Podcasts about new york's chinatown

Thursday on the NewsHour, the top U.S. military officer apologizes for joining President Trump in a controversial June 1 photo op amid protests in Washington, D.C. Plus: Unemployment in America, protests against racism extend beyond the U.S., the struggles of black-owned businesses, dealing with addiction during the pandemic, strengthening American democracy and community in New York's Chinatown. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Chinatown is typically a vibrant and bustling staple of New York City. But as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the area became a ghost town, and some people there experienced xenophobic attacks. In response, longtime resident Karlin Chan created a neighborhood community patrol to keep everyone safe. Chan offers his Brief But Spectacular take on the Chinatown Block Watch. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Chinatown is typically a vibrant and bustling staple of New York City. But as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the area became a ghost town, and some people there experienced xenophobic attacks. In response, longtime resident Karlin Chan created a neighborhood community patrol to keep everyone safe. Chan offers his Brief But Spectacular take on the Chinatown Block Watch. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Chinatown is typically a vibrant and bustling staple of New York City. But as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the area became a ghost town, and some people there experienced xenophobic attacks. In response, longtime resident Karlin Chan created a neighborhood community patrol to keep everyone safe. Chan offers his Brief But Spectacular take on the Chinatown Block Watch. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Jackson Bliss is an assistant professor of creative writing at BGSU. His genre-bending fiction focuses on being mixed-race in a global world. This episode features a conversation about exploring identity through writing and a reading from his forthcoming novel, The Amnesia of June Bugs.   Transcript: Intro: This podcast features instances of explicit language. If you are listening with children, you may want to save this conversation for later. Intro: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Musical Intro: I'm going to show you this. It's a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome to the Big Ideas Podcast, brought to you by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American culture studies and the director of ICS. Jolie Sheffer: Today I'm joined by Dr. Jackson Kanahashi Bliss. Bliss is an assistant professor in the creative writing program here at BGSU. He's published in The New York Times, The Boston Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, and many other publications. He earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. Today we have the pleasure of hearing him read from his new work, Amnesia of Junebugs. Thanks for joining me today, Jackson. Jackson  Bliss: Happy to be here. Jolie Sheffer: You are both a creative writer and a literary scholar. How do you think of your creative writing as being shaped by scholarship on Asian American literature? Are there other ways in which you see your work as interdisciplinary? Jackson  Bliss: Yeah, it's a funny marriage, actually, and I think it's an accidental one, because, in the beginning, I wrote most experimentally, and then when I started studying Asian American studies, I realized there was a sort of strong bent towards experimentalism and activism and how it connects to ethnic nationalism, ethnic studies, academic studies, and academic centers and universities. So this was completely accidental. I didn't intentionally sort of imitate the preferred genre of activist-minded APIA literature. It just sort of happened that way. But the more I studied Asian American studies, particularly works like Immigrant Acts by Lisa ... What's her last name? Jolie Sheffer: Lowe. Jackson  Bliss: Lisa Lowe. Yeah. It sort of made me realize there's a strong sort of push against the stylistics of the empire, which tends to be connected to linear narratives and coming-of-age stories. That made me want to write that story, particularly because I found it a little bit both historically informed, but also generically arbitrary that a particular sub-genre of fiction would supposedly work so well, right, in something that we are actively trying to deconstruct. Jackson  Bliss: I feel like writers like Viet Thanh Nguyen are perfect examples of people who said, "No, you can have a narrative arc and do a lot of important work instead of deconstructing standardized, sort of imposed European models of narrative." Jackson  Bliss: So I think all of those things appealed to me a lot. So it became much more conscious the more I wrote fiction, I think. Yeah. But in the beginning, it was totally accidental and organic. Jolie Sheffer: Your peace Dukkha, My Love is an experimental hypertext novella, created for the web. Can you describe our audience, what that term