From the Australian. This is the weekend edition of The Front. I'm Claire Harvey. Three years in custody, isolation, psychological torture, deprivation of every kind. When Australian journalist Chung Lei was imprisoned in China, wrongfully convicted of espionage, she was forced by her captors to write so called self reflections declarations of guilt. It was all part of the torture and Lay had to comply expressing a guilt she had no
reason to feel. Lay was innocent. Now she's written a book, The Truth, this time on her own terms, accompanied by a documentary and a Ted talk on her harrowing experience. Her book for HarperCollins, A Memoir of Freedom, is released on Wednesday. For June and her docors dum Entry. Chung Lay My Story premieres on Tuesday, the third of June on Sky News and sky News dot com Dot a U. I've got to know Lay over the past few years, and she's warm, funny, super smart and deeply kind. I
hope you enjoy our conversation. In twenty twenty, Chung Lai was a glamorous news anchor working for a Chinese state owned TV station. You were living the life of a kind of rom com, this glamorous Beijing apartment, sort of trotting into work in your shift dress and your year more Bridget Jones. She had an incredible network of friends and contacts, including her close friend Hayes, a Chinese who was working for American news agency Bloomberg. One day, Lay
sent Hayes a text. It was mundane the main points that would soon be announced in the Chinese premier's annual work report. The text said, no growth target GDP nine million jobs target. It's the kind of information journalists exchange all the time. Government agencies set embargoes on press releases or speeches, and if an Australian journalist like me jumped the gun and published early, I'd probably get an angry
call from a media advisor. That'd be it. Unbeknownst to Lay, she sent that text to Hayes seven minutes before the news was allowed to be published under an embargo she didn't know existed. China said she'd revealed a state secret. For the next three years, Lay would be known only by her prisoner number two to one, double zero three. Lay writing the book about the music that was used to wake everybody up in the detention center. What was that?
I'm sorry, Beethoven, it was for release. Sometimes I would have been awake for hours already, just staring at the tiles, counting them again and again. And I hear that music and always sigh a little, because it's ruined it for me forever.
And all my cell mates. Lay started out in solitary confinement Harris.
Dell is the Chinese spelling for.
Hell RSDL residential surveillance in a designated location all day and night. She was watched in a windowless room where the light was never turned off by officers constantly positioned within a meter of her. And then she moved to a detention center where she shared a cell with other women, also prisoners of the Ministry of State Security, also accused of crimes like espionage or sharing state secrets. Nobody was allowed to use their real name, just a number, but
Lay and her cellmates gave one another nicknames. There was og for Ottawa, Grandma, a Canadian Chinese woman, Canto, a Cantonese speaker from China South, and Psycho Bitch, a prickly prisoner with whom Lay found herself trapped. They called her peeb for short. I've got a passage that I was hoping you would read for us, actually, and it's about when you were in a cell just by yourself with psycho bitch. Oh yeah, would you mind reading it? Thank you?
PB was turning the detention center rules into a joke. It became a cycle. The officers would discipline her in sensing her to the point of uncontrollable fury, which escalated the punishments and her retaliation.
She seemed to get off on it.
Even after screaming at the detention center chief earned her three days and nights of handcuffs. She said she was going to sue the detention center for discrimination and was going to report Canto's varied sins. It dawned on me that the world stepped back when you had no shame, no qualms about lying, and the loud voice that you used often. She was the Donald Trump of inmates. To combat this constant stress, I had to be my own
coach first world problems. Think of people experiencing wars and famine, being brutalized. This is the best time in my life to read and study Zen Mantra. Life is full of suffering. Everything is in flux. Only if you stop grasping, can you have peace of mind? Each time she pisss me off, I'll do ten pushups. Imagine that she's my annoying little sister. I have to put up with her. This is temporary, and things could be worse. They have been worse. In my first six months, I had no sunshine, no TV,
no conversations, and nothing I could call my own. I reversed the Eschylus quote that there is no pain as great as the memory of joy in present grief. I believed when I got out there would be no bliss so complete as the memory of suffering in present joy.
Did that turn out to be true when you got out?
Absolutely? The counterpoint really helps us appreciate the smallest thing. Every time I put a cap on the toothpaste, every time I hang out washing, every time I put on a piece of jewelry and look at myself in the mirror, things like spotting a flower or feeling the breeze on my face. Without what I suffered, I will just take all this for granted.
And is there anything that you've let go of? Conversely, you know, are there big and small things that don't annoy you anymore or not.
I'm pretty chilled about almost everything. When people honk at me, I smile at them, And when I see something annoying, I'll remind myself that I'm so privileged to be able to have that annoyance. And I eat a lot and don't really fret about, oh, what I look like. I've only bought very little clothes because I went for three years and two months wearying, you know, two or three T shirts and all of my worldly belongings can fit
into one little container. So now material things mean a lot less to me.
What you've just described seems like a part of the Chinese philosophy of living too, you know, eating all parts of the animal, for example, not wasting a life. Yes that you've taken for food. It seemed to me that in prison you felt very Australian. What remnants are there of your Chinese personality? And where do you land now?
You know? I love that question because it's one that I often ask myself. It is very conflicting to be ethnically Chinese, to try to separate what I feel for the country, whatever you call a country. It's almost because of the incarceration I find country, a nation, and state to be dirty words because there was me, an Australian Chinese citizen working for a Chinese company, well state owned company, thinking I was helping a Chinese friend who worked for
an American company, and they call it espionage. I mean, obviously they had to pin something on me. But the absurdity of the lines we draw on this planet. Instead of being nationalist, we should be earthist, universalist. We're not so different.
