Dispatch #3: E-commerce returns, Guatemalan radio, transgender teenagers, Palestine
Read about Swedish e-commerce returns in the Atacama desert, indigenous radio in Guatemala, being transgender in Taiwan, and aid programmes in Palestine
Welcome to Translator’s third weekly Dispatch of stories from languages and places around the world which have caught our eye and those of our community over the last few weeks.
Dispatch #3 contains our summaries of four articles: a fascinating, image-heavy investigative piece from a Swedish newspaper tracking returns from Shein and Temu around the world, a longform article about the struggle of indigenous radio stations in Guatemala, a Taiwanese piece about the situation of transgender teenagers in Taiwan, and a Swiss report following the German head of UNRWA’s West Bank office.
We hope you enjoy the read.
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Tracking Temu
A Swedish newspaper uncovers the dystopian world of Temu and Shein returns – with photographs
Colin Huang, a 44-year-old former Google engineer and graduate of the University of Wisconsin is one of China’s richest men. PDD, the company he founded in 2015, is registered in the Cayman Islands, headquartered in Dublin, and listed on the US stock market. Its total value at the date of publication of our Dispatch #3 was a shade under $170 billion – a little less than Uber, considerably more than Boeing.
Temu, the e-commerce marketplace which has been at the root of PDD’s success, connects consumers around the world with Chinese manufacturers of everything from make-up bags marked with the words ‘All my fucking meds’ to extra-long rubber gloves for cleaning aquariums, to brightly coloured instant print cameras marketed to children. Its slogan on the Apple app store is: Shop like a billionaire.
One of Temu’s attractions – apart from low prices, and its highly addictive app – is its free shipping and returns policy. But, if you do return stuff, where does it end up?
Swedish journalists Staffan Lindberg and Magnus Wennman decided to find out for Aftonbladet, running two parallel investigations over the course of 2024: one into returns from the TikTok fuelled fast-fashion platform Shein, and a second into returns from Temu, hiding AirTags in randomly purchased from products from both platforms, and then returning them, to see where they would go.
It's a growing issue. The logistics around e-commerce have exploded across Europe. 2.3 billion packages enter the EU every year duty-free. “In 2024”, Aftonbladet notes, “Swedes ordered some five million small packages from China, a sharp increase on the previous year”. It is inevitable that a proportion are returned. Aftonbladet’s investigation throws serious doubt on the promises made in terms of where those returns go, and the environmental impact in the process.
In the case of the items purchased and returned by Lindberg and Wennman, the returns process for both Shein and Temu begins with the same shipping company in Malmö in southern Sweden with appalling approval ratings, no email and a telephone number which can’t be reached (but which Swedish search engine hitta.se warns may be associated with fraud).
After that, the stories diverge. The 4-part Shein story takes Lindberg and Wennman through a bewildering network of Polish transshipment centres staffed by Ukrainian refugees, to an Italian company specialising in unsold returns which sends a couple of items to New York.
Other items, however, end up much further away: in the hands of smugglers in Bolivia or in the Atacama desert in Chile, where clothes are regularly dumped and burned (Wennman’s beautiful and disturbing photographs of this place are available here). A previous investigation conducted by the two journalists into H&M returns took them as far as Ghana. “We thought it couldn’t get any worse”, they write: “we were wrong.”
After Malmö, the Temu returns tracked by Lindberg and Wennman follow a different route. Initially they are shipped via Rotterdam (April) and Malaysia (May) back to China (June). The distances covered by ship are enormous. Aftonbladet notes the environmental consequences: “our shopping is driving global warming.”
By September, some of the returned Temu items have left China again and arrived in Iraq. By October they are in Baghdad, at a market where goods first purchased in Europe are prized as being higher quality than those sent direct from China. A local Iraqi journalist Zhyar Rawf tracks down the Nintendo case and the lip balm set originally purchased by Lindberg and Wennman in February to an address near one of Shia Islam’s most holy sites.
Back in Sweden, the journalists note, the same lip balm set is being touted on the Temu app as a bestseller, and being offered at a discount.
