Drum Tower: Stand-up feminists

You're listening to a free episode of Drum Tower. To listen every week, you'll need to be a subscriber. To sign up, click the link in the Show Notes or search online for Economist Podcasts plus.

Hi, this is Christy from Back to the Bar. You've probably heard about GLP1 weight loss medications and the side effects that can come with jumping in too fast. That's why Ilove Noom makes getting started easy. Their microdose GLP1 program begins with a smaller dose and gradually scales up based on how your body reacts. The Noom GLP1 microdose program starts at 99 and is delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP1 journey today at Noom.com that's n o o m dot com Noom micro changes big results average.

Weight loss eight pounds in first month. Meds and personalization based on clinical need and not available to all individuals. Medications are not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy or quality. Pricing based on first month only.

The economist.

So, David, I've been spending some time reporting in the dark basements of New York City.

Tell me more.

I went to capture a story for Drum Tower and it involved a lot more laughter than usual.

What is going on there?

So when we were in the US I went to a Chinese feminist standup comedy show in New York City. It's called which can mean two things. It can mean women's ideas or it can also mean good ideas.

And of course, feminists in China, along with all kinds of activists, have been having a much, much harder time recently.

So much so that many have now left the country and yet they are trying to rebuild a feminist community from the outside. This week we're asking, why have some of China's feminists taken to doing standup abroad and can their comedy have any impact back home? This is drumtar from the Economist. So, David, how are you? How have you been this week?

Well, I was a little late for recording because the Beijing traffic police have had a crackdown on bicycles doing things like jumping the lights and going the wrong way down cycle lanes, which is a big shock because as you'll remember, Alice, if you're on a bicycle, you could basically do what you like in Beijing most of the time. But one of our Chinese colleagues has a theory that's the end of the year and so they got a quota of tickets to give out. But it's just a line of unhappy bicyclists being given tickets and me taking a long way round, which obeys all the Traffic rules for the first time in a very long time.

So you didn't get a ticket?

I was tipped off and went the right way round.

That's very good. I'm actually recording here from London for the first time. And I was also almost late for recording because, I don't know, I made the amateur mistake of not giving myself enough time to squeeze onto a tube train at rush hour. And I actually had to wait like three or four trains before I could get myself on.

That can be ugly. Yeah. So tell me more about this comedy you've been listening to.

Yeah, that's right. So I went to this standup comedy show in New York. It's a new thing that started last year and I had been following them for a while online. And I thought, if I'm ever in New York City, I'm gonna make sure I coincide with this once a month show. It took place in midtown Manhattan in this basement comedy club. And stepping into that basement was really like walking into a parallel universe of an alternative version of China.

No. How so?

Well, first of all, it was like you go downstairs and then suddenly all around you is Mandarin, is, you know, Chinese in mainland accents, which I hadn't heard for a long time because I've been living in Taiwan. So I was like, oh, it's like I'm in just like a basement club in Beijing. But then you immediately realize, okay, this is not Beijing, because on the wall behind the stage in the club, there are all these posters covered with protest slogans. I could see, you know, the Sitongqiao slogans.

Oh, wow, the bridge that had the incredibly rare slogan protest late last year.

Yeah, that's right. And I also saw English translations of them. There was Xi Jinping notmydictator. There was a picture of Huang Shiqin, who is this really well known feminist journalist who's been detained. And so clearly it was like China, but in another version where you can freely express yourself and you can put political slogans up on the wall with no problem and then have a show in front of those posters.

Yeah. Not in Sanlitan now.

No.

And of course, the reality is, as we talked about that bridge protest late last year on an overhead sort of highway bridge in Beijing. It was unbelievably rare, unbelievably brief. And we haven't seen hide nor hair of the poor man who staged that protest. Because this is a really dark time for feminists and frankly, all kinds of social activists, as we've talked about on Drum Tower. And I guess it's kind of revealing that you had to fly thousands of miles to hear free speech from mainland Chinese.

Yeah. Although it isn't that uncommon to hear stand up comedy in Chinese. That is something that has been getting more popular in recent years within China. But when people do stand up comedy inside mainland China, there's always a certain level of self censorship. Right. People are careful not to cross political lines, not to criticize the party. And lately the controls on stand up back home in China have been getting tighter too.

