Talking Taiwan Ep 183 | Erin Hale: On Taiwan's Antiquated Banking System and Being an American Journalist Living in Asia
Erin Hale is an American Journalist who has lived and worked across Asia.
She is currently a freelance journalist based in Taiwan. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Voice of America, The BBC News, The New Statesman, The South China Morning Post, Marie Claire, The Southeast Asia Globe, Forbes.com and other outlets.
I came across her work through a recent article she wrote about how Taiwan’s banking system is stuck in the 80’s. I happened to discover it the same week we released episode 180 with Paolo Lising. In that episode Paolo and I talked about how people in Taiwan still update their account passbooks by running them through dot matrix printers at the bank.
Erin has lived in Asia for seven years. We talked about how she's lived in Hong Kong, China and Cambodia and the reporting she's done on Hong Kong and Cambodia, in addition to Taiwan.
Here’s a little preview of what we talked about in this podcast episode:
- What brought Erin to Taiwan
- What Erin witnessed of the Hong Kong protests in 2019
- Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement of 2014
- John Lee who was elected to succeed Carrie Lam as Hong Kong’s next leader
- How the recent article that Erin wrote for BBC News about how Taiwan’s banking system is still stuck in the 80s was inspired by a tweet by Catherine Chou (@catielila)
- The reaction on Twitter to Erin’s article and how she used Twitter to crowdsource research for it
- How often Erin uses Twitter to do research for her stories
- How Erin appealed to Twitter for people’s experiences voting in the Philippines presidential election
- How Erin deals with bots on Twitter, fake news and disinformation as a journalist
- Taiwan-related visa and immigration issues that Erin has dealt with
- The bureaucracy that Erin has experienced in Taiwan
- How Erin gets ideas or sources for her stories
- Working as a freelance journalist
- What it takes to succeed as a freelance journalist
- What Erin enjoyed about writing the story about banking in Taiwan
- The article that Erin wrote about Taiwan’s indigenous people
- What it’s been like for Erin to learn Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan and what her goals in studying Chinese are
- How Erin ended up moving to Asia
- Beijing’s 'Airpocalypse' in 2013
- How journalists’ experiences in China have changed over the last five years
- How Cambodia has changed and become influenced by China
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