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The Current Transcript for November 19, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

A vaccine can make Covid-19 a preventable disease, and no one should die of a preventable disease simply because the country they live in can't afford the vaccine.

MATT GALLOWAY: There has been incredibly encouraging news this week about a vaccine for Covid-19. Now, the challenge is to get it not just into the arms of people here, but right around the world. In an hour, the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation explains why they are giving 450 million dollars U.S. to ensure a vaccine gets to the poorest parts of the world and what the place of philanthropy is in public health. And later this morning.

SOUNDCLIP

Growing up, I was a voracious reader of nature writing, but I so rarely saw stories like my own. But in recent years, I feel like that's been really changing. And to be any small part of that shift is incredible.

MG: It's hardly a small part. Yesterday, Jessica J Lee won the 60000 dollar Writer's Trust Award for non-fiction for her memoir, Two Trees Make a Forest. In 30 minutes, she'll be here to talk about the connexion between family nature and her ancestral homeland of Taiwan. Also this morning, how the Netflix drama, The Queen's Gambit put the spotlight on sexism in the chess world and sold a lot of chess sets. We begin, though, with heated debate over Canada's medical assistance in dying law and where it leaves people with disabilities. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. And this is The Current.

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'Cold comfort to be offered the choice to die' when not offered support to live, says disability advocate

Guests: Catherine Frazee, Senator Chantal Petitclerc

MG: Medical assistance in dying has been available in Canada for four years now, but only under very specific circumstances, and many who have wanted a planned and assisted death have been told no. Last year, a Quebec court sided with Nicole Gladu and Jean Truchon, both living with disabilities, to strike down the provision of the law that required someone's death to be reasonably foreseeable. Now the federal government is racing to update that law and expand access, while advocates on both sides of the debate fight for changes. The deadline for all of this is the 18th of December. But for some Canadians living with disabilities, this new bill is not an acknowledgement of equality. It is instead an existential threat. Catherine Frazee is a professor emeritus at Ryerson University's School of Disability Studies. She was chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission from 1989 through 1992, and she has given testimony on this bill to the Justice Committee. Catherine, good morning.

CATHERINE FRAZEE: Good morning.

MG: You started that testimony by asking a question and the question was, why us? What did you mean by that?

CATHERINE FRAZEE: What I meant is when you look at it clearly, what the government is proposing is a special kind of shortcut to an assisted death, whereas everyone else, I still wait until they are at a point where natural death is reasonably foreseeable. People with disabilities won't have to rate people with disabilities if this amendment passes, will be able to access an assisted death if they really have years. So there's now this amendment proposes opening up an entire new approach to assisted death, where it's now an alternative not to a painful death, but to a painful life, to a life that is considered intolerable or not worth the pain. And that extension will apply only to people at risk disabling medical conditions. And so for those of us who live with that, many of us who remember well with disabling medical conditions, we think the question has to be asked why us? Given what we know, that the experience of the Covid pandemic, how disabled people are truly and disproportionately impacted, how disabled people, the vast majority of disabled people, live very insecure lives without proper housing, without income, without access to supports and services. It's little wonder that suicidal thinking is so very prevalent.

MG: If you take a look at broader society and you've said that we do everything to prevent suicide in the broader society. Your belief is that that these amendments will make it possible for people with disabilities to have an easier path in some ways to taking their own lives.

CATHERINE FRAZEE: Yes, absolutely. And it is undermining any kind of suicide intervention in the life of a disabled person. I mean, remarkably, if we see someone approaching the edge of a bridge with the obvious intention to jump the first thing, we do not think that if their autonomy, we think about saving their lives and to hold up autonomy as an absolute overarching value that must be respected even when a person wants to die. It's a dangerous proposition, particularly when it is limited restricted to people with disabilities. What is it about disability that makes people think this is OK? We think it's discrimination.

MG: The argument that will often come back is that this is an issue of choice. In many ways. That was the issue at the heart of this case, of the original case. I mean, when you hear that this is an issue of choice, what do you say?

CATHERINE FRAZEE: That it's cold comfort, I think, to be offered the choice to die when you are not offering the choice to live a different kind of life, when you are not offering basic supports and the basic dignity that we as Canadians to consider, I think minimal for all members of our community.

MG: Chantal Petitclerc in her speech to the Senate, her first speech to the Senate in 2016 talked about her own experience with pain and disability, and she said, these are her words. When you have a disability, the worst part is feeling as if you have no control over your own life and your own body. And she and others are arguing that not including those with disabilities and expanded access to a medically assisted death is discriminatory, is cruel, is condescending. What's your response to that? That people living with a disability deserve in some ways to have that option and to deny that option is a form of discrimination itself?

CATHERINE FRAZEE: I think that the one direction that I would suggest is that it's not about denying people with disabilities access to assisted death. Rather, their death is not closer at hand. What the amendment is proposing that we make a special case only for people with disabilities and disabling medical conditions is that it does not exclude. And I'm not proposing that reinterred more. But I think that that is a distortion of what this amendment took that on that was proposed.

MG: You mentioned, the issue of living. Just finally, there are people who are calling for medical assistance in living in addition to medical assistance in dying. What does that look like, medical assistance in living?

CATHERINE FRAZEE: It looks like a lot of things, Matt. It looks like homecare as an alternative to warehousing people in institutions as it continues to happen. It means providing people with the basic necessities back, is safe and accessible housing and safe and secure access to food and inclusion. Inclusion and the opportunities that permit us to form networks of support and friendship and everything around us.

MG: You live a full life and you've done extraordinary things in your life. As I mentioned, you know, professor at the School of Disability Studies, chief commissioner of the Human Rights Commission, when you heard that the Quebec government wouldn't appeal this decision or that the government wouldn't appeal this decision in Quebec when it came to these amendments, just personally, what was your reaction to that?

CATHERINE FRAZEE: I was profoundly disheartened. As you acknowledged, you know, I remember very privileged and meaningful my life with significant disabilities, and so I know what is possible. There is no good reason why people with disabilities don't have the resources to live a full and meaningful life as I have lived. But there is no reason to deny them access to what we all need in order to contribute.

MG: Catherine, it's a pleasure to talk to you, as always. Thank you.

CATHERINE FRAZEE: Thank you so much.

MG: Take care of yourself. Bye bye.

CATHERINE FRAZEE: Bye.