means? What is an electronic novella, and what can people expect when encountering a text like that? What were you hoping to explore, both formally and thematically? Jackson  Bliss: I think part of it is that there is a very tiny archive of electronic writing, just in general. If you go to the standard places that catalog experimental writing, for example, they're really small. They're highly limited. A lot of writers that write experimentally or create online hypertext don't even publish through them. They just publish on their website. So it's highly decentralized in a way that can be really frustrating for, for example, scholars in new media, because there is no clearinghouse for someone to find all the works. Jackson  Bliss: I think the thing that new readers of hypertext, which is online experimental writing, have to sort of keep in mind is a lot of it is about the ability to create your own narrative, sort of on your own terms. This is sort of the burden, but the beauty of reading. In Dukkha, My Love, essentially, readers click on hypertext, not knowing where it takes them. So they have control, but they're doing it blindly, right? So there's a lot of that going on. It's highly immersive, but it's also indeterminate in terms of where your freedom and control as a reader will take you. Jackson  Bliss: Eventually, as readers start reading more and more, they sort of participate in the cyclicity of the three intersecting narratives, which is absolutely part of the point of reading it, which is the ways in which there is a historical cycle that would repeat, the ways in which we repeat sort of certain cultural modalities of xenophobia and fear against the other, the ways in which our own understanding of reality sort of goes in these continuous cycles of knowledge and awareness and denial, and the proof of this as well is on the first page, when readers click on one of the destinations, where you can basically pick where you want the story to go. It'll even say, "My life is a circle," right, sort of reinscribing this idea in the reader that they are participating in it, but they are not necessarily aware of where they're going, which I think is kind of a fitting cultural analogy of sort of our own conceptualization of history, right? So we sort of have an idea of where it's going, but we're sort of blind as to where exactly it lands. Jackson  Bliss: So yeah, it took me about probably four years of doing research and writing the excerpts and about four months of teaching myself how to code enough to learn how to strip audio files off of YouTube videos and then basically take my own music and sort of record it and then time it and cut it in such a way where it worked with the videos, which I basically ripped off from the Learning Channel and someone else. God bless all of you. Thank you for your fine work. Jackson  Bliss: Yeah. But I was learning as I was creating. That particular genre was something I had never done before, and that's why I wanted to contribute to the discourse, because I felt like it's pretty emaciated, in terms of a genre, right, but also highly accessible. Those two things really appealed to me. Jolie Sheffer: That project in particular, you set yourself a set of hurdles that were challenges you had to then work within, right? So you make something that is, by nature, through coding, deeply linear and kind of limit certain pathways. It is not an endlessly, right? You have to create a set of possibilities, which means foreclosing others, and yet your work itself and the things that interest you are all about the chaotic, the unpredictable, the messy. So how did you kind of respond to the challenge that you set for yourself? Did you feel like you'd handcuffed yourself, or was it liberating, in some sense, to have to work within these limitations? Jackson  Bliss: To be honest, I thought the limitations were there to keep me sane, because I think I would have lost my (beep) mind if I had literally created a work of infinity, because, originally, the idea was I was going to create [inaudible 00:06:50] Book of Sand, right? You could almost make that argument, but if you read Dukkha, My Love enough, you will eventually hit the same narrative strand. So you do sort of touch on finitude at some point. It's impossible to avoid that textual finitude. Jackson  Bliss: But the constraints ended up being lifesavers for me, because this project otherwise could have gone on forever. Let me give you an example. When I was trying to keep track of all the three separate narrative strands and then create a separate stub for each one on my website, this required a level of organization that, frankly, I don't like to have in my art. That goes against my entire ethos as a multimodal, mixed-race, experimentalist-leaning, voice-driven, stylized writer. Yet here we were, where I basically had to control my choices, one, so that I could finish this product before the next semester started and, two, to sort of create a bottleneck, I guess, a narrative bottleneck, where, at some point, everything does have to go through certain sort of