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"Stories from the Front Lines of China's Great Urban Migration"

Aired on Thursday, March 29th.
Aired on Thursday, March 29th.

Today on our program we speak by phone with Michelle Dammon Loyalka, a freelance journalist and editor, who's just put out a new book (from the University of California Press) called "Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Front Lines of China's Great Urban Migration." Praised in Publishers Weekly as "a thorough and insightful examination of the gritty, arduous side of the Chinese economic miracle," this book profiles eight different migrant peasants in contemporary China --- an impossibly vast and rapidly changing country where, each year, some 200 million such migrants travel from the countryside to various urban centers in search of work. As this book makes clear, such an enormous class of poor yet hard-working migrants provides the sky-rocketing Chinese economy with a virtually endless supply of cheap labor. Loyalka, who has lived in China for more than a dozen years, provides her readers with (as Kirkus Reviews has noted) an "insightful look at the hard lives of real people caught in a cultural transition."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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