Podcasts about Matsu

A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists. Happy Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month! Even though the Trump Administration has eliminated recognizing cultural heritage months, we are still celebrating diversity and inclusion here at APEX Express and KPFA. We believe in lifting up people's voices and tonight on APEX Express the Powerleegirls are focusing on “Asian American Children's book authors”. Powerleegirl hosts Miko Lee and daughter Jalena Keane-Lee speak with: Michele Wong McSween, Gloria Huang, and Andrea Wang   AAPINH Month Children's Books part 1 transcript Opening: [00:00:00] Apex Express Asian Pacific expression. Community and cultural coverage, music and calendar, new visions and voices, coming to you with an Asian Pacific Islander point of view. It's time to get on board the Apex Express.   Ayame Keane-Lee: [00:00:49] Happy Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Even though the Trump administration has eliminated recognizing cultural heritage months, we are still celebrating diversity and inclusion. Here at Apex Express and KPFA, we believe in lifting up people's voices. And tonight on Apex Express, the PowerLeeGirls are focusing on Asian American Children's book authors. PowerLeeGirl hosts Miko Lee and daughter Jalena Keane-Lee. Speak with Michele Wong McSween, Gloria Huang and Andrea Wang. Thanks for joining us tonight on Apex Express. Enjoy the show.   Miko Lee: [00:01:21] Welcome, Michele Wong McSween to Apex Express.    Michele Wong McSween: [00:01:26] Thank you, Miko. It's nice to be here.    Miko Lee: [00:01:28] I'm really happy to talk with you about your whole children's series, Gordon & Li Li, which is absolutely adorable. I wanna start very first with a personal question that I ask all of my guests, which is, who are your people and what legacy do you carry with you?   Michele Wong McSween: [00:01:45] I would say my people are really my family starting with, my great, great grandparents who came here down to my grandparents, my parents, and onto my children because, to me family is. The reason why I created Gordon & Li Li in the first place, it was really to bridge that connection for my children. I didn't grow up feeling that connected with my culture because as a fourth generation Chinese American, I was really in the belief that I'm American. Why do I need to know anything about my culture? Why do I need to speak Chinese? I never learned. As a sidebar to that, I never learned to speak Chinese and it didn't really hit me until I had my own kids that I was really doing a disservice to not only my kids, but to myself. my people are my family. I do this for my kids. I do this to almost apologize to my parents for being so, Disrespectful to my amazing culture and I do it for the families who really want to connect and bridge that gap for their own children and for themselves.    Miko Lee: [00:02:53] And what legacy do you carry with you?    Michele Wong McSween: [00:02:55] Again, my family. My, great grandparents. Really. Started our family's legacy with the hard work and the prejudices and all the things that they endured so that we could have a better life. And I've always felt that it is my responsibility to teach my own kids about the sacrifices that were made and not to make them feel guilty, but to just make them appreciate that we are here. Because of the the blood, sweat, and tears that their ancestors did for them. And so we are, eternally grateful for that. I think it's important for us to continue that legacy of always doing our best, being kind and doing what we can do to further the experience of not just our family, but the people in our community that we connect with and to the greater world.    Miko Lee: [00:03:43] when you were growing up, were your parents speaking with you in Chinese and did you hear about your great grandparents and their legacy? Was that part of your upbringing?    Michele Wong McSween: [00:03:52] I heard about my great grandparents in the stories that my mom told us, but to be quite honest, I wasn't receptive to really digging deep in my cultural understanding of. my great-grandfather and what he went through. I know mom, I know he came over in 19 whatever. I know he brought over all these young sons from his village, but I really didn't fully take it in and. No, I didn't hear Chinese spoken in the house much. The only time my parents spoke it was to each other so that we didn't know what they were talking about. They had like this secret code, language. My experience with my language was not, That positive. we did attempt to go to Chinese school only to be teased by all the other kids because we didn't speak it. It didn't end up well. my mom ended up pulling us out and so no, we were really not connected all that much to the language.   Miko Lee: [00:04:48] I can really relate to what you're saying. As a fifth generation Chinese American, and my parents their ancestors came from different provinces, so their dialects were so different that they even spoke to each other in English. 'cause they couldn't understand each other in Chinese. So it happens so often. Yeah. Yeah. And so I really relate to that. I'm wondering if there was an epiphany in your life or a time where you thought, oh, I. I wish I knew more of those stories about my ancestors or was there some catalyst for you that changed?   Michele Wong McSween: [00:05:17] All of this really kind of happened when I moved to New York. I, you know, raised in Sacramento, went to college in the Bay Area, lived in San Francisco for a while with a job, and then I eventually moved to New York. And it wasn't until I came to New York and I met Asians or Chinese Americans like me that actually spoke Chinese and they knew about cool stuff to do in Chinatown. It really opened my eyes to this new cool world of the Chinese culture because I really experienced Chinatown for the first time when I moved to New York. And it was just so incredible to see all these people, living together in this community. And they all looked the same. But here's the thing, they all spoke Chinese, or the majority of them spoke Chinese. So when I went to Chinatown and they would look at me and speak to me in Chinese and I would give them this blank stare. They would just look at me like, oh my gosh, she doesn't even speak her own language. And it kind of made me feel bad. And this was really the first time that it dawned on me that, oh wow, I, I kind of feel like something's missing. And then it really hit me when I had my kids, because they're half Chinese and I thought, oh my gosh, wait a minute, if I'm their last connection to the Chinese culture and I don't speak the language. They have no chance of learning anything about their language they couldn't go that deep into their culture if I didn't learn about it. So that really sparked this whole, Gordon & Li Li journey of learning and discovering language and culture for my kids.    Miko Lee: [00:06:51] Share more about that. How, what happened actually, what was the inspiration for creating the Children's book series?    Michele Wong McSween: [00:06:58] It was really my children, I really felt that it was my responsibility to teach them about their culture and language and, if I didn't know the language, then I better learn it. So I enrolled all of us in different Mandarin courses. They had this, I found this really cute kids' Mandarin class. I went to adult Mandarin classes and I chose Mandarin because that was the approved official language in China. I am from Taishan, My parents spoke Taishanese, but I thought, well, if Mandarin's the official language, I should choose that one probably so that my kids will have at least a better chance at maybe some better jobs in the future or connecting with, the billion people that speak it. I thought Mandarin would be the way to go. When I started going to these classes and I just realized, wow, this is really hard, not just to learn the language, but to learn Mandarin Chinese, because we're not just talking about learning how to say the four different tones. We're talking about reading these characters that if you look at a Chinese character, you have absolutely no idea what it sounds like if you're, if you're learning Spanish or French or German, you can see the letters and kind of sound it out a little bit. But with Chinese characters. No chance. So I found it extremely difficult and I realized, wow, I really need to support my kids more because if I am going to be the one that's going to be bridging this connection for them, I need to learn more and I need to find some more resources to help us. when we would have bedtime story time, that whole routine. That was always the favorite time of my kids to be really, quiet and they would really absorb what I was saying, or we would talk about our days or just talk about funny things and I realized, wow, these books that they love and we have to read over and over and over again. this is the way that they're going to get the information. And I started searching high and low for these books. back in 2006, they didn't exist. and so I realized if they didn't exist and I really wanted them for my kids, then I needed to create them. That's the impetus, is there was nothing out there and I really wanted it so badly that I had to create it myself.   Miko Lee: [00:09:09] Oh, I love that. And I understand you started out self-publishing. Can you talk a little bit about that journey?    Michele Wong McSween: [00:09:15] I'm glad I didn't know what I know today because it was really hard. luckily I had, A friend who used to work for a toy company, it was all through connections. there was nothing really on Google about it. there was no Amazon print on demand. There were none of these companies that provide these services like today. So I just kept asking questions. Hey, do you know a toy manufacturer in China that maybe prints books? Do you know a company that could help me? get my books to the states. Do you know an illustrator that can help me illustrate my books? Because I had gone to fashion design school, but I had not learned to illustrate characters or things in a book. So asking questions and not being afraid to ask the questions was really how I was able to do it because, Without the help of friends and family, I wouldn't have been able to do this. I had all my friends look at my books, show them to their kids. I had my kids look at them, and I kind of just figured it out as I went along. Ultimately when I did publish my first book, I had so much support from my kids' schools. To read the books there, I had support from a local play space for kids that we would go to. I really leaned on my community to help me, get the books out there, or actually it was just one at the time. Two years later I self-published two more books. So I had three in total. no one tells you that when you self-publish a book, the easy part is actually creating it. The hard part is what comes after that, which is the pr, the marketing, the pounding, the pavement, knocking on the doors to ask people to buy your books, and that was really hard for me. I would just take my books in a bag and I would explain my story to people and I would show them my books. sometimes they would say, okay, I'll take one of each, or Okay, we'll try it out. and slowly but surely they would reorder from me. I just slowly, slowly built up, a whole Roster of bookstores and I kept doing events in New York.    I started doing events in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and through that I gained some following, some fans and people would tell their friends about me. they would give them to their nieces they would give them to their cousin's kids, or, things like that. I knew that I had to do it because my ultimate goal was to have Scholastic be my publisher. That was my ultimate goal. Because they are the publisher that I grew up with, that I love that I connected with, that I was so excited to get their book club, little flyer. I would check off every book that I wanted. And my mom never said no. She always let me get every single book I wanted. I realize now that that's what really Created the love of books for me is just having access to them and, going to the libraries and seeing all these books on the bookshelves and being able to take them out and read them on the spot. And then if I loved them enough, I would check them out and take them home and read them over and over. So it was really, my experience, having that love for books that I thought, oh gosh, it would be a dream. To have Scholastic become my publisher. So after 10 long years of events and community outreach and selling to these bookstores, I finally thought, okay, I've sold, about 17,000, 18,000 books. Maybe, maybe now I can take my series to them. I also had created an app. Maybe I can take this to them and show them what I've done. Maybe they'll be interested in acquiring me. And I got an appointment with the editor and I pitched my books on my app and within a couple of days they offered to acquire my books, which was my dream come true. So anyway, that was a very long story for how self-publishing really is and how ultimately it really helped my dream come true.    Miko Lee: [00:13:08] Now your books are on this Scholastic book, fair Circuit, right?    Michele Wong McSween: [00:13:13] Yes, they are. Well, it's actually just one book. They took the three books, which were everyday Words. Count in Mandarin and learn animals in Mandarin. They took all three books and they put them in one big compilation book, which is called My First Mandarin Words with Gordon & Li Li. So it's a bigger book. It's a bigger board book. Still very, very sturdy and it's a great, starter book for any family because it has those three first themes that were the first themes that I taught my own boys, and I think. It just, it's very natural for kids to want to learn how to count. animals were, and my kids were animal lovers, so I knew that that's what would keep them interested in learning Mandarin because they actually loved the topic. So, yes, my first mandarin words with Gordon & Li Li does live on Scholastics big roster.   Miko Lee: [00:14:01] Fun. Your dream come true. I love it. Yeah. Thanks. And you were speaking earlier about your background in fashion design. Has there been any impact of your fashion design background on your voice as a children's book author?   Michele Wong McSween: [00:14:14] I don't know if my background as a fashion designer has had any impact on my voice. I think it's had an impact on how I imagined my books and how I color my books and how I designed them because of working with, you know, color palettes and, and putting together collections I can visually see and, can anticipate. Because I have that background, I can kind of anticipate what a customer might want. And also, you know, speaking with people at my events and seeing what kids gravitate to, that also helps. But I think there's so much more to being an author than just writing the books. You know, when I go to my events, I have a table display, I have setups, I have props, I have, I actually now have a, a small. Capsule of merchandise because I missed designing clothes. So I have a teeny collection of, you know, sweaters, hoodies, onesies, a tote bag, and plushies   Miko Lee: [00:15:04] they're super cute by the way.    Michele Wong McSween: [00:15:06] Oh, thank you. So, you know, fashion has come in in different ways and I think having that background has really helped. kind of become who they are    Miko Lee: [00:15:17] Can you tell us about the latest book in the series, which is Gordon and Li Li All About Me. Can you tell a little bit about your latest?   Michele Wong McSween: [00:15:25] Gordon & Li Li All About Me is really, it's, to me, it's. I think my most fun interactive book because it really gets kids and parents up and out of their chairs, out of their seats and moving around. And you know, as a parent, I always would think about the kind of books that my kids would gravitate towards. What would they want to read and what as a parent would I want to read with my kids? Because really reading is all about connection with your kids. That's what I loved about books is it gave me a way to connect with my kids. And so a book about body parts to me is just a really fun way to be animated and get up and move around and you can tickle and, and squeeze and shake it around and dance around. And, you know, having three boys, my house was just like a big energy ball. So I knew that this book would be a really fun one for families and I have two nieces and a nephew, and I now, they're my new target market testers, and they just loved it. They had so much fun pointing to their body parts and the book ends with head, shoulders, knees, and toes in English and in Mandarin. And so of course. Every kid knows head, shoulders, knees, and toes in English. So we sing that. We get up, we point to our pottered parts, we shake it around, we dance around. And then the fun part is teaching them head, shoulders, knees, and toes in Mandarin because they're already familiar with the song. It's not scary to learn something in Mandarin. It just kind of naturally happens. And so I think the All About Me book is just a really fun way to connect with kids. I've actually launched it at a couple of events already and the response to the book has been overwhelming. I was at the Brooklyn Children's Museum and even the president of the museum came and did the head shoulders. Knees and toes, songs with us. It was so much fun. Everybody was dancing around and having a great time. So I'm just really, really excited for people to pick up this book and really learn about the body. It's, you know, body positivity, it's body awareness, and it's just a great way to connect with your kids.   Miko Lee: [00:17:31] So fun. I, I saw that you're recently at the Asian American Book Con. Can you talk a little bit about that experience?    Michele Wong McSween: [00:17:38] Oh, that was great. That was the first of its kind and. I led the entire author segment of it. I would say individual authors. There were, there were, publishing companies that brought in their own authors, but I was responsible for bringing in the independent authors. And so I think we had about eight of us. There were Indian, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and we all came together for this one really special day of celebrating our voices and lifting each other up. And there was so much energy and so much positivity in that event, and I. Actually was just thinking about reaching out to the organizers last year and seeing if we could maybe do, part two? So, I'm glad you brought that up. It was a really positive experience.    Miko Lee: [00:18:27] So we're celebrating the end of Asian American Pacific Islander Native Hawaiian month. Can you tell us why this month is important to you?    Michele Wong McSween: [00:18:36] When you have something designated and set aside as, this is the month that we're going to be celebrating Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander heritage all month long, I think it kind of perks up. People's ears and they think, oh wow, this is a great opportunity for me to see what's happening in my community. I think it just brings the awareness to. The broader community and ultimately the world. And I think when we learn about each other and each other's cultures, it brings us closer together and makes us realize that we're really not that different from each other. And I think when there are so many events happening now it peaks the interest of people in the neighborhood that might otherwise not know about it and it can, really bring us closer together as a community.   Miko Lee: [00:19:27] Michelle Wong McSween, thank you so much for joining me on Apex Express. It's great to hear more about you and about your latest book Gordon & Li Li and the entire series. Thank you so much.    