narrative choices. Jackson  Bliss: That's both because of the limitation in my coding skills, frankly, but also because there are certain sort of narrative strands I want readers to go through, and I don't want them to necessarily be negotiable. So, for that reason, the index page is, in and of itself, a sort of delimitation of the narrative choices, right? Readers only have basically 10 to 15 places to choose, and then they only have 4 to 10 actionable links on that page. So it sort of starts and ends with finitude. Jackson  Bliss: There is, believe it or not, those of you that have read this, a goodbye page, an acknowledgement page, but, as it turns out, it's incredibly (beep) difficult to find. I mean, I can't even find it, and there's other details that I put that I think were just a little too [inaudible 00:08:41] for themselves. There was an asterisk next to certain narrative strands, letting readers know, "Hey, this is it. This is about to take you to the final page," and I hope that readers would note that this was connected to the theme of the star colonies. That's why the asterisk's there. But you have to scroll down, and if you don't scroll down, you don't see it, and then it doesn't take you to the final page. Jackson  Bliss: But I'm not upset about this. I don't hate myself. I have accepted that there are limitations to reading, and you really can't predict, unless you're into analytics, what your readers are going to do. To me, that's the beauty of it, is that it gives readers, essentially, some blind power to decide how the story is told, which, frankly, isn't done very often in speculative fiction. So that's why it appealed to me. Jolie Sheffer: Much of your work deals with being hapa, or mixed race. How do you see your identity playing a role in your creative work, or, conversely, how has your fiction played a role in your understanding of your own identity? Jackson  Bliss: It's interesting you ask me that, because, in the beginning, when I look back to my earliest fiction, all my characters were white, and this is for a couple of reasons. One, because, at that point, I was definitely passing as white. Two, it's just simply easier for me and my mom, who's hapa as well, my brother, who's also hapa, to just not push the mixed-race button. I was born in Northern Michigan. I didn't live in a community where we celebrated, right, sort of any sort of multicultural, multiracial identity. Jackson  Bliss: There was a lot of survival going on. I mean, even my obachan would not speak to me in Japanese unless I begged her. This was partially because she had a sort of assimilationist paradigm, when it came to living in America. So she thought she was helping me by just making me only speak English. Jackson  Bliss: So, ironically, as I got older and started realizing I have two very different racial and cultural modalities, I mean, I'm literally the son of Japanese immigrants on my mom's side, and that's how close that side of the genealogy is. It's insane I'm never writing about that. It's bizarre that I don't talk about that. I think part of it's because I didn't know how to. There's a lot of things I love about growing up in the Midwest, but it's culturally not the most progressive place to examine your racial hybridity, and I think if I had grown up in SF or New York City, a place where there are strong multicultural identities as the centering of the urban ethos, I probably would have found myself a lot earlier. So it took me a long time. Jackson  Bliss: So I realized at one point that my racial hybridity, in a lot of ways, sort of mimicked my generic hybridity, right, where I like to write in a lot of different genres. I sort of pick and choose. I don't feel like I should be pigeonholed. I sort of embrace this idea that I can almost pick the concept of the neutral, in terms of what it means and [inaudible 00:11:35]'s notion of you don't have to pick one side or other. You can choose to not pick between two options, especially when they're highly binary and deeply delimiting, existentially. Jackson  Bliss: So these things sort of coincided. My desire to sort of subvert genre conventions and just find whatever's the right genre and voice for me coincided with my realization that I had a lot I wanted to understand and investigate about my own mixed-race identity, as someone who's French, British, and Japanese. So it's really my PhD years where I really started fully embracing this and really interrogating it. Jolie Sheffer: What kinds of research do you do for your creative work? You alluded to some of that. What scholars or authors have shaped your work and worldview? Jackson  Bliss: The first people to influence my voice, Junot Diaz and then JD Salinger, and the third one is Zadie Smith. These three writers really informed my whole conception of voice and textual and racial hybridity. So the thing I liked about JD Salinger as a teenage boy was the authenticity of someone questioning authenticity, right? That sort of self blindness, I found really compelling, right? Jolie Sheffer: All his talk of phoneys, right? Jackson  