One of the first times I met you, Yes, we met when we were both going to a big, fancy event where we were both going to be on stage, the Australian sixtieth Anniversary. We started talking about whether we got stage fridle nervousness on stage, and you told me about a phrase that one of your TV mentors had taught you. That's right, what was it?
BTFI beyond the fuck it. We've all had those fuck it moments. I've stuffed up many times on air off air, and if you can ride out that worst wave, you'll find serenity.
One of the things I like about that is that it tells me something about you. You know, you like swearing for a stile.
It's a you know, preworquisite of being Australian, I think and working in TV right, oh, definitely, Live TV.
Language is very stressful, and you are you seem to me to be comfortable with being a flawed creature, being a human. You know you are open to revealing everything about yourself, and you.
Don't take myself seriously.
Your book is very revelatory. You have really gone there in every way about going to the toilet and having your period and everything that happened to you in prison, many things that other people might have glossed over. Did it occur to you to gloss that over? To present a version of yourself that didn't go to the toilet? I didn't have periods.
No. I think it's a big part of being human to feel pain and discomfort, and if we can't acknowledge that, then what's the point of writing. I like to think that I've written an honest book, and it's just a big reversal from what China is about, which is hugely glossing over things, making up facts, pinning crimes on people, and then saying with a straight face, this did not happen.
One of the things about writing a book a memoir is that you step back into the past very deeply. Did you have any moments of thinking, I kind of wish I hadn't come back into this moment, and I wish I was just moving forward.
No, because even towards the end of my incarceration, I found peace inside and that meant I was no longer afraid of pain. I mean, I've written passages in that book where I was howling by myself, and I don't see that as a negative or a deterrent to writing. Pain is a counterpoint for happiness and pleasure. A lot of Buddhism is about not trying to grasp joy or avoid pain, but letting it all flow through.
It's a remarkable book. It's one of those books that really takes me somewhere else, you know, the wonderful, magical thing that books can do. And when you're trying to teach children to read, the hope that they will get this idea that if you have a book, you can escape and you.
Start to channel the spirit of the writer.
Oh, I've always I felt like I was in there with you, in that cell with Og and Psycho, Bitch can Doo and Skinny. Yeah, as a cell mate. Were you conscious of trying to be a good cell mate, or were you just trying to get yourself through it.
Well, to do one, you do the other. I think I came through relatively okay because I felt each day I was going to teach them some more songs. We were going to sing a bit more without getting into too much trouble, and share books, and I was going to make up new games, and we're going to have some laughs, and each day it's going to be a little bit of fun. Otherwise it's just too dark and too utterly dull. One partying phrase I love to leave
people with is have fun. Life's too short to take yourself too seriously or to stress out about small.
Stuff coming up. More from my interview with Chung Wi. Random detention of people is such a powerful weapon in silencing people. There's a theory that you were collateral damage in the Australian government's criticism of China over the origins of COVID. If the price that foreign governments pay for speaking up about China is the potential detention of a citizen and effectively the torture of a human being, is it still worth it for foreign governments to speak up?
Well, we have to better protect our citizens, like the Alliance that we created led by Kylie Moore Gilbert and co founded with Sean Turnell. We think if there was a specialized Envoyd role for victims of hostage diplomacy, then
it's a stronger deterrent. But I also think by my speaking out after what happened, it's a deterrent to China incarcerating more journalists, more Australians, because if you don't change your ways, then people are going to find out more about your secret prisons, and China is ultra secretive about its state security incarceration.
Do you have any hope that anyone in China will see you or read your words.
No, I'm not hopeful that that would happen unless they went overseas. I by mistake, clicked on some Chinese articles when the press release about my book went out in February, and the hateful comments under that all of them were hateful that I was a foreigner loving slut. Of course, you know, the whole sexcess thing comes out. I should be put back into jail. I should never been let out.
I should be shot on the spot. I don't deserve to have my children with me because I'm such a bad role model, and on and on, and as upsetting as it was to read it, it motivates me to speak up even louder because that's what they want. They want you to feel shame and guilt for being human, for telling the truth, and that's not going to happen.
And just finally, the colleague working for an American company who you sent the text message to which was the pretext for putting you in prison, Yes, Hayes Farm. Yes, she was also detained but was released on bail before you were released. How do you feel about her now?
I'd love to talk to her, very forgiving person. I don't do anger, I don't do hate. I like to talk and find out what happened to her.
Well, you often talk about feeling that you don't deserve praise, and maybe that's the Australian part of you, or maybe it's the Chinese part or just the human part.
No, it's having a very strict dad.
But if you were ever in any doubt, now you have created a work of art in the book that is going to change other people's lives. And you know we'll make everybody's life better, including people who are in detention. Well, congratulations, thank you, thank you. Don't want to embarrass you by praising you, but I'm grateful. I'm grateful to be Australian and to be free. Each day I reflect on.
The kindnesses of our people as a whole, and I just want to do so much more to make it better.
Chung Lay is an anchor on Sky News Australia. Her book for HarperCollins, a Memoir of Freedom, is released on Wednesday for June, and her documentary Chung Lay My Story, premieres on Tuesday three June on Sky newsand sky News dot Com dot a You. This episode of the Front was hosted by me Claire Harvey and co produced with Jasper League, who edited the episode and also wrote our theme.
Thanks for joining us on the Front this week. Our team also includes Kristin Amiot Leat, Sammaglu, Tiffany Dimac, Josh Burton and Stephanie Combs.