And it's not just explicitly political stuff. That's risky. You and I both read that really depressing story from earlier this year where a stand up comic in a club in Beijing eventually got into trouble with the police. Full on criminal investigation. And then his production company getting such a large fine. It's basically designed to kill the company US$2 million. And his crime was to quote a Chinese army slogan, I think originally coined by Xi Jinping in a harmless joke about his pet dogs and how fierce they are when they're hunting squirrels in the park. And someone decided this was seriously insulting China's armed forces. But what you were looking at in New York wasn't just stand up comedy in a mainland accent. It was feminist specifically. Why did feminists choose to do stand up?

Well, that's exactly what I wanted to find out.

And if telling jokes is hard in China, there's no doubt we've talked on Drum Tower before, that being a feminist is particularly rough. That Me too. Accusations involving powerful men have not worked out well in almost every case for the women who level them. And even the idea of kind of forming an NGO or civil society is under such intense pressure in Xi Jinping's China. And could you tell that was the kind of driving force that had pushed some of these women that you met into exile?

Yes, for sure. And I could get a hint of that just from getting a good look at who was in the audience. It wasn't just diaspora Chinese and people who enjoy comedy, but I recognized quite a few prominent feminist activists in the crowd. There was one woman who filed a big lawsuit against workplace gender discrimination a few years ago. There was a member of the Feminist Five, these really prominent activists who were arrested in 2015. And there are a lot of people who I recognize from their online names because they used to have huge followings on Weibo and they used to be very vocal online, but most of them have lost their accounts. They can no longer talk on the Chinese Internet. But now they were here in person.

Gosh, that's got to Be bittersweet to meet so many, because on the one hand, you know, what a community to find, but on the other hand, what an indictment that they're not in China anymore.

Yeah, that's right.

And so tell me about this show. What was the kind of material they were working with?

The show happens once a month, and every time they have a theme. And the theme this time was the moment I stood up. So I expected that there would be a lot of stories or bits about different kinds of standing up, however you want to interpret it. But one of the highlights every time is also that the organizers always do a skit in the middle of the show. It's basically a parody of China's nightly news program, Xin Wenlianbo. You got it.

I felt myself sitting up straighter as that music played, wishing I had on bouffant hair and a shiny red tie. That is a very famous program which hundreds of millions of Chinese watch every evening.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's the signature state television news program. And what happens at this show is that they do their own satirical feminist version.

That does sound promising, I have to say.

Jinping Shi Nian. So you have, you know, these two women, they're sitting very prim and proper at a table on stage, and they say, welcome. Today is October 1, 2023, the 10th year of Jinping, kind of implying like.

Like an imperial reign name, Right? Like implying that he's an emperor. He dates the years by how long he's been in power, like emperors did.

That's right. 10th year of the Emperor Xi.

Wow.

It's very deadpan. Like, they're very serious. They're gonn the news exactly the same as on state television. So here the announcers are saying in a very serious way. The Wall Street Journal reported that former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has disappeared and he was officially fired due to issues of personal conduct. An internal investigation found that while serving as China' ambassador to America, he was involved in an extramarital affair and even fathered a child born in the US. And then the commentator adds, qin Gang has truly achieved the American dream of all communist state leaders, which is to become America's daddy. And then everybody laughs and cheers.

It's a zinger.

Yeah. I was kind of shocked. I didn't know how far they were going to go in their skit. And I was like, whoa. Okay, you're going straight for the foreign minister. Like, whoa. And they're kind of making fun of how Chinese nationalists like to use this kind of language. Like, I'm your dad, you know, like China is so strong and we're the daddy of Americans, but they're doing it in this way where they are co opting that language, making fun of it and blending it with the news at the same time.

Any other good political jokes?

Yeah, I mean, there were a lot. Actually a lot of them were quite closely related to drum tower topics. At one point they were talking about the Fukushima water that Japan was releasing and how Chinese nationalists were calling random numbers in Japan to complain and to shout at them. And then they very sarcastically said, well, these young Chinese, they don't have jobs. So that's a joke about youth unemployment. It's like they don't have jobs and yet they're pulling money out of their own pockets to fulfill the great rejuvenation of the nation by embarrassingly calling and berating the Japanese. And because it's kind of like everyone in the audience has also been following that news and seen these things online. So everyone's like, oh my God, like you're saying it out loud. It's very funny.