CATHERINE FRAZEE: Catherine Frazee is a professor emeritus at Ryerson University's School of Disability Studies. I mentioned Senator Chantal Petitclerc. She's sponsoring Bill C7 in the Senate, a 21 time Paralympic medallist. She also lives with a disability and she says it's time for those with disabilities to be included in this legislation. Senator Petitclerc. Good morning to you.

SENATOR CHANTAL PETITCLERC: Good morning. The way that Catherine Frazee sees this, you are making a special track for people with disabilities to be able to choose made. How would you answer her question? Why us?

SENATOR CHANTAL PETITCLERC: Yes, and I think it is a very important conversation that we are having right now on medical assistance in dying and access to medical assistance in dying. And clearly, I don't see it the same way that Catherine Frazee sees it. And I don't see this bill and this amendment restricting it strictly or targeting persons with disabilities. What I see is an amendment that really well, first of all, answers a decision from Congress. It was Gladu and [unintelligible]. And there's also the continuity of the Carter decision and in the mixed committee of the parliament in 2016. And so you remember that they did speak on Bill C14 at the time. And I did not agree with denying access to MAID when that was not or, you know, end of life was not foreseeable. So but I guess what I think also is that now that we have to answer to that decision, we need to do it right and we need to do it properly. And so we need to make sure that we do have those safeguards to protect persons who may be in a situation of vulnerability.

MG: But I want to go back to the concerns disability. Yes. If I might, it's not just Catherine Frazee. I mean, Krista Carr, who's the head of Inclusion Canada, said this is her worst nightmare, that that having a disability would become an acceptable reason, in her words, for state sponsored suicide. Do you believe that these amendments open that door?

SENATOR CHANTAL PETITCLERC: No, I do not. I do not. And when I read the safeguards and when we studied those safeguards, I think that they very much protect the vulnerable and the potential risk and vulnerability. And it really was the goal was to make sure that on the one hand, you do respect and I strongly believe in that you do respect the right to autonomy, self-determination. We do propose a bill that is not patronising. And on the other hand, that makes sure that there are safeguards that are serious, that are responding to the risk. And when we look at C7, those safeguards are they are pretty solid and pretty strict. And I guess also what I want to say about that and while I do respect the voice of Catherine Frazee and Ms. Carr, and I did have a long conversation with them, and obviously we agree. But what I want to to say is that we also need to make sure that we continue listening to the voice of people like Truchon, Galdu, Julia Lamb. We need to make sure that also, you know, there is 14 to 20 percent depending on numbers of persons with disabilities. In Canada, we're all unique. We're all different with different position. Not everybody is part of an organisation. So we need to be very delicate when we say that we speak for persons with disabilities.

MATT GALLOWAY: Well, you talked about the safeguards. How concerned are you about making MAID an option before better support and services are available? Catherine talked about the idea of not just, you know, the right to die, but a right to live. So do those are those supports there for people in a way that they're looking for them?

SENATOR CHANTAL PETITCLERC: Mm hmm. Well, it is a very excellent point. And it is maybe where myself and Miss Frazee meet, because it is a conversation that we cannot shy away from. And it is true that in different provinces, you know, depending on circumstances where you live, who you are, access to services, even, you know, access to having a wheelchair can be a challenge. But it is not what this bill is about. And but it is a conversation that is very important and that we need to have. And I think that it is important that we keep pushing for better services, for better tools for persons with disabilities in this country. This government has done a good job so far. We've had Bill CH1. We have a strong commitment and speech from the [unintelligible], but we need to see the delivery of that and we need the provinces to embark on that. And on this, I, too, feel that there is a lot more to be done. But, when we go back to the bill, because it is this bill that we have in front of us will not fix, obviously, you know, what we need to do for persons with disabilities in this country and at other levels in providing services. But we need to make sure that lack of services will never be a reason to want to have access to medical assistance. And, you know, I think everybody agrees on that.

MG: You use the word autonomy and you talked about Joyce. Tell me a bit more about that from your perspective as someone who lives with disability. Why is that an issue of autonomy and control in this context so important to you?

SENATOR CHANTAL PETITCLERC: Well, I think it is important because as persons with disabilities here in Canada, but everywhere in the world, you know, historically, persons with disabilities have been patronising the choices, decisions have been made for them years and years and at so many levels. And we have come to a point where, finally, persons with disabilities are respected and are making their own choice. So when it comes to choosing how you want to have access, if you are in a situation of, you know, irreversible decline, unbearable pain, I think that you should be able to make that choice under very strict criteria and under very serious safeguards. You know, when you look at Bill C7 and you look at the safeguards that says that the patient must be informed of means that are available to them and counselling services, mental health, disability support services, community services, palliative care, that the patient also must be all for consultation with relevant professionals. And then one thing that I remember reading under Bill that gave me a great sense of security was that the bill really specify that this physician or nurse practitioner and the person, they must agree that the person has given serious consideration to these. So to me, those are very important safeguards. And if you combine that with the right to make your decisions, I think we have a bill that is quite balanced.

MG: We're almost out of time. But to your point, I mean, the community of people living with disabilities is not a uniform community. There are different perspectives and different points of view. And we're hearing that this morning. You have your perspective on this as an issue of control and choice. And we heard earlier that others believe that this undermines the value of life. Just briefly, how can you bridge some of those gaps?

SENATOR CHANTAL PETITCLERC: Well, I think this conversation is not going to be over when and if the, you know, the bill becomes law. I think this is something that will always be very important and serious and a conversation on the place and the role of persons with disabilities in Canada is one that is going to evolve and continue with time and that it is important to have it. And even when we don't agree, I think it is important for Canadians to know that the community of a person with a disability is not a community with one thought and one vision. But as there are many diverse individuals with different disabilities and needs and vulnerability, there are different opinions.

MG: Senator Petitclerc, I appreciate speaking with you this morning about this. This is a conversation that certainly will continue, as you say, even if and when this bill passes. Thank you very much.

SENATOR CHANTAL PETITCLERC: Thanks to you.

MG: Senator Chantal Petitclerc, sponsor a bill C7, a Paraolympic medallist. We'd love to hear from you on this. As the senator said, the community of people living with disabilities is not one uniform voice. You can add your voice to this conversation. Email us at thecurrent@cbc.ca. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. The CBC News is coming up next. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

Writing Two Trees was a sort of exercise in finding the overlap between a migration story and a nature story. And I've been so grateful to see it find its readers, especially amongst the Taiwanese diaspora in Canada and elsewhere.

