Anna Chen is a performer, writer and blogger who writes and presents programmes for BBC Radio 4. Her blog, Madam Miaow Says, was shortlisted in the 2010 Orwell Prize for blogs and stands at number 52 in the Total Politics Best Left of Centre Blogs, and at number 31 in their Best Media Bloggers awards for 2011. Madam Miaow casts a sharp eye over the political and cultural landscape and takes a scalpel and a shotgun to the guilty parties.
“Just imagine, the whole place being upset by one little Chinese girl in the scullery.” (Piccadilly, 1929)
Columnist for New Internationalist magazine and the South China Morning Post
Writer and presenter for BBC Radio 4
Charles Shaar Murray writes:
It is my pleasure and privilege to welcome you to a variety of different views into the world of Anna Chen: actor, playwright, poet, singer, songwriter, comic, cineaste and martial artist.
Anna was the first homegrown British Chinese comedienne to appear on UK television via a guest appearance on Stewart Lee and Richard Herring’s Fist Of Fun on BBC2, and in 1994 she became the first east asian woman comic to write and perform her own show for the theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Suzy Wrong – Human Cannon was, like its creator, challenging, insightful, witty, politically informed, transgressive to the toenails, thought-provoking and very, very funny.
These truths, which we hold to be self-evident, were duly recognised with a blizzard of ecstatic reviews (find a selection under Press) praising Ms Chen for her formidable wit, ingenuity and intellectual prowess. Suzy Wrong was followed by an all-too-brief outing of I, Imelda, and The Opium Wars, a stand-up comedy show about, well, the Opium Wars in the 19th century.
There are occasional sightings of Madam Miaow in performance or on radio for the eagle-eyed and eared, while 2009 saw her new show Anna May Wong Must Die! debut.
Anna has written and presented for radio. Her play, Red Guard, Yellow Submarine, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2004. She wrote and presented the acclaimed groundbreaking ten-part history series, Chinese In Britain, her half-hour profile of Hollywood’s first screen legend, Anna May Wong: A Celestial Star In Piccadilly, was broadcast in 2009, while her investigation into Western clichés of Chinese music, Chopsticks At Dawn, hit the airwaves in 2010. More commissions have been confirmed for 2011.
She is currently working on her first novel Coolie, a tale of the Chinese workers who built the first transcontinental railroad across America. ‘I started writing about this in 1993 so it’s already taken longer than the construction of the actual railroad.’
By the way, she’s also a magnificent chef, hell on wheels in quizzes and a formidable authority on all things cinematic, but it was when I saw her making really good shadow animals that I realised I was in the presence of true genius….
Charles Shaar Murray