First, I want to say that after watching it, I felt empowered. As the interviews put it, doing gender work can sometimes feel like fighting alone. But I think back to meeting diasporic queers at Bangkok Pride, and to seeing in the documentary what the Feminist Five went through: how they were reborn out of loss. I also saw the different ways people in China, Japan and Korea fight for and push gender issues forward, and at times I glimpsed our predecessors in their youth. In those moments I thought of the manga Orb: On the Movements of the Earth (my chūnibyō flaring up). There’s a feeling of being moved by what gets passed down: even though every stage met with setbacks, we never stopped. So I really resonated with the film’s “affective resonance,” and I was moved. Also, seeing Korea move forward, I feel gloomy Hong Kong deserves a little celebration too. The documentary gave me a sense of synchronicity, especially the global political pressure and the difficulty of handing things on to an even younger generation. A Korean interviewee said that in the past, because of the English barrier, they didn’t understand the language of the UN. For our generation, it’s that we have never understood this mechanism at all. Maybe it’s learned helplessness. Also, I often wonder: as a non-binary person, can I represent women’s issues? In the documentary, my name could actually be shown as Erica/Erics (they/them), to highlight this small tug-of-war between this gender identity and women’s issues~ While watching, I kept wondering whether there would be an answer to the “split between women’s and gender-diverse consciousness.” And while I was waiting for it, it turned out I was the one who had put that question to Mabel of the Association for the Advancement of Feminism, which I found rather interesting. Gender, democratic institutions and the political climate are bound together. In days when collective gatherings are lost and same-sex partnership registration is scrapped, the powerlessness is plain, and gender suddenly seems to lose its political edge. I wondered whether there would be a way out. Having seen the different approaches across East Asia, I’m convinced that taking the path of gender education can also make everyday gender politics possible, and can connect with the next generation so they can carry on holding a place for gender equality. Also, seeing Judith Butler speak about a way forward: we can support cross-issue work to build broader civic literacy. I also hope to see more of the Korean part in future. I believe they’ll offer insights to other places too.

I was deeply moved, not only because the women from many countries who were so fired up back then are now white-haired and still devoted to their pursuits, but also because the film shows a younger generation every bit as committed as those who came before them, the filmmakers included. Gathering historical materials and interviews across borders is extremely hard, and I feel both moved and gratified. What touched me most was Tingting describing how she felt when she learned of the support from women in other countries. It was handled beautifully. During the film’s long stretch of wordless silence, I cried. I truly hope you will make another film that brings to light the people in each country who first proposed and organized this great undertaking, so that later generations will know them. As a historian, I can never stop thinking about the historical figures who have been obscured and forgotten. Of course, that would be even harder. I fear some of them have already passed away. It is only a wish.

I thought of the 2022 Shanghai lockdown. A video was circulating at the time: a young couple who refused to be forcibly transferred to quarantine were threatened that the punishment would “affect three generations.” One of them replied: “We are the last generation, thank you.” Later, one day, I put on my “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt, wrote “We are the last generation” on the back, and went downstairs for a PCR test. Someone photographed me from behind, and the photo was later shared widely on Twitter. What many people saw was just a small act of resistance by one Shanghai resident in that moment. But for me, what carried me down those stairs was not only anger. It was also the strength feminism had given me. Feminism has never been only about gender. It is about everyone. After I came to Tokyo, I joined some public events, like Pride Month and International Women’s Day marches. But when I sent these photos and records back behind the Wall, I soon found that almost all of them were blocked. Things at home have been slowly tightening all along. In 2015 and 2016, people still carried rainbow flags at the Shanghai Marathon, but later, as soon as anything rainbow appeared, the materials were strictly censored. Every Pride Month, and at other important moments, event materials have to be inspected. One bar was ordered to shut down for hosting a script reading of The Vagina Monologues. The film talks about the relationship between feminists and LGBTQ communities. In China’s reality, the crackdowns on these two groups often happen at the same time. That’s why I think we need to connect with each other all the more. Honestly, when I first came across feminism and queer culture, I treated them as little more than a fashionable label. Then some things happened: the MeToo movement, the Xianzi–Zhu Jun case, the chained woman of Xuzhou. Slowly I began to see real people and to know what had really happened, and after that it became hard to pretend I hadn’t seen anything. The film mentions the 1995 World Conference on Women and the connections that later formed across East Asia. I knew nothing about any of it before. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but it made me realize that much of the time we don’t know what history we’re standing in. I’m in Japan now, and I don’t know how much longer I can stay here. But as long as I’m alive, I will keep speaking out, writing down and recording what I see. And I will do my best to carry the world I’ve seen out here back behind the Wall. Even if this information is blocked again and again, I will keep doing this.