MG: The winner of the Writer's Trust Award in non-fiction, I'll speak with Jessica Gaoli about her award winning book, Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels amongst Taiwan's mountains and Coasts in search of my family's past. And from books to chess on the screen. Have you been watching the Queen's Gambit very popular series about sexism within the chess world? We'll talk more about that with the Grand Master coming up. I'm Matt Galloway you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

Jessica J. Lee wins $60,000 award for memoir Two Trees Make A Forest

Guests: Jessica J Lee, Nick Petten, Shawn Bath

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, a woman grand master in chess relates to the hit Netflix series, The Queen's Gambit. She tells us why she thinks chess is the most beautiful game. But first, Canadian author Jessica J Lee on winning the Writers Trust Award and writing her family tree and the Canada's cultural landscape.

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SOUNDCLIP

There are tons of people who need to be thanked. My husband amongst them, but those are all in the acknowledgements for now. I'll say this wouldn't have been possible without the generosity of my mother, who not only gave me my grandfather's story, but her blessing to write it, Mama [foreign spech] and to [unintelligible] and [unintelligible], my grandparents let this serve as a record that you and so many people like you who came to Canada leaving everything behind you're remembered and loved. Thank you very much.

MG: That is Jessica J Lee accepting the writer's trust. Hillary Weston Prize for non-fiction. It is the richest prise of its kind in Canada. It comes with a 60,000 dollar cheque. And she won that prise for her book, Two Trees Make a Forest, which has been praised for its genre defying mix of memoir, family history, travelogue and nature. Writing Jessica J Lee. Good morning.

JESSICA J LEE: Good morning.

MG: Congratulations. This is a lovely book, and this is a lovely bit of news.

JESSICA J LEE: Thank you so much. I'm still still processing it, to be honest, that it hasn't fully sunken in.

MG: How do you find out that you win an award like this? What goes on?

JESSICA J LEE: Well, this year, I guess, this year is a bit different because of the pandemic and I'm abroad and so I found out on the phone, I got aphone call telling me that I had won and it was fascinating. I don't think I believe this.

MG: How did you react?

JESSICA J LEE: I prevented myself from saying a lot of inappropriate words. I just kept saying, no, no.

MG: This is a story that, as I said in the introduction, kind of goes all over the place. I mean, that's literally you do a lot of travelling, but there's a lot that's in this book as well. Where did the idea for telling the story come from?

JESSICA J LEE: Well, I had been carrying around my grandparents life story is something I'd wanted to write about and tell for many years, about a decade before now, and I hadn't really figured out how to do it. But then in 2016, after my grandmother died, we found a letter that my grandfather had written many, many years before as he was developing Alzheimer's. And it was his life story. And, you know, this was around the time that I had started writing. I'd finished my first book and and I sort of their story came back to me and I realised I really wanted to tackle it and to get into it, I guess, from the voice that I have as a writer, which is as a nature writer, as an environmental historian. So it became this sort of entwined thing of telling my grandparents life story as they move from China to Taiwan to Canada, while also, I think, tracking my own effort to get to know the landscape in Taiwan and to find a sort of shared language between us.

MG: Was it always going to be a memoir or were you looking at other ways to tell this story?

JESSICA J LEE: Oh, I tried and failed at many other ways, I you know, about ten years ago, I tried writing it as a novel. I tried short stories and I just never got anywhere with it. It always felt a bit, I guess, one dimensional until I realised that, you know, my role as the author was actually I was a part of the story. I was their grandchild. And and I needed to sort of bring that into the fold somehow.

MG: You said in that acceptance speech, in talking about your grandparents stories, you said your stories matter. What was in that letter that you found from your grandfather?

JESSICA J LEE: Well, it was a sort of strange document, it was written in Chinese, so I struggled to read it. I'm not fluent, but it was this sort of cyclical and sometimes fragmentary story of his childhood in China through the 1920s and 30s, through the Civil War, through the Second World War, in which he became a pilot in the Air Force amongst the Flying Tigers. And then Historias. He moved to Taiwan after the end of the Civil War. So it sort of traced his life, but in strange fragments in I guess, you know, in repetitions, in ways that as a writer, I found really compelling because there was so much I could ask why there are so many questions, so many gaps to fill and so many gaps that still remain unfilled. And I find that quite I guess [unintelligible] as a writer.

MG: And this documents in some ways revealed a family history or part of a family history that you didn't know really existed?

JESSICA J LEE: Yes, I mean, I always knew these things sort of in sketches about my grandfather and about my grandmother, that, you know, they sort of lived through very extraordinary historical circumstances. But so much I think who they were as people was cut off to me in many ways, perhaps, you know, language barriers. But also, you know, they didn't talk about it when I was growing up and I was a kid, so I never asked. Right. So this letter, it sort of just opened up the world to me in which my grandfather was a much richer person than I had sort of ever known intellectually and sort of philosophically and and had lived this life. I never really understood. I wish in a way I could have asked him about it, you know, while he was still around. But, you know, writing this book was sort of in lieu of that.

MG: When you were growing up, you grew up in Niagara Falls.

JESSICA J LEE: They lived in Niagara Falls. I grew up in London, Ontario.

MG: They lived in Niagara Falls. You're talking a little bit about that that family connexion you write in the book about the city of Taipei and you say that Taipei was a city that belonged to my childhood imagination, built of words, spoken gently by my mother. What did you know about Taipei? Tell me about those words that your mom was telling.

JESSICA J LEE: You know, it's funny because it's such a potent image for me, she would describe leaving school every day and walking down this hill where there would be loads of street vendors and she would buy loads of food she loved to eat, and then she would go home to the apartment where she lived with my grandmother. And, you know, that was the only sort of space that she'd constructed for me. So in my imagination for so long, I could only see Taipei as the sort of school and the hillside on the street vendors and nothing else. And and so obviously, when I went back and when I went to visit as an adult with my mother and then when I started working on this book, I had that very quickly sort of implode and sort of be filled in with the richness and vitality that is actually Taipei and the rest Taiwan.

MG: What did you see when you first got there? I mean, square those two narratives.

JESSICA J LEE: In my imagined version of it, there were just sort of yellow sunlight, but no plants, no trees, nothing. And in reality, of course, Taiwan is incredibly biodiverse. It's just one of those places where trees and plants and ferns and moss, they're just growing off of everything, right? Like off the sides of the buildings, through roofs, off balconies. So I was struck by just the greenness of everything. So I guess vibrant and warm and humid and so much richer than I sort of could have imagined from just that sort of childhood vision I have.

MG: I mean, it's no surprise that you'd be drawn to the nature that's there, given so much of your work. What is the connexion that you see? Because as you're describing the landscape that's there, there's a connection between your family history and the geology that's there, the landscape that's near the plants that are there. What's that connection?

