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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and there are geniuses among us. The 2020 MacArthur Fellows were named a couple of weeks ago. That's the official designation of this group of "Exceptionally creative individuals", but they are better known as MacArthur genius grants. Our listening area is home to quite a few of them this year. All this week on the Brian Lehrer Show, we have lined up a genius a day to end the show with five newly minted genius prize winners.

Again, one to end the show with each day this week and today we're joined by documentary filmmaker Nanfu Wang of Montclair, who was honored to, "What the MacArthur foundation had to say for creating intimate character studies that examined the impact of authoritarian, governance, corruption, and lack of accountability on the lives of individuals." Nanfu, congratulations and thank you for joining us and sharing your genius. Welcome to WNYC.

Nanfu Wang: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Brian: I see that you grew up in China and two of your three documentaries are about policies there. The first, I will let our listeners know, Hooligan Sparrow deals with sex workers and human rights violations, and your most recent film One Child Nation, which won the Sundance grand jury prize for documentaries as well as, is a searing look at China's one-child policy that was in effect when you were born. When you came to this country to study communications and eventually documentary filmmaking at NYU, did you have the aim of telling stories like those specifically?

Nanfu: Not really. It was all-learned later. I was born and raised in China and I moved to the US in 2011 when I was 26. At the time I didn't know I was going to be a documentary filmmaker. I was hoping that I would be a journalist so that I could go back to China to report stories. In the process of going to China in 2013 and the following the women's rights activist, which is a Hooligan Sparrow, that complete changed me.

I would say that was my political awakening process because while making the film, I was surveilled by the Chinese government and they interrogated me and my family and my friends. I witnessed a lot of the things that I wasn't aware of when I lived in China. That really I think changed me and made me to be more politically aware. That later led to the later films and my motivations One Child Nation as well.

Brian: One Child Nation covers a lot of devastation that the population control policy brought to bear collectively and individually, including in your own family. It's hard to watch at times because the stories of forest late-term abortions and sterilizations, abandonment of baby girls, and seizure of infants is overwhelming and done on such a scale. But you, as the filmmaker, don't seem angry with the government so much is with everyone's acceptance that this was the way things were. Is that a fair understanding?

Nanfu: Yes, absolutely. As a filmmaker, I've always been fascinated by how story would change based on who is telling it. Different people would experience the same issues, but see it in a very different way. When we were making One Child Nation, the idea is to include as many different point of view as possible and in order to understand such a complex issue.

We did go out and interview government officials, midwives who did a lot of abortions, and including victims’ families too.

One thing that really surprised me was, initially, we thought the government officials and the midwives, the doctors and nurses who did abortions, they were perpetrators, there were the bad people, but as soon as we met them, we realized that this were people who were taking orders and thus were victims too. They've suffered from the guilt, the pain, and the trauma, at that case just as the women who had gone through the abortions and lost their children.

Brian: As you know the politics of abortion and family planning here are different. Some of the strongest critics of China's one-child policy in this country where those on the anti-abortion rights side of debates here, but you see that divide differently. How do you?

Nanfu: I was very surprised when I came to the United States and learned that there is a restriction on abortions. On the surface, China and America looked very different, two complete different political systems. The policies on abortions are very different two. One is state-forced abortions and another is, certain states would restrict abortions. But I see them [unintelligible 00:05:22] the same because they are both the government trying to control women's bodies and trying to take away the choice from a women. That's something that I always was fascinated at how two similarly different systems could have the same policy on that.

Brian: In the film, you share that your name Nanfu is the combination of the words from man and pillar and it was the name intended for a son, but your parents gave it to you anyway, in the hopes that you would grow up to be "strong as a man". The sexism in that aside, the story of how you ended up in graduate school at NYU is a tale of strength. Considering you were taken out of formal education when you were so young, you were in middle school. Can you share that story?

Nanfu: It was a detour for sure. I grew up in a very poor family in a remote village in China when I was 12, my father passed away and I had to abandon my education so I could work to support my family and then my younger brother who my family decided should be the one to go to school. I worked for several years and I saved money and it took me a long time to eventually go back to school to continue my education. I think all the early experience eventually contributed to the way that I looked at the world and since then I've focused my work on issues like injustice, corruption, freedom, surveillance, and other societal problems and its impact on individual lives.

Brian: You've won this MacArthur genius grant, as it's known. Somebody once said, I've seen it attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald, that, "Genius is the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory views in mind and still function." With China and the US so much at odds, is that something you have to do in your work and maybe even in your family?

Nanfu: Absolutely. I feel when I explain what I do to my family and a friend in China, it oftentimes would invite arguments and fights sometimes. There were a lot of things that just when talked about the issues of abortion, it looked at different, but a lot is out in way in here only similar in terms of disinformation and the propaganda, which are the scenes in One Child Nation, how the propaganda, the state propaganda in a way change the narrative of how people see the one child policy. I think in the time that we currently live in, the disinformation and propaganda exist in both countries in different words and that's something that I am personally fascinated and try to work on next too.

Brian: We will have to leave it there. Thank you, Nanfu Wang, now of Montclair, for talking about your 2020 MacArthur genius grant. I will note that One Child Nation is available to stream, listeners, on Amazon Prime. Thank you and congratulations.

Nanfu: Thank you very much.

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