Episode 7: Crossing Borders to Find the Story

Elena Li Chow spent her childhood in Buenos Aires learning Spanish, in Malaysia during ethnic unrest, and in China navigating censorship while passing just enough to be trusted. After six countries, multiple languages, and a career at Sony Pictures, she began writing fiction. In this episode, she describes what that kind of perpetual foreignness actually trains: the ability to read a room without being seen reading it, to enter private lives through patient attention, and to build characters out of composites from her own life. Her novel Behind Closed Eyes grew directly from stories that briefly surfaced in Chinese newspapers and then vanished — stories she could access precisely because she knew how to listen across cultural distance.