Helena Lee may have had a decade-long (and counting) career at the inimitable Harper’s Bazaar, but that doesn’t mean she’s afraid of a little change.

And while career pivots are de rigeur in 2021, the now acting deputy editor at Harper’s Bazaar was appropriately ahead of the trend when she left a career in advertising to retrain in journalism as a 28 year old.

“I was a director one day, and the next day I was reorganising an editor's bookshelf in alphabetical order”, she recalls. “I was thinking, ‘what am I even doing?’”

What she was doing was laying the foundation for a career that’s outlasted seismic shifts in the media landscape, seen many magazine titles fold, and the eight-page cover story spread replaced with a 280-character tweet.

But Helena remains unshakeable with the conviction that long-form storytelling is here to stay. “I think these trends come in waves. In this digital world, the need for really good journalism and storytelling is ever more important because you need people and institutions and brands you can trust. Yes, we have to evolve as form changes, but you have to stay true to the value of your brand”.

She’s so convinced, in fact, that in 2022 she’ll be releasing her book, inspired by her experience launching East Side Voices, a platform to combat the lack of visibility that East and Southeast Asian people face today. She wants to close what she calls ‘the empathy gap’. 

In this episode of the Sisterhood Works Podcast (listen to the episode here), Helena tells host Georgie Abay about how to be a writer, and a good one. She talks about why she believes networking is really just about genuine connections, and how a special journey to Hong Kong connected all the dots for her personally. 

Image: @hels_lee

“When I left university I worked for ad agencies for six years, on the account side. I went straight into a graduate career, and it got to a point where I was on a treadmill. It was an amazing experience and I loved it, but when I looked at the bosses ahead of me - because I'd reached a level where I was quite senior - I knew I just didn't want to take the next step. I didn't want to do what they did. And even though I loved the industry, I just realised that I really wanted to write. Or at least give it a good go.”

And give it a good go she did, at 28 years old. “I retrained and did an MA in magazine journalism.”

It was certainly an adjustment. “When I first started out in advertising, I was in a grad-trainee course and so you're told, ‘you're the best’, and all that sort of jazz. I've never done work experience before, and then I went into journalism. I was a director one day, and the next day I was reorganising an editor's bookshelf in alphabetical order. And I was thinking, ‘what am I even doing?’ But I stuck it out.”

Aside from her beautiful writing, which she prefers to do in the morning – “writing in first light is always lovely” - Helena’s approach to networking gives an insight into her success and longevity. “I'm quite uncomfortable with the word networking”, she says, and she’s not alone on that front. “But I'm lucky that in my job I get to work with the best writers and artists and creative photographers. And I've never seen that as networking, as such, because it's about making genuine connections. My job is all about relationships and making meaningful connections with different people, whether it's businesses or brands or practitioners, and I think it means that you're never stale. You're always coming up with new ideas and you learn new things, and gain insight into areas you might never normally know about, and I love that. You can't pretend to know everything, but what you are is a sort of curator of things.”

Over the last decade, she’s witnessed the rapid shifts in media that have completely changed the way we consume content. “It's a difficult landscape at the moment, especially when attention span is so small. I think understanding the business of brands is key, understanding how a brand is and how it works. Harper's Bazaar is a heritage brand, it's not just a magazine. It shapes the cultural landscape. And I think you always have to be reminded of that, and I see my job as being a custodian of that. Storytelling is not an easy thing to do, and that's why we're trained the way we are and it's an intrinsic part of bringing that brand to life, whether visually or with words or through social media, through your site, through events, through partnerships. All of those things ladder up to an experience for the audience.”

Speaking of experience, there’s one in particular that stands out to Helena, because it connected her to a part of herself she didn’t know. Visiting Hong Kong, she says, was “an amazing opportunity to explore my father's childhood and his past, because Hong Kong had never really been part of my childhood. My mum's from Malaysia and she was the storyteller, so she would tell me stories of when her brother fell into a river and almost got eaten by crocodiles, or climbing up mountains in slippers and things like that. Whereas my father didn't really tell me that much about his childhood, and every now and then we'd get a package sent from Hong Kong and there'd be this smell, in a way, of Hong Kong - but that's all I knew of it.”

“His story is amazing. His mother raised six children by herself, living in one room, sewing purses to keep them all alive and he would play barefoot in the streets, unaware of how tight money was. He used to sit in the airport and do his homework in there, because it's the only place that had aircon, and he would watch the planes go by and think, ‘one day I'll be in one of those planes.’ And it just made a lot of sense... Why he spoke about the things he did, why he's so concerned about money, his aptitudes. And I think, therefore, my past made a lot more sense and it felt right. It's almost as though the combination of seeing things like wet markets and some road signs, and just all these tiny things, emotionally it felt right. I said in the story I wrote eventually it was like the feeling you get when you click a clasp on a watch. Something made sense. For that reason it was a very, very illuminating trip.”

When it comes to the intersection between culture, race, and identity, Helena talks about a watershed moment in her life that set her on the path to founding East Side Voices. “It started when I watched Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and there's this really awful scene where Brad Pitt and the person who plays Bruce Lee, Mike Moh, they have an altercation and he's basically humiliated and it's very, very damaging representation of someone who should be revered in Hollywood, especially when the whole film is about that." 

“I went online and I couldn't believe that no one really spoke about it. Everyone around me was laughing in the cinema, and I felt there was nothing I could do to counter it. And so I launched East Side Voices out of frustration with this damaging representation of East and Southeast Asians, because they're always objects of mockery, or written out of domestic dramas or never talked about on the news except in various damaging terms.”

The same representation – or lack thereof – was a problem in the news cycle, too. “It's been especially damaging during the pandemic, and there's a huge empathy gap between everyone consuming media, and Asians. 33% of images used to convey news about the pandemic used images of East and Southeast Asians, even though it was a pandemic that affected the whole world.”

Ultimately, Helena believes the key is empathy. “I think Anti-Asian rhetoric from people like Trump has really stoked a culture of division and othering, and so violence against those with Asian heritage has been woefully under-reported because news outlets just haven't been giving it as much importance. It’s been very, very upsetting. Especially the last year. We've seen horrendous stories of violence against East and Southeast Asians, and racially motivated attacks, like 70 year old women being pushed into the road. That should be as outrageous to everyone as if their own granny had been attacked, and I think that's the sort of empathy gap I want to close. I want people to think these are British people who are being affected.”

When we ask Helena about the digitisation of media, she remains hopeful. “I think there's always room for long-form storytelling, and I think these trends come in waves. In this digital world, the need for really good journalism and storytelling is ever more important because you need people and institutions and brands you can trust. Yes, we have to evolve as form changes, but you have to stay true to the value of your brand, and I think in terms of Bazaar, the magazine will remain the flagship, even if the way we disseminate our content will be different.” 

So how to write those long-form stories? Helena’s advice is as simple as it is solid: “Write what you can, when you can. Write as though no one's looking, and write when you're waiting for your tea to brew, or just when you have a really good thought, and I always keep a notebook or write it down on your phone. Think about the subjects you are most passionate about, because it means you can be the expert in that area, and do more research than anyone else. And it's all about practice. And just keep doing it.”