As a journalist who has followed and reported on gender issues and the feminist movement in China ever since covering the Feminist Five in 2015, I was deeply moved to see activists who later became my friends, and many other interviewees. I thought about the decade of the movement we lived through together and the individuals within it; about my own growth, changes and struggles over these ten years; and about the ever-worsening political environment we face together. Seeing feminists of different generations across East Asia say at the end that they will persist — that every achievement comes from the struggles of one generation after another — I truly felt that women have no country, only each other.

I want to record the Bao Li case. By six degrees of separation, I was unusually close to it. More precisely, a friend of mine was caught up in it, and other friends and I stayed with that friend through what happened and the storm of public opinion that followed. When it first happened, we were shocked. We talked a lot about the causes behind it, and about how everyone could help Bao Li and her mother. After the follow-up piece by Zhengmian Lianjie was published, we had more discussions, because the friends who were helping Bao Li at the time felt the report contained many inaccuracies and that her family had not been properly informed. It later set off a lot of debate about journalistic ethics. For me, though, it meant thinking and talking a great deal about whether the perspective of the people directly involved, and what they care about, matter enormously to how the whole story is told. That is why her family and the group of friends later published several pieces themselves. This was a long time ago now. Bao Li never woke up and is gone, and the friends who were caught up in it have moved on to new lives. But much later, I saw that the law had made the Bao Li case a reference case, and psychological abuse was brought within the scope of domestic violence. Still, I don’t think anyone won. It was really a failure: the family and friends around her lost her forever. But I’m also grateful for everyone’s continued efforts, which are why failure is not only failure. As for the film, what I had was more of an understanding and a feeling. I’d long known that a great deal came about after the 1995 World Conference on Women, and that the spread of women’s consciousness in China today continues within that lineage. But tracing it back again through the film, I still felt deeply stirred. Thirty years ago there truly was nothing, just a small group of people. And now there are so many. I’ve always felt that what sets feminism apart is that it is a theory closely bound up with life and the everyday, or one that grows out of it. The longer I’ve identified as a feminist, the less I actually talk about big things in daily life. Instead, in every small everyday choice, I make the choice I’d rather make. For example, I offer collaboration opportunities first to women creators I like working with, or to other women. I don’t see this as us making some kind of gender choice. Rather, since men have received so much favoritism from childhood on, why shouldn’t I, this time, when the choice is mine, give that favor to women? But it isn’t only that simple. On a deeper level, from working with women over a long time, I can feel everyone’s consideration for one another. Each person thinks a step ahead for the other and doesn’t want to put them out, and all of this makes working together go more smoothly. What I saw in the film did give me some encouragement. Some of what we’re trying now may not show results in the short term, but perhaps it will spread to other places and be passed on to some people. This vague feeling will carry all of us further. At the Taipei screening, Wu Wei-ting shared her experience, which filled in a great deal of past context, not only in Taiwan but across East Asia. I hope to have the chance to hear more of her stories of past participation and collaboration. I feel friendship mattered enormously in all of it. She also mentioned going from arguing with Chinese feminist activists to eventually becoming friends. They didn’t completely win each other over, but everyone moved forward together, with their differences coexisting. What I’ve found really frustrating at times over the past two years is the feeling that everyone is sunk deep in their own nation and doesn’t care much about other places. But I’ve always believed that exchange and communication are necessary and must not stop. The juxtaposition in this film matters a lot. At last we’re not always talking about a single place. We may each be at different stages right now, dealing with problems that aren’t quite the same, but only by seeing each other can we share a direction.

There were a few moments I can’t forget: an interviewee saying “we learned UN language”; a Taiwanese activist packing conference materials into her suitcase to take home, because “Taiwan doesn’t have these”; and someone naming gender-based violence and turning it into cards that can be drawn, read and passed on. I keep thinking about that phrase, “learning UN language.” First of all, it means this was not their language. They had to learn it before they could put their experience into it, before they could be heard. The phrase points to two things at once: the possibility of entering, and the cost of entering. There is strategy and compromise in it: abstracting concrete, embodied experience into concepts that can be discussed in a meeting room inevitably means something is lost. And there is also a kind of dignity: I am willing to pay this price to enter your language, because my experience needs to enter a larger context and become memory. The conference thirty years ago and the search thirty years later both revolve around “memory.” Memory does not form on its own. For those on the margins, experience does not automatically settle into history or naturally turn into vision; it can struggle even to persist. More often, it keeps happening and keeps dissipating. What the moments above reveal is precisely a longing to “make memory”: learning a language so that experience can enter a context; carrying materials home because experience won’t reach “elsewhere” by itself; turning violence into cards so that the naming won’t vanish, but can be held and passed on. This longing is moving because everyone knows: it’s not that we have no history, only that history will not write us in on its own. By default, our experience will not be kept. And so every action points toward an imagined future: there will be an “after,” an “elsewhere,” someone not yet met, who will need these experiences. And the documentary itself is part of this action and this imagination.