JESSICA J LEE: Well, I mean, my family, obviously, everyone in my family has been sort of passionate about plants and landscape, I think from my grandpa, my grandfather was really passionate about about plants. And he passed so much of that knowledge onto my mum. And, you know, going back, it was really interesting to get that passed on to me to say, OK, what's this tree? What's this plant? Because they weren't plants that I had grown up with in Canada, for example. And to have my mother tell me names and translate them for me and, you know, to find the sort of bridges between our languages and to realise that that was a kind of inheritance from my grandfather in a way. And likewise, you know, the landscape in Taiwan is just so it's been shaped by so much sort of geological turbulence. In a way, it really mirrored quite nicely the family story.

MG: You write that plants come to represent us on city streets, in parks, in our poetry and in our shared dreams. What is it? That's a really powerful way to describe something that in in cities often are looked at as as, you know, an extra a nice to have, but not a need to have. And you kind of invert that a little bit. Tell me a bit more about the place of of nature in your life and in our lives?

JESSICA J LEE: Well, I think for me, you know, I was really drawn to this issue of not nature as strictly an escape or as wilderness or this thing that's out there. Right. But we go into but rather the ways that sort of nature shapes our stories and and the ways that actually by looking at the natural world, we can understand so much about human history because we ourselves have sort of culturally shaped the landscape. And in Taiwan, there was, you know, so much of that was really visible to me because you go hiking in the mountains there and you get such a sense of, I guess, how remote they feel. But likewise, the second you get into it, you start to understand a bit more about, you know, Taiwan's colonial history of the number of sort of incoming cultures that have come in and tried to sort of colonise that land. And my grandparents generation, my own family story is, you know, part of that more recent wave of incomers to Taiwan. So by getting to know that sort of landscape history, it helped me really understand my own my own family's place in coming into Taiwan and and finding their their sort of position and their identity within within that country.

MG: What was it that brought them there to Taiwan?

JESSICA J LEE: Well, they both moved. I mean, they met in Taiwan, but they both moved separately at the end of the Chinese civil war. My grandfather was stationed there as part of the Air Force in 1947, and my grandmother moved in 1949, not realising that she was going to be moving there sort of forgood, that she would never go back to China. So, you know, there's this moment in the book and that my mother had told to me as the story of my grandmother leaving China, leaving Nanjing on a boat and not realising that she would be never returning. So thinking, you know, I'll see my family in a few months and seeing her mother sort of disappear on the shoreline and that being, you know, goodbye for the rest of their lives, it's an incredibly powerful moment.

MG: Do you ever I mean, could you imagine being on that boat?

JESSICA J LEE: That was the one thing I think working on this book, so imagining myself into the position of my grandmother in particular, so many times it was almost too much to bear. Like she lived in Nanjing, grew up, lived through the war there and all of the atrocities. And then to have that sort of goodbye, without realising it, in many ways, it makes me sad even still to think about it now. You know, of course I know it was heavy because, you know, she never talked about it. And I think that's, you know, often it's what goes unsaid that really matters.

MG: There's a word that you use in the book and you're trying to figure out what the right word is to describe the feeling that you have about trying to understand your family's story and the word one of the words that stands out to try and pronounces right: [unintelligible].

JESSICA J LEE: [Unintelligible].

MG: Which means longing for one's native place. What's powerful to you about about that emotion, that longing?

JESSICA J LEE: Well, I think, you know, as someone who grew up in Canada to sort of two immigrant parents, my dad's Welsh, my mom came from Taiwan, and I think I always just had questions about belonging from a very early age. And, you know, in that book, I list a lot of words that sort of point to this issue and finds that I can't find a word that really pinpoints how I feel, if that makes sense, why it is that I feel such a longing to connect with Taiwan in particular. But I you know, I often come back to the idea of having moved around a lot and coming from a sort of immigrant family. I think there is that question all the time, of which of these places are my homes and do I have to choose between them? And for me, it's very important to actively say to resist that, to resist the choice, to say, you know, Canada is my home. I live in Britain now. Britain is my home. I was living in Germany for many years. And Taiwan is ostensibly one of those homes for me. And that that, you know, that that is valid, that we can hold all of those parts at once without them being fragmentary, if that makes sense. You know, I'm mixed race, but I'm not a half of anything. I'm a whole person. So bringing those, bringing that really, I think- I don't know to try and encapsulate that in the single words. I mean, I sort of felt I had to write a whole book about it.

MG: And list a bunch of words that didn't actually work, right?

JESSICA J LEE: Exactly right. And I think there is always that exercise of reaching reaching for words to sort of pin down a feeling sometimes it's not possible.

MG: How many languages do you speak?

JESSICA J LEE: I think four? I have to count on English and French, German, I'm learning Spanish right now, so four, maybe five.

MG: I love that you forget how many languages you speak anyway. If you speak different languages, do you find when you talk about how, as you said, you're not half of anything, you're a whole something, but you're a whole something that has a lot of different disparate parts to speaking different languages help you reconcile those different parts?

JESSICA J LEE: Yes, and I think it sort of crystallises the idea of all of these parts being sort of whole and and the part of me in a way, even though they're all sort of distinct from one another, you know. So when I speak Mandarin, my Mandarin is very childlike. It's kind of embarrassing. I still feel like, you know, a toddler speaking to my mother. But, you know, I think that for me has such an emotional depth and, you know, every sort of language that I've layered on top of that, I think it brings out a different side of myself. I'm a different person in each language, and I like to be all of them.

JESSICA J LEE: You could hear your smile in that acceptance speech and the joy that you took in winning this prise, having worked on this story and tried to figure out the best way to tell the story. And then you get that validation of a prise. What does that mean to you?

JESSICA J LEE: I don't even know, again, I don't even know if I have words for this, it's you know, for me, I wasn't sure if this could work as a book. I struggled with it for years. And in many ways, even when it went out into the world, I was thinking, oh, gosh, is this a functional hole? Is it is it a book? And to see it, find audiences that resonate with it, and particularly in the Taiwanese diaspora, that for me is so gratifying. I've had readers come back and say, you know, this is the book I needed when I was growing up. This is the book that helped me understand my family, and that means the entire world. So a prize like this is just it's extraordinary, right? It will help the book reach much wider audiences. And for me, is just such a I guess, an acknowledgement that I'm sort of on the right track in some way.

MG: And it comes with a big check as well, which is I mean, writing is a profession.

