October 3rd, 2022
In the first episode of People Like Us, host Kim Ghattas brings us to the heart of the show’s purpose and the genesis of its concept.
In a personal essay published in 2021 in The Atlantic magazine, she connected the dots between the unraveling of three different places: Beirut, Hong Kong, Kabul between 2019 and 2021.
Even before the war in Ukraine, the global world order was imploding with stunning rapidity for people there as China strangled Hong Kong, Lebanon’s economy crashed and Afghanistan returned to Taliban rule. Reactions to her article came not only from the region but from around the globe, underscoring how much connects people everywhere, and how the Middle East’s own experience is relevant to others. Kim speaks to Muqadessa Yourish, a former deputy minister of commerce of Afghanistan who had to flee Kabul in August 2021, Lina Mounzer in Beirut, a writer and translator who captured the mood in Beirut in her essays for the NYT, and Shawn Yuan, an award-winning journalist who covered the protests in Beirut and Hong Kong protests and told her he had hoped China’s future would look like Hong Kong.
Guests
Muqaddesa Yourish
Muqaddesa Yourish was a deputy minister of commerce and industry in Afghanistan until she had to flee Kabul when Taliban took over in August 2021. She is now living in the U.S. and a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Muqaddesa grew up a refugee in Pakistan and returned home to Afghanistan in 2002, after the Taliban were ousted. She was politically active to rebuild her country until she had to leave.
Twitter: @YourishM
Lina Mounzer
Lina Mounzer is a Lebanese writer and translator based in Beirut whose work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, New Lines Magazine, and L’Orient Today. One of her notable essays is “War in Translation and Giving Voice to the Women of Syria” published on LitHub.
Twitter: @warghetti
Shawn Yuan
Shawn Yuan is an award-winning, American-Chinese journalist and photographer who has covered Hong Kong and the Middle East. His work has been published in a number of renowned outlets such as Vice, Al Jazeera English, BBC, and Bloomberg, among many others. His most recent articles are published on his website.
Twitter: @shawnxyny / Instagram: @shawnxyny
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