It's also really interesting the way they're taking the aggressive language of nationalists online and turning it against them. And often those nationalists would be going after feminists in other contexts. So apart from the political jokes, did they get onto kind of directly feminist topics?

Yeah, they did. They often dress up as different characters. So someone dressed up as this well known CCTV host who harassed an intern and she filed a MeToo lawsuit against him. And that went on for a number of years, but ultimately it failed and he's been kind of reinstated in his position. They had one of them dressed up as this guy and kind of was mocking him and they were interrogating him. And I think that was just probably very cathartic for a lot of people to see.

And in real life, that was not a funny story. Right. I mean, that poor woman, when she accused this famous variety show presenter, the police even told her, you know, you can't possibly accuse him, he's too popular with the masses.

Yeah, that's right. And I think that's the clever thing about this standup show. It was like some parts of it were just very irreverent. Everyone just really enjoyed finally being able to hit back at nationalists, make fun of them or some of the politically absurd things that are happening in China. But other parts of it, I have to say, were really actually not so much funny as just really moving and earnest.

Oh, wow.

So the bulk of the show was actually this Open mic format where people could come up and talk for five minutes. They could just tell jokes that are not political at all. Like, there were a lot of people who told stories about coming out to their parents in China and how they reacted. One person said they were coming out to their mom gradually, like a frog, you know, in slow boiling water. Like, bit by bit, dropping hints about their preferences.

Well done. Well done.

And then, you know, they finally came out and she accepted them. Those are moving and kind of funny. But then there were also some stories that were quite political. There was one person who came up and said that they were working for the Hong Kong government while the protests were happening in 2019. And their story was about what it was like to have to pretend you don't care about what's happening out on the streets, and you have to just keep your head down and continue. But eventually they decided to quit their job, and that was the one step that they could take to say, I don't want to be part of the system. But then they said, now I'm here and I'm really struggling. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't have a job, you know, now I'm trying to get by. There was a woman who told a story about how she always remembers growing up and one time taking a bus in China and seeing a man molesting a girl on that bus. And she wanted to do something, but she was too afraid. And at the next bus stop, she just got off and ran away. But she always wished that she had done something to stand up.

Oh, wow.

And then she said, after growing up, you know, I see similar kinds of. Not that the state is molesting people, but there is state abuse happening of people in China. And she has that same kind of feeling of wrestling with. You feel like you want to do something, but you're afraid if you do something, they're going to come for you. And so it wasn't necessarily all jokes and also wasn't necessarily all stories about moments of brave activism. A lot of it was actually kind of like confessional. It was like people telling stories about being afraid. And I think even just being able to admit that they were afraid was a really big deal.

That's so different from the normal sort of combative nature of a comedy club. I can see this as something much more kind of cathartic. As you say, like community.

Yeah, that's right. But some people were still really worried about the repercussions of speaking so freely. Like, there was one guy who was on stage, but he wore sunglasses and a mask, so he was trying to hide his identity.

Is that because they're worried about repercussions for family members still home or because they themselves want to go home?

I mean, I think it's both. I think most immediately, most of them have parents or other family members still in China, and they know that anything they say could be tracked back and could affect their loved ones. And also, many of them said they want to go home, they want to go back to China in the future. So they have to take a certain amount of caution.

And so they're speaking out in the US they're providing tremendous community for themselves in this basement. But do they feel that that could have ripple effects back in China? You know, they're activists. Their ultimate dream is to effect change in China. Is that their motive? What do they tell you about that?

Well, I met some of the speakers and the audience members, and that's exactly what I asked them.

Foreign hi, this is Christy from Back to the Bar. You've probably heard about GLP1 weight loss medications and the side effects that can come with jumping in too fast. That's why I love Noom. Makes getting started easy. Their microdose GLP1 program begins with a smaller dose and gradually scales up based on how your body reacts. The Noom GLP1 microdose program starts at $99 and is delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP1 journey today at noom.com that's n o o m dot com Noom micro changes big results.

Average weight loss eight pounds in first month. Meds and personalization based on clinical need and not available to all individuals. Medications are not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy or quality. Pricing based on first month only.

So, Alice, who did you meet? Tell us about the performers and tell us about who was in the audience.

