One Month of Tweets
Embracing the 10,000 character limit
It’s been one month since one of my tweets went viral. Before that one usually no one read my tweets so I was surprised to see such robust conversation in the comment section.
It is also one month after the introduction of the 10,000 character limit tweet.
The amount of views, retweets, and comments has been overwhelming. Mostly positive encouraging comments and then some rather rude and aggressive comments. It took a while to get used to it.
Good discourse is good, rude and aggressive comments are weak.
These are the tweets that started the ball rolling.
A week after seeing the interest, I started this Substack publication and named it - China Unfolded 中国展开.
The metaphor of peeling back layers of an onion to allow for the hidden parts to emerge was what I started with, but thought that I wanted the title to suggest more of an opening or unfurling.
So I worked backwards trying to find a strong word in Chinese that suggests an unfurling. I landed on 展开 zhǎn kāi which means to unfold, but can also mean ‘unfurl’ or ‘open up’.
My main message aims to move the narrative away from headline politics towards cross-cultural understanding.
I believe the way to understanding a country is to experience it, learn the language, study its history, and have true conversations with real people.
I embraced Twitter Blue’s increase in character limit to 10,000 and started with a few long-form tweets about my experiences in China weaving in historical facts. There was an overwhelming response. My post on the new train system alone has 410K views, another post on how I saw America a very changed and disturbing place had 146K views. My post on how the US should stay out of the Taiwan issue garnered 80K views.
The most excitement came from the clip I posted with Wang Yibo 王一博 with 168K views and many of his fans commenting.
I am not an expert, but what I do bring to the table is a history of living for almost four decades in many cities in Asia - Hong Kong, Taipei, Mumbai. Traveling as a local throughout China-Burma-Thailand in 1986, India-Pakistan-Xinjiang in 1992, and many shorter journeys to Japan, Cambodia, Philippines, Vietnam, Korea.
Spending years working in mainland China as an actress from 2009 to the present has given me the enviable position to met and talk to people from across China, to learn and hear their views, and to begin to understand Chinese culture and get a sense of it.
It seems I have hit upon issues that many care about, and I also sense a curiosity to hear from my experiences first hand.
In that spirit, I have launched this newsletter and also share on Twitter. You can also follow me on Twitter.
I hope you will come along with me on my journey to share what I have learned and am still learning about China.