[Both Shein and Temu responded to Aftonbladet’s investigation by telling the newspaper that their business model was inherently more environmentally efficient because their on-demand structure reduced the likelihood of unsold inventory, and therefore waste. These responses are recorded in a footnote to both stories here and here.]
Full articles by Staffan Lindberg and Magnus Wennman available here (for the Shein series) and here (for the Temu piece).
Vad händer med Shein-returerna?, Aftonbladet, 16 January 2025
Vem vill ha våra Temu-prylar?, Aftonbladet, 25 January 2025
Aftonbladet is one of Sweden’s leading daily newspapers.
The Voice of the Mountains
Community radio is a lifeline for Q’eqchi speakers in Guatemala – and a target for the powerful
In most parts of the world, the hegemonic role of radio as the medium of the masses, a tool for conveying the information a government (most probably) wanted you to hear, or for shaping popular narratives, reached its peak sometime in the twentieth century. Then came television, and then the fracturing of national monocultures through the internet and social media. In 1938, Orson Welles created panic about alien invasion across the United States through a radio play. It’s hard to imagine that now.
But radio can still be a powerful community-builder – a means for physically disparate groups to understand and organise itself in the world, a public service, a virtual university, even a tool of resistance.
Xyaab’ Tzuultaq’a, an indigenous community radio station affectionately known as ‘the voice of the mountains’ (‘la voz de los cerros’) has played all of these roles for indigenous Q’eqchi speakers in the uplands of Guatemala. Plaza Pública journalist Xiomara Ajín travels to El Estor to meet Ana Chen, the semi-fugitive director of the radio station and to speak to the listeners for whom it is a cultural (and sometimes literal) lifeline.
“Radio is very important to us,” says Reginalda Che, who lives in a wooden house with a tin roof in El Estor’s Santa Cruz district, making a living breeding chickens to sell to a local butcher. A photograph by Edwin Bercian shows a small portable receiver dangling precariously from her kitchen ceiling. “When my husband comes home, the first thing he does is turn on the radio”, she says: “they speak to us in our own language.”
Though the station also sometimes broadcasts in Spanish, its use of the Q’eqchi language was essential during Covid, when it translated Covid-19 protocols and provided public health information. “We did what the government was supposed to do,” Chen says. It also activated the community in other ways: “people survived not because of help from the state, but because communities shared their knowledge of ancestral medicine”. When a barrage of hurricanes hit shortly after, the station coordinated humanitarian aid.
There was a time when everyone wanted to be on the radio: local politicians, health officials, the police. Xyaab’ Tzuultaq’a has hosted programmes on demystifying the workings of the law in Guatemala, and on women’s rights. "Before, they did not know their rights”, presenter Guadalupe Xol Quinich tells Plaza Pública: “radio has been very helpful”. Alfredo Bax calls it “our university.”
Despite this, Xyaab’ Tzuultaq’a has long operated in a grey zone, regularly facing threats of closure. Ana Chen has been harassed on Facebook. Even the community radio station’s inaugural broadcast in 2017 was accompanied by security training, with the example of Éxitos 97.1 FM fresh in people’s minds – a private station that was raided the previous year, and whose director ended up in jail. “Not because the radio station was illegal”, a journalist from Prensa Comunitaria explains, “but because it was providing human rights’ training, and denouncing corruption and pollution by companies”.
There is a deeper, structural issue, Plaza Pública reports. Out of over five hundred officially registered radio stations in Guatemala, only one is an indigenous community radio station. A 2021 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights stated that the way radio is regulated in the country amounted to a de facto prohibition on the free expression rights of indigenous communities.
Xyaab’ Tzuultaq’a has been forced off the air several times. In October 2021 its studio was raided by over twenty police after it reported on rolling demonstrations against a local mining project. “We managed to get the equipment out," says Robin Macloni, a long-time contributor. Local journalist Julie López blames a “structure of corruption” in the region which can serve both local mining interests and those of drug traffickers. Chen has been working remotely ever since.
The station continues to broadcast, but more irregularly now. “Young people are always ask us: ‘what happened to the radio?’”, says presenter Guillermo Sam Kabnal. Though some express confidence in the future, the situation remains fragile.