JESSICA J LEE: Yes, so this is I mean, not to be crass, but it's genuinely life changing financially for me, you know, just it offers a kind of stability and possibility that as a writer would pretty much never be possible otherwise.

MG: I'm so happy for you. Congratulations. It's a wonderful book.

JESSICA J LEE: Thank you so much.

MG: Jessica J Lee, this year's winner of the Hillary Western Prise for non-fiction. Delivered by the Writers Trust of Canada. Her book is Two Trees Make a Forest in Search of My Family's Past amongst Taiwan's mountains and Coasts. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway.

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MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio one, my name is Matt Galloway.

SOUNDCLIP

Everything you think about from car batteries, rubber clothes, rubber boots, computers, microwaves, I often joke about the ocean being like the Internet or whatever you can type in or whatever you look for is there. There's days just myself driving, we'd haul out 50, 60, some days over 100 one day. With the boat, we're going to do way better than that. We'll have a full crew aboard a boat and we should be able to bring in a 100 tyres a day underwater along with thousands and thousands of pounds of other trash.

MG: That is Shawn Bath speaking this week on the wharf in Cupid's Newfoundland. It's a big week for Shawnn. You might remember him. He is no ordinary garbage man. For more than two years, the former sea urchin harvester has been hauling away thousands of kilograms of trash from under the sea. And he's done that mostly alone, wearing an old, glued together leaky wetsuit. We spoke with Shawnn earlier this year together with Nick Petten. Nick's family donated a boat to Sean's cause. The boat belonged to Nick's father, Lindsay. Lindsay was one of Newfoundland's top fishermen, died just the age of 46 while he was diving for scallops at Christmas time of last year. Here's part of our conversation with Nick and Shawn. You'll hear Nick first and then Shawn a little bit later on.

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NICK: It's surreal to think about. It is. Basically it happened towards the end of our dive when we were coming up for a safety stop and we were both at the same depth, were only probably ten feet below the surface. And I was only an arm's length away from my dad. And that's when things went south. It's just the fact that in those seconds that mine, my brothers, my sisters, my mom's life were all just turned upside down. And it's something that we're never going to have what we had before. We're never going to get dad back. It's a large set of shoes to fill. And I know that we're not going to come close to doing that. We're not going to film at this point. We're just trying to get by. Growing up, I knew that dad was a remarkable man. I mean, I don't have any memories of my father getting upset, which is something that I'm super fortunate and super lucky to be able to say. I mean, Dad was such a gentle, warm, loving man. He was the skipper that would go ahead and he deviate off course for 45 minutes to pick up a balloon that was marked of another boat, not not ours, but one of a different vessel that end up coming off of their fishing gear and floating off tarps that covers crab boxes. But not only that, but then also when we fish, a lot of boats would go ahead and anything us decomposable or would break down, they toss over. But Dad always had the attitude of why would we do that? We have space onboard, stowed away and put it in the proper means of disposal when we got home. I guess what I'm trying to say is dad done a lot in terms of his conscience. And like his conscious efforts like and his decisions that he made, yes. And really, when it comes down to it, that's what it means to make a difference.

SHAWN: When I was driving there down the port [unintelligilbe] to look at the boat centre because I'm by no means I love spending time on all the big boats. And every day I drove down there, I drove past this little boat catch of the day and I kind of noticed that wasn't being used for a while. So I pulled in out and had a look at it. And Nick came by there and we started talking for a bit and I asked if it was for sale. And he said, not really, but he said he would check in with his dad, see if he would consider selling it or whatever. They weren't using it. And they liked what I was doing. So a year and a half [unintelligible] we still really never had funds to buy that boat. And one day I got a message from Nick, asked me to give him a call. Certainly wasn't expecting him to be donating their vote to me and knowing the ordeal that he just went through losing his dad. I thought, well, maybe he's going to be donating some of his dad's diving gear [unintelligilbe]. I asked, after seeing that, seeing what he had to go through, I didn't think he'd ever be diving anymore. And when I got down there, he said to me, you know, he said, I kind of lied to you about the role and the gear donation, he said. And he chuckled. And I said, well, what do you got for me, then? And he said, what about that boat? And he pointed at that boat. And he said and I'll give a big hug. I almost cried. What do you say. Somebody donate something worth 30 grand.

MG: Nick, what do you think your dad would have made of this?

NICK: It gives Shawn a tool that in a way is going to let him take care of something that dad loves so much. I'm sure he'd be proud to see the work that is going to be done out of the boat by Shawn and basically the impact it's going to make because I know me for one, I believe that it's huge.

MG: I love that conversation. Nick Petten and Shawn Bath in an interview recorded earlier this year. The pandemic slowed down donations to make all of this possible. But this week in Cupids, a refurbished catch of the day was launched into the water. Here again is Shawn on the wharf there this week.

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SHAWN: And today we're going to get our boat launched over the side to warfare with the boom truck. And this will be distributed for all the old tires and all the trash that we've been taking off [unintelligible]. Prior to having our own boa. We were just jumping off the wharf, swimming out and tying stuff on, using our truck the whole lot. But now we've got no hydraulic system put in place and we've got a beautiful boat, got probably 79-80 thousand dollars of stuff donated to us in the last six, seven months or so. This is going to be done now on more of a commercial level.

MG: That's Shawn Bath, a man whose mission it is to clean up the garbage around the harbours of Newfoundland. I should mention as well that Shawn told our producer this week he's still wearing the leaky old wetsuit. Winter's coming. It's going to be cold in that water, Shawn. Hopefully the news that, he's liked the suit, but hopefully the new wet suit will be coming along sooner rather than later. Coming up after your regional update, making sure that the race to develop and distribute a vaccine for Covid-19 doesn't leave out the world's most vulnerable. I'll speak with Mark Suzman, who is the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I'm Matt Galloway you're listening to the current. We're back in 90 seconds. Stay with us.

Gates Foundation CEO on vaccine access, Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit and women in chess

Guests: Mark Suzman, Dorsa Derakhshani

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current.

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If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrence, but we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We're not ready for the next epidemic.

MG: Bill Gates delivered that warning five years ago during a talk in Vancouver. More than a million people have died from Covid-19 over the course of this pandemic, and few countries have been able to stifle the spread of Covid. Now all eyes appear to be on a race for a vaccine. In little more than a week, two promising candidates have emerged. Vaccination is also at the forefront of funding efforts by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That foundation has committed 450 million U.S. dollars to confronting Covid-19, most of which is going towards developing and distributing vaccines and making sure that they are available to some of the poorest countries in the world. Mark Suzman is the foundation's CEO. Mark, good morning.