Bliss: Yeah, phoneys. Right. Jolie Sheffer: Yeah. Jackson  Bliss: In many ways, he's [Salinger] the phoniest of all. But, on the other hand, there's a tender side to him that often gets ignored, where he's deeply concerned about preventing trauma to people, because he himself appears to be traumatized, in a way that Holden Caulfield was incapable of sort of working out. So that was powerful to me, and the stylization of the voice was really powerful. Jackson  Bliss: But then when I read White Teeth by Zadie Smith and then Drown by Junot Diaz, I suddenly realized that there was space for my voice, this sort of multicultural urban realism combining with almost sort of Creole sort of language, patois, right, in English. I didn't know that you could do that. I didn't know we were allowed to put the language of our other identity into English. It sounds really crazy when I hear it, but yeah, it was sort of a revelation to me that we could have a stylized voice that sort of embraced and sort of interrogated and was a product of a multicultural identity. Jackson  Bliss: With White Teeth, I think I was just so invested in the ways in which she sort of did these portraitures of different racial and historical and cultural communities and gave each of them a sort of majesty and humanity and an interrogation that I found really amazing and actually rare and then combine it with a sort of these moments of maximization, where the language just explodes off the page, right? Jackson  Bliss: I realized these writers were doing a lot of important work that I myself wanted to do, that I needed to understand better and also, at the same time, that they were giving me permission to sort of figure out my own narrative modality, my own stylized voice, because it's easy to feel like you have to basically come off as neutral, which is code for sounding white. A lot of writers of color I'm friends with feel the same way. They feel this invisible constraint all the time to write in a way where Ivy League-educated, East Coast white readers will understand and connect with. Jackson  Bliss: The problem is there's things that that demographic cannot connect with, and if we write for this imagined, embodied, universal voice, we can give up a lot of the most vital parts of our own sort of unique lyricism and our own techniques for storytelling. So that was a huge revelation for me. Jolie Sheffer: You recently published an essay in TriQuarterly called The Cult of Likability, or Why You Should Kill Your Literary Friendships. In it, you talk about how readers frequently criticize characters for their likeability, or lack thereof. Do you see this as a racialized or gendered criticism, and what qualities do you think are important to make characters compelling? Jackson  Bliss: I do think it's heavily racialized, and I think it's heavily gendered. I think it works in a really sort of sinister, unconscious way for a lot of people. There's still this notion of universal literary merit. When something's amazing, it has this broad appeal. But universality in literature, at least in the 21st century, is mostly code for literature that appeals to a massive white readership. What I've noticed in my workshops, but also in a lot of book reviews, is that works that are written with characters of color or by authors of color or both, especially when they're women, are much more heavily criticized than when they are, for example, white narrators or white female narrators, right? Jolie Sheffer: Yeah. You don't hear people complaining that Humbert Humbert wasn't likable enough in Lolita. Jackson  Bliss: Right. Exactly. Yeah. Jolie Sheffer: That's not the criticism, or that Rabbit Angstrom isn't likable. Jackson  Bliss: Right. That's right. So one of the arguments I made in this essay is, first of all, some of the most important works that I think have shaped, in a positive way, a sort of expanding sort of foundational text canon in America comes from books that weren't necessarily fun to read, with characters who we didn't necessarily like at all, who are important. I mean, Native Son has Bigger Thomas, I think his name is, and that's a crucial character, right? To say, "I don't like this, because I didn't get him" or "I didn't like him" or "He didn't appeal to me" is so essentially irrelevant to the importance, both culturally and historically and racially, that that voice sort of incarnates. Jackson  Bliss: I'm noticing a tendency now where liter agents and now MFA students and a lot of readers are using love and infatuation as this sort of literary metric for determining the value of something. "I didn't love it. I didn't love the voice. I didn't love the character," as if we are now given permission to not consider the literary value of the work, the importance of the marginalized voice, for example, because we realize we don't like the character. Jackson  Bliss: I think it's connected, partially, to cancel culture. But I also think it's partially connected to reality TV, because, with reality television, when we saw a character we didn't like, we would vote