Michele Wong McSween: [00:19:39] Thank you, Miko   Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:19:40] Thank you all so much for joining us. I'm here with Gloria l Huang, author of Kaya of the Ocean. Thank you so much for joining us, Gloria.    Gloria Huang: [00:19:48] Oh, thanks so much for having me here.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:19:50] So first off, one question that we're asking all of our guests on our show tonight is, who are your people? However you identify, you know, your community, your ancestors, and what legacy do you carry with you?    Gloria Huang: [00:20:01] Oh, that's such a good question. So I am my heritage is Chinese. My parents were born in China and then grew up in Taiwan. And I myself was actually born in Canada. But then moved the states pretty young and and American Canadian dual citizen and now, but I, my heritage plays a lot into my. Kind of my worldview. It really shaped, how I grew up and how I saw things. And so it features very prominently in my writing and in my stories as you could probably tell from Kaya the ocean.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:20:34] Yes. And I love the book so much. It was such a    Gloria Huang: [00:20:37] thank you,    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:20:38] amazing read. And I'm also half Chinese and love the ocean. Just love the beach so much and have always felt such a connection with the water. I don't wanna give away too much things about the book, but I was wondering if you could talk about your inspiration for writing it and a little bit about, setting and everything.   Gloria Huang: [00:20:56] Of course. So the inspiration for the book actually started I came up with the idea when the world was first emerging from the pandemic and I was seeing a lot of people obviously experiencing a lot of anxiety, but a lot of children very close to me in my life. And they were experiencing it for the first time, which was can be so difficult. I remember when it happened to me and there's just this tendency to. Worry that there's something wrong with you or that you've done something and you feel so alone. And so I remember standing by the ocean one night actually and thinking that I'd really love to write a book about a girl who is struggling with. The anxiety just to be able to send a message to all these kids that there's nothing wrong with them. They're not alone and really all parts of who they are. Even the parts they might not love so much are important parts of these amazing, beautiful, complicated people. They are. So that was the inspiration for that part of the story, the setting. I was very inspired. As you mentioned, the ocean is a huge inspiration to me. It actually comes into my mind, a lot of my stories and someone pointed that out once and I was like, you're right, it does. And I think part of it is that I love the ocean. I love the beach. I love being there, but I'm also so in awe of this powerful thing that, you know, where we know so little about it. It is. There's so much mystery to it. It can look so beautiful on the surface and be so dangerous underneath. I love it as a metaphor. I love it as a part of nature. So I think that was a huge part of why I wanted to incorporate that, especially because I think it also plays well into the metaphor for how some people experience anxiety and you can be calm on the surface, but so much is happening underneath.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:22:29] Absolutely. Yeah. Those interplay with each other and are metaphors for each other in such a beautiful way, mirror the experience. Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit more about anxiety and particular, as a young Asian American girl the cultural specificity of having anxiety as a young Asian American woman.    Gloria Huang: [00:22:46] Yes I definitely think it's no coincidence. I think that anxiety often goes hand in hand with perfectionism and pressure and I, many people feel that kind of pressure, but certainly a young Asian girl especially with immigrant parents, will feel specific kind of pressure. And so I was really trying to portray that, Somebody once said to me, they were like, oh, I really like how Kaya on the surface seems so put together. She's, got really good grades. She works really hard at school. She's close to her parents, but there's all this going on underneath. And I actually think that's not unusual in terms of that experience for Asian American children of immigrants, and especially if you're female I was really trying to. Tease that out. And then in addition I think there's a tendency, and this might exist in other cultures as well, but in Asian culture, at least in my family history there's a tendency not to really want to talk about mental health. There was a, there's a joke in my family that my parents thought anything could be solved with good sleep and good nutrition, like anytime you had any problem. And I think that there is a, there's a. resistance to feeling like your child can be struggling in a way you can't help them. So I, really wanted to touch on that, part of the cultural pressures at play in kaya's life.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:23:59] And you did so beautifully and it was very relatable, as a anxious Asian girly. And also just, the discussion of big feelings and somehow, having inklings that you may be more powerful than you even realize, but the kind of like emotions that come with that too.    Gloria Huang: [00:24:15] Yes. I think that's a huge part of it is that like when you experience these huge feelings they feel powerful, know, in a negative way. But what I was really trying to get at was, there is also power in accepting these parts of yourself and realizing that They can make up this powerful being that you are, even if you might not love them in that moment.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:24:34] Yeah. I felt very seen by the book and I, couldn't help but wonder wow, what would it have been like if I had read this when I was, 13 or 12 or kind of Closer to the age of the characters in the book.   Gloria Huang: [00:24:45] Thank you so much for saying that it actually means a lot because a lot of my motivation when I do write these books is to write for people who are either of that age or, wish they had a book like that at that age, which is also how I feel a lot about books nowadays and oh, I, I'm so glad that exists. I wish that had been around when I was that age.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:25:03] Yes. Were there any books that really set an example for you that either you read, maybe when you were, in the young adult. Age range or that you've read now as an adult where you're like, okay, this is definitely the audience that I wanna be writing for.   Gloria Huang: [00:25:17] Definitely. I actually love this question 'cause I'm a big reader and so I love talking about books . When I was a kid, middle grade books were my gateway into my love of reading. So I still remember a lot of my favorite books, but I would say a recent book, it's actually maybe not that recent now, it's maybe a couple years old, but a book that really. Had an effect on the middle grade book was when you trap a tiger by Tae Keller and it explores. The kind of Korean experience, but also through the prism of kind of understanding generational grief. And it was just so beautifully done and really made an impact on me. So that was one recently that I thought was really powerful. And, I was like, this is an important book. This is definitely a book I would've loved as a child. When I was younger and I was reading books, there were three books that meant a lot to me. One was called the true confessions of Charlotte Doyle, and it was like a swashbuckling adventure story starring a girl, which was, at that time not very common. And it was, it meant, it was so earth shattering to me to be able to see a female character in that role. So that was great. There's a book called. Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt. And it's an adventure story and it also stars. The main character is a very strong female character and Tuck everlasting, which I just think is a beautiful book. It's also female characters. Now I'm saying it out loud. They are all female main characters. And all about, existentialism and adventure and things that, it was important for me to see. Female characters exploring. But I did also wanna say that when I was reading middle grade books, some of my favorite books included a series called, babysitters Club, which I think that they've redone now as a graphic novel. And that was actually really important, not necessarily for the stories, but because there's a character named Claudia Kishi who. Was a Japanese American character and she absolutely shattered the minds of, I think all kids that age were Asian descent and female in reading these books because there just wasn't a character like her before that, she was so cool and artistic but she had immigrant parents and she had a sister who was very good at math and they didn't get along and she loved junk food and she was. So incredibly nuanced and it was just not something that we saw back then. So that really inspired me, I think, to want to add to the diversity of voices. And thankfully there are many more diverse voices now than when I was reading.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:27:30] I love that. And I also feel like books that you read at that age, they stay with you forever.   Gloria Huang: [00:27:35] They really do.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:27:35] And they shape so much of like your worldview and your friendships. And I'm curious, 'cause I know the book was released this year in January. Mm-hmm. So what has it been like for you on your book tour and what's been some other responses that you've heard? I.    Gloria Huang: [00:27:48] It's been really great. It was so exciting to do the book launch and then just the amount of support from the writing community from, my, my kind of network, my agents and my publisher and editor. And also just readers. It's been really great. But one thing I think I wasn't expecting to love quite so much, not because I was expecting to not love it. I just said, it occurred to me that I would feel this way is getting feedback from, child readers is amazing because, I think as writers we love feedback no matter what. And if it's positive feedback, that's even better. But having a child reach out and as some of my friends will send a video of their. Children reacting to the book or they'll, their, let their child type out a text messages and just to hear how the book hits with them and to hear their excitement or to hear that they were moved or to have them want to know what happens next. It meant so much to me because it was, they're the target audience and to have them feel seen in that way was just, it's just the ultimate kind of powerful feeling.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:28:51] That is so sweet. Oh my gosh. I can only imagine. And so you're talking about the young readers. Yes. But I'm also curious if you have any advice or thoughts for young writers who might be wanting to share and get similar stories out to the world?   Gloria Huang: [00:29:05] Yeah I definitely do. And one of the. Experiences I've had that's been great is I've been doing, some school visits and I go and I talk about the book, but I actually talk about the writing process. And when I do that, I really talk to the kids. As if they're writers. The one of the first questions I ask is, hold up your hand. If you love writing or you think you want me, you might wanna be a writer someday. And a lot of hands go up and I tell them like, what the publishing process is, what are, the different genre options, what you might wanna consider, how you come up with an idea, how you sit down and write it, how you reach out to an agent. And I am surprised at how. Intensely, they're hanging onto every word and they're insightful questions after it. It shows me that a lot of them are really thinking about this. I think for one of the school visits, I remember someone held up her hand and she said what is the youngest age I. Someone has been able to be published. And I thought that was great. Because they're so inspired and you can tell that, that they're thinking for the first time this is a possibility. I have all kinds of advice during the school visits, the main piece of advice is really. Just that it can be a tough industry. writing is a very isolated process usually. There's a lot of kind of obstacles and there's a lot of gatekeeping. And so I tell 'em that the most important thing they can do is just keep pushing through and not to let any, setbacks stop them, because the ultimate goal is to reach even just one person.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:30:24] Absolutely. And what kind of advice do you give around learning how to hone your own voice and also having discipline when it comes to an artistic practice?   Gloria Huang: [00:30:33] Yeah, I think that's such a great question. And I was gonna say this piece of advice is probably more for I. Older writers, but adult writers, I guess I should say. The one thing that I've really been thinking about having published a middle grade book is the very specific and unique experience of writing for middle grade audiences. I think a lot of my friends who write for older audience groups, young adults, adults, They have their own challenges, but one of the things that is different is when they're writing, they are writing for the same target audience. That's also the decision makers. So generally, adults and young adults are picking their own books, and they're speaking to someone who will. Ultimately be the ones to pick up the books where when you're writing for middle grade audiences they're not usually the decision makers. at bookstores, they may or may not be in charge of which book they buy, in. Schools, usually it's a librarian or a teacher. So in some ways you're writing for one audience, but you're also writing a subject matter that you're hoping the decision makers will decide is worthy to put in front of your ultimate readers. So that's one challenge. And then the other challenge is I think middle grade audiences are so. fascinating because they're going through this amazingly unusual time in their lives, whether it's eventful and there's new experiences and that can be exciting, but also scary. So there's a lot to mind in terms of topics, but they are also a mixture of being very sophisticated readers who are on the cusp of being teens. And so there's a healthy dose of, skepticism, but they're still young enough that they. Believe in magic, at least in the literary world. So you, there's a lot of room to play with that. But they also. They sound different. They speak differently than adults. So it's important to get the dialogue, for me I, turn to children in my life, including my own, just to do a check to make sure that the dialogue sounds authentic and something that, people, that kids would say. So a lot of thoughts there, but I think, I've been thinking a lot about middle grade and writing for middle grade, and what a unique experience it is.   Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:32:26] Yeah, that's such a good point about the decision maker and having the multiple audiences, and I'm sure sometimes the decision makers are reading the books too, right? Or reading it with their kids or what have you. For your personal writing practice, are there any upcoming projects that you can share with us? And how do you stay inspired for what I imagine is like the long haul of writing something.    Gloria Huang: [00:32:45] I'm happiest when I have like several projects in the pipeline. So as soon as I am done a book or it's, outta my hands, it's with my agents or my editors. I'm looking to write another book. And I think sometimes I probably overwhelm my amazing book before agents. 'cause I'm like, I'm ready to start another story. And they're like, we're still looking at the book you just sent us. But I, that's very much how. I am happiest. I would definitely say that everybody finds their own rhythm. I'm in some writers groups and some people are incredibly fast drafters and just need multiple projects at a time. And some people are like, no, I need to work on one project and I need to have it to perfection and I'm gonna work on it for a year or two. And I think whatever works for the individual artist, I think is the best kind of process for them. But yes, for me it's very much about having multiple projects. I think I'm most inspired when I have different projects going at the same time. finding your own rhythm, I think is my advice.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:33:40] kaya of the ocean has, strong themes and storylines about, myths, mythology, Chinese mythology, and goddesses. I'm curious if you wanna talk any more about that and then also if that shows up in any of the other projects you're working on    Gloria Huang: [00:33:54] Yes, the Chinese mythological water goddess that features. Pretty prominently in Kaya of the Ocean is Matsu. And I find her to be such a fascinating character. She is a real goddess who's worshiped still in Asia. I think. Fishermen often will, pray to her for safe passage when they go out on the water. And my father told me about her when I was younger he told me like the side stories and I thought that was really interesting. But it was only when I started thinking about this book that I thought, I'd love to, I'd love to incorporate her. I hadn't heard about her too much in, in the fictional world, even though I knew she was still like a revered goddess. But I thought it was so cool that she was this strong. I. Strong female figure in a space that didn't always have that, hundreds of years ago. And so I dove into her story a little bit and found out, the story is that she was once a human child who loved to read and then she was afraid of swimming in water until she was older and then she drowned, saving, trying to save some relatives and it was interesting 'cause I'd already started plotting out Kaya and writing Kaya. And so much of her story wove easily into what I had already come up with. Like there, I think she has two sidekicks that were one time enemies that she, made into her friends and I'd already had Kaya written with two friends, Naomi and Ana. So I, there was just so much that I felt was kismet. And it was really fun to be able to weave that story together and fictionalize it. But I think it was also meaningful for me to be able to do that because. When I was younger, I loved reading Greek mythology. the stories are beautiful and they've been redone in beautiful ways, but it definitely was an area where I didn't necessarily see myself reflected. As part of my goal to add to the diversity of voices, I really wanted to feature Chinese mythology and bring those stories in so that. Kids can either see themselves reflected in those stories and or understand a new kind of set of mythology and learn about a new culture.   Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:35:46] Yes. I'm so glad you put it that way because it is, it's such a privilege to have access to, our own I. Cultural stories and knowledge through these, like fun and modern interpretations. Definitely. So I'm so glad that this can provide that.    