MARK SUZMAN: Good morning.

MG: The global health community says that it was taken by surprise by covid-19. And yet, as we just heard, many health experts and those who work in that field had been sounding the alarm for years about this virus or about a deadly virus. Who is listening, do you think, to those warnings?

MARK SUZMAN: Well, we had quite a lot of people listening, but nobody doing very much, unfortunately. One of the few actions that did take place was the establishment, which we helped set up of a new group called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations SEPI, and that helped start preparing for the next epidemic. But it was severely underfunded. Unfortunately, at the governmental level, what we didn't have is the level of preparation that we clearly, in retrospect, badly needed.

MG: How encouraged are you by the news that's coming out around these two potential vaccines?

MARK SUZMAN: Oh, it's really encouraging. It's encouraging on two levels. The first level is that two vaccines that have got the early trial results, the Moderna and Pfizer Biotech, are using a new technology called an MRA, a technology which was unproven, has never been successfully used in a human vaccine before. And that's part of what's being able to have it happen so quickly. And it's also promising as a platform for the future. But it also means that it's more likely than not that some of the other vaccine candidates, which may be cheaper and easier to manufacture and distribute, will also be successful. So in aggregate, it makes it much more likely that the overall challenge to find and successfully vaccinate as much of the world as possible is a plausible scenario next year.

MG: One of the things next year is, I think, really encouraging to people because people are asking when can I get the vaccine? What would global equitable distribution of vaccine look like? How do you how do you ensure that it's not just me that gets the vaccine, but that everybody gets the vaccine?

MARK SUZMAN: You know what? There's an initiative called COVAX, which the Canadian government has been an early and prominent supporter of, and over 180 countries have joined into a mixture of rich, poor middle income countries, which is about trying to secure equitable distribution of Covid vaccines. And it essentially pulls risk, invests in multiple candidates. And then they would provide enough vaccine for 20 percent of each participating country's population. About 20 percent is clearly not 100 percent. But it is enough to start vaccinating health care workers, higher risk groups like the elderly or those with underlying conditions that put them at greater risk. And that, we think, should be the first step. Obviously, a number of countries, particularly wealthier countries, again, like Canada, have also put in place some bilateral deals with many of these vaccine manufacturers. But we do think, first and foremost, a stronger, more sustained global support for COVAX is the best vehicle to provide equitable distribution globally.

MG: Tell me more about that. I mean, Canada, to your point, has purchased enough doses to vaccinate its population five times over. Are you concerned about that?

MARK SUZMAN: Well, it's obviously a very legitimate and appropriate for any government to do what it can to protect its own citizens. What we're looking for and asking for from participating countries is please do a both and then again, Canada is actually doing that and Prime Minister Trudeau has been a prominent voice saying we need to support global efforts and participate in global efforts for equitable participation, as well as looking after our population. Currently, the Trump administration in the United States, for example, has not participated in COVAX. We really think it's it's a problem if you only focus on your own population.

MG: Is it possible to do both and? I mean, Pfizer has sold the majority of its potential doses to countries like Canada. So how do you do both and?

MARK SUZMAN: Well, they've sold doses in advance. What there hasn't been is the exact prioritisation of distribution as they get manufactured and so, for example, Pfizer is in discussions with the COVAX facility about what portion of the first round of manufactured vaccines might be able to be purchased by them. There are some particular challenges also with the Pfizer vaccine because it requires what's called an ultra cold chain that has to be stored and distributed in very cold temperatures, minus 70 degrees centigrade, which makes it more challenging for distribution in the developing world. So that one, in the end, may have somewhat limited utility in poor countries. But in general, what we're trying to have is parallel discussions in both manufacturing. We need to scale up the manufacturing and in fact, we're doing everything we can right now to manufacture as many doses, even without them being proven, and then try and treehoppers the distribution a little so that it does go where the greatest needs are. We did do is the Gates Foundation. We have a report every year we put out around the UN General Assembly called Goalkeeper's Around the Sustainable Development Goals. This year was a much more depressing report about the corollary impact of Covid. But it also contained a study with commission from Northeastern University, which did some modelling on the distribution of the first two million doses of a vaccine. And essentially it found that if you focus the distribution of those doses primarily on wealthy countries alone, you would save half as many lives as if you actually had a more equitable distribution across the wider world.

MG: Is your sense that international donors are doing enough to combat that? Or are they are they doing enough to support the global rollout of a vaccine?

MARK SUZMAN: On the global rollout of the vaccine, what we've seen is we've hit our target at the end of this year of raising two billion dollars for what's called the COVAX Advanced Market Committee, which is essentially the money to be put aside to help purchase vaccines for poor countries that can't afford it themselves. It is far, far short of what's going to be needed to actually provide vaccines at the breadth of coverage we need across the developing world. We need many, many more billions. We're hoping the United States will step up if and when there is a new stimulus bill in the US. This would be in the order of seven to eight billion dollars.

MG: What do you expect different when it comes to the administration in terms of leading a global fight against Covid-19?

MARK SUZMAN: The one thing the United States and the Trump administration did very well and the world should be grateful. It was the amount of money that operation warp speed, which is their effort to invest in vaccines, put into developing the research and development that's actually helped underwrite some of the successes we've seen from Moderna, their advance purchase agreements from Pfizer, although Pfizer didn't take money from them. So that has even if it wasn't intended as a global public good, it is a de facto global public good. What's been completely missing and is very unusual. Historically, I should point out that the United States historically has been a true global leader in global health issues from the fight against HIV AIDS, where President George W. Bush was a great leader, to efforts in malaria, where President Barack Obama took a strong position. The US has been at the forefront and a strong, strong partner that's just been completely missing in the covid response, the US has not only withdrawn from the World Health Organisation, it is the only prominent country that has declined to be part of the COVAX discussions I mentioned earlier. And so that's really the first step of what we hope will reverse.

MG: You can create a vaccine, but you need to get it into the arms of people around the world. And I know that the foundation has done work and in supporting immunisation programmes in countries around the world, what is it that that wealthier countries could learn from that work?

