From Maine to Mongolia with Public Radio Reporter Emily Kwong
Emily Kwong hates winter. She also hates being alone. And yet, the public radio reporter keeps finding herself drawn to some of the coldest and most sparsely populated places on the planet, from northern New England to a remote Alaskan island. Most recently, she traveled to the frozen steppes of Mongolia to produce a three-part audio series for NPR’s Morning Edition and an accompanying visual narrative.
The Mongolia expedition was supported by NPR’s Above the Fray fellowship (run by the John Alexander Project), which provides early-career journalists the chance to spend several months covering under-reported stories abroad.
“Applying to the fellowship is a bit like playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? with a billion computer tabs — you can go anywhere in the world,” says Kwong, who was especially interested in reporting on climate change and migration. “Mongolia quickly rose to the top as a fascinating place to explore those topics.”
Why Mongolia?
“Climate change reporting is often signaled by water: melting ice caps, warming oceans, tropical storms. But another measure shaping the world as we know it is drought,” says Kwong. “What is that doing to global agriculture and landlocked places? In Mongolia, the drought-ridden summer of 2010 was followed by an unusually cold winter — killing grasslands that animals depend on for food. Some herders gave up their lifestyle and flocked to the capital city. Other managed to rebuild their herds. All continue to keep a nervous eye on the weather. Changing weather patterns are likely to shift the population centers of nations. Mongolia has been grappling with that for a decade.”
From her home base in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, Kwong traveled with NPR photographer Claire Harbage and local fixers Ganbat Namjilsangarav and Bolormaa Riimaadai on reporting trips to the steppe and the Gobi Desert.
“The series exists because of the depths of their questions and access to wonderful sources in Mongolia,” says Kwong. “I’m incredibly proud of the work we did together.”
The team’s first dispatches explored the homegrown game of ice shooting and Mongolia’s biggest camel festival, where herders compete in a beauty pageant, play polo, and sing songs to soothe heartbroken camels. Besides having to endure negative-30-degree temps, the biggest challenge of the trip was tracking down nomadic interlocutors.
“Herders don’t exactly have an address. To find them requires a serious test of back seat stamina,” says Kwong.
The experience of reporting in Mongolia, she adds, helped emphasize that “who you work with — the quality of those relationships — makes all the difference to your sanity and your storytelling.”
Kwong first discovered radio storytelling as an undergraduate while tuning in to All Things Considered and This American Life.
“Listening to those shows felt like a lightning bolt through my body. There was a kind of recognition of myself — and my values — in the work,” she says.
Her first piece — This Columbia Life — was a love letter to the university she made just before graduation in 2012. [Full disclosure: Kwong was a star pupil in a music course I taught at Columbia.]
She went on to the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Maine, where she produced a story about a local newspaper reporter living with an artificial voice box. The piece, Parts of Speech, won Third Coast’s Best New Artist award.
Kwong interned with StoryCorps in 2013, editing more than 30 interviews for national broadcast. She spoke with her mom about a suicide attempt in a powerful interview that wasn’t broadcast until five years later.
“It took all our courage to have that conversation,” says Kwong. “It took even more courage to permit NPR to air it on Morning Edition.”
“While I didn’t produce the story in the traditional sense (all credit for that goes to Jud Esty-Kendall), I did live the life that made the story. My mom lived that life. I’m proud of how we fully showed up to share that life in the hope it would help others struggling with mental illness,” she says. “Also, being on the other side of the microphone, putting our lives in the hands of someone else to edit, was a humbling role reversal. It drove home the full power we carry as radio producers and the trust we are given.”
In 2014, after a stint at WNYC’s Radio Rookies, Kwong decided to leave New York in search of a job in a smaller market — a station where she could focus on her craft, get behind the mic on a regular basis, and actually live in the community. She applied for a fellowship at KCAW, a community station on an island in Alaska, and was eventually hired as a full-time news reporter.
“Taking that job and ‘staying put’ — as Zach Hirsch put it on Transom — was one of the most rewarding, healing decisions I’ve ever made,” she says.
At KCAW, Kwong produced stories on fisheries, bald eagles, and confused sea lions, but she is most proud of a story she reported following the Pulse nightclub shooting in June 2016.
“I had interviewed several LGBTQ+ individuals at a Pride event in Juneau on June 11, the day before the shooting,” she says. “The simple act of following up with them was powerful. I’m proud of how the piece follows these individuals throughout time, showing how the news can change our lives in a blink.”
She also recalls learning an important lesson from her former boss in Alaska, Robert Woolsey: “Whenever I made a mistake or a source turned me down, he would point to this yellow post-it note that said: Let it go, Kwong. He taught me to cultivate a sense of self-worth independent from the work. No matter what state your story or project is in, trust yourself to know what to do and reach out to those who can help you. Alaska taught me that my fears could be in the car, but not in the driver’s seat.”
While abroad this winter, Kwong was elected to serve as a board member for the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR). She decided to run after having volunteered as captain of AIR’s New Voices scholarship program, which provides funding for producers of color to attend the Third Coast International Audio Festival.
“I want to see New Voices grow beyond the conference weekend, reaching its full potential as an alumni network for hiring and resource sharing,” she says.
Now that her Above the Fray fellowship has concluded, Kwong says she is on the lookout for her next audio endeavor.
“Radio gives me permission to be my truest, weirdest, most empathetic, most curious self,” she says. “I’m grateful to have found this medium and the people who make it.”
Emily Kwong’s Podcast Recommendations
I was floored by WNYC’s Caught on the juvenile justice system and Gimlet’s Uncivil. My podcast mainstays are The Daily (NYT), TAL (WBEZ), and Invisibilia (NPR). I’ll always love The Heart.
My closest friends and I send each other voice memos: five- to twenty-minute recordings straight from our phones. I cannot recommend this form of “keeping in touch” enough. It’s like a podcast for your ears only.
Follow Emily Kwong on Twitter @emilykwong1234, hear more of her work on her website, and get a behind-the-scenes look at her Above the Fray reporting journey on John Alexander Project’s Instagram feed.
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