Well, first of all, the audience, it was almost 200 people and pretty much all Chinese. A lot of young women in their 20s or 30s, but also a number of older people. And some of them, I think, were maybe longtime activists or lawyers or just members of the diaspora who are supportive of this kind of slightly subversive event.

Do you think lots of students from mainland China are kind of curious about it?

Yeah, they are. And actually it's really hard to get tickets for this event. As I said, it only happens once a month and the organizers told me they usually sell out within one minute of releasing the tickets.

And do they try and stop sort of spies from the nearest Chinese embassy? From going or they sort of assume that there will be effectively Chinese secret police in the audience.

Yeah, I was concerned about that too. I mean, they do check the names of everybody who is attending, so I think they're trying to be careful about it. But I think anybody who shows up to this event knows that they're taking a bit of risk even by being in the audience. And actually that's something that one of the performers said on stage. She was like, we all struggle with taking a stand, but actually, even by coming here, you're standing up, even though you're sitting down. But this is quite a big step to take.

And who's kind of the main mover behind the evening that you went to?

Well, it's a whole group maybe of, I don't know, ten or so people. One of them that I interviewed is named Yang Xiaowen. She left China actually in 2016, but she was still very active in online feminism, being involved in the MeToo movement and spearheading these discussions online. That is until 2021. That's when she lost her WeChat and her Weibo accounts. And at that time, she was being attacked by a lot of nationalists. There was an account by the Global Times that accused her of getting payments from abroad to, you know, help America foment unrest in China.

And I think we should just dwell a second on the stakes there. One thing, the Global Times tabloid newspaper under the People's Daily, which is very closely connected to the Ministry of State Security, if they accuse you of taking money from hostile foreign forces, that's a pathway towards being charged with espionage or national security offenses. That's really frightening. And losing your WeChat and Weibo account, that may sound like nothing much, but everyone here in mainland China, you don't have those sort of super apps on your phone. You can't talk to anyone, you can't buy anything, you can't take a taxi. It's your kind of your whole life. Right. That is a serious threat to wheels.

Yeah, exactly. All these things are happening online, but the stakes are very much real life stakes. So Xiao Wen is actually working as a lawyer now. When you first see her, like I first saw her standing on stage because she was hosting this show and she's quite petite, she has long hair, and she doesn't look like somebody who could win a fight with a bunch of state sponsored thugs, you know, but once she starts speaking, she's extremely firm. She speaks a lot of conviction. I was kind of taken aback because she was one of the people making the most cutting jokes, crossing red lines and clearly enjoying it. And so she's a small person, but she has a lot to say. Xiao Wen told me about how when she lost all her access to her Chinese social media accounts, she felt like she lost her voice and like she wanted to keep pointing out these absurdities in society, but she couldn't because there was nowhere where she could say it.

It's hard to kind of emphasize enough, isn't it? Just how unbelievably dominant a couple of these social media apps in China. If you don't have those, then no one is going to hear you.

Yeah, that's right. And she made this point that even before that, when you're trying to speak up on Chinese social media, you're still not speaking freely because there are so many ways you have to censor what you say just to get your message out. For example, if you want to write something police harassment, you won't write it directly because once you type those words, your message is not going to send. So she's like, on the Chinese Internet, everybody is using euphemisms and abbreviations and changing the way we speak, which affects the way we think.

And you can see why in that case, if you can't even discuss the absurdities of society with your friends or just in messages online, you can see how you end up as a stand up comic.

Yeah, well, so someone told me she, like, didn't really have any interest in standup comedy before, but it's that once she was here in New York and she lost her contact with the Chinese online world, she felt like, I've been silenced and like I'm losing touch and I can no longer speak to those people. She was looking for a way to rebuild connection from far away. And then one of her feminist friends had dabbled a bit in stand up comedy and said, why don't we try doing this? This is like an offline activity. It's live, it's interactive, you go on stage, the audience is cheering or booing, and it's kind of like the perfect antidote to that controlled online experience.

Did they find it hard to come up with material?

So Xiaowen said, no, actually, it's not hard because once you open the gates and you're able to talk about anything, she's like, as a Chinese woman or a sexual minority or anybody who's under political oppression, the jokes just write themselves. Because the political environment is so absurd. All you have to do is just share your experience. You don't even need to modify any of it. And immediately the audience gets it because they're like, oh, I've lived through this exact crazy environment.