MARK SUZMAN: It is absolutely doable. That's the main thing. I mean, they used to be great scepticism 20 years ago that was possible even to increase vaccination rates across the developing world. And still, if you ask the average American or Canadian what they think, global vaccination rates, you'll normally get an answer saying, well, maybe around 50 percent. And the answer prior to Covid was it's actually over 80 percent. It does happen. It gets to the very poorest parts of the world. And what you see is huge demand in those poor parts of the world because they see the diseases that vaccines help prevent. And so we've got pretty robust systems and structures in place to do that, which we can mobilise for covid. But what we've got to do is mobilised an unprecedented scale because the vaccine programmes that we've talked about that we support every year are aimed at children, primarily newborns and infants. And that's a cohort of several hundred million a year. We're talking about the need for billions. And because most of nearly all the candidates under consideration, except for one from Johnson and Johnson, are going to require two doses, which means you have to track everybody to make sure they come back for that second injection. That also may sound easy, but it's pretty difficult. How do you track who's had the first one? And so I think while there are good lessons to learn about how to do this cheaply and effectively, we've truly never done it at this kind of scale. And that's going to require everybody to step up, both with financial resources, but also logistical innovation and a number of other important steps.

MG: How concerned are you about vaccine hesitancy? There is a lot of misinformation, not just around covid, but around vaccines generally. And you see that starting to play out already before a vaccine for covid has even been developed. How concerned are you about that?

MARK SUZMAN: Yes, we're always been concerned about that. I mean, it's a it's a real challenge and it clearly has grown. I mean, there are a number of opinion polls that show, frankly, much more in the rich world and in the poor world where they still see the utility of vaccines. That is a challenge. And that's why, first and foremost, it's been so important to have the regulatory process looking at these vaccines being of the highest possible standards. The worst of all possible outcomes would be that you release or partially approve a vaccine or a treatment and then find there are side effects or challenges that weren't caught in the trials that would destroy faith in vaccines and public health generally. And so we are very comfortable that that's exactly what regulators have been doing, even if they may be doing it at unprecedented speed. There have been no shortcuts. And then I think what we need to do is think about innovation. We we promote the campaigns both in your prominent people being willing to take on the campaign. That's something that's a tool that we've used. Most important, I think we'll just be if and when people see others taking it, no side effects and being able to then re-engage in a quote unquote, normal life, go back to work, go back to school, be able to travel freely, that will be its own incentive. So I'm hopeful partially the problem will take care of itself as the vaccines roll out.

MG: One of the things that could give people concern is that, I mean, over the last 20 years, the foundation has given something like 40 billion dollars towards global health programmes. And people might wonder whether it's sustainable to rely on the generosity of a billion dollar philanthropists to tackle some of the big health problems that the world is facing right now. Is that sustainable, do you think?

MARK SUZMAN: Two words; absolutely not. It is true. But we have very large funders. In fact, we've spent well over 50 billion dollars the lifetime of the foundation. And we do play an important role. And sometimes we get challenged about playing a disproportionate role in areas like the polio battle or the fact that we provide significant support to the World Health Organisation. We think there is an important catalytic role that philanthropy can play. We can move much more quickly than governments. So, for example, right at the beginning of the Covid outbreak before a single case it left China, we were able to provide support, for example, to the African Centres for Disease Control to help African countries develop their own testing facilities, because at that time, only two African countries, Senegal and South Africa, even had the capacity to test. And within a couple of weeks, without resources, they were able to expand that up to 40. That's the kind of thing that philanthropy can do quickly and effectively and will also take some bigger risks, maybe some of the therapeutics or the vaccines. But the scale of what we need is the ultimate global public good. That is what public funding is needed for the global health infrastructure, whether the World Health Organisation, GAVI, the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria, you get significant funding, but they are woefully, woefully underfunded relative to the scale of need and opportunity. And hopefully this current moment is a wake up call that providing those payments globally is not somehow an additional tax that's giving money to foreigners that could be spent at home. It's an insurance policy and a public good that allows the world as a whole to be better prepared for crises that don't respect borders like covid, and so I'm very hopeful and we will be pushing very hard for a much, much more significant set of public investments going forward. That has to be something that is an outcome. If we have economic damage of nearly 20 trillion dollars, which is the current estimate from the IMF spending a few extra billion a year on this seems like a very, very cheap insurance policy.

MG: How do you make sure that the big check and the velocity that the foundation can move out doesn't undermine the efforts of individual governments?

MARK SUZMAN: Well, by being partners in collaborative efforts like COVAX or like GAVI, that that's one of the things we it's not constructive if we act independently. So whether it's at the national level where, for example, we've been working with the governments of Ethiopia or the governments of India or Bangladesh to try and support their national efforts around Covid preparation or vaccination campaigns. And at the global level, it's very much how do you create a framework that cuts across and ideally brings together industry, civil society, governments, multilateral philanthropists like ours. What you need are transparent, open frameworks.

MG: I agree.

MARK SUZMAN: Common plans. And then you can look in within those plans where are areas where philanthropy like ours could have an advantage by being able to move quickly or or take a risk that is just more challenging for governments to do. Again, funding some of this big science is actually often challenging because very few politicians want to go back to their public and say, you know what, we spent a billion dollars on this new vaccine experiment and it failed. Sorry, but we can take that risk.

MG: Just before I let you go, what is your timeline? I mean, if we're looking at and we keep hearing, you know, there could be a vaccine in the next few months and some people could start to get it by the end of year. And then more of the population in developed nations midway through the year, if you're looking at a truly equitable vaccine distribution for billions of people around the planet. What's the timeline for that?

MARK SUZMAN: Well, hopefully most of it can happen in 2021. I think some of it will probably have to wait till 2022, realistically. But we want to get as much as possible as quickly as possible. Some of that will depend on the science, again, of which vaccines come through and which vaccines get approved. But certainly with the most recent scientific results that we've got, we feel much more optimistic than we did a few weeks ago, that 2021 is going to be the key year, but it probably will take us all year.

MG: You've been really generous with your time and you have a lot going on. I appreciate speaking with you this morning, Mark. Thank you so much.

MARK SUZMAN: Thank you. Pleasure to talk to you.

MG: Mark Suzman is the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is The Current on CBC Radio one. My name is Matt Galloway.

This chess master says it's 'pretty cool' The Queen's Gambit is encouraging young girls to take to the board

Guests: Dorsa Derakhshani

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VOICE 1: It was close.

VOICE 2: I still beat you.

VOICE 1: You got to beat me sooner. You should learn the Sicilian defence.

VOICE 2: What's that?

VOICE 1: When white moves to King Four black does this.

VOICE 2: Then what?

VOICE 1: Knight to KB3.

VOICE 2: What's KB3?

VOICE 1: King's Bishop Three where I just put the Knight.

VOICE 2: The squares have names?

VOICE 1: If you play well, they have names.

