the timeline. In the immediate, first of all, there’s a lot of people who are not familiar with what the term apartheid is even, [especially] under the age of 35. However, most of the decision makers that we are seeking to engage with are above the age of 35, and they’re in government, and they have direct recollection of those events in the eighties [in South Africa] until the dismantling of the apartheid system in 1990. It has a real moral and resonant power for those decision makers, so part of this campaign is aimed around introducing the term gender apartheid, so people are familiar with what that actually means. What does apartheid refer to, what does it refer to in the context of Iran and Afghanistan, and why is this still going on.

The second thing is, we want parliaments around the world to issue resolutions condemning the apartheid in Afghanistan and Iran. That’s moving forward in Canada, in the UK, in New Zealand, and now we’re doing a lot of outreach to states in South America and Africa because we think that will be very important to have a global frame. This isn’t just a Western effort, and we want to make sure that is understood.

The ultimate goal is to have some of the legal frameworks that apply to apartheid amended or introduced to include gender apartheid. One of our main goals is to have gender apartheid included in the definition at the upcoming global convention on crimes against humanity. It should be adopted at the end of 2024, with any luck, and we want to be included.

Do you think the history of the term being so associated with race helps or hinders the movement?

Well, it’s not called racial apartheid. It’s just called apartheid. The reason that apartheid doesn’t include gender is because it was created in the 20^th century out of the South Africa experience. I [also] think a lot of international criminal law [has been] created by men in small rooms, and not necessarily with women’s input and that’s changing. We see that there is an increased focus on gendered crimes. There’s even a reevaluation of the crime of genocide to focus more on the gendered aspects of it. Historically, people have assumed that genocide has to be mass killing, not realizing that actually, it could also just be sterilization, and those forms of genocide are much more focused around women.

The point is a lot of crimes that we grapple with are really viewed through more of a male lens, and there’s been a concrete effort to apply a gender lens to that. I think this ties into the reason why apartheid didn’t focus on gender. It wasn’t because there weren’t gender apartheid regimes. It was just because of the kind of dialogue that was happening in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.

Longer term, what happens if you succeed in changing international law? What happens if [gender apartheid] is criminalized?

The biggest thing is just that then it’ll be possible to be prosecuted, and there’ll be a lot of new pathways for accountability. It also ultimately will enforce prosecution of crimes like gender persecution, as well, because prosecutors will start to think more deeply about the gender aspects of crime. But while the end goal might be to have this legally enshrined, really, the goals are all along the way. Because what we want to do is raise awareness about what this crime is, but also drive policy actions.

I mean, with South Africa, the ask was really to financially isolate that regime and to get people—governments, companies—to stop doing business with them. With Iran and Afghanistan, they’re already very isolated, they’re already very sanctioned. It’s not about introducing new sanctions or dissuading companies from working with these states, because they already aren’t. It’s about reframing the discussion. Those sanctions are issued for nuclear proliferation, for WMDs, for ballistic missiles, for terrorism; they are not issued for human rights violations, and they’re definitely not issued for gender apartheid. So we want to start to reframe why it is that we’re saying that governments should not engage with these governments [so] they need to change their behavior. It makes it unacceptable.

The crime of apartheid as distinct to the crime of gender persecution, gender apartheid would introduce more of a question about third party actors. Because of the historical example of South Africa apartheid, there’s a question of liability. If governments and companies are complicit, or doing business with regimes that are perpetrating gender apartheid, are they willingly aiding and abetting this regime? It’s a bit more expansive than what’s currently on the books, in our view.

We’re not asking for increased sanctions as part of this campaign. What we’re asking for is that there clearly are demands that gender apartheid come to an end.

For more information, you can read the letter in its entirety, and join in signing it, at endgenderapartheid.today.

You Should Give a Sh*t About is an ongoing column highlighting local stories with a global impact. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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May 18, 2023August 4, 2026

You Should Give a Sh*t About: Gender Apartheid

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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