them off. So, essentially, likability had consequences, right? Jackson  Bliss: What I think is happening now is people are reading texts that decenter them or ask them to do work or research. Suddenly, they will just decide, "I don't like this character," and that's the end of it. Jolie Sheffer: It also seems to me, though, related to what you were talking about before, which is that if you don't recognize, if you're encountering a new voice, a new perspective, that is not one that you have been taught to recognize because of literature and because of established kind of genres of reading, that first impulse might be, "I don't like this person," and it takes time to actually get used to new voices. Jackson  Bliss: That's right. Yeah, and I think that sort of discomfort maybe at being de-centered is a completely understandable, very normal one. Everyone feels that way. The problem is communities of color and marginalized communities have felt this their entire lives. They go into any room, they go into any white space, and they are always de-centered, all the time. I think this is something that, in general, white readers are a lot less capable and patient and willing to deal with, in part because they've never had to, right? Jackson  Bliss: So for this to happen in the sort of sacred American pastime of reading I think rubs people the wrong way, but I feel there is a silver lining, which is these readers can sit in that lack of comfort and know, at the end of the day, that it's going to be okay and that they will work it out and they will start to slowly understand these characters and potentially empathize with them. But that takes time, and if we don't learn to learn about people and sort of enter into their space, we will never get there. Jackson  Bliss: That's actually one of the arguments I make in this essay, which is not only would we erase some of the greatest literature written by writers of color if we decide we don't like the characters, but, more importantly, we lose our critical thinking skills and our empathetic ones, because this requires us to learn from the other, whoever the other is for us. Jackson  Bliss: I think that's my issue with likability, is it's become this eroticized literary metric, as if infatuation is actually a legitimate metric to analyze the literary value of a work. Frankly, I don't give a (beep) whether someone loves a book of mine or not. What I care about is if they can enter into it, if they can learn from it, if they can go someplace new, from the end of the book to when they started. To me, that's, in some ways, almost more important. Jackson  Bliss: Whether I'm friends with a character, whether we're besties or not is ... I could give two (beep) about that. But it's becoming a sort of standard comment to make in workshop, and I do my best to sort of interrogate that a little bit. But I feel like we have now reached a point in our culture where not liking something, in our eyes, gives us permission to essentially dismiss it. Jolie Sheffer: We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas Podcast. Intro: If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie Sheffer: Hello, and welcome back to the Big Ideas Podcast. Today I'm talking to Dr. Jackson Bliss about fiction, form, and mixed-race identity. You prepared a reading for us called The Amnesia of Junebugs. Can you tell us a bit about the piece you're going to read and where it fits into the work as a whole? Jackson  Bliss: Sure. So this is a tiny excerpt from one of four principal characters. This character's name is Winnie Yu, and he's essentially a culture jammer. So he creates political graffiti, and/or he takes ads from companies and essentially turns the ads against themselves by adding different color, texture to essentially make the ad self-indict itself. It's a very sort of critical novel, as a whole, on capitalism and sort of begs for the role that public art plays in a sort of taking back of streets that are essentially corporatized, in a lot of ways. Jackson  Bliss: So this tiny part here is just a tiny sort of backstory of Winnie describing the first time he realized he did not live in Asia, but that he actually lived in New York City, a tiny secret he didn't realize at the time because he had never taken a train to another borough. So that's sort of like the context for this work. Jackson  Bliss: Winnie had lived off of the Bowery his whole life. Didn't even know that New York was in America until he was six. His parents spoke Cantonese, Taiwanese. Everyone in his fam did. The market signs on Grand Street, where his mom bought her groceries, were written in simplified Chinese characters. His neighbors watched Cantonese soap operas in the afternoon. Old men hung out at Mr. Chang's corner store at night, playing dominoes and drinking ginseng tea and Viper Whiskey, cracking jokes in Wu. His super was Fujian, the cheapest mother (beep) he'd ever seen, who tried to fix everything with duct tape, tinfoil, and DAP. Jackson  Bliss: For the longest time, Winnie believed he lived in Asia. He thought white people