MG: It's like another language in some ways. That's a clip from the hit Netflix series The Queen's Gambit. The tale of an orphan female chess prodigy who goes on to become an international champion has won the hearts and the minds of millions of viewers. Chess board sales are soaring. eBay reports a 273 percent increase in searches for chess sets in the first 10 days following the show's premiere. That's equal to something like one search for every six seconds. This is a fictitious drama, but many real life queens of the sport say they relate to the story. Dorsa Derakhshani was just 18 years old when she was awarded the title Woman Grandmaster and International Master by the World Chess Federation in 2016. And she joins us now from St. Louis, Missouri Dorsa. Good morning.

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: Hi.

MG: What were you thinking as you listen to that clip from the Queen's Gambit, is the Sicilian defence a strategy that that you like to use?

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: I usually play against this as white, and I like playing against [unintelligible].

MG: It's a very aggressive stance, apparently.

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: Yes. Yes, it is, yes. And most of the chess openings are quite aggressive. And even if they come off as more strategic, it kind of feels like it's just building up for that tension to be released in a dynamic way. But, yes, Sicilian is kind of nice.

MG: Could you have ever imagined, as somebody who is deeply immersed in the chess world, that a show about chess would be the number one show on Netflix for three weeks running?

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: No, honestly, I didn't. It's very nice that it has happened. It brings a lot of awareness to chess and kind of encourages people to explore options and think about playing chess, even if it's just to learn the pieces and how the pieces move. I think that's still pretty cool. That's the whole concept of bringing awareness.

MG: You come at this with the eyes of an expert. Watching the series, how accurate are the games?

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: The game are actually very, very accurate because, from what I understood, ex-world champion Garry Kasparov was consulting on the chess parts and the game. So those are actually very accurate. And At first I was quite surprised at how accurate and how actually strong the games are, because usually whenever we see a chess set and a chess game in cinema or on TV, there's always something. We're always looking to kind of spot the issues. But this one is actually surprising. So I actually looked it up and I saw that Garry Kasparov had have been helping with the chess aspects of this TV show. And I think that was a very awesome just just getting that accuracy.

MG: In the series, the young female chess player Beth Harmon, takes to the game at the age of nine. What do you remember about when you started playing? How young were you when you picked up chess?

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: I knew the moves when I was two and a half, because my dad liked to play it and my Dad likes to just play it with my Mom. They kind of taught me what the pieces are and how they move, but I wasn't really playing it, or I didn't really know the goal behind it. I kind of picked it up when I was six, six-and-a-half, and I was still doing a lot of other stuff because I think I was going into first grade, and my mom knew that I would be very bored at school, since I finished first grade when I was two-and-a-half.

MG: Two-and-a-half when you finished first grade?

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: Yes.

MG: Oh my goodness!

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: My parents didn't want me to, quote, waste my time. So they started teaching me early on to read and write. And I was co-hosting a kids TV show back in Iran from when I was two and a half until I was six, just to kind of inspire kids to read. And that it's not like a big deal, but I'll have to wait until they go to school to do this, and that's it. Yes.

MG: I feel like I've wasted my life listening to how much you've accomplished early on. By the age of eight, you were the national chess champion in Iran. What was that like?

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: Well, I was the national champion in my age category of under eight, but it was actually pretty awesome because I wasn't expecting this going in, because I love how other there were some other kids in my category who were actually training privately with coaches and actually preparing for the tournament. But I was just playing it because it kind of sounded fun and I ended up winning it. I remember with eight out of nine, I went there and won games and I actually still remember it was a the only game that I lost was so it's just an official chess game we have. It's tough to move. So if you touch a piece, you have to move with it. Unless you had said that you were intending to to kind of like just like make it to stay in the square, like in between two squares. So there was a little controversy because I was sure I said it, but apparently my opponent didn't hear it. So, like, we have to take it. So I was there and I was just like, this is my opponent. And I ended up losing that game because of that move, but I ended up in a tournament anyway. So I kind of learnt the more of a tournament rules. But I was going along as well.

MG: In the Queen's Gambit, Beth is often the only female player in the tournament. What is that like for you to be the only woman who's playing in a tournament?

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: I think that growing up in Iran, that was pretty much the case.

But in the US there is a lot of awareness in chess, and the St. Louis Chess Club and the US Chess Federation, they have a lot of programmes that brings awareness for girls who play chess, not necessarily in a professional manner, but just something like if they want to pick it up. Here are the rules. And they have a lot of different programmes right now there are classes of different great chess players around the world, mostly female. So there's a lot of opportunities and awareness. But growing up in Iran, I was definitely the only female in the tournament. And that was kind of actually it was because I was so young and because they didn't want males and females playing together in over the bord. So there were a lot of restrictions like that. And because I was like 10, they were like, OK, so we can make an exception. Yes, it was an ongoing fight every year.

MG: You're now a premed student at St. Louis University. Do you have a different relationship to chess now than you did when you were young and winning all those tournaments?

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: Definitely, I feel like I just have completely changed my view and not just over the board, but in real life too, because, well, I actually talk with people and have those deep talks and a philosophy of life, I view it much differently and the way I analyse things, the way I think about think critically about life choices. I think it's much more chess playing than my other friends who do not play, who have not played just for this long. I have, in fact, that some of my friends who are playing chess, but they enjoy it. And I try to not, I have to probably stop doing that.

MG: You're the best teacher that they could have, though, I'm sure. And one of the things you're seeing just - we only have a few seconds left - but you're seeing the show get a lot of young people playing chess. If there's a young girl who's listening, who wants to play chess for the first time, what one little piece of advice would you give them?

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: Don't give up.

MG: Don't give up.

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: Yes.

MG: Dorsa, it's a real pleasure to talk to you. What you've accomplished thus far in your life is quite astonishing and where you will go from here will be exciting as well. Thank you very much for speaking with us.

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: Yes, thank you for having me.

MG: Dorsa Derakhshani is a chess master premed student as well at St. Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, talking about chess and women in chess and the excellent and very popular Netflix series, The Queen's Gambit. That is The Current for today. Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's Q Tom Power is speaking with Dolly Parton, country music legend, somebody who's been in the news lately because she, through her foundation, helped fund some of the research into one of the Covid-19 vaccines. She has given away millions and millions of books over the course of her lifetime. And of course, she has a new book of her own out. It's called Song Teller: My Life in Lyrics. She's a new album, A Holly Dolly Christmas, and she sings Jolene to Tom Power. You'll want to listen for that. That's coming up next on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. Take good care. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

Thursday November 19, 2020 Full Transcript

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