Between 1995 and 2005, I experienced sexual abuse by my father’s younger brother while my father was present. When I tried to tell my father what had happened, he did not respond and simply continued watching TV. As the MeToo movement gained traction in South Korea in the 2010s, my mother once made a remark comparing me to my father’s younger brother. In tears, I asked, “How can you say I resemble the person who sexually abused me?” At that point, my mother began to take the situation seriously. When she later asked, “Didn’t that experience make you live more cautiously?” I was able to clearly identify her response as a form of secondary victimization. The situation was eventually addressed after my mother spoke to my father. Perhaps the MeToo movement in South Korea has had a direct or indirect impact on our family as well. Watching the film in Mae Sot, Thailand, alongside friends from Myanmar and other countries, I couldn’t help but think how deeply connected East Asia’s past is to Myanmar’s present. As a doctoral student focusing on Myanmar studies, I found it profoundly meaningful that Aung San Suu Kyi, as one middle-aged male attendee pointed out, delivered her speech via a sent video at a 1995 conference right after being released from her six-year house arrest. As a South Korean, it was astonishing to see how closely women activists across various East Asian countries interacted and influenced one another. I recall my own feelings of loneliness and isolation during the 2008 candlelight vigils, subsequent protests, and within youth activist circles, where the prevailing discourse was always to ‘consider women’s issues later, after other critical matters are resolved! Hearing the South Korean women activists calmly mention that they were not necessarily connected deeply resonated with me, making me feel indirectly understood. It feels as though East Asia’s ‘past’ is being replayed and repeated in Southeast Asia’s-particularly Myanmar’s-‘present’. In this regard, it was heartening to confirm through the film that solidarity and communication among women activists across Asia are continuously necessary and, in fact, ongoing.

I’m an 18-year-old Chinese woman, and I came to the screening at the University of Melbourne. It’s been half an hour since the film ended, but what stirred in me still hasn’t settled. Before watching this film, I knew almost nothing about the movements for women’s equality in East Asia and in China, because they were never mentioned. I once took a course on the history of Western women’s liberation, a structured, effective liberation movement divided into waves. After finishing it, I felt very disappointed by my own country’s “blank” in this area (I knew nothing at the time). Because of this gap in knowledge, I once wondered whether Chinese women were living under a pitch-dark, inescapable patriarchal structure, their development held back by the system, the law and all kinds of restrictions. Only today, through the film, did I learn for the first time about the World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, and that at least ten years ago, many people from all over the world were working for women’s equality in China. Even now, the voices for women’s equality haven’t disappeared; they just haven’t been visible anywhere I could see them. Through the film, I saw how the East Asian countries marginalized within mainstream Western feminism have struggled to make sure women’s rights are no longer ignored, and to make the world better and better. I felt an immense strength from it. Before, I had never made up my mind about whether to become a feminist, because every social media platform I’d encountered portrayed feminism as an extreme ideology. Now, the strength of women across East Asia joining together toward a brighter, more woman-friendly, more beautiful future has given me a strong urge to say “let me do something too” and to become a feminist. Like the fifth part of the film, I want to contribute my own share, and, united with the women, walk toward a brighter world and future!

In December 2023, a group of girls and I publicly called out a serial sexual harasser as part of MeToo. It wasn’t the first time I had experienced sexual violence, but some things can’t be faced alone. There is strength only when people come together. Next, we want to keep this strength going by publishing a zine, holding public conversations, and letting the energy spread further. Activists in every era face their own challenges, and each of them finds a way to keep going.

In 2020, I experienced domestic violence myself and called a helpline. But my first reaction was still “I provoked him,” that it was my fault, and I kept making excuses for the other person. It took me a long time to get back to feeling and thinking from my own center. It was during the pandemic, and I felt completely shut in and hopeless. The anti-violence-against-women hotline and all kinds of information online gave me a great deal of strength. If I remember correctly, at the start of the film several of the interviewees appeared simply as participants at the 1995 World Conference on Women, and only when the film looked back were their identities revealed one by one. That contrast was stunning. A few prosecutors and lawyers looked just like the aunties around us; I never imagined that thirty years ago, at the conference, they were so full of spirit, with calls that rang out loud enough to wake the deaf. At the Taipei screening, Ms. Wu’s relaxed, easygoing talk was also incredibly powerful. She told the story of these thirty years with humor, unhurriedly. I had expected people to discuss lots of difficulties and to look back on history through a revolutionary narrative. Instead, what I felt was everyone’s sincere and tender love, the courage to face hardship head-on, and a slow but never-extinguished hope.