Nanxi and Xiaojiao are the co-hosts of sisreads (姐姐好读), a Chinese-language podcast about literature, art, and contemporary life told through the perspective of women readers. The show has become one of the leading Chinese-language cultural podcasts with more than 350,000 followers and has been named one of Apple Podcasts’ Top 10 Arts Shows in Chinese. You can find the show on YouTube and Instagram.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anna Burgess Yang: How did sisreads start? What was the original idea, and how has the podcast evolved over time?
Nanxi: The first episode came out in February 2024. Xiaojiao and I were postdocs, co-teaching a course at a university in Shanghai. In our casual chatting, we found a lot of mutual interest in each other’s reading — especially in women writers we wanted to talk about. We were in my office, and Xiaojiao and I were brainstorming authors we wanted to read together. So it really started as a private interest in starting a book club and reading great books together.
Xiaojiao: The postdocs performed in front of students that semester. Nanxi and I did a skit and revised the idea of A Doll’s House by Ibsen and combined it with Barbie, because that was a time when Barbie was in cinema. That was our first collaboration, to some extent.
There are a lot of works by male authors. So we thought there could be more female writers that we could read. And we wanted to do something more public-facing — to give a broader audience the opportunity to listen to us talk about female writers.
ABY: What’s a typical format of the podcast? How do you decide what to talk about or what to cover?
Nanxi: Overall, I would describe it as a book podcast, although we do cover other topics like art, films, or even popular culture. Most of the time, we consider this a chat among women readers. Each episode is about 60 minutes long. We have a third co-host, a screenwriter living in Beijing. Sometimes it’s the three of us chatting, and sometimes we have great guests who are women creators in different fields.
We try to introduce the book a little and open with a brief description, but it’s not really a summary of the book. Overall, we try to make it a free-flowing conversation, more spontaneous and fun to listen to. We laugh a lot. We try to make it fun and engaging. Our other co-host is so funny. She’s the best storyteller I’ve ever met, and she always turns something dense into something delightful and vivid.
Podcasting is very public-facing, and people usually listen to it while they are doing laundry or driving. So the entertaining aspect of it is so crucial in planning our content.
Xiaojiao: We also broadened our scope a little. It’s not exclusively female writers. We do a little bit of comparison — I work in comparative literature — and we combine books with film adaptations or other pop culture references.
In an episode we recorded recently, we talked about the summer vacation in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time alongside a book called Sommarboken (Summer Book), written by a Finnish female writer, and a Japanese film about summer in the countryside. It’s a mixture of different things, but the theme is about how we have a good time in the summer. Because it’s August, we want our audience to have a summer reading list. Each of us recommends a work that we hold dear to our heart for the summer.
ABY: At this point, you’re navigating very different professional paths — Xiaojiao still in academia and Nanxi building sisreads into a platform. How do you think about the relationship between your primary work and the podcast?
Nanxi: I started doing sisreads full time after I finished my postdoc program, and of course, it’s a very different career trajectory. I was not 100% committed to academia towards the end of my PhD. I also have a background in media — I did journalism for my undergrad. So this is a natural detour, a shift of my focus. Preparing for one podcast episode is quite similar to the workload of preparing for one class. It comes out as a natural evolution.
I have to handle a lot of the business side. I have to try to get sponsorship for our show, and I have to coordinate when we do the recording and plan the next season. We’re still a tiny team, but it’s still a small business.
That aspect, for me, is challenging, but also a lot of fun. I enjoy this very steep learning curve. I’m absorbing a lot of new information, and sometimes, especially when you talk to marketing people or to PR and brands, you have to adopt a different tone. How do I convince them that this would be a worthwhile investment to sponsor us? It’s definitely been a very fun journey, and we have an amazing team to work with.
Xiaojiao: I’m still in a literature department, in academia. The difference is that in academia, when we write or when we speak in a seminar, we always want other people to think that we are the smartest person in the room. But with this type of public-facing communication, the most important thing is for the audience or the reader to think they are smart enough to absorb this information. Instead of feeling, “I don’t know anything about this topic” or feeling intimidated by the conversation. So I think the shift in mentality, to think about the audience before myself, has been helpful.