Gloria Huang: [00:36:00] Oh, thank you. I did realize I didn't answer your other question, which is does it feature my other works? Which so I have sold another middle grade novel and I'm, it's not announced yet. I'm hoping to announce it soon. And I have some other. Books. I'm working on a young adult novel so far. They have not featured Chinese mythology, but I do definitely have a type that my most of my books tend to be contemporary settings, but with elements of speculative. Fantasy, just like the light touch of that and sometimes a little bit of historical elements as well. So they, they definitely all have that similar motif, but so far chi of the ocean is the only one to feature a Chinese mythological goddess.   Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:36:43] Thank you so much for sharing that. I love that. And I really love the relationship that Kaya had with her two friends and just and then also like the cousin that comes and just capturing like the banter amongst, amongst the girls.    Gloria Huang: [00:36:56] Thank you so much. that was really important to me, I think because at the stage that Kaia is in her life the loves of her life really are her two friends, Naomi and Ana, and they feature very prominently in how she learns to cope with her anxiety and her symptoms of anxiety. And so I really, I think that I really wanted to center her their friendship as much as possible. So I'm I'm glad that you saw it that way too.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:37:19] Yeah. And I feel like, I mean, it truly is the most important relationship. And so it's nice when works of fiction and yeah, works of fiction, can reflect that in such a beautiful way. I know you mentioned that you have daughters or have children?    Gloria Huang: [00:37:32] I do, yes. I have a son and a daughter. And my daughter actually was quite involved because when I first started writing Kaya, I think she was exactly of the age that she would be the target reader group. And so she actually helped Beta read it. She provided a lot of feedback. She became like a cheerleader. She was definitely involved in the process and I think that was really exciting for her. my son became of the reading age once it came out, so he reads it and he's a big fan too,   Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:38:00] that's so sweet. I love that your daughter was part of the editing process too. That's amazing.    Gloria Huang: [00:38:04] Yeah. Yeah. She loves writing and always says she wants to be a writer herself, so it was really special that she got to be part of this and see it up close.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:38:13] Oh wow. Do you think you would do any collaborative projects with her in the future?   Gloria Huang: [00:38:16] It's so funny that you say that. She always suggests that. And then sometimes they'll actually start a Google doc and they'll say, let's write a story together. And we all have, of course, very different writing styles. And then at some point they both actually usually just start reading what I'm writing. And at that point I'm like, this is not collaborative. You have to write as well. So we've had a couple of false starts, but that's always a joke that we're gonna do that together.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:38:39] that's so sweet. What else is upcoming for you? I know this is, Asian American and native Hawaiian Pacific Islander month right now, and the episode will come out towards the end of May. So if there's anything else coming up from you for this month or for June or the summer. Yeah. We'd love to hear what you have going on.    Gloria Huang: [00:38:57] Oh, yeah. Today actually Kaya's audio book was released people can listen to it. It was narrated by this amazing, narrator, Cindy K. And so anywhere you find audio books is available. And that was really cool. I've listened to a little bit of it and you, when you write, you hear the words in your head one way, and then it's amazing to hear like another artist do their take on it. So that's really cool. I will be at the Bay Area book Festival at the end of the month of May. There. Doing like different panels and I'll be on a panel. it's about Fantastical Worlds. I'm really excited about that. hopefully we'll be able to announce this other book soon. As you, you may know publishing is a very long lead time it will be a while before it's released, but I think the hope is to release it during, a API month as well just not this year. And working on a young adult novel that hopefully we can go on submission with at some point. But it's an exciting time for sure.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:39:51] Wow, that does sound so exciting. I can't wait to hear about your new projects and to continue to read the work that you put out into the world. Is there anything else that you'd like to discuss or talk about?   Gloria Huang: [00:40:01] I think just to say a thank you to you for, having me on here and reading Kaya of the Ocean and really anyone who's been interested in joining Kaya and her friends on their journey. It's just, it's so amazing, I think, to create these characters that become real to you, and then have them become real to other people. I don't have the words to describe how meaningful it is to me, but thank you.    Jalena Keane-Lee: [00:40:24] Thank you for letting us join into the world of Kaya for a little bit 'cause it was very fun and healing and all of the amazing things. And thanks so much for joining us today on Apex Express.    Gloria Huang: [00:40:36] For sure. Thanks so much.   Miko Lee: [00:40:38] Welcome, Andrea Wang, award-winning children's book author to Apex Express.    Andrea Wang: [00:40:43] Thank you, Miko. I'm so happy to be here.    Miko Lee: [00:40:46] Happy to have you. I'd love to start first with a personal question, which is, who are your people and what legacy do you carry with you?   Andrea Wang: [00:40:57] My people are from China. My mother's family belonged to an ethnic minority, called the Haka or the Kaja people, and she and her siblings were. A military family, and we're each born in a different province. And when the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, they went to Taiwan where she grew up and immigrated to the United States in 1965 or 1966. My father's family are from Guangdong Province, and so I'm Cantonese on that side, although I don't speak any Cantonese. And he went to Hong Kong after the Chinese Civil War. So I am the daughter of Chinese immigrants, second generation Chinese American.    Miko Lee: [00:42:01] And what legacy do you carry with you?   Andrea Wang:[00:42:03]  I carry the legacy of their stories, both the ones that I know and the ones that I don't know yet.    Miko Lee: [00:42:12] Ooh. It sounds like there's lots of juicy things for you still to discover. That is fun.    Andrea Wang: [00:42:16] Yes.    Miko Lee: [00:42:17] Today we're talking about your new book, watercress, can you share what the audience, what the book is about, and then what is your inspiration for this book?    Andrea Wang: [00:42:25] So the book is about a Chinese American girl who is growing up in rural Ohio and her parents spot watercress growing in a ditch by the side of the road, and they immediately pull over and make her enter older brother, get out of the car and get down into the ditch with them and collect this. Vegetable, but to her it's a weed. And so when they serve it to her and her family at dinner, she really is unhappy about this and. For her, picking food out of a ditch has a really different meaning than it does to her parents who survived a lot of hardship in China. And it's not until her mom tells her a story about her childhood growing up in China and spoiler alert, loses a sibling to the famine that the girl begins to understand and better appreciate her parents, her culture, and her heritage.   Miko Lee: [00:43:29] And the inspiration for this book.    Andrea Wang: [00:43:32] So the inspiration is largely my own life. this is a semi autobiographical story. The memory of picking watercress by the side of the road was just something that I couldn't forget, I don't know why this memory continued to haunt me into adulthood. And then after my mom passed away, I started writing down, memories and stories of being with my family in order to maintain a connection to her. When I wrote this, at first it was a personal essay and it just wasn't working. I would put it away and I would occasionally take it out and I would put it away and take it out and work on it again. And it wasn't until I decided to pursue writing for young people that I completely changed the manuscript from a personal essay into a picture book. But at that point it still wasn't working. It was in third person and it wasn't very personal It took me several more years to figure out the heart of the story for me. So it was largely based on my own memories and my mother's childhood stories that she shared with me.   Miko Lee: [00:44:39] Can you share more about the power of memory and the artistic process? 'cause you've written many books and in different genres as well, but can you talk a little bit more about memory and its impact on your work?   Andrea Wang: [00:44:52] Yeah, that's a great question. I tend to write primarily for myself. And to figure out how I felt about certain experiences, how they've changed me, to try and process things I feel like I remember a lot about my childhood. parts of it are very vivid and I like to go back to those. Moments that have stuck with me all these years and explore what it means to me. Like I'm just very curious about why I remember certain things watercress was largely my way of processing my childhood feelings of shame about my family and my culture. I have leaned into that and am still writing stories about identity and the struggle to find our identity. Memory has a lot to do with it. I put myself in every single book.    Miko Lee: [00:45:45] Ooh, that's so interesting. And you're talking a little bit about shame and overcoming that. I'm wondering if you could speak more on, if you feel like memories hold the power to heal.    Andrea Wang: [00:45:56] I firmly believe that memories hold the power to heal. I think that writing watercress and talking about these feelings has really helped me, , heal from, that sort of trauma of not feeling like I belonged as a kid and also that I may have been. Not the nicest kid to my parents, not the most filial, right? And so writing this story was, as I say in the author's note, sort of an apology and a love letter to my parents. So it's been very healing and healing to hear about from all the. People who have read the book and had it resonate with them, the things that they regretted in their lives and hoped to, heal as well.    Miko Lee: [00:46:42] Oh, have you heard that story a lot from adult readers?   Andrea Wang: [00:46:46] I have. They will often tell me about the things that their parents did that embarrassed them. A lot of foraging stories, but also stories about, relatives and ancestors who were sharecroppers or indigenous peoples. And it's just been fascinating how many people connect to the story on different levels. There is that theme of poverty. I think recognizing. That's not often talked about in children's books, I think makes people feel very seen.   Miko Lee: [00:47:14] Yeah. That feeling of shame is really showcased by the illustrator Jason Chin. I mean your young you character kind of has a grumpy look on their face. And it was just so fun. Even in the book notes, Jason Chin, the illustrator, writes about how he combined both the western and eastern style of art, but also his similar cross-cultural background. I'm wondering when you very first saw the artwork and this was kind of young you did anything surprise you by it?    Andrea Wang: [00:47:42] I mean, it's amazing, gorgeous artwork and I was really struck by how he dealt with the flashbacks because when I sold this manuscript, I. Had no idea how an illustrator would deal with how interior it is and, , and how they would tackle those flashbacks. And there's one spread where on the left hand side of the page, it shows the main character's current time and then it morphs across the gutter of the book into. The moms past and her childhood memories in China, and it was just exquisite is really the only way to describe it. It was, it's just brilliant, and amazing. We don't, as picture book authors typically get to work with our illustrators. We often do not have contact with them through the making of a picture book. But in this case. Our editors said since it was such a personal story for me, that he, , felt that Jason and I should collaborate. And so I provided photos, family photos, photos of Ohio, lots of different, , source materials to Jason and would talk to him about the feelings that young me in the book went through. And so the fact that, he was able to take all of that and put it on the page, it was just. Spectacular.    Miko Lee: [00:49:01] Oh, that's so fun. I also understand that you love mythical creatures as you I, and one of your children's books is the Nian Monster, which I love. I'm wondering what is your favorite mythical creature and why?   Andrea Wang: [00:49:15] I. Have been sort of fascinated with the qilin, the, or they call it the Chinese unicorn. Right. Although it looks very different from what we think of a, a European unicorn looks like. Yes. And I think it's because they're supposed to be this really benevolent, creature and Have all sorts of powers and I would love to do more research about the qilin and, you know, incorporate that into a book someday.   Miko Lee: [00:49:42] Ooh, fun. Next book. I love it. you have so many books and I'm really curious about your upcoming book Worthy about Joseph Pierce. I love these as Helen Zia talks about these. MIH moments that are missing in history. And Joseph Pierce was the highest ranking Chinese American man who fought in the Civil War. Some people might recognize this picture of this Chinese American guy in a kind of civil war, uniform. Can you tell us one, when is the book being released and a little bit more about it?    Andrea Wang: [00:50:11] Sure. The book is being released on September 9th, 2025, and it is. A picture book, which we typically think of as for younger readers, but it is 64 pages. So you know, it's an all ages picture book. I think my editor and I would like to say, and it is the story of a Chinese boy born in the, First half of the 18 hundreds in China in Guangdong province, and was sold by his father to an American ship captain named Amos Peck. the reasons for that are, lost to time, right? He left no primary sources behind, there was so much going on in China at the time. Famine war, you know, all of these, Difficult things that his father probably sold him in order to keep the rest of the family alive and as well as give him the opportunity to have a better life. And he did end up in Connecticut. He was raised with the captain's, siblings and sent to school and treated almost like a member of the family except for the fact that he was. Clearly Chinese and there were very few Chinese people in, Connecticut at that time. he joined the Union Army when he came of age and was able to leverage his service into gaining citizenship, which really people of color, weren't really able to do successfully back then. And so. He gained a citizenship. He married, he had a family. He was able to own property and accomplish all these amazing things. Sort of right before the Chinese exclusion Act was, enacted. So he was a very brave guy.    Miko Lee: [00:51:45] It's a wild story and you sent me on a little bit of a rabbit hole, which is fun. Just, looking at Ruth Ann, McCune's. historical piece that there were 10 different Chinese American men in the Civil War, but he was exceptional because he rose to such high ranks. And I just think it's so interesting that, in the 1880 census, he registered as Chinese. But then after the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, he listed his race as Japanese in the 1890 census. but he was racialized as white so that he could buy property and everything. Yeah. Can you just talk a little bit about that, like talk about code switching? He like literally changed his race,    Andrea Wang: [00:52:26] right. And people at that time could not tell the difference. Similar to now, people often can't tell different Asian, ethnicities apart. Right. I found actual newspaper articles where Joseph Pierce was interviewed about the battles, that the United States was having with Japan or the battles that Japan was having. He was asked his opinion on what the Japanese government was doing because he told these reporters he was Japanese and that was really the only clue that I had that he, Was code switching that after the Chinese exclusion Act was passed, he felt like he needed to protect himself and his family and he must have cut off his cue because otherwise, you know, that would've identified him immediately as Chinese. So that went into the book. I think it's a powerful moment, right, where he's doing what he has to do to survive and ensure his protection and his family's safety,   Miko Lee: [00:53:25] You have a, a really interesting background. Just having No really, I mean, having done all these different things and I, you know, I think you have a science background too, right? Can you talk about the times that we're living in right now, the political times that we're living in, where our government is banning books that don't align with certain conservative ideologies, where right now certain words are forbodden suddenly. And can you talk a little bit about how that impacts you as a children's book author?    Andrea Wang: [00:53:59] it is very disheartening and discouraging that the current climate is against, people who look like me or other people of color. And as a children's book author, we are experiencing a huge decrease in the number of teachers and librarians who are asking us to come and visit schools, to talk to students, which is horrible because. These young people are the ones who need to learn from books, right? Knowledge is power. And if we are not keeping them informed, then we are doing them a disservice. I think the attacks on our freedom to read are really unjust. and. personally as an author of color, I understand that books like Worthy may end up on some of these banned book lists because it does talk about racism. but these are the stories that we need now, and I'm going to continue writing these stories about the Hidden History, And to talk about these difficult subjects that I think kids understand on some level. but if they're not reading about it in books, then it's hard to spark a conversation with, educators or adults about it. So I think these books that I'm writing, that many of my friends and other children's book authors are writing are providing that. Sort of gateway to talk about, the topics that are so important right now.    Miko Lee: [00:55:29] Thank you so much for sharing, and thank you so much for being on Apex Express today. We appreciate your voice and the work that you're putting out there in the world. Is there anything else you'd like to say?   Andrea Wang: [00:55:39] you know, there's so much to say, I think just to. Stand up for what we all believe in and to, I encourage people to stand up for their intellectual freedom and that of their children.   Miko Lee: [00:55:56] Thank you, Andrea Wang. I appreciate hearing from you and hearing your voice and seeing your work out there in the world.    Andrea Wang: [00:56:03] Thank you so much, Miko. It was a pleasure.   Miko Lee: [00:56:05] Please check out our website, kpfa.org. To find out more about our show tonight. We thank all of you listeners out there. Keep resisting, keep organizing, keep creating and sharing your visions with the world because your voices are important. Apex Express is created by Miko Lee, Jalena Keane-Lee, Preti Mangala-Shekar, Swati Rayasam, Aisa Villarosa, Estella Owoimaha-Church, Gabriel Tanglao, Cheryl Truong and Ayame Keane-Lee.   The post APEX Express – 5.29.25 AAPI Children's Books appeared first on KPFA.

