Category: Dr. Ann Lee

Season 2: Dr. Ann Lee

Trailer out now with episodes 1-6 streaming from 1st August, 2021.

Summary:

Welcome to Season Two of the Listen by Heart Podcast, where we feature Stories from the Women of the South China Sea. Podcast host Jasmine Low introduces Dr. Ann Lee, and they chat about Ann’s short story that was published in Malaysian Folk Tales: Retold & Remixed, edited by Daphne Lee and published by ZI Publications (2011). Su and her Natural Love for Swimming is based on the folktale about a girl who was kidnapped by an orangutan, and will be narrated in a later episode.

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Biography

Born in Tawau, Malaysia, Ann Lee is a playwright, researcher and lecturer. Her plays are published in Sex, Stage & State: Kuali Works plays (Parama Adhi Perkasa, 2011) and Southeast Asian Plays (Aurora Metro, 2016). She was Artistic Director of Kuali Works, an all-women theatre group for over a decade and is immediate past Protem Chair of the Women Writers Committee, PEN Malaysia (chapter of PEN international). She is also a committee member of ReformARTsi, an independent coalition of over 100 Malaysian arts organisations and individuals, advocating reform in arts education, arts funding, and freedom of expression.

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Ann completed a doctorate in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is writing a book on political humour in Indonesia and Malaysia. She also holds a MSc in History of Science, Medicine and Technology (Oxon). Ann is a past Fellow of the Asia Leadership Fellow Program (Japan Foundation and International House of Japan).

She has also had a career in advertising and public relations, the pinnacle of which was working as Associate Creative Director in a team that developed a voter education campaign for the African National Congress (ANC), helping to ensure that Nelson Mandela won the first modern democratic elections in South Africa with a landslide win (despite years of Apartheid disallowing education for the majority population). 

Early days in theatre

Ann began writing for theatre as a member of the Royal Court Young Activists theatre group, London, where she joined a writers’ workshop with then writer-in-residence Hanif Kureishi. 

An Asia Leadership Fellow (ALFP, 2001), she spent time in Tokyo with colleagues from China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand, and presented her research on ‘the ghosts of Asian values’.

Kuali Works produced her first plays, including the critically acclaimed, Kuala Lumpur Knock-Out, about a young factory worker who dreams of boxing Mike Tyson (which received a Director’s Exchange Award from the Australian High Commission, Kuala Lumpur); Hang Li Poh – Melakan Princess, a re-telling of the myth of the Emperor of China’s daughter who married the Sultan of Malacca; and From Table Mountain to Teluk Intan by Shahimah Charmaine Idris (with Lee, Sue Ingleton and Jo Kukathas), based on the true story of a Cape Malay child in South Africa who leaves apartheid but ends up on the ‘right side’ of the tracks to face her most difficult trial. The last play Lee directed was Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, which was banned in Malaysia in 2002. Her last full-length play, Tarap Man, won a ‘Best Original Script’ award at the 2007 Boh Cameronian Arts Awards, Malaysia. She is working on a new full-length play, provisionally titled Not Far Now. Lee’s work for the stage has been performed/read at the Asian Monodrama Festival, Commonwealth Games Theatre Festival, Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, Sydney Writers Festival, and the New York International Fringe Festival.

In our conversation while preparing for this podcast, Dr. Ann Lee shares more about the concepts behind her work. Her doctorate thesis is grounded in humour studies, epidemiological studies and Southeast Asian studies. Entitled ‘Outbreaks of satire: a political epidemiology of dissent in theatre, television, and social media memes (Malaysia and Indonesia, 1989 – 2018)’, she identifies rhetoric about health and well-being, and how this is used to support and denigrate the satirical.

Born of mixed parentage, Dr. Ann recalls stories of her family: her maternal side in North Borneo and Sabah, Malaysia, as well as her paternal side from Salford, Manchester in England. For example, her maternal great-grandmother, a Hakka Chinese known as Madam Voo Hock Liam, was born in 1882 and became renowned as a fierce and determined character. She later married Chan Yau Lam, originally a stonemason in Papar, North Borneo. He became a respected leader (kapitan cina), and set up an English language school at a time when this was unpopular. (There is a photo of him shaking hands with England’s Duchess of Kent on her visit to ‘British North Borneo’.) On the other hand, little is known of her paternal great-grandmother but her paternal great-grandfather did not believe in education for girls. Ann’s paternal grandmother did not continue school beyond her early teens, though she went onto qualify as a swimmer for the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam.

Before and since her doctorate, Ann has also been working on a new play. Titled Not Far Now, the play is inspired by the real-life story of a medical student from the East Indies, fighting for independence from the Dutch who later became a political prisoner – and also an orderly – in Germany’s Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen WW2 concentration camps.

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About the Listen by Heart Podcast

You have been listening to Jasmine Low’s Audio Journey experience, presenting Season Two of Listen by Heart: Voices of the Women of the South China Sea with Dr. Ann Lee. 

Subscribe to the podcast on your preferred platform and if you’d like to encourage us on, find out how you can support the production. Thank you.

Our purpose: Listen by Heart Podcast is an audio project that sets out to record and archive stories from women of the South China Sea, an area of much interest lately. As we document and record all of these stories, we will also be digitising and creating an online presence for women of Southeast Asian heritage and honouring the women who came before them.

Our Mission: Listen By Heart Podcast aims to serve as the Sentinels of the South China Sea, keeping our region at peace.

Production Credits

An open-source project created, narrated and produced by Jasmine H. Low (jasminelow.com).
An AsiaFitnessToday.com Podcast Production.
Supported by GoInternationalGroup.com.
Website by WebPROjx.com.

#ListenbyHeart | https://listenbyheart.webprojx.com

Would you have a tale to share or know somebody who does? Do you identify as a woman with heritage from the nations encircling the contentious South China Seas? We’d love to hear from you…

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