At prime time (20:00–20:30, Thai Time), on any given evening across the regions of southwestern China and Southeast Asia, the Lisu can tune in to a thirty-minute radio program, a mix of preaching and music, broadcast from the Manila station of the Far East Broadcasting Company (FEBC), an international Christian radio network founded in 1948 and broadcasting in 124 languages from their globally distributed transmitters. Lae Mae Samuel, a Burmese Lisu pastor based at the Chiang Mai Christian Lisu church, currently serves as the announcer addressing the listeners from the far north of rural India to the suburban families in Yangon: “Brothers and sisters, tonight let's come together again and study God's word.” This opening statement implicitly indicates the power of the radio in bringing the voice of God to an aural audience across national borders. Lisu AM radio broadcasting was started in 1968 as a turning point in the Morse missionary families’ effort to reestablish contact with their former converts in Myanmar and China. Sound technologies—chief among them the radio broadcasting network— were used in the continuation of Western missionaries’ evangelistic endeavor to make up for their physical absence. For the hanleixsu, recorded sounds became an emerging Christian phenomenon.

This chapter examines the key sound technology of this remote (re) construction of Christian communities: radio broadcasting, as carried out in the context of postcolonial media evangelism. Attempts to reconstruct a comprehensive historical radio-listening culture by relying solely on recordings, oral histories, and mission newsletters were beside the point.