were the tourists. But in one day, Mama changed the rules of his storytelling. By taking the subway together for the first time to Brooklyn, she thought it would be cool for them to go over the Manhattan Bridge, and it kind of was. He'd never ridden over a bridge before, didn't understand that New York City had islands or that they were connected together by bridges, the vertebrae of the urban body. It took him a long time to see that subway lines are veins; the major subways, arteries; the streets, capillaries. Jackson  Bliss: Until that fateful and transformative day, Winnie didn't know he lived in a fractal world, in a city of billboards, insects, damaged vascular systems and wandering spirits. He didn't know that New York is an ethnographic sponge, silently absorbing the screenplay of immigration. He didn't know that New York is a megapolis, its streets, highways, and bridges resembling the human nervous system. NYC is an urban hive imploding with refugee stories, diasporic longing, bustling multiculturalism, and inherited fortune, a collapsing urban space where culture dances between neighborhoods and history intersects ethnicity, creating abstract forms that interact, but don't touch each other, like a kaleidoscope. Jackson  Bliss: Until that day, Winnie thought New York was only ten blocks, from Mr. Chang's bodega all the way to Good Times Dry Cleaners. He thought New York was the unofficial capital of Taiwan, a nation and an island and a freaky global village. He was half right, actually. Jackson  Bliss: The straight (beep) is that the day they took the train over the Manhattan Bridge, Mama was showing him the way to St. Ursula's School, were Asian, Latino, and black kids wore unforgiving white polo shirts with stiff colors that dug into their necks like plow yokes and old man pants with creases running down their legs like highway meetings that resisted wrinkles and clumps and refused to be rolled up at the ankles at a school were Asian, Latino, and black girls were forced to wear skimpy plaid skirts, even in the spring, where poor students of color pretended they were rich, rich white students pretended they were gangsta, and all the teachers spoke Midtown English. It was an academy of impersonations and a theater of the restless mind. Jackson  Bliss: The day Mama enrolled Winnie in Catholic school and filled out the paperwork for a St. Martin de Porres Scholarship for Immigrant Students, a detail and a reference he wouldn't even understand until he was in high school, when he realized his mom had accidentally taken away his fixed identity and shoved him into a chrysalis of his own making. As they passed over the Manhattan Bridge again, he didn't understand how the whole world he'd seen that day could all be one city, didn't understand why all the Asian people disappeared, or so it seemed, why no one spoke his family's languages anymore. Jackson  Bliss: Even now, as a 30 something, he still couldn't figure out how his parents had managed to sequester him from the class struggle, the racial conflict, and the spatial tension of inner-city life for as long as they did. What he did know is that after Mama had enrolled him for classes, smoothed his hair back for a school ID, bribed him with feng li su cakes from a Taiwanese Baker he'd never seen before to celebrate his enrollment, and then led his (beep) back to their apartment, pineapple paste caramelized in his teeth, Winnie realized that he didn't know (beep) about his American life anymore, except he wasn't living in Asia, and he certainly wasn't Catholic. Jackson  Bliss: As far as birthdays went, turning six (beep) sucked, the worst thing to happen to him, at least until explosive acne in 10th grade, at least until his Ba peaced out of his life for good too soon. Jolie Sheffer: You really set the scene of this world within a world, where a child could grow up in New York's Chinatown without realizing they were even in the US. You've lived in the Midwest, on the West Coast, in Japan, Argentina, and Burkina Faso. How do you approach the idea of setting a sense of place, in this story in particular and generally in your work? Jackson  Bliss: One thing is that I think places are characters. I have felt this way pretty much ever since, I think, I watched my first Bertolucci film. It's something I learned very early on, and I feel, as a writer who considers himself to be a sort of stylized urban maximalist, it's impossible for me to define or construct characters without understanding the sort of cultural context in which they grew up and evolve, because that's true for me, and that tends to be true for them. So, for me, setting and place are interconnected with voice and identity. Jolie Sheffer: What kind of research did you do for that piece? Jackson  Bliss: Mostly just walked around Chinatown a million times. I wrote a lot of this novel when I had an editorial internship at Hachette Books in New York City. I also visited in the fall of 2006. So I spent a lot of time just walking around New York City, taking the subway, looking for sort of famous graffiti that people