On this month's episode of Voices of the Mat-Su titled“Braver Than We Believe,” we hear from two people who pulled themselves up out of crisis and chaos. Stories of finding strength and hope through belonging and friendship..

Republicans yesterday were able to uphold Governor Dunleavy's appropriate veto of HB69, the massive education funding increase passed by Democrat-led majorities in both Legislative chambers that included absolutely no measurable outcomes to ensure that public school students would benefit.Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Senator Mike Shower, a MatSu legislator who leads the Alaska Senate Republican Caucus. Shower, a long time friend of AFC and one who emanates common sense, is not falling for the mainstream media line that the veto and subsequent vote by the Legislature to uphold it, pits pro-education policy makers against those who don't want our public schools to succeed. And you shouldn't either.I hope you can tune in.Support the show

April is the Month of the Military Child. In“We Serve Too”, this month's episode of Voices of the Mat-Su, we learn a little more about the challenges and the pride in being a military child. L

A late-night dining spot in downtown Anchorage is still standing after a vehicle crashed in the early hours of Sunday morning. Father Madison Hayes is a priest for the Archdiocese of Anchorage-Juneau based in the Mat-Su remembers Pope Francis and shares memories of when he lived in the Vatican for four years during his studies.   

https://www.bigcabbageradio.org/2025/04/16/valley-edition-matsu-v

Dos crímenes brutales estremecen a Chile y enlutan a Venezuela. Estefany Morales y Sarais González eran dos jóvenes zulianas que emigraron buscando una vida mejor, pero encontraron su final de la forma más cruel. Una fue eliminada por su suegra en Osorno, la otra por su ex pareja en Temuco. Ambas dejaron atrás sueños, familias rotas y una sociedad que todavía no puede creer lo ocurrido. Distribuido por Genuina Media

Foreign countries are pushing back on President Donald Trump's tariffs with import taxes of their own. We take a look at how that has affected Alaskan goods and oil prices. Plus, in the Mat-Su, a weekend altercation at a movie theater left an employee of the theater shaken as she claims she was “body-slammed” during an altercation involving a group of teens.

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Send us a textAlaska State House Representative Jubilee Underwood of Wasilla lost the August 2024 primary to the incumbent Representative David Eastman. Few folks thought that she had a chance of winning that race, but come November, Underwood defeated Eastman. She is now here in Juneau forging a new path for her community. Prior to running for the House she served three years on the MatSu School Board, the last as President. We talk about her journey into politics as well as her early life on today's show. Note: one of her best friends from high school, Elexie Moore was also elected to the State House at the same time as Underwood. Moore replaced Jesse Sumner as a representative of Wasilla. You will hear us refer to Elexie by her first name at various points during today's interview. 

馬祖 Mǎzǔ - Matsu (an archipelago near Taiwan)兩岸 liǎng'àn - both sides of the Taiwan Strait對岸 duì'àn - the opposite shore (mainland China in this context)集結 jíjié - to assemble, to gather兵力 bīnglì - military forces配備 pèibèi - to equip, equipment重型大炮 zhòngxíng dàpào - heavy artillery射程 shèchéng - range (of a weapon)覆蓋 fùgài - to cover, to span over島嶼 dǎoyǔ - islands戰鬥機 zhàndòujī - fighter jet防禦工作 fángyù gōngzuò - defense operations國軍 guójūn - national military (Taiwanese army)隨時警戒 suíshí jǐngjiè - to stay on high alert at all times修築 xiūzhú - to construct, to build防禦工事 fángyù gōngshì - defensive structures, fortifications預測 yùcè - to predict, to forecast攻打 gōngdǎ - to attack, to assault傍晚 bāngwǎn - evening, dusk出奇 chūqí - unexpectedly, surprisingly聲東擊西 shēngdōng jíxī - "create a diversion in the east and attack in the west" (a military strategy)戰略 zhànlüè - strategy中共 Zhōnggòng - Chinese Communist Party (CCP)假裝 jiǎzhuāng - to pretend, to feign攻打 gōngdǎ - to attack (repeated)金門 Jīnmén - Kinmen (an island near China controlled by Taiwan)戰場 zhànchǎng - battlefield高度戒備 gāodù jièbèi - high alert, heightened security砲擊策略 pàojí cèlüè - artillery strike strategy單打雙不打 dāndǎ shuāng bù dǎ - "fire on odd days, ceasefire on even days" (a bombardment strategy)每隔一天 měigé yì tiān - every other day發射 fāshè - to launch, to fire (a missile or shell)炮彈 pàodàn - artillery shell炮彈聲 pàodàn shēng - sound of artillery shells死神 sǐshén - the Grim Reaper, metaphor for death低語 dīyǔ - to whisper警告 jǐnggào - warning性命 xìngmìng - life擊中 jízhòng - to hit, to strike一戶人家 yí hù rénjiā - a household, a family不幸遇難 bùxìng yùnàn - to die tragically, to perish in an accident居民 jūmín - residents, inhabitants地雷 dìléi - landmine防止 fángzhǐ - to prevent敵軍 díjūn - enemy troops登陸 dēnglù - to land (military invasion)埋設 máishè - to bury, to install (mines)陷入 xiànrù - to fall into, to be caught in踩到 cǎi dào - to step on後果 hòuguǒ - consequence, outcome不堪設想 bùkān shèxiǎng - unimaginable, disastrous consequences誤踩 wùcǎi - to accidentally step on喪生 sàngshēng - to lose one's life, to perish生存法則 shēngcún fǎzé - survival rule遺跡 yíjì - historical site, relicWant to improve your Chinese?

In this compelling episode of the Must Read Alaska Show, host Ben Carpenter welcomes Donna Anderson, a retired educator and the Kenai Chapter Chair for Moms for Liberty, to discuss the pressing issues facing Alaska's education system.   With over 30 years of involvement in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District as a teacher, substitute, parent, and grandparent, Donna brings a wealth of firsthand experience to the conversation. She opens up about her decision to retire after 26 years of teaching, driven by frustration with inconsistent policies, questionable curriculum choices like Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA), and a growing disconnect between district leadership and classroom realities.   Now, as a leader in Moms for Liberty—a national organization dedicated to empowering parents and holding government accountable—Donna is channeling her passion into grassroots advocacy. She sheds light on overcrowded classrooms, controversial age-inappropriate content, and the district's failure to address teacher burnout or conduct exit interviews to understand why educators and families are leaving. From her regular presence at school board meetings to her role in launching a statewide legislative committee, Donna explains how Moms for Liberty is mobilizing concerned parents, grandparents, and even dads across Alaska's four chapters (Fairbanks, Mat-Su, Anchorage, and Kenai Peninsula) to demand transparency and better outcomes for students.   Listeners will gain insight into the challenges of curriculum rushed into implementation, the financial waste of unused materials, and the broader cultural and policy shifts needed to retain both students and teachers. Whether you're a parent, educator, or citizen seeking solutions, this episode offers a candid look at the state of public education and a roadmap for getting involved. Contact Donna at moms4libertykpen@gmail.com or 907-252-7207 to join the effort, or visit momsforliberty.org to connect with a chapter near you and “find your people.”

Send us a textAlaska State Senator Rob Yundt was born and raised in Wasilla and stumbled into wrestling as a 7th grader. Little did he know that wrestling would change his life ultimately leading to a career as a professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter with a professional record of 9 wins and five losses – his UFC match against Ricardo Almeida in 2008 (which is available on YouTube) was a pay-per-view event streamed live from the Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas and was watched by millions of people worldwide. After a couple decades of managing his own construction companies, he ran for the MatSu Borough Assembly and won serving from 2020 to 2024. Last year, he defeated incumbent Wasilla Senator David Wilson. We talk about all of that and his bill that would close the S-Corp loop hole that allows certain companies to pay less taxes than others. 

Today we'll dive into the headlines and the latest on what's happening the AKLEG, then in hour two we'll be joined by State Senator Shelley Hughes to discuss her thoughts on the budget and maybe catch up with some of the Matsu delegation.

Anchorage and Mat-Su residents were battered overnight Saturday into Sunday by a severe windstorm that saw a peak gust of 110 mph in Bear Valley, a pedestrian bridge partially collapse onto the Seward Highway, and part of a roof rip off a Muldoon home that was caught on video. The aftermath of the storm is covered on Alaska's News Source.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Get a glimpse of the musicians and DJs who are creating the growing music scene in the Mat-Su. In this episode of Voices of the Mat-Su with Emily Forstner, learn just what Strikes a Chord in the Mat-Su .

Contact Scott from Bonsai MatsuWell 2024 is done and there has been so many highlights for me personally as well as with my bonsai. I chat about a few of my podcast favourites and how small incremental improvements with my bonsai make me happy. During the year I travelled for bonsai, I travelled a lot! From one corner of Australia to the other as well as a trip to New Zealand and I loved it all. So many shiny, happy, bonsai people and so much bonsai love. It's nice to know we're not alone. Bring on 2025...Support the showBecome a podcast supporter and show the Bonsai Love (it's really appreciated) ❤️https://www.buzzsprout.com/263290/supportWhere to find Bonsai Matsu:InstagramFacebookYouTube Web

Today we'll talk with 2 legislators about the upcoming session and the creation of the minority caucus. We'll start in hour one with Rep Kevin McCabe from the MatSu about his priorities and what he sees coming up in this years session as the big issues. Then in hour two we'll have the full hour to talk to Rep Justin Ruffridge from the Peninsula about the upcoming session and especially gas and other issues.

Good afternoon, I'm _____ with today's episode of EZ News. Tai-Ex opening The Tai-Ex opened up 235-points this morning from yesterday's close, at 22,972 on turnover of $8.3-billion N-T. Labor Funds Earn NT$20.9 Billion in October The Ministry of Labor reports that Labor Funds grew by $20.9 billion NT in October. That brings total gains for 2024 to $93.91 billion NT. The funds, managed by the Bureau of Labor Funds, are valued at $6.88 trillion NT with a 14.96 percent return rate for the first 10 months of the year. Key funds include the Labor Pension Fund, with a 14.59-percent return, and the Labor Retirement Fund, at 17.92-percent. The National Pension Insurance Fund also saw a strong performance, reaching a 16.01-percent return. Over the past decade, these funds have delivered an average annual return of 6.7-percent. Officials warned of global market uncertainty (不確定) due to interest rate policies, uneven growth, and geopolitical tensions, but noted Taiwan's stock market remained solid in October. Rain and Cooler Weather in Northern Taiwan The northeast monsoon is bringing cooler weather and rain to northern Taiwan today. Greater Taipei, Yilan, Hualien, and Matsu could see showers, with heavy rain expected in northeastern mountains. Other areas, including Penghu and Kinmen, will stay mostly dry and sunny. Drivers in central and southern Taiwan should watch for thick morning fog that's reducing visibility (能見度) to under 200 meters in some places. Strong winds are hitting coastal areas, including Taoyuan and Hsinchu, and islands like Penghu and Matsu. Air quality in western Taiwan is worsening due to pollution buildup. Central and southern areas are under an “Orange Alert,” with some spots reaching “Red Alert” levels. Israel Launches Airstrikes After Hezbollah Projectiles Israel has unleashed its largest wave of airstrikes across Lebanon since agreeing to a ceasefire with Hezbollah last week, killing at least 11 people. The strikes came after the Lebanese militant group fired a volley of projectiles earlier on Monday as a warning over what it said were Israeli truce (休戰) violations. This was apparently the first time Hezbollah took aim at Israeli forces after the 60-day ceasefire went into effect last week. The increasingly fragile ceasefire aims to end more than a year of war between Hezbollah and Israel — part of a wider regional conflict sparked by the devastating Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Guinea Football Stampede Leaves Dozens Dead There's growing anger in Guinea after dozens were killed in a stampede at a football match. Officials say clashes broke out among football fans at the stadium after a contested (有爭議的) goal. Correspondent Nabil Ahmed Rufai reports. NZ SpadeToothed Whale Dissection Scientists and culture experts in New Zealand have begun the first-ever dissection of a spade-toothed whale, the world's rarest whale species. The creature, which washed up dead on a beach on New Zealand's South Island in July, is only the seventh specimen (樣本) ever found. None has ever been seen alive at sea. Over the next week, researchers will study the 5-meter-long male at an agricultural research center near the city of Dunedin. Almost nothing is known about it but scientists, working with Maori cultural experts, hope to answer some of the many lingering questions this week, including where they live, what they eat, how they produce sound and how this specimen died. That was the I.C.R.T. EZ News, I'm _____.