For Ana Chen, “the satisfaction of turning feelings into words and allowing indigenous communities to exercise their right to use their own forms of communication” is a reward without price.
Full original article by Xiomara Ajín, with photographs by Edwin Bercian, available here.
‘Una radio comunitaria que hace el trabajo de gobierno’, 28 January 2025
Plaza Pública is a Guatemala City-based, Spanish-language magazine publishing longform articles about social injustices online.
Xiomara Ajín, a journalist of Mayan K’iche origin, writes primarily about environmental issues, indigenous people and their human rights, with a particular focus on women and children.
Being a trans teenager in Taiwan
A Taiwanese reporter interviews transgender teenagers about the challenges they face from the medical system
Following the legalisation of gay marriage in 2019 – the first Asian country to do so – public discourse in Taiwan has continued to shift on LGBTQ+ issues, including improved awareness of young transgender people. The same year, 2019, saw Taiwan’s first transgender march. Taiwan’s flourishing cultural and political scene around LGBTQ+ issues as been documented in an excellent series of articles by Edric Huang, available here. Rights organisations such as TAPCPR have long campaigned to remove surgery as a requirement for individuals wanting to change their legal gender. They’ve recently celebrated a major legal victory.
But for transgender teenagers in particular, the situation remains tricky. In an article for The Reporter, journalist Hong Qinxuan interviews transgender teenagers to understand the continuing mismatch between legal norms, the health system and their hopes for the future.
Current Taiwanese law stipulates that the desired hormonal treatments necessary for changing gender are reserved for those over the age of 18 with full medical autonomy. The situation is more complicated for younger teenagers seeking gender-related medical care. Most hospitals will only see minors after they have received parental consent—one of the bigger hurdles—and undergone a strict psychological evaluation.
The Reporter interviews several teenagers about the medical and other challenges they face. One key takeaway is the diversity of lived experiences and challenges. “Every transgender person’s anxiety is different,” says Simon, a first-year high school student. “I don’t get anxious when I wear a skirt or have long hair… I just don’t like my body, voice and how society views my gender: why are they all different from what I think?”
Prevented from easily accessing the medical care they would like, some teenagers resort to alternative solutions found online. Weihao (a pseudonym) was fifteen when he first injected testosterone, bought from someone presenting themselves as a fitness coach (Weihao uses the term “bodybuilder”). The exchange took place at a bus station in Ximending (“10 thumb-sized bottles for 3,000 yuan in cash” notes The Reporter).
Seven years on, he is still using the privately sourced treatment. (An alternative is to go via Chinese pharmaceutical companies online.) But these medications aren’t without additional risks. An increased risk of blood clots and early onset of osteoporosis are two possible side-effects of hormonal treatments, says Xu Zhiyun, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who has opened a sought-after consultation clinic at Taiwan University Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry and seen over a hundred young transgender patients.
Nor is all hormonal medicine is the same. Trans women don’t need to rely on injections, but can rather take pills, much easier to source online. The Reporter speaks to Wan Cake who bought 300 pills for 500 yuan. She didn’t notice much physical change initially, but she did notice something else: empowerment. “Taking the medicine has a psychological effect. When you take the medicine, you feel ‘I’m finally starting’” When she couldn’t afford a steady long-term supply, Wan had to resort to less regular means of obtaining the medication – and adjust her doses.
Trans woman Jinger’s life took a more radical path. Growing up in China, Jinger came to her transgender identity as a pre-teen, initially stealing money from home to secure blood pressure medicine which has the side effect of suppressing testosterone production. The most obvious thing the medicine did, initially, was to reduce her acne. Her life spiralled out of control when her mother found out about and confiscated her medicine at the age of 13. Five years later, she resorted to extreme measures and removed her testicles herself in the bathroom of a rented house. She has since moved to Taiwan, cut off from her mother but staying in touch with her father.