And it's amazing sitting here in China, hearing someone talking like that. And it's a feminist talking about these awful experiences, these terrible pressure, but not as a victim. It's that sense of agency and power that they have. But it's in exile. It's interesting that she performs in Chinese. Is that purely to hit a Chinese audience?

Yeah, you know, that's the shared language. It's about reconstructing the Chinese world. But also, Xiaowen said it's the first time that most of them have had a chance to really practice speaking totally unrestricted in their own language. Told me that to practice using your own language and using your own voice on a stage to say political things out loud, it's almost like a kind of training. It's like a tiny, tiny form of training in courage.

I totally get that.

Yeah. And, you know, when I. When I first heard her say that, I was really moved. And I really did resonate with that. Because even to me, sitting in that audience that day, listening to people say these things out loud on stage, it was a bit of a shock. It was just like, these are the things you usually hear spoken very quietly, one on one, or over a safe encrypted app or online before it disappears. You never see it, just like in front of a crowd on a stage, you know, in public.

It's a vision of how China could be, but absolutely isn't. And is there any connection between these activists and feminists who are still trying to keep a movement alive here in China?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, many of the people who were there are people who were part of that movement in the past and in fact, used to do. Really, nowadays, it seems radical. Back then, it seemed okay, you know, on the street, public actions, protesting, occupying men's toilets, marching down the street in wedding dresses smeared with ink so it looked like they were bloody to try to raise awareness about domestic violence. All this kind of activism was once relatively accepted in China in the early.

2010S, and it did actually trigger some laws, right?

Yeah, that's right. This kind of activism, they triggered the enactment of anti domestic violence laws. They were really trying to make political changes. But all of that kind of stopped after 2015 when a group of these feminist activists, the Feminist Five, were arrested. The US ambassador to the United Nations.

Samantha Power, is urging China to release a group of women's rights activists known.

As the Beijing Five. These Women could face up to five years in prison, and their detention may send a wider message to keep quiet.

It was such a landmark story, wasn't it? It was three years into Xi Jinping's rule, and these women were being arrested for five feminism. So you realize that you didn't have to be a dissident and sort of say, down with the Communist Party to get yourself arrested in this China.

Yeah. In fact, I think it happened just before Women's Day. And the five women who were arrested, like they had been preparing to hand out stickers on the subway against sexual harassment, which is, you know, not really challenging Communist Party authority in any way at all. But this was the Chinese authority sending a clear message, like any kind of organization is not allowed. They were detained, and that drew a lot of attention, and eventually they were released. And actually, one of those five women was at this show. Her name is Li Maizi.

Because patriarchy is like a very comprehensive system, so we cannot account for the government departments, but we can account for the culture. The culture is very misogyny.

Did she perform, or she was just in the audience.

So she performed. I think it was her first time doing stand up, participating in this show.

And what does she talk about?

So Mai Zi told a story that actually wasn't very funny at all. She talked about how last fall, after the Sitong Bridge protests with that man who went on the bridge in Beijing, her flatmate was putting up posters of those slogans in public bathrooms. And one day the police broke into their flat and grabbed her flatmate and took her away. And Mai Zi story was about what it was like to be a bystander in that moment and how helpless she felt seeing her flatmate arrested.

So this is not much more than a year ago. She was still in Beijing back then?

Yeah, she was still in Beijing. And it's really interesting because Maizi has this reputation for being kind of this hardcore frontline activist, but her story was actually all about the moments where she felt like she didn't have it in her to take a stand. She said shortly after her roommate was arrested, there were these protests that broke out all over China, the blank paper protests. But she decided to sit those out too, because she felt she was under so much pressure, so much surveillance, couldn't really participate.

And is there a link, did she say with having been detained back in 2015?

Yeah, there was. Maidzi said seeing the police come in and take her flatmate away, it awakened all these memories she had of being in detention, and she was really Honest, she said, I think I'm still traumatized by that. And I think this was, like, refreshing that memory for her. But it's not like after she was arrested, she just dropped her activism. Because in the years in between, you know, from 2015 until now, Maizi has been really active. It's just that she hasn't done street protests, but she and many other feminists in China have done a lot of online activity. They've tried to mobilize around the MeToo movement. There have been lawsuits, as we mentioned before, but in the last two or three years, even that has gotten really impossible. You know, many of those cases were lost or dismissed. One of the most prominent journalists reporting on them was arrested and has been charged with inciting subversion of state power. And for Maizi, at one point, she lost access also to her WeChat and Weibo accounts. And she told me, you know, that's when she decided, if I have no voice in China anymore, then it's time for me to leave.

