How Holly Williams fell in love with China
Holly Williams is used to finding herself in uncomfortable situations -- she spends much of her life reporting from war zones like Syria and Iraq for the CBS Evening News. But she wasn’t prepared for the awkward surprise veteran producer Michael Gavshon sprang on her as she filmed this week’s story on the booming Chinese film business, her first for 60 Minutes.
Sitting down to interview Chinese movie mogul James Wang, she learned she’d be translating the interview herself. “No, Michael had not had that conversation with me,” Williams tells 60 Minutes Overtime editor Ann Silvio in the video above. “He hadn’t told me that he was expecting me to do a full-on 60 Minutes sit-down, hour-long interview completely bilingually.”
Fortunately, Williams’ Mandarin was more than up to par, thanks to the 12 years she spent as a journalist in China for the BBC and Sky News. “Over the last two or three years, she’s been doing hard news in the Middle East,” explains Gavshon. “But actually, this is where she came from. This where she cut her teeth journalistically, in China.”
But how did Williams, who grew up in Tasmania and mainland Australia, end up spending so much time in China? It was a fascination that started when she was 12 years old and saw the Tiananmen Square protests on television.
“It was one of the first big news stories that really caught my attention. And I think in part because the people who were in Tiananmen Square weren’t that much older than I was. You know, they were 18, 19, 20 years old. And they were demanding things of their government,” Williams tells Silvio. “And then it was just such a horror to discover that the government had turned on its own young people.”
A few years later, at age 15, she convinced her parents to let her visit China as an exchange student. It was the early 1990s and China had not yet become the economic powerhouse it is today. Williams saw bicycles flooding the roads; cars were few and far between. “We landed in Shanghai and I just remember getting off the plane and just being totally enchanted with China at first sight,” she recalls. “Just thinking, ‘This is the moon. This is, like, a totally different society.’”
When she returned home, Williams indulged her fascination by watching Chinese films -- like the politically provocative “Farewell My Concubine,” directed by Chen Kaige. Decades later, she was able to interview the renowned filmmaker for 60 Minutes.
“I was, you know, a little overawed by the whole experience,” she says.
During the interview, Chen Kaige brought up a deeply painful moment from his past -- being forced as a teen during the Cultural Revolution to publicly denounce his own father. As he told his story, Williams was unexpectedly emotional, needing a moment afterward to regain her composure.
“Holly’s reaction was really visceral,” Gavshon recalls. “I don’t think anybody really understood just how close she felt to China and to the people of China. And she really just generally, genuinely loves the place. So it was her coming back home. It was her home for so long and I think it shows in the way in which she told the story.”
The video above was originally published on April 10, 2016, and produced by Ann Silvio and Lisa Orlando, and edited by Lisa Orlando.