Transcript | Murder House: Zhong Na on the Silicon Valley Tragedy That Exposed the Cracks in China's Meritocracy

Note: Just so you have all the links and the timestamps, I’m including the text of the regular podcast page below, and will do so going forward. Transcript courtesy of CadreScripts follows that! Image by Keya Zhou.

This week on Sinica, I speak with Zhong Na, a novelist and essayist whose new piece, “Murder House,” appears in the inaugural issue of Equator — a striking new magazine devoted to longform writing that crosses borders, disciplines, and cultures. In January 2024, a young couple, both Tsinghua-educated Google engineers living in a $2.5 million Silicon Valley home, became the center of a tragedy that captivated Chinese social media far more than American outlets. Zhong Na explores how the case became a collective Rorschach test — a mirror held up to contemporary Chinese society, exposing cracks in the myths of meritocracy, the prestige of global tech firms, and shifting notions of gender, class, and the Chinese dream itself. We discuss the gendered reactions online, the dimming of America’s appeal, the emotional costs of the immigrant success story, and the craft of writing about tragedy with compassion but without sentimentality.

5:06 – How the story first reached Zhong Na, and the Luigi Mangione comparison

7:05 – Discovering she attended the same Chengdu high school as the alleged murderer Chen Liren

8:10 – The collaboration with Equator and Joan Didion’s influence

10:30 – Education, class, and the cracks in China’s meritocracy myth

16:01 – Tiger mothers vs. lying flat: two responses to a rigged system

19:12 – The pandemic and the dimming of the American dream

22:49 – Chinese men as perpetrators: immigrant stress and the loss of patriarchal privilege

25:56 – The gender war online: moral autopsy and victim-blaming

30:25 – The obsession with the ex-girlfriend and attraction to the accused

34:37 – The murder house, Chinese numerology, and the rise of Gen Z metaphysics

37:08 – Geopolitics, the China Initiative, and rethinking America as a destination

39:42 – Craft and moral compass: learning from Didion and Janet Malcolm

42:31 – Zhong Na’s fiction: writing Chinese experiences without catering to Western expectations

Paying it forward: Gavin Jacobson and the editorial team at Equator

Recommendations:

Zhong Na: Elsewhere by Yan Ge

Kaiser: Made in Ethiopia, documentary by Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan (available on PBS)

Transcript:

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with a show in the newsletter, please consider lending your support. You can reach me at sinicapod@gmail.com. And, listeners, please, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. You will enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators.

And, of course, you will be able to bask in the knowledge that you are helping me do what I honestly believe is important work. So, do check out the page to see all that is on offer, and consider helping me out. This week on Sinica, we’re looking at one of the most widely discussed and unsettling stories to cross the Pacific in recent memory — a murder that took place in Silicon Valley that, for reasons we will be exploring, really captivated audiences across China. A young couple, both brilliant engineers, both products of China’s most elite university, both living the dream at Google, found themselves at the tragic center of a case that quickly became far more than just a true crime story.

It became a kind of collective Rorschach test, a mirror held up to contemporary Chinese society to the myths of meritocracy and study-your-way-out social mobility, to the prestige of global tech firms like Google, to shifting notions of gender, of class, and the Chinese dream itself. The writer who captured this story with uncommon depth and sensitivity is Zhong Na — Na Zhong as she goes by an English — a novelist and essayist who has contributed to the Chatham Project back when it was still SupChina, and whose new piece, The Silicon Valley Murder, appears in the inaugural issue of Equator – a striking new magazine devoted to longform writing that crosses borders, disciplines, and cultures.

I’ve mentioned Equator on the show before, as have some of my other guests. Equator’s mission is to connect global narratives that illuminate how people live, dream, and struggle in a rapidly changing world. And Zhong Na’s story does exactly that. It’s hauntingly written, really meticulously recorded, and, as we’ll see, about much more than just this single act of violence. It’s really about a generation raised on the promise of mobility through education, about the illusions and the burdens of tech world success, and also about gender, about rumor, about censorship, the way that China and its diaspora process tragedy in an era of algorithmic storytelling. We’ll talk about all of that and about Zhong Na’s craft, the choices she made as a writer, the moral questions she wrestled with, and what she believes this case ultimately tells us about who the Chinese middle class has become and what they fear they might be turning into.

I’m delighted to welcome the author today to the show, coming to us from New York. Zhong Na, welcome to Sinica.

Zhong Na: Hi, Kaiser. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here.

Kaiser: Great to have you. So, Zhong Na, before we get to the larger implications your piece draws up, maybe you could start with your own first encounter with this story. And let me first lay out the basics just so that people know. It was January 16th, 2024, police entered be very, very nice Santa Clara home at 714 Valley Way, an address that actually matters in the way this story was later discussed. And there they found this guy named Chen Liren, who is 27-year-old, Tsinghua educated Google engineer is kneeling near the body of his wife, whose name is Yu Xuanyi, who is also a Google engineer, also a Tsinghua graduate. I think anyone with even a glancing familiarity with China would understand intuitively why this story was bound to be more than just a grim domestic violence homicide and would instead detonate across all the different social media platforms and prompt a lot of intense sleuthing, polarized gendered readings of it, even a lot of soul searching.

And why when it went to court, it would see packed hallways and a real time live translations of the preliminary hearings. So, Zhong Na, how did the story first reach you? And, was it the human tragedy itself, the reaction to it, or something else that you made you really glom onto it? When did you realize it was a story that you really needed to write?

Zhong Na: Sure. I have to backpedal a little bit and talk about another case. It’s the Luigi, you know…

Kaiser: Sure. Luigi Mangione. Yeah.

Zhong Na: The Luigi shooting case. And why it captured me and my attention is because, like, as an immigrant, I wrestled a lot with the health care system and the insurance system in the U.S. And when the piece came out, it gripped the mainstream English media, and everybody was talking about it. And there were all sorts of discussions about it, around it, and within like we are really getting into the meat of it. Well, in contrast, when the Santa Clara case came out, I was surprised and also a little bit disappointed to see it was eventually dismissed as a horror story of middle-class marriage. You know, like people, the reporters, to do their justice, they try to build a connection between the stress of working at a big tech company and also with the looming massive layoff that is always like a cloud over their head.

But eventually, they didn’t manage to find any evidence to prove this argument. So, eventually, they had to land on the $2 million house in Santa Clara and also the brutality of the case itself. I definitely felt that the English media’s depiction of the story didn’t do the couple justice. I feel like there’s more to it, to the story. And meanwhile, the story has traveled back to China, where the two grew up and where people obviously knew more about them. So, immediately, it exploded across social media. People were talking about even there which high school they went to, which none of the English media covered was heatedly discussed in China.

Kaiser: You actually went to the same high school as Chen Liren, right?