Welcome to this special installment of the NüVoices podcast. I’m Jessie Lau, editor and board member of NuVoices — a collective celebrating the brilliant women shaping how we understand China today through their writing, research, and in-depth reporting. We’re a volunteer-led nonprofit that first launched in 2018 and is now registered as an NGO.
In 2025, we ran our first ever annual NüStories personal essay contest to encourage and honor non-fiction writing on China by underrepresented writers. We chose the theme “Chinese identity” because we wanted to showcase the diversity of Chinese-ness both inside and outside of China’s borders, and to provide a space for people to grapple with what it means to be Chinese today.
We were blown away by so many wonderful submissions from talented writers all over the world, and we’re really grateful that you share your work with us.
As a bonus episode series for the NüVoices podcast, we have invited three winners of the personal essay contest to read out their essays.
In this episode, you will hear from Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray, who won first place for her essay, “You need glasses for Asian faces.”
Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray is a writer and comic artist. She won Singapore’s 2023 Golden Point Award and co-authored two books on the arts in Singapore, “Semionauts of Tradition” and “Reimagining Singapore”.