were talking about. I spent a lot of time eating vegan dim sum in Chinatown. I feel like sometimes the best way to do research for cities is simply live in the city and see how it breathes. So a lot of it, yeah, was simply walking around, observing, taking notes, talking to my New York friends, asking them questions, asking my Chinese American friends questions. But most of it was just walking, breathing, living, eating in those places. Jolie Sheffer: Your characters always have very distinctive voices. You were just talking about character, but in the characters in your stories, how do you think about approaching developing their particular patterns of speech? Jackson  Bliss: I feel like, a lot of times, the verbal tics, they take time, because who I think a character is in the beginning when I write them is almost never who they are at the end, and then it's sort of up to me to go back and sort of reconcile the voice, so to speak, because there's this implicit rule in fiction where a character's voice has to actually be more consistent than people's voices in real life, right? Because in real life, we, for example, especially people I know who work in different sort of social, professional, racial, and cultural spheres, they code switch all the time, and this can seem inauthentic to people, but it's very normal. But in fiction, you actually have to have a more sort of reconciled voice that readers won't see as too contradictory. Otherwise, they won't think it's the same person. Jackson  Bliss: So this is one of those sort of secret constraints that most fiction writers I know struggle with. How do I keep a voice? How do I construct it, and then how do I maintain it? So I think a lot of times, I will read my dialogue out loud, and I'll just basically understand the character through their orality first, right? How do they sound? How do they feel? Jackson  Bliss: Then, I think, from there, I make modifications, especially when these characters make important sort of plot decisions that might alter their voice or their modulation in some way. For example, I once wrote a character, and then I realized halfway through, "Oh, this character isn't going to be Portuguese-Japanese. They're going to be" ... I don't know. I don't know what I decided, French-Japanese or something, and that changed some of the vocabulary, right? That changed some of the sort of place names and cultural references. Jackson  Bliss: I have another novella that's actually interconnected with this novel, and, for the longest time, it was written from a Senegalese American point of view, because I had spent a decent amount of time in West Africa. Then I realized I was interested to see what would happen if I changed the character and made him mixed-race and made him Japanese Senegalese American. I did that, and it suddenly transformed his voice. There were certain beats that didn't work anymore, right? There's certain slang that doesn't make sense anymore, and there are other things that had to sort of have a presence. Otherwise, it was just a whitewashed mixed-race character. Jackson  Bliss: I think that's the general process, but it always begins and, I think, ends with me simply speaking, because I need to literally hear the voice to understand it on the page. Jolie Sheffer: Lots of creative writers read their work in public, right? That is a kind of professional part of the job. You have a very particular kind of performative approach. How do you think about preparing what you're going to read, how you read, and how do you think that shapes your readers' or listeners' perception of the work? Jackson  Bliss: Yeah, I'll confess right now I'm a speech and debate geek, so in high school and even college, I was a debater, and I was one of those extemporaneous speakers. So I have a long history of sort of seeing the value that public speaking makes. Jackson  Bliss: But I also think that most of my important characters, the ones I'm really invested in emotionally, almost always have some level of identification with their language. So that's where the voice will end up being so sort of important and sort of fleshed out, and I've noticed in the past couple of years that when I give readings, I tend to read either the character or passages from a longer work that allows me to sort of take a very performative, language-driven sort of role in my reading. Jackson  Bliss: For that reason, if I've written a really difficult extemporaneous-feeling work that's actually highly edited and revised, that is really prolix, I guess, and heavily language-driven, I may not read it, especially if, for example, I can't find space to breathe. I have certain work that was pretty much meant to be read, even though I didn't realize it. Jackson  Bliss: So, for me, I think a lot about reading as performance, I think a lot about performance as text, and I think one of my big complaints with a lot of readings I go to is they tend to fall in a couple camps, which is, one, either they just read in this really monotone voice and they have this kind of arrogant idea that work should speak