Meet Taylor Jordan, disabled veteran and owner of Black Birch Books, a third place, (anchors of community life that facilitate creative interaction where you can relax) a place where everyone is safe and excepted. A place of community support, belonging and coffee. Listen in to learn about support groups and programs at BBB, also she […]

Gala Maria Follaco"Un posto tranquillo"Matsumoto SeichōAdelphi Edizioniwww.adelphi.itLa doppia vita di una moglie molto per bene, in un nuovo, tesissimo noir di Matsumoto.Traduzione di Gala Maria FollacoKōbe. Durante una cena tra imprenditori e funzionari ministeriali, una cameriera si avvicina a uno dei commensali e gli sussur­ra qualcosa all'orecchio. C'è una chiama­ta per lui da Tokyo. L'uomo, Tsuneo Asai, si alza senza dare nell'occhio e raggiunge il telefono. Sua moglie Eiko, poco più che trentenne, è morta improvvisamente d'in­farto. Una notizia non del tutto inattesa, dal momento che Eiko era già da tempo mala­ta di cuore. Eppure le circostanze della sua morte, avvenuta in un quartiere un po' fuo­ri mano di Tokyo, a due passi da un alber­go a ore, gettano un'ombra sulla sua figura timida e riservata, e sul suo passato. Cosa ci faceva lì? E chi doveva incontrare?Questa storia è come una strada che parte leggermente in salita e si fa a ogni passo più ripida. Una strada piena di vicoli cie­chi, che sembra esistere solo nella psiche del protagonista. Qui, i temi cari a Matsu­moto – la vendetta, l'ossessione per un det­taglio che non torna, il timore dello scan­dalo, l'ansia di essere scoperti che conduce alla rovina – si condensano in un noir ano­malo e beffardo, senza un caso né un inve­stigatore, dove chi cerca un colpevole può finire per diventarlo lui stesso. Un noir che è anche una critica acuminata della società giapponese e della ragnatela di convenzio­ni che la invischiano.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarewww.ilpostodelleparole.itDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.

Join Voices of the Mat-Su to hear the stories of two families affected by homelessness here in the Mat-Su borough. Step into their lives and journey with them, with Emily Forstner.

The activation of the 7G Network was supposed to catapult Japan into the future. Instead, it left reality stretched and broken outside of one specific train line leading to source of the disaster. When a trio of girls learn that one of their friends may still be alive near the end of the line, they embark on a journey through increasingly bizarre stations to reunite with her, confronting weirdness at every turn. The Con Artists have some thoughts on whether the promise of the show holds up over its length.   Want to see our episode-by-episode thoughts on Train to the End of the World? Read our Rolling Reviews here: https://theconartistsblog.com/rolling-review/   The intro music is: "GA-TAN GO-TON" by Rei Nakashima   The outro music is: "Eureka" by Rokudenashi   Disclaimer: The Con Artists own nothing but our opinions and this podcast.

Today we'll focus on Valley stuff, starting off in hour one with an interview with Candidate for MATSU School Board Tom Bergey. We'll talk about his vision for schools and more. Then in hour two we're going to talk with Senator Shelley Hughes about Valley races and some of the issues she's seeing.

In this episode Ryan and Zongjun had the opportunity to interview Bryan Ong, the Founder of Matsu Matcha based in Singapore. The conversation spanned across many topics including the current matcha landscape in Singapore, building a matcha brand, matcha evaluation techniques and even digital advertising strategies. https://www.instagram.com/matsu_matcha/ https://matsumatcha.com/

It was fun seeing Fox Butterfield, the first New York Times correspondent in China since 1949, in Portland, Oregon back in July. I last visited Portland in 2022, and you never quite get over the sight of Mount Hood dominating the horizon on a clear summer day in its awesome fashion.Fox welcomed me to his home, perched on a small hill in a modestly upscale suburb. A history enthusiast, he has lived through and witnessed some of the most pivotal moments in modern history: from meeting Harry Truman as a teenager with his grandfather, to studying under John Fairbank, the progenitor of Chinese studies in America, to reporting on the Vietnam War and helping expose the Pentagon Papers, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Though trained as a China specialist, he only began his reporting inside China in the late '70s, culminating in his book China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. This bestseller set a benchmark for generations of China correspondents. Later in his career, Fox shifted his focus to domestic issues of race and crime, writing acclaimed works like All God's Children and In My Father's House.Talking to Fox was a breeze. I was pleasantly surprised that his spoken Chinese remains impressively sharp — his tones and pronunciations are still spot-on. Of course, we did most of our chatting in English. This piece will explore his early experiences, particularly his family background, his time at Harvard, and his reporting during the Vietnam War. While the bulk of the piece may not focus directly on China, it offers a glimpse into the intellectual formation of one of America's most prominent China watchers and how both domestic and global forces shape U.S. perceptions of China.Enjoy!LeoIndexSeeing China with Joe Biden and John McCain in the 70sCyrus Eaton, Lenin Prize and family legacy in Cold War“Rice Paddies”, and studying under John Fairbank at HarvardFrom Pentagon Papers to VietnamReporting on the frontlines in Vietnam Seeing China with Joe Biden and John McCain in the 70sCould you talk about your first trip to China?I was the Hong Kong correspondent for The New York Times from 1975 to 1979 because that's where we covered China in those days. I couldn't go to China until 1978, when I attended the Canton Trade Fair. That was my first trip to China; I can barely remember it.My second trip to China was much more memorable. In 1979, when the U.S. and China were about to normalize relations, China invited the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to visit, and I was invited as a New York Times correspondent. In those days, China had a shortage of hotel rooms, at least for foreigners, so they made everybody room with somebody else. The Chinese government assigned me to room with the naval liaison to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who was a Navy captain named John McCain.For two weeks, John McCain and I were roommates. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together and traveled everywhere. McCain's best friend on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was Joe Biden. So, the three of us did almost everything together for two weeks. That one is easy to remember. What was your impression of Joe Biden?Joe Biden was a nice man, very earnest, but he was a typical career politician that when he approached somebody, he always grabbed them by the hand. He was tall, had a strong handshake, and would give them a big smile and grab their hands. He kept doing this to the Chinese, who didn't really know what was going on because they're not used to being touched that way, especially not somebody almost breaking their hand.So I finally said to him, “Senator.” And he'd say, “No, call me Joe.” I said, “Okay, Joe, please don't grab Chinese by the hand. It's kind of rude and offensive to them, and they don't understand it.” He would say, “Well, why not?” And I said, “Because that's not their custom.” He'd say, “Okay, thank you very much.” And then, five minutes later, he'd do the same thing over and over again.John McCain and I became good friends, especially because I had seen McCain in prison in Hanoi when I first started working for The New York Times, and we bonded over that shared history during our trip to China. They allowed me to go into his prison in 1969, and I was the first reporter to find out that John McCain was still alive when his jet fighter was shot down over Hanoi.I saw him then and as roommates 10 years later in China. We had a great time, and I would take him out and say, “Let's sneak away from our handlers and see how Chinese really live and what they really say.” We just went out and talked to people, and he thought this was a lot of fun.“He said something straightforward and obvious, but I had never thought about it. He said China is the oldest country in the world with by far the largest population. It's a big, important place.”That's a wonderful tale. What made you initially interested in China?When I was a sophomore at Harvard as an undergraduate in 1958, there was a fear that the United States was going to have to go to war with China over those two little islands, which Americans call ‘Quemoy' and ‘Matsu' and Chinese people call ‘Jinmen' and ‘Mazu'.America's leading sinologist and Harvard professor of Chinese studies, John Fairbank, decided to give a public lecture about the danger of the United States going to war for those two little islands.I attended his lecture. He said something straightforward and obvious, but I had never thought about it. He said China is the oldest country in the world with by far the largest population. It's a big, important place. Why would the United States want to go to war with China over those two little islands? It made no sense logically. And we had just finished the war in Korea. As I listened to him, I realized, “Gee, I don't know anything about that place.”So I began to audit his introductory class on the history of East Asia. And in the spring, I decided to take a second class in Chinese history that Fairbank was teaching. As a Harvard undergraduate, I would find out my exam grades at the end of year from a postcard you put in the exam booklet. When I received my postcard back from the final exam, it said: “please come to see me in my office, tomorrow morning at 10.” “Oh no,” I thought I really screwed up my exam. So I went to see John Fairbank. I was nervous, especially because he was a great man, a big figure on campus, and the Dean of Chinese studies in the United States. So I went in, and he said, “Fox, you wrote a wonderful exam. Have you considered majoring in Chinese history?” I went, “oh, no, I had not considered it.” I was so relieved that I had written a good exam.He said, “Well, if you are, you must immediately begin studying Chinese.” At that time, Harvard did not teach spoken Chinese, only classical written Chinese, and there were just about 10 people, all graduate students.So Fairbank said, “here's what you do. Going down to Yale, they have a special program that teaches spoken Chinese in the summer because they have a contract with the Air Force to teach 18-year-old Air Force recruits how to speak Chinese so they can listen to and monitor Chinese air force traffic.”So I spent the summer at Yale studying Chinese with air force recruits. I took classical written Chinese classes when I returned to Harvard that fall. Luckily, I got a Fulbright Fellowship to go to Taiwan after I graduated, so I studied in the best spoken Chinese program at the time run by Cornell University.Cyrus Eaton, Lenin Prize and family legacy in Cold WarI wonder whether there's any family influence on your China journey. Your father was the historian and editor-in-chief of the Adams Papers, and your maternal grandfather, Cyrus Eaton, was one of the most prominent financiers and philanthropists in the Midwest. Could you speak on the impact of family legacy on your China journey?My father certainly instilled a love of history in me. That was always my favourite subject in school and the one I did best in. Eventually, my major at Harvard was Chinese history. My father didn't know anything about China and never went. My mother visited Taiwan and stayed with me for ten days in the 60s.My maternal grandfather, Cyrus Eaton, would fit the Chinese notion of a rags-to-riches success story. He grew up in a small fishing village in Nova Scotia, Canada, and went to college in Toronto with the help of an older cousin. This cousin went on to become a Baptist minister in Cleveland, Ohio, across the lake. Among the people in his parish was a man named John D. Rockefeller — yes, the original John D. Rockefeller.The cousin invited my grandfather and said he had a job for him. So my grandfather started off as a golf caddy for John D. Rockefeller and then a messenger. Ultimately, he founded his own electric power company in Cleveland — Ohio Electric Power — and became quite influential. He had multiple companies but then lost everything in the Great Depression.During World War II, my grandfather heard about a large iron ore under a lake in Ontario through his Canadian connections. By then, he had already formed connections with President Roosevelt and then Truman, so he said, “If you can give me some money and help underwrite this, I can get Canadian permission to drain the lake for the iron ore deposit,” which became the world's richest iron ore mine, Steep Rock Iron Ore. That's how he got back into business. Truman and my grandfather ended up having a close connection, and he used my grandfather's train to campaign for re-election in 1948. My grandfather was an unusual man. He had a real vision about things.He was trading metals with the Soviet Union as well.I don't know the details, but when Khrushchev came to power, my grandfather became interested in trying to work out some arrangement between the United States and Russia, which is where the Pugwash movement came from. He was inviting Russian and American scientists to meet. They couldn't meet in the U.S. because it was against American law, but he arranged for them to meet in his hometown of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. We had American and Russian nuclear physicists meeting to discuss nuclear weapons in this little village. Eventually, he invited some Chinese people to come.At one of these conferences, I met Harrison Salisbury, an editor of The New York Times and the first NYT Moscow Correspondent. I was just starting out as a stringer for The Washington Post, but Salisbury saw something in me and suggested I send him a story. That connection eventually led to my job at The New York Times.He must have known people pretty high up in China too.I don't know the China connections; he didn't know Mao or Zhou Enlai. He did have a close relationship with Khrushchev, to the extent you could. It started with the Pugwash movement.He just sent a telegram to Khrushchev and became friends?Yes. What do you call that, guanxi?I guess so. Do you remember when he won the Lenin Peace Prize?I do. I think I was in Taiwan at the time. I didn't go to the ceremony.How did you feel about his activities growing up?I was never too sure what was going on. My mother had the intelligence of her father—in fact, she looked remarkably like him—but she was skeptical because she always felt that he was making all these big deals but wasn't looking out for his own family.What was your mom like?My mother was a smart woman. She went to Bryn Mawr during the Depression, but my grandfather refused to let her take a scholarship because it would signal he had no money. She worked full-time while in school and graduated near the top of her class. She was angry at him for making her life difficult for his own pride.My mother worked all her life. By the time I reached college, she was working at Harvard University, which was unusual for the time. She started as a secretary but eventually became the registrar in charge of all the records. When she died in 1978, the Harvard Crimson published a tribute saying she had been the most helpful person to many undergraduates.What did you want to become as a teenager?I wanted to be a baseball player. Yes, for a long time my life revolved around baseball. I thought I was pretty serious. Some time in college, I realized I wasn't going to become a major league baseball player, and I became much more interested in the life of the mind.“Rice Paddies”, and studying under John Fairbank at HarvardDid you think of Asia growing up?There was really almost nothing until I mentioned, in my sophomore year, when I was 19, beginning in 1958 as an undergraduate at Harvard studying with John Fairbank. No courses offered at high school that I could have gone to. Even at Harvard, the Chinese history class was almost all graduate students. Harvard undergraduates could take an introduction class to the history of East Asia, which included China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Harvard students nicknamed this course “Rice Paddies.”That's the famous course by Fairbank and Reischauer. What was it like studying with those two legends?Well, they were both significant people in every way. Fairbank helped start the field of Chinese history in the United States. Reischauer certainly started studying Japanese history.In my first year, they had just finished a textbook for the Rice Patties course. It had not been published as a book yet, just a mimeograph form. They gave us these big books you had to carry around, like carrying one of those old store catalogues with hundreds of pages printed on one side. You would bring these things into class. One was called East Asia: The Great Tradition, and the other East Asia: The Modern Transformation.What was John Fairbank like as a person?Intimidating. He was a tall, bald man, always looking over his glasses at you. But he was charming and friendly, and if he sensed that you were interested in his field, he would do almost anything for you. He reached out to students in a way that few other faculty members did.“He was an academic entrepreneur and missionary for Chinese studies, and was creating the field of Chinese history in the United States. Before him, Chinese history didn't exist for most Americans to study.”And he had regular gatherings at his house.Yes. His house was a little yellow wooden house dating back to the 18th century, right in the middle of the campus. Harvard had given it to him, and every Thursday afternoon, anybody interested in China who was in Cambridge that day was invited. You never knew who you were going to meet. Fairbank was a kind of social secretary. When you walked in, he'd greet you with a handshake and then take you around to introduce you to some people. He did that all the time with people. He was an academic entrepreneur and missionary for Chinese studies and was creating the field of Chinese history in the United States. Before him, Chinese history didn't exist for most Americans to study. I always wanted to major in history. That subject appealed to me and was my strongest area of study. I took some American history and intellectual history classes, but the Chinese history class became the one that I really focused on. I couldn't tell you exactly why, but it was interesting to me. The more I read, the more I liked it. After that first Fairbank class, I signed up for the more intensive modern Chinese history class and whatever else Harvard had. I signed up for a Japanese history class, too. At the end of my senior year, John Kennedy named my professor Edwin Reischauer his ambassador to Tokyo. So, on my way to Taiwan as a Fulbright scholar, I stopped in Tokyo to meet Reischauer at the US Embassy, and two of Reischauer's grown children took me around Tokyo. I reported in Tokyo later in my career.Was Ezra Vogel working on Japan at the time?Yes, Ezra had. Ezra was in my Spanish class in the first year. He hadn't yet decided what he would focus on then. We sat next to each other. We were always personal friends even though he was a bit older. He was a nice man and became a professor later. I sat in the same classroom with several other older people who went on to teach about China, including Dorothy Borg. Even then, she had white hair. She worked for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York but was taking classes at Harvard. When I first went to China, she was still involved with China.So, from that group of Americans studying China at Harvard at that time, many went on to do things related to China, including Orville Schell, Andy Nathan and me. I did not know Perry Link while in Harvard.Many major figures in China studies today were at Harvard with you.Yale had Mary and Arthur Wright, but they were graduate students at Harvard with me and went on to become full professors at Yale. This must be because that was a place where Fairbank was an evangelical figure that people gravitated towards, and he was preaching this new faith of Chinese studies.From Pentagon Papers to VietnamWhat did you do after Harvard?I spent a year in Taiwan when I graduated. I wanted to stay, but Fairbank hurried me up to get back to graduate school.Did you listen to Fairbank?I was going to get my PhD at Harvard and teach Chinese history, but after five years, I became less interested in actually studying Chinese history.During the 1960s, the Vietnam War happened. Vietnam is kind of a cousin of China, so I started reading everything I could about Vietnam. I even started a course on Vietnam so that Harvard undergraduate and graduate students could learn about Vietnam.I got a fellowship to return to Taiwan to work on my dissertation about Hu Hanmin. At that time, many American GIs were coming to Taiwan on what we call R&R — “rest and recreation.” The U.S. government made a deal with the American military that anyone who served in Vietnam for a year had an automatic R&R, a paid week leave to go anywhere in Southeast Asia. Many chose Taiwan to chase pretty young Chinese girls. So, GIs would show up in Taiwan and didn't know what they were doing. I would see them on the street, go up and talk to them.I became more interested in Vietnam over time. A friend told me, “You're spending so much time reading newspapers about Vietnam, you should become a journalist.” It hadn't occurred to me. By chance, I met a correspondent from The Washington Post, Stanley Karnow, who was the Hong Kong correspondent for the Post and covered Vietnam for quite a while. He asked me to be his stringer, a part-time assistant. So I would send my story to him, but he'd never do anything with it.I was discouraged, and that's when I met Harrison Salisbury through my grandfather in Montreal. Salisbury asked me to send stories to The New York Times. I thought I was a traitor to my job with The Washington Post. But it wasn't really a job; it was in my imagination. When I sent Salisbury my first story, I received a cable from the foreign editor of The New York Times saying they had put my story on the front page and given me a byline. My parents at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts saw it that morning, and they wondered, what is Fox doing?” They thought I was working on my PhD dissertation.“Oh, that looked like our son there.”The story was about Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who was becoming Chiang Kai-shek's successor. I wrote about how he was going about it. That was a good news story, so The New York Times sent me a message and said, “If you'd like to work for us, we'll be happy to take more stories.”So I started sending them stories once or twice a week, and after four or five months, they gave me a job offer in New York. That was just one of those lucky breaks. I guess The New York Times correspondent who made that initial contact with me, Harrison Salisbury, who had won several Pulitzer Prizes, must have seen something in me.What's your relationship with your editors over the years? Generally pretty good. They certainly intimidated me at the beginning. The person who actually hired me was the foreign editor at The New York Times, James Greenfield. When I returned to New York, it was New Year's Day, the end of 1971. James asked me about my training and asked me to spend the next couple of months sitting at the foreign desk to watch how they do things. I couldn't even write stories for a while; I just handed them the copy that came up. I later got promoted to news assistant and was asked to find something interesting and write one story a week. I wrote some stories about Asia for the newspaper. They wouldn't give me a byline at first as I wasn't a reporter. My first assignment was to Newark, New Jersey, which had gone through a series of terrible race riots in the late 1960s. I was going to be the correspondent in Newark.This was after they hired you and during those two years of training? Yes. One day, I was covering a story. The new mayor of Newark — the first black mayor of a major American city — called a meeting in city hall to see if he could stop the riots.He was trying to bring people together: white, black and Hispanic. Within ten seconds, everybody was having a fistfight. People were knocking each other out with the police and mayor in front of them. The mayor yelled at people to stop, and they still kept punching and hitting each other with big pieces of wood right in City Hall. And I was there. Two very large black men grabbed my arms behind my back. The nasty term for white people in those days was “honky”. They said, “What are you doing here, honky?” They began punching me in the stomach and hitting me in the head. I thought I was going to die right there before I finally broke free. I got to my office to send my story of the city hall by telephone across New York City. And they put that story on the front page.Your second front page at The New York Times. So the editor of The New York Times was a very intimidating man, Abe Rosenthal, a gifted correspondent who'd won several Pulitzer Prizes. He won a Pulitzer Prize in Poland and Germany. I got this message saying, “Mr. Rosenthal wants to see you in his office immediately.”I thought, “oh jeez I'm getting fired.” I just got beaten up in City Hall and they're going to fire me. So I walked in, and he said, “Fox, that was a really nice story.” He said, “you did a really good job on that story. We have another assignment for you. I want you to go over to the New York Hilton Hotel”, which was about ten blocks away.He told me that one of our correspondents, Neil Sheehan, had gotten a secret government document, the Pentagon Papers, which were boxes and boxes of government documents. Neil couldn't read all that by himself, so I had to go and read it with him. Besides, I knew about Asia. By that point, I had read as much as I could about Vietnam. I also knew Neil Sheen because I had helped him come to Harvard to give a talk about Vietnam while I was a graduate student. So we actually had a good relationship. I spent the next two months in Neil's hotel room reading documents, but two of us were not enough, so a third and eventually a fourth correspondent were brought in. Did you understand the risk you were taking working with the classifieds? You could be arrested. Right, yes. I had to tell my parents, “I can't tell you anything about what I'm doing.”When we finally started publishing, I wrote three of the seven installments, which was amazing because I was a junior person. Abe Rosenthal called me back into his office after we finished, and said, “Fox, you did a nice job on this, so we're sending you somewhere. We're sending you to Vietnam.” He said, “I want you to go immediately.” So I went from the Pentagon Papers to Saigon. That was a surprise. That was not where I wanted to go. In fact, what I really wanted was to go to cover China, but that would have meant Hong Kong. But Vietnam turned out to be fascinating. There was always something happening.Reporting on the frontlines in VietnamCan you talk about your Vietnam experience?It was an experience at many levels. Intellectually, it was seductive because there was so much going on, people getting shot every day. The only way to truly understand it was to be there.You could divide the correspondents into those who stayed in Saigon and those who went out to the field. I wanted to be in the field as much as possible. I spent time on Navy ships and even in a fighter plane, hitting what appeared to be factories.The GIs, or “grunts”, wanted to know what we wrote about them, and some would come to our office in Saigon. Sometimes they were angry. A few correspondents received threats, but we mostly had a good relationship. The more you were willing to go out into the field, the more respect you earned. I was out there from the beginning.Vietnam was more complicated than I initially thought. If you were strictly anti-war or pro-government, you missed the full picture.You had been against the war before. How did you feel once you were there?I was part of the anti-war movement and then found myself in the middle of the war. I got to know many ordinary Vietnamese who were actually happy to have Americans there because the communist soldiers would threaten to confiscate their property. Vietnam was more complicated than I initially thought. If you were strictly anti-war or pro-government, you missed the full picture.What was the relevance of the Pentagon Papers then?The Pentagon Papers showed that the U.S. government was deceiving the public, but we were also helping some people. It was more complex than the extreme positions made it seem.Were you at risk of being arrested for the Pentagon Papers?Possibly, yes. My name was on the case, but by that time, I was in Vietnam. I put it out of my mind.How long were you in Vietnam?I was in Vietnam from 1971 to 1975, with breaks in Japan. The New York Times didn't let anyone stay more than two years at a time because of the exhaustion of war. But I kept going back and stayed until the last day of the war in 1975 when I left on a helicopter to a Navy ship.I took the place of a brilliant female correspondent, Gloria Emerson. I inherited her apartment, and Vietnam was as exciting a place as it could be. There was always something to do, something to see, something that you shouldn't see but wanted to see. Vietnam was all that I talked about for four years. I stayed until the last day of the war, April 30th, 1975.Did you get hurt during the war?I was hit by mortar fragments and lost my hearing for almost a month. Once, I was left behind after the unit I accompanied ran into an ambush. I had to walk three hours to get back to safety.Vietnam absorbed all parts of your brain, your mind, your body, and your psyche. It just took over.How did the war experience change you?It depends on the individual. Some correspondents loved Vietnam and never wanted to leave. Others were terrified and left without a word. Even today, I still belong to an online Google group of ex-correspondents in Vietnam, and I still get dozens of messages every day. They always want to discuss Vietnam.Back in the day, some got afraid and just left. I had several friends who would literally just leave a message at their desk saying, “Please pack my belongings and send them back to New York.” It's hard to generalise and have an ironclad rule about. It was different from regular assignments in most other countries.Well, Vietnam was certainly special.Vietnam absorbed all parts of your brain, your mind, your body, and your psyche. It just took over. When the war ended, I came out on a helicopter that landed on a Navy ship. The captain said I could make one phone call. I called my editor in New York and said, “I'm out, I'm safe.” He replied, “Good, because we're sending you to Hong Kong.”Recommended ReadingsFox Butterfield, 1982, China: Alive in the Bitter SeaJohn Fairbank, Edwin Reischauer and Albert Craig, 1965, East Asia: The Modern Transformation, George Allen & UnwinEdwin Reischauer & John Fairbank, 1958, East Asia: The Great Tradition, Houghton MifflinAcknowledgementThis newsletter is edited by Caiwei Chen. The transcription and podcast editing is by Aorui Pi. I thank them for their support!About usPeking Hotel is a bilingual online publication that take you down memory lane of recent history in China and narrate China's reality through the personal tales of China experts. Through biweekly podcasts and newsletters, we present colourful first-person accounts of seasoned China experts. The project grew out of Leo's research at Hoover Institution where he collects oral history of prominent China watchers in the west. Peking Hotel is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Lastly…We also have a Chinese-language Substack. It has been a privilege to speak to these thoughtful individuals and share their stories with you. The stories they share often remind me of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming. I hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!Correction note: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly referred to sinologists Mary and Henry Wright as "Fords." We thank reader Robert Kapp for bringing this to our attention. Get full access to Peking Hotel at pekinghotel.substack.com/subscribe