At the time she is interviewed for the article, Jinger she is 19, dressed in gender-neutral clothing with pony-tail. She used to think about trying to talk in a higher pitch in order to sound more stereotypically female, she says. But “I’ve read enough feminist articles now to not force myself”. If she could turn back the clock, she sometimes wonders whether she would make the same choice of radical self-surgery. Though it’s hard to re-imagine herself into that time, she feels she would: “I wanted to do it from the bottom of my heart”.
December 2024. Jinger is on her way to a Christmas gathering of the local Taiwanese transgender community, showing her sense of humour by wearing a T-shirt with the words ‘Made in China’ in Gothic font. Much has changed for Jinger over the last years – she can be far more open about who she is.
Yet elements of this world remain underground. She shows The Reporter a small flask of oestrogen, made up by a Brazilian trans woman. It is only purchasable with crypto and disguised as skin oil.
Full original article by Hong Qinxuan (洪琴宣) available here.
‘年輕跨性別世代素描：性別認同覺察提早，在尋醫與私藥間找出路’, The Reporter, 19 January 2025.
The Reporter (報導者) is an independent non-profit news organisation in Taiwan.
The other Palestine
On the road with the German director of UNRWA for the West Bank
Initially established as a temporary organisation after the mass displacement of Palestinians and the 1948 war – events Palestinians call the Nakba – the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has since become a symbol of an unresolved conflict, and a legal and political battlefield in itself – one which has intensified massively since October 2023, not just in Gaza.
Allegations that UNRWA employees in Gaza were implicated in the October 7, 2023 massacres in southern Israel – some directly – led to an intense renewed focus on the agency’s inner workings, the firing of some employees, a UN report into whether the UNRWA was fulfilling its duty of neutrality, an active Israeli information campaign against it, a pull-back of international donations (some have resumed; others have been more recently withdrawn) and ultimately an Israeli law banning it from Israeli-controlled East Jerusalem (including closing its headquarters) and various other measures making its operations elsewhere harder to maintain.
At the end of January, just before his visa was revoked by the Israeli government – along with that of the agency’s other international employees – a journalist from the Zurich-based NZZ followed the German director of UNRWA’s West Bank operations on a final tour of some of the agency’s projects around Nablus.
The ‘refugee camps’ in the occupied West Bank – the inverted commas are in the original – are now “solid concrete houses densely-packed together”, NZZ notes. Roland Friedrich, dressed in a tweed jacket and red corduroys, declares that UNRWA here is “a kind of mini-government”. But he can’t control who puts up Hamas-supporting posters and receives no special treatment when passing through an Israeli checkpoint outside the city. Friedrich has since had to move to Jordan.
“That UNRWA as an organization should be close to the Islamists of Hamas is an absurd accusation,” Friedrich tells NZZ, pointing to Hamas complaints about co-educational teaching in UNRWA schools. The Israeli government, he says, sent a list of names and ID numbers to UNRWA in 2024, but “that is no proof of anything”.
Getting rid of UNRWA as an organisation, as Friedrich suggests the Israeli government might want to do, would not get rid of the Palestinian refugee problem either practically or legally. If UNRWA were to be disbanded, one of his colleagues says, Palestinians would suffer, but it would not change their status.
Friedrich doesn’t believe managing operations remotely, from Jordan, is sustainable in the long-term. The NZZ speaks to an anonymous Israeli source who says that over time the Palestinian Authority will have to take over. Friedrich discounts the idea UNRWA could be replaced or supplanted, given its scale and its own operation of schools and health centres.
A doctor at an UNRWA clinic says he would rather not give NZZ his name. He tells the newspaper that these clinics have more users than ever. They are free, he explains, while private clinics or those run by the Palestinian Authority are not: “It would be a disaster for people here if we couldn’t operate”.
Friedrich walks past a poster showing two young Palestinians recently killed by Israeli security forces and considered martyrs locally. Get rid of UNRWA, NZZ notes, and maybe there’d be more such pictures, not fewer.
Full original article by Rewert Hoffer available here.
‘Auf verlorenem Posten: Unterwegs mit dem UNRWA-Direktor für das Westjordanland’, NZZ, 30 January 2025
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung is one of Switzerland’s leading German-language newspapers.
That’s all for now—keep an eye out for our next dispatch of translated summaries this time next week!
The Translator team