So if people are being silenced or detained or frightened so they don't speak up, does that mean that the Communist Party is winning?

I think it's hard to say. I think the Party is definitely succeeding in breaking apart all of these organizations and communities. But one point that Maize made was she said, feminism is going to continue in China.

This resistance will be, in a very decentralized way going on in China. I think this is the part that the government, or from the authority, they feel very helpless about that. They think there must be an organizer. But at this era, there's no organizer. There's just.

Yeah, you can see the extraordinary cynicism of the kind of the machine. When you get these incidents that really shock public opinion, particularly shock, say, women, when you see, you know, there's women beaten up. You remember in that barbecue restaurant in the city of Tangshan, there was the terrible case of the trafficked bride, appeared to be mentally ill, who was chained up in a kind of animal shed and had given birth to eight children by the man who paid for her. And officials had clearly known and covered this up, and some people are punished. But then the censorship machine comes in. I guess you can see from the party's point of view that as long as the rage and the unhappiness is in individual hearts and they don't take the streets and they don't organize, then the security apparatus will take that for the win.

Yeah, but, you know, Mize's perspective was that the party can do all it wants to dismantle these organizations. But if it doesn't address the core problems of actual gender inequality in China, then these kinds of incidents will keep popping up and individual people will keep responding. So they're never going to be able to fully stamp out feminism.

But Alice, as we've talked so often before, this is always a numbers game in China, isn't it? If the majority is conservative, then the Communist Party will always buy social stability by pandering to that conservative patriarchal majority.

Yeah, and maybe it's not just about the majority, but it's also about the authorities themselves being patriarchal and conservative.

Right. There is some evidence for that thesis.

Confucian.

Did you know he'd met Karl Marx?

That's another episode.

So how do these women in New York matter? If you're a Chinese feminist trying to keep the spark alive, wondering if anyone out there feels the same way as you do, are they just exiles comforting each other in this faraway place, but without any power to influence events back in China?

Well, I asked the organizers about that and they were incredibly realistic. Yang Xiaowen told me. She said, you know, given the current state of things in China, not just now, but for a long time into the future, we can't really dream of any kind of overnight earth shaking change. But she said, you know, whether we're feminist activists inside China or outside, all we can do is try to create a bit of political space, however big or small, however we can. And within that space, we quietly try to keep some seeds alive. So what she's saying is like, they don't think they can change the direction that China is going, but they want to keep hope alive and a vision alive for what it could be in the future, and they just need to survive until then.

So maybe it's the wrong question to ask how these exiles are going to affect events in China that actually in the first place, the thing they need to do is to look after themselves and keep themselves in good shape.

Exactly. When I spoke with Maizi, she was telling me how, honestly, she's really tired and now she just needs to focus on staying alive. And it kind of hits on something we've heard quite a few times on Drum Tower from other people. It's this idea, especially from young people in China, that they just need to outlive the current stage that China is in. And I think for Mai Zi and individuals like her who were under such high pressure and surveillance and isolation for such a long time, coming out, getting a bit of relief and finding people who share your vision for what China could be who will understand your jokes, who get your stories, and who laugh and cheer with you and embrace you. I mean, that's something that's healing. It's really important. It may not change the trajectory of China right now, but it helps at least this group to keep going. Thank you so much for listening to.

Drum Tower and hello to Chen and her four month old baby in London. And to Moritz riding his scooter to work through Shanghai's French Concession. We love your emails. Please keep sending us more@drumconomist.com if you're.

Listening to this that means you are a subscriber. So thank you very much for choosing to sign up for Economist Podcast. Plus, as a member you get to access all of our shows. Lately I've been enjoying Boss Class, which is our series on management, but I find it to be just the right mix of snark and wit and youthful office skills in general. Our editor is Papi Seabag. Montefiore, Benji Gai, Jie Hao, Chen Alize, Jean Batiste and Barclay Brand produced this episode. Sound design is by Weidonglin. Drum Tower's music was composed by Jocelyn Tan. The executive producer is Marguerite Howell. And special thanks to Stevie Hertz.