Today in hour one we'll talk about a few of the state headlines, including the close races in some of the races around the state as well as some of the crazy stuff from the MatSu over the weekend. Then in hour two we'll chat with Jared Goeker who's running for state senate in Eagle River and see what his vision looks like.

The Mat-Su School District made headlines last fall when they voted to severely limit the student representative position on the school board. Ben Kolendo, a senior at Mat-Su Career & Tech High School in Wasilla, held the seat at the time.  Then this summer, the school board voted to entirely remove the position, which dates back to 1979.  ATMI producer Edison Wallace Moyer sat down in the studio with Kolendo to talk about his experiences on the school board. He spoke about the responsibilities of being a student representative, the conflicts with the school board that led to his role being limited, and the larger story that followed. Hosted by Ormund Alaois. Produced and written by Taylor Heckart. Edited by Logan Ehrhart. Music by Kendrick Whiteman and Devin Shreckengost.  Many thanks to supporters of our podcast, including the State of Alaska Division of Public Health.  The views expressed in this program do not necessarily represent the views of our sponsors. Alaska Teen Media Institute is based in Anchorage, Alaska. We would like to acknowledge the Dena'ina people, whose land we work on.

In this episode of the Must Read Alaska Show, host John Quick sits down with Mayor Edna DeVries, the current Mayor of Mat-Su Borough, to discuss her decision to run for re-election. Edna shares her motivations for seeking another term, outlines her key priorities if re-elected, and explains what sets her apart from the other candidates in the race. Tune in to hear an in-depth conversation about the future of Mat-Su Borough and why Edna believes she's the right choice to continue leading the community. Check out her website here: http://www.ednadevries.com/ 

Omicasa, aka DJ Craze & Matsu, go Back To Back! Willy talks with them about their new "We Got U" EP, working with Dirtybird, making house with a hip hop attitude, what DJs don't understand about booking agents, creative constraints, quitting the day job, attic parties, being a kid forever & lots more!   Omicasa:  https://bio.site/omicasa Willy Joy: http://linktr.ee/willyjoy   PROTECT REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS: https://abortionfunds.org/funds/ https://www.prochoiceamerica.org/ https://www.sistersong.net/  

Today we'll start with another candidate for AKLEG. This time it's he MatSu's Rob Yundt. We'll discuss his thoughts an plans for the State and how to bring us back from our fiscal crisis. Then in hour two we'll be joined by JD Tuccille from Reason magazine about the latest uptick in home schooling and what it may men for brick and mortar schools across the country.

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that's exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that's exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that's exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that's exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that's exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that's exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that's exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Today we talk to two new candidates. In hour one we'll go north and chat with FNSB candidate Miguel Ramirez about his vision for the Fairbanks area and the challenges it faces. Then in hour two we'll come back to the MatSu and talk to Jubilee Underwood's challenge to the incumbent Eastman.