As postdocs, there was a lot of doomsday discourse around academia falling. There weren’t many jobs out there. Even today, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the fields are shrinking — no funding sources, few jobs available out there. So everyone’s stressed. Having sisreads really took some of the pressure away. It opened up this new world to us, saying that you don’t need to be a scholar to survive.
ABY: You have 350,000 followers and a Top 10 Apple Podcasts recognition, so sisreads clearly resonates with listeners. Why do you think that is?
Nanxi: We didn’t really plan it when we started in our office. We couldn’t have imagined we would have a solid base of listeners. If you look at our listener demographics, it’s 96% women. And 70% from the age of 23 to 40, so it’s young women, and a lot of them are professionals. It’s really amazing that there’s this virtual community of young women who are eager to learn but who are also thinking about how to live their lives.
I think the amateurish vibe, or the kind of playfulness we want to highlight on this show, is also partially why it resonates. But we are being very serious about the production and about how to make it a better cultural product. We spend tons of time editing because it’s very hard to edit a conversation. But 60 minutes is a long time, and I want the listeners to have a quality 60 minutes with us.
Xiaojiao: Young women in China are the future of China, from my perspective. They are curious, because these days I think there are more women in universities in China than men. So there are a lot of highly educated, forward-looking, bold, curious women out there, and they make up the majority of our audience. And I think reading — that’s my hope — has been revived to some extent. I hope this trend goes on.
ABY: How do you pick a book or a topic that you want to cover?
Nanxi: We’ve been thinking about it more seriously now that we have more people listening to our show. We now have our shows on a seasonal basis with about 10 episodes, and then we take a break. During that break, we collectively decide what books or topics to cover for the next season.
We try to figure out what books we are personally interested in. For example, Xiaojiao would propose Proust’s In Search of Lost Time because she has been a reader for a long time, and she’s really familiar with the work. And sometimes we also try to talk about topics that have been widely discussed, like a hit movie or some social phenomena.
Although we are a small team, we kind of work like an editorial board. We sit together and think about the best way to approach this topic or the best way to plan the episode.
Xiaojiao: We also want some diversity in the authors and the content. For instance, each season we want to have some American writers, and then Japanese, and writers from China. So it’s a combination of literary works in different languages and cultural backgrounds, so that our audience can have a more diversified exposure to the cultural products that we’ve been discussing.
We have long, really long outlines and scripts that we prepare and books we read for those episodes. But the eventual effect that we want our audience to have is this playful, easy-to-listen-to, easy-to-get-into episode. Behind it is a lot of pre-production and post-production work. A lot of teamwork.
ABY: Do you assume the audience hasn’t read the book you’re discussing, or do you assume they have read it, or maybe have heard of it?
Nanxi: If we are teaching any kind of class, it’s required reading. The students have to come into the room prepared to discuss the reading. But when it’s a podcast, you cannot require your listeners to have done the reading before listening to the show. So we would not assume they have read the book.
Maybe they have heard of it, and that’s what makes them interested in listening to this particular episode. But the way we tackle it is that in the first 15 minutes, we have to build this common ground. Even if you haven’t done the reading, you will have an idea of what is going on.
Xiaojiao: A lot of our audience will comment saying, “I’m going to buy this book and read it.” It’s more like a promotion of certain literary works, instead of a classroom where students have read the book and then we analyze it together. We give them a sense of what this book is like, and then some of them would afterward get the book and read it.
ABY: What has building sisreads taught you about work, ambition, or success that’s been different from other points in your careers?
Xiaojiao: For me, as a literature scholar, it really helps me to unlearn a lot of things. Recording the episode on Proust, I was thinking about how I need to forget a lot of the theoretical things that I have read about Proust.
This journey has dragged me out of my niche of literary scholarship and theoretical research, and really broadened my understanding of literature. It brings back my childhood reading experiences. Like your first encounter with a great author, when you don’t know anything about other people’s writing about him or her. That’s the passion that I regained from doing this.
Nanxi: I’ve been learning so much. It’s not like academia, where you work on a topic for years, trying to write about it and trying to be at least among the top people who know about the subject. In podcasting, that’s impossible. You have to put out an episode every week. It cannot be perfect, and you cannot be the expert on this book. But it is about a continuation of how to produce work that you feel comfortable sharing with the world.
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