The legendary DJ Craze and New York's Matsu combine powers to become Omicasa. And On this episode of Dirtybird Radio they turn out a guest set that packs a huge punch and features their brand new Dirtybird single "Ultimate" which hits the streets in just a few days. VR warm-up set:geriFree - "Pure Joy (Stacey HotWaxx Hale & HazMat Live Remix)" [Give A Beat Records]Eskuche - "How To Groove" [Farris Wheel Limited]Julian Collazos - "Minigroove" [Mood Child]New Girl - "Time Is Frozen (K-Mack Remix)" [UnlearnRecords]Omicasa guest set:Deekapz – Poc PocGeotheory – The DifferenceSlumberjack & Posij - ScoutMatsu & Mike Deuce - Fading [Nervous Records]Hardrive – Deep Inside [Strictly Rhythm]Matsu & Mike Deuce - Empty [Slow Roast Records]Omicasa (Craze & Matsu) – Ultimate [Dirtybird Records]Rodney Dinkles – Alien Shuffle (Hype Bass Remix) [Music is 4 Lovers Records]Holt 88 - Flow [Perfect Driver Records]Corey James x Dice Of Nights - Sisco [Club Bad Records]Omicasa (Craze & Matsu) – Big Groove [Unreleased]L.R.S (feat. Siobhan Anderson) - Get Fucked Up [Dirtybird Records]Omicasa (Craze & Matsu) – Alkaline Dreams [Slow Roast Records]Max Kaluza - Only You [This Ain't Bristol Records]Elay Lazutkin – Special [There Is A Light Records]Breaking Beattz – Flex [Retail Records]Steve Angelo – Freedom (Body Ocean Remix) (Ft. Pusha T)Bleu Clair - Places [Rules Don't Apply Records]Matsu – Y'all Wanna Play?! [Unreleased]Jace Mek – No Stress [DND Records]Matsu – Right On Time [Slow Roast Records]Errio Indra – Kill It With Da [Dirtybird Records]Juush – My Sh*t [Retail Records]CASHEW - PumpinSeanathan - Call On Me [Nite Records]Borgez – Millions (Omicasa [Dirtybird Records]Martin Ikin – Hustlin' [Black Book Records]Zack Darza - Yep [Confession Records]Good Times Ahead – Make You [Unreleased]AC Slater, Chris Lorenzo, Fly With Us – SeismicOmicasa (Craze & Matsu) – Me N My Cru [Slow Roast Records]

Host John Quick dives into a compelling conversation with Andrew Shane, a dedicated community leader and candidate for school board in the Mat-Su. Andrew shares his journey from firefighter to small business owner, highlighting his passion for education and public safety. Discover Andrew's motivations for running, his top priorities if elected, and his commitment to integrity and fiscal responsibility. Learn about his initiatives to protect women's sports, enhance school safety, and expand workforce readiness programs. Check out his website here: https://shaneforschoolboard.com/ 

Moving on with our third part of the Gishiwajinden Tour, we head to the old area of Matsuro, which, for us, means modern Karatsu.  Here we have some of the oldest rice paddies in all of Japan, but Karatsu is so much more.  It was part of Matsura, where the Matsura family (aka league, factions, or pirates, depending on how you saw it) arose.  It is also a short hop from Nagoya, which briefly became the capital of Japan; Nagaoka-kyo gets a mention in the histories, but Nagoya rarely merits it, since it was just the Taiko and every actually important person minus the Tenno. For more photos and others such things, check out: https://www.sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/matsuro-koku/   Rough Transcript: Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua and this is Gishiwajinden Tour, Part Four:  Matsuro-koku So far on this tour through the locations listed in the Weizhi's Wa Record, the Gishiwajinden, following the route to Queen Himiko of Wa, we've hit the area of Gaya, or Gara; Tsushima—or Tuma-koku; Iki, aka Iki-koku; and now we are arriving at Karatsu, thought to be the location of Maturo-koku. Now before we go any further, let's talk about the name.  After all, up to this point in the account, the names haven't been too far off.  Well, Tsushima was recorded as something like Tuma in the Chinese record, which seems reasonable, and “Iki” was actually recorded as something like “I-dai”, though we are pretty sure that was a transcription error based on other evidence. But Karatsu and Maturo, really don't seem related.  Also, didn't we earlier equate Matsuro with Matsuura, Matsura?  But if you look for Matsuura on a map it is quite some distance away from Karatsu—in fact, it is in modern Nagasaki prefecture as opposed to Karatsu, which is in modern Saga prefecture. First off, Karatsu is a later name for the city, not the area.  It literally means “Tang Port”, and that name seems to appear in the 15th century in the form of Karatsu Jinja, or Karatsu Shrine.  So no, the names Karatsu and Matsuro are not related.  Prior to being called Karatsu, though, it was part of a larger area called Matsura.  It sits at the head of the Matsura River, which spills out into what is now called Karatsu Bay.  In ancient times this seems to have been the heart of the area known as Matsura or Matsuro.  Over time it was incorporated into the larger area known as Hi no Kuni, and when Hi no Kuni was divided up by the Ritsuryo state into Hizen and Higo, we see the Matsura district, or Matsura-gun, is a part, along the coast.  The fact that it is spelled as “Matsu” and “Ura”, meaning “pine beach”, might hint at the original name of the place or could be a false etymology, imposed by the need to record the location in kanji, the Sinitic characters used at the time.  Fun fact time:  Hizen refers to the area of the land of Hi that was closer to Yamato, while Higo refers to the area of the land of Hi that was further away.  If you look at a modern map of where these two ancient provinces were, however, you'll notice that by a slight technicality, Higo is actually closer, as the crow flies.  But remember, people are not crows, at least not in this life, and in all likelihood, most of the travel to and from Yamato would have been via sea routes.  So Hizen is closer to Yamato from that perspective, as you would have to sail from Higo, around Hizen, or take the long way south around Kagoshima. But where were we? So Matsura district in Hizen started at Matsura-gawa and the area around Karatsu bay, and included modern areas of Hirado all the way out to the Goto islands.  That was a pretty large area.  It later got further subdivided into East, West, North, and South Matsura subdistricts, with Karatsu in the Eastern subdistrict, and some portion of the west.  Eventually, Karatsu city became its own administrative district, in modern Saga prefecture, and so did Hirado city, in what was the old Northern Matsura sub-district, joining Nagasaki prefecture.  The western sub-district went to Karatsu or incorporated as Imari, known for their Imari-ware pottery.  And that left a small portion of the northern sub-district. The incorporated villages and islands eventually came together as Matsuura city, in Nagasaki prefecture, which is what you'll see, today.  And that is why, looking at a modern map, “Matsura” and modern “Matsuura” are not precisely in the same place. That history also helps demonstrate the historical connections between Karatsu, Hirado, Iki, and Tsushima—as well as the Goto islands.  This region was where the Matsura clan arose, which controlled at least out to Iki, Hirado, and the Goto archipelago, and it was known for its strong navy, among other things. For our trip, heading to Karatsu was originally borne out of convenience:  Our goal was to take the ferry so that we could travel along the ocean routes.  We had traveled the route from Izuhara, on Tsushima, to Ashibe port, on Iki island.  During that trip it was interesting to watch as Tsushima disappeared and then eventually Iki appeared on the horizon, but it wasn't immediate, and I suspect you would have wanted an experienced crew who knew the route and knew what to look for.  Conversely, from Indoji port, on Iki, to Karatsu I felt like we were constantly in sight of one island or another, or at least could see the mountains of Kyushu to get our bearings.  There wasn't really a time that felt like we were that far out from land.  Even so, it would still have been a treacherous crossing back in the day. Coming in to Karatsu from the ferry, the first thing you will notice is the castle.  Karatsu castle, also known as Maizuru Castle, is a reconstructed castle, but it really does provide a clear view of what one would have seen.  The original was abandoned in the Meiji period and sold off in 1871.  The main keep was later demolished and made into a park.  In 1966 they built a new, 5-storey keep on the original base, and from 1989 onward have continued to make improvements to various parts of the castle moats and walls.  You can still see the layout of the Ninomaru and honmaru sections of the castle, encompassing the old samurai districts of the jokamachi, or castle town, of Karatsu during the Edo period. Our primary goal in Karatsu, however, was not castle focused.  We wanted to go back to an earlier time – the Yayoi period, to be precise - and Karatsu and the Matsuro-kan did not disappoint.  While not quite as extensive as the reconstruction at other Yayoi sites like Harunotsuji or Yoshinogari, the site at the Matsuro-kan is still impressive in its own right. What is the Matsuro-kan, you might ask?  It is the building and grounds of what is also known as the Nabatake site.  In 1980, construction workers were excavating for a road through the Nabatake section of Karatsu when they noticed they were pulling up artifacts.  An investigation between 1980 to 1981 determined that the artifacts were from the late Jomon to middle Yayoi period.  Further investigation discovered the presence of old rice paddies.  In 1983 the site was designated as a national historic site, further excavations were carried out, and the Matsurokan was built to house the artifacts and also provide some reconstructions of what the rice paddies would have looked like.  For context these are some of the oldest rice paddies found in Japan, along with the nearby Itazuke rice paddies, in neighboring Fukuoka prefecture, and are key for giving us insights into what we know about early rice field cultivation. Here I should point out that these fields were in use through the middle Yayoi period, while the mission to Yamato—or Yamatai—recorded in the Weizhi would have been in the late Yayoi or early Kofun period, so likely several hundred years later.  There are other Yayoi settlement remains found up and around the peninsula, and there are Kofun in the area, especially along the banks of the Matsura river.  Given how built up much of the area is, it is possible that any large scale settlement may have been destroyed by subsequent settlements, or is somewhere that there just hasn't been a good reason for a full excavation.  Still, who knows what we might eventually find.    The Matsurokan appears to stick with the dating of the Yayoi period from about 300 BCE.  This is based largely on assumptions regarding the development of different pottery styles.  Recent research has suggested that this should be pushed back to about 800 or even 1000 BCE, suggesting a more gradual development.  For our purposes, it is enough to note that this site appears to cover from the final Jomon era in Kyushu to the coming of wet rice agriculture with the advancing Yayoi culture. Based on what was found at the site, the wet rice paddies were created in what at least one scholar has suggested as a “primitive” wet rice paddy.  The paddies themselves appear to have been placed in a naturally swampy area, irrigated by a natural stream.  This would have made flooding the fields relatively simple, without the large ponds or waterworks required to cover a more extensive area.  This may have sufficed for a small village, possibly only a handful of families living together and working the land. Besides the impressions of the paddies themselves, various tools, pottery, and more were also found at the site.  Stone harvesting knives were plentiful—a semicircular stone knife that was held in the fingers of one hand, allowing a harvester to grasp the stalks and cut them quickly.  This was the standard method of harvesting prior to the arrival of the sickle, or kama, and is still in use in some parts of China and Southeast Asia.  It is more labor intensive than the sickle, but provides some benefits in the consistency and lack of waste product. The Matsurokan demonstrates how a lot of the Yayoi tools are, in fact, still in use in one form or another in different cultures that also absorbed rice cultivation, showing how widespread it became. In addition, there are artifacts such as shards of pottery showing what looks to be the imprint of a woven fabric, and various equipment for weaving and sewing.  We have some beams and posts from buildings, which give us something at least try to guess at how things were put together. There are bones of various animals as well as stone arrowheads.  There are also fish and even dugong bones, suggesting they also made a living from the nearby sea.  And there are various bits of jewelry, including magatama, and what appears to be a shark's tooth with holes drilled in so it could be worn on a cord.    There are also carbonized rice grains found at the site, likely grown there. We don't have any ancient strains of rice that can be proven to come from these fields, but in their reconstruction, outside the museum, they have rebuilt some of the rice fields and grow old rice variants in them.  This is used, in part, to teach local schoolchildren about rice cultivation – in fact, local schools are allocated individual paddies each growing season. Besides the rice paddies, the Matsurokan also boasts several reconstructed dwellings.  These are similar to ones you might find elsewhere depicting what life was like back in the Yayoi period. As the Yayoi period gave way to the kofun, we do see some mounded tombs in the area, though not quite as many as in others.  Matsura appears to be rather rural. Around the Heian period, we see the rise of a local group that comes to be known as the Matsura group, or Matsura-tou, which eventually consolidated into the Matsura family.  There are several lineages claiming that the Matsura family descended from the Minamoto or Abe clans or through branch families thereof.  Matsura-to itself is sometimes called the 48 factions of Matsura.  It wasn't as much a family as an alliance of local warriors, each with their own base of operations.  I can't quite tell if the lineage of the later Matsura clan, as they were known, were meant to represent a single lineage or the various lineages that came together.  For all we know, they may have married into official families or otherwise concocted lineages to help legitimize them as much as anything else—this far out from the center, in the 11th century, there wasn't necessarily as much oversight. Early in the 11th century they also had a chance to prove themselves with the Toi invasion – that was the Jurchen invasion we mentioned last couple episodes.  After the Toi invaders attacked Tsushima and Iki, they set their sites on Hakata Bay, which was the closest landing to the Dazaifu, the Yamato government in Kyushu.  They were chased off and headed down the coast.  Minamoto Tomo is said to have led the forces that repelled the Toi invaders, who finally departed altogether, striking one more time on Tsushima before heading back to wherever they came from. Minamoto Tomo is said, at least in some stories, to have been the founder of the Matsura clan, or at least the leader of the 48 factions, which then coalesced into the Matsura clan, which eventually would run the Hirado domain. Over two hundred and fifty years after the Toi Invasion would come the Mongols.  If the Toi were bad, the Mongols were much worse.  The Toi were a band of marauders, who caused a lot of havoc, but do not appear to have had state backing.  The Mongols were perhaps more appropriately the Yuan empire, who had already conquered the Yellow river valley and were working on the Song dynasty along the Yangzi.  While the Toi had brought with them Goryeo warriors as well—who may or may not have joined up willingly—the Mongols had huge armies from all over that they could throw at a problem. As we talked about in the past two episodes, the Mongols swept through Tsushima and Iki and then headed straight for Hakata, the closest landing zone to the Dazaifu, the government outpost in Kyushu.  Even during the height of the Kamakura shogunate, this was still an important administrative center, and would have given the Mongols a huge advantage on holding territory and eventually sweeping up the archipelago. Fortunately, they were stopped.  Whether it was the gumption, skill, and downright stubbornness of their samurai foes or the divine wind that swept up from the ocean, the Mongols were turned back, twice. During each of these invasions, the Matsura clan and others rushed to the defense of the nation, but unlike with the Toi invasions, there do not appear to have been any serious battles along the Matsuura coastline—not that I can make out, anyway. After the Mongol invasion, Kyushu was not left out of the troubles that would follow, including the downfall of the Hojo, the rise of the Ashikaga, and the eventual breakdown of the shogunal system into the period known as the Warring States period.  Through it all the Matsura continued to ply the seas and encourage the trade from which they and others, like the Sou of Tsushima, came to depend on.  They also allied with other entrepreneurial seafarers, known to others as pirates, and they started trading with a group of weird looking people with hairy beards and pale skin, who came to be known as the Nanban, the southern barbarians—known to us, primarily, as the Portuguese. One faction of the Matsura were the Hata—no relation to the Hata that set up in what would become the Kyoto region in the early periods of Yamato state formation.  The Hata ruled the area that would become Karatsu, but eventually they were taken over by the Ryuzoji, who were allied with Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi's interest in the Karatsu and Matsura area had to do with its easy access to the continent.  And so Hideyoshi began to pay attention to Nagoya, at the end of the peninsula down from Karatsu.  And no, not *that* Nagoya.  If you hear Nagoya, today, you are probably talking about the bustling metropolis in Aichi, which was where Toyotomi himself got his start, growing up and going to work for the local warlord, named Oda Nobunaga.  Due to a quirk of Japanese names and how they read particular characters, this is a different Nagoya. The Kyushu Nagoya had been one of the Matsura trading posts, run by a sub-branch of the Hata family, who had built a castle on the site.  Hideyoshi had much grander plans for the area.  In 1591 he began work on a massive castle and associated castle town.  This castle was to be his new headquarters, and he moved his entire retinue there from Osaka, with an expectation that all of the daimyo would follow him.  Sure enough, they showed up with their own vassals, setting up camps around the peninsula and in the new city-to-be. The castle was the base of operations from which Hideyoshi coordinated the invasions of Korea.  It was a massive undertaking, and extremely impressive.  The city itself sprung up, and although the wood was still new, and the buildings somewhat hastily put together, it was soon a bustling metropolis and briefly became the center of art and culture in the entire archipelago. Hideyoshi himself had a teahouse built within the confines of the castle, where he apparently spent most of his days, even when receiving reports on how things were going across the sea on the archipelago.  The city had a Noh theater, as well.  It must have been a sight to see. As for the castle itself, based on the remains, it was massive.  It appears to use the contours of the hill upon which it sits.  It seems there was a previous castle there of some kind, and it is unclear how much this was merely expanded, but Hideyoshi's new castle was truly monumental, with a labyrinth of gates to get in -- similar  to Himeji Castle, for anyone who has been there, but with a serious vertical incline as well.  Nagoya Castle was second only to Osaka castle, and yet it was erected quickly—only 8 months.  I guess that's what you can do when you can mobilize all of the daimyo across Japan.  Even today, ruined as it is, the walls tower over you, and you can spend hours wandering the grounds. For all that it was impressive, the good times at Nagoya Castle lasted only for a brief seven years—when Hideyoshi passed away, the council of regents moved back to Osaka, and Nagoya castle was deliberately destroyed, stones removed from the walls such that it could never survive a true siege. This was a sign to the Korean peninsula – the Joseon court - that, with the death of the taiko, Japan had given up any pretext of conquering the peninsula. Today, only the stones and earthworks remain of the briefly thriving city, but on the grounds is a wonderful museum that catalogs this particular slice of Medieval life.  The Nagoya Castle Museum of Saga prefecture is off the beaten path—there is no train, so you'll need to take a bus or private car to get there—but it is well worth it. The museum itself is dedicated to Japanese and Korean cross-strait relations, which feels a bit like atonement given that the castle was built with conquest in mind. Of course, the centerpiece of the Museum is the castle, but it also does a good job telling the story of relations between the peninsula and the archipelago.  It starts in the ancient times, talking about how, even during the Jomon period, there were commonalities in fishhooks and similar equipment found from Kyushu up through the Korean peninsula.  From there, of course, trade continued, as we've seen in our journey through the Chronicles.  It talks about some of the shared cultural items found from the Yayoi through the Kofun, and also demonstrates how some of the earliest Buddhist statues have clear similarities to those found in Silla.  It goes over the various missions back and forth, and even gives a map of the Toi Invasion that we talked about hitting Tsushima and Iki. The Mongol invasion is also heavily talked about, but not nearly so much as the invasion of Korea.  There is another reproduction of the letter of King Sejeong, with the faked seal from the Sou clan in Tsushima.  This of course, was the period when they built Nagoya-jo into a castle and city of at least 100,000 people, almost overnight.  Even the Nanban were there, trading in the city while supplies from across the country were gathered and shipped off to keep troops fed on the invasion of Korea. There are plenty of images from this time—from a Ming envoy to Nagoya castle to images of the invasion from the Korean perspective, with Koreanized samurai manning the walls of the castles they had taken.  They don't exactly lionize the samurai, but they don't accentuate some of the more horrific things, either, like the piles of ears taken from those killed because taking their heads, as was standard practice in older days, was too cumbersome. There is also some discussion of relations afterwards—of the Joseon embassies, though those went through Hakata, Nagoya-jo having long been abandoned at that point.  For reasons one can probably understand, it doesn't go into the post-Edo relations, as that is much more modern history. After the destruction of Nagoya castle, the area was largely abandoned, but the city of Karatsu proper really thrived during the Edo period.  Karatsu was also a castle town, as we've mentioned, but a bit out of the way.  As sailing ships were now more sturdy and able to handle longer sea crossings, it was now often Hakata, in Fukuoka, that received much of the trade, and the Dutch traders who had replaced the Portuguese, were limited to Dejima, in Nagasaki. When Hideyoshi swept through, the Hata were not exactly considered trustworthy, and were placed under the Nabeshima, a branch of their rivals, the Ryuzouji.  During the invasion of Korea, the Hata rebelled, and were destroyed for it in 1593.  Their territory was given to Terazawa Hirotaka, who had been put in charge of the construction of Nagoya castle and later put in charge of the logistics for the invasion effort from the Kyushu side.  As a result, he was granted the lands formerly controlled by the Hata, including Karatsu, and what would become the Karatsu domain. Hirotaka could see which way the wind blew—in more ways than one.  After Hideyoshi's death, he supported Tokugawa Ieyasu, allowing him to keep and even expand his fief.  He redirected the Matsura river—then known as the Hata river—to its present course, and he built a pine grove along the northern beach that is the third largest such grove in all of Japan.  Known as the “Niji no Matsubara”, or the ”Rainbow Pine Forest” for its shape, it was erected as a windbreak to protect the precious farmland just on the other side.  It is still there today, still managed, and quite famous.  You can drive through the pine trees or stop and walk through them, even out to the beach.   And there is even a fantastic burger truck that parks along the main road through the pine grove, so you can enjoy a lovely picnic among the trees. The Terazawa would not remain in place for very long.  During the Shimabara rebellion of the early 17th century—a rebellion based on either taxes or Christianity, depending on whom you ask—the Terazawa line was extinguished.  Terazawa Katataka, then ruler of the Karatsu domain, was held liable for mismanagement of the domain and loss of a castle to the rebels.  He had land confiscated and he felt publicly humiliated, and so he took his own life while he was in Edo.  As he had no heir, the Terazawa line died out. Karatsu domain went through a variety of hands after that.  Its value fluctuated, but it is generally thought that the real value of the domain, thanks to the ability to trade, was well beyond what it was assessed to produce.  As such it was a lucrative position, and also held sway as a check against Nagasaki, watching the trade there with the Dutch merchants.  Because of all of this, the lord of Karatsu was also banned from holding certain government positions, so as not to distract from their duties, making the position something of a blessing and a curse. Through the years, Karatsu thrived.  They were and are still known for a type of traditional pottery, known as Karatsumono, or Karatsuware, and they maintain elaborate festivals.  One of the festivals, the Karatsu Kunchi, is considered a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.The Karatsu Kunchi is an annual parade where neighborhood associations carry giant floats through the city from Karatsu Shrine down to the shore.  It was inspired, in the early 19th century, by the famous Gion Matsuri of Kyoto—a wealthy merchant saw that and donated the first lion-head float to Karatsu Shrine.  Later, others would create their own floats. These floats, known as “Hikiyama” or “pulled mountains” can be five or six meters high and weigh anywhere from two to five tons.  There appear to be 14 hikiyama, currently, though there used to be 15—a black lion is currently missing.  The floats have gone through a few iterations, but are largely the same, and often have some relationship to the neighborhoods sponsoring them. From Matsura, aka Matsuro-koku, we went north along the coast of Kyushu to Itoshima, thought to the be old country of Ito-koku, and beyond that, the Na-koku of Fukuoka.  We'll cover both of those in our next and final installment of our Gishiwajinden tour. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to us at our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.

島嶼 dǎo yǔ - island 馬祖 mǎ zǔ - Matsu 群島 qún dǎo - archipelago 組成了 zǔ chéng le - composed of 公里 gōng lǐ - kilometer 台灣本島 tái wān běn dǎo - Taiwan main island 戰爭的最前線 zhàn zhēng de zuì qián xiàn - the front line of war 豐富 fēng fù - rich 戰地文化 zhàn dì wén huà - war zone culture 防禦 fáng yù - defense 坑道 kēng dào - tunnel 碉堡 diāo bǎo - bunker 防空洞 fáng kōng dòng - air-raid shelter 政治宣導 zhèng zhì xuān dǎo - political propaganda 精神標語 jīng shén biāo yǔ - motivational slogans 心戰喊話站 xīn zhàn hǎn huà zhàn - psychological warfare broadcasting station 海景 hǎi jǐng - sea view 金黃潔白 jīn huáng jié bái - golden and white 沙灘 shā tān - beach 藍眼淚 lán yǎn lèi - Blue Tears 夜光藻 yè guāng zǎo - bioluminescent plankton 群聚 qún jù - gather 岸邊 àn biān - shore 形成 xíng chéng - form 夜晚 yè wǎn - night 發光 fā guāng - glow 現象 xiàn xiàng - phenomenon 藍光 lán guāng - blue light 海浪 hǎi làng - waves 擺動 bǎi dòng - sway Follow me on Instagram: fangfang.chineselearning !

Our Happy Half Hour guest today is the local chapter CEO of probably one of the most beloved and recognizable charities in the world: The Make-A-Wish Foundation, San Diego chapter. We invited Suzanne Husby, who garnered her title in 2021, to talk all things Make-a-Wish at Matsu in Oceanside. Husby has been with the foundation for 17 years, moving up the ranks from intern to wish coordinator, a few more big titles, and finally ending up as chapter CEO most recently. Her specialty was overseeing wish-granting operations, volunteer management, and medical outreach, and she was key in granting a whopping more than 3,200 wishes for local children. Recently, the Foundation decided to partner with executive chef/owner William Eick of Matsu to host their upcoming gala and collaborate on special appearances to benefit Make-A-Wish. When gala chair Dai Logan first approached chef Eick, it was instant kismet. Logan had been a superfan of the chef while chef Eick has always had big heart for the organization. The pair formed a new friendship and partnership shortly after. In the episode, Husby chats wish fulfillment and details several wish-making missions that have taken place in San Diego during her decades-long tenure at the organization. As we chat, Logan opens up about her Happy Half Hour fandom as well as her recent trip to Japan, during which she existed solely on chef Eick's recommendations, and shares a special bottle of sake with us that she brought back to the states. Finally, we get the scoop on the foundation's Make-a-Wish gala which takes place on October 12 at the Park Hyatt Aviara with chef Eick. Closing out the show, Troy discovers radishes at Marisi; Jackie finally finds NY-style pizza that she likes; 24 Suns pop-up is teaming up with IRS Cocktails to open Swan & Fox in Oceanside; the Puesto group is opening a CDMX-style restaurant at The Headquarters; and The Del is opening beer spot The Laundry Pub as part of its new sprawling reno.

TONIGHT: The show begins in Gaza and Ukraine, then to the White House, to Kyiv and retreating from Donbas. To NATO exercise across Europe. To Rio, to Bogota, Buenos Aires, the Flaklands, San Salvador, Panama.  Then to 1920 and the six presidents in the mix. To Shanghai and Hong Kong as the market sinks, to Quemoy and Matsu. To the South Pole of the Moon, and to Mars. 1886 Robur the Conqueror, Jules Verne

#TAIWAN: #PRC: The famous Quemoy and Matsu. Rebecca Grant, president of IRIS Independent Research and a visiting fellow of the Lexington Institute, @GordonGChang, Gatestone, Newsweek, The Hill https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68345292   1857 China

In this inspiring episode of the Must Read Alaska Show, host John Quick engages with Mat-Su Assemblyman Rob Yundt, a dedicated leader and Alaska state senate candidate, who embodies the spirit of public service and community dedication.  Yundt opens up about the motivations behind his decision to run for office, highlighting his commitment to giving back to the community by donating his entire salary to Alaskan nonprofits.  As a seasoned business owner and family man, Yundt brings a wealth of experience and a fresh perspective to politics, advocating for the incorporation of common-sense business practices into government operations.  His stance on halting the government's borrowing spree to fund its activities sets him apart as a candidate focused on sustainable financial policies. Tune in to discover how Rob Yundt's passion for public service and pragmatic approach to governance could shape the future of Alaska's legislative landscape. For more information about Rob Yundt and his vision for Alaska, visit his campaign website at www.robforalaska.com

PREVIEW: #TAIWAN: #PRC: #QUEMOY: #MATSU: #EISEN  Excerpt from a conversation with colleagues Gordon Chang and Rebecca Grant re the famous island of Quemoy and Matsu off the coast of the PRC -- asking Gordon what is it like to walk on the rolling sand dunes of what could have been a trigger for nuclear war in the Eisenhower Administration.  More later tonight. 1922 Taiwan

ROBERT CHARLES, Spokesman, Association of Mature American Citizens, Former Assistant Secretary, State at the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs in the Bush Administration, Author, “Eagles and Evergreens,” @RCharles4USA Charles' personal experience in the Soviet Union Analyzing the death of Alexei Navalny Chinese "grow houses" discovered in Maine STEVEN MOSHER, President, Population Research Institute, Author, “Bully of Asia: Why China's Dream is the New Threat to the World,” @StevenWMosher The importance of Taiwan's Matsu island chain Chinese incursions into Taiwanese sea and airspace A history of the relationship between China and the Soviet Union Is China's "window of opportunity" to invade Taiwan closing? BILL WALTON, Host, The Bill Walton Show A preview of CPAC 2024 How much does the U.S. contribute to the funding of the World Health Organization (WHO)? China's role in the WHO