for itself. But the problem with that is what if you suck? What if you're awful? What if everyone's falling asleep? In that case, shouldn't they just stay home and read the book? Why did they waste their time to go out to this reading, where you became the greatest American sleep aid? But on the flip side, I've also seen people who sort of take it really far, and they act like they're basically unpaid beatniks. Jackson  Bliss: So I feel like every writer who ends up becoming a sort of social public figure on some level, which is inevitable once you start publishing, they have to negotiate the sort of reading ethos. For me, it's always been really important. I want readers and listeners to hear the rhythm, because musicality informs a lot of my writing, and that's from my music days. But I also want them to be transported, on some level, by my reading. I want them to feel the language and the cadence and the emotion. Jackson  Bliss: I used to get shamed when I was younger for my performances. People would be like, "Yeah, that was really something." Then you would go to their reading, and half the people were on their iPhones, fiddling away. So, for me, I see my readings as a performance, and I think that to ignore the audience is to be incredibly deceitful and to be delusional. You aren't reading to yourself. You're not reading to your partner. You're not reading to your little Shitzu. You're reading to people, and their experience should be something you think about, because that process is dialectical. It's not just about you, and it's not just about them, but there's an interplay that I honor and that I love. Jackson  Bliss: So yeah, I think a lot about how to read, when to read, and I always practice my readings because of that. Jolie Sheffer: Thank you so much, Jackson, for joining me today and sharing your work. Jackson  Bliss: Oh, it was my pleasure. Jolie Sheffer: You can find Dukkha, My Love and more of Jackson's work at his website, jacksonbliss.com. Jolie Sheffer: Our producers for this podcast are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza, with sound engineering by Jackson Williams. Research assistance for this podcast was provided by ICS intern Taylor Stagner, with editing by Stevie Scheurich. This conversation was recorded in the Stanton Audio Recording Studio in the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Center at Bowling Green State University.  

In Episode 39 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg explores the politics of the Hong Kong protests—and especially how they have been playing out in New York's Chinatown. It is natural that the Hong Kong protesters have made common cause with the Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongols also struggling for their rights and dignity against China's ruling party-state. But some supporters of these movements have come to embrace a separatist position, actually seeking independent states in Hong Kong, Tibet, East Turkistan and South Mongolia. Will self-determination for these regions and peoples be possible without active solidarity with the struggles for democracy and political empowerment by the Han Chinese majority of the People's Republic? Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon. Production by Chris Rywalt We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $25. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex New episodes will be produced every two weeks. We need your support.

The dark and violent side of the history of Chinatown, in New York City, during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Also: Police Blotter & Court News (Florida), November 24, 1899. HISTORICAL REFERENCES Troubled Times In Chinatown: Luc, Sante, Low Life (1991), at pp. 127-29; 144-47; 226-29. Tom Lee, Mayor of Chinatown (photo, 1913). Tom Lee, Infamous New York (blog page, 2013). Seligman, Scott, Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York's Chinatown (2016). Willemse, Cornelius, A Cop Remembers (1933), at pp. 309-14. Gilfoyle, Timothy, A Pickpocket's Tale (2006) (life and times of George Appo and Qimbo Appo). Beck, Louis, New York's Chinatown: An Historical Presentation of Its People and Places (1898). Connors, Chuck, Bowery Life (1904) (falsely identifies Connors as “the Mayor of Chinatown"). Funeral Procession of Tom Lee, Mayor of Chinatown (photo, 1918). Police Blotter and Court News: The Chipley Banner, Chipley, Florida, November 24, 1899. GUEST VOICES Troubled Times In Chinatown: Guest Narrator - Jessica Yuan, host of Asian Madness Podcast. Police Blotter and Court News: Guest Narrator - Erin Fleming, host of Redrum Blonde Podcast. Police Blotter Intro Title Voice - Maria Micklasavage - free-lance voice actor. Judge / Call to Order - Edward LeSaint, free lance actor and voice performer. Judge / Adjournment – Harry Morgan, free lance actor and voice performer. MISCELLANEOUS Exit Aphorism (voice) – Kit Caren of the Whispered True Stories podcast. Host Intro – Nina Innsted, the host of the Already Gone podcast. Exit Aphorism - Source: Chinatown (movie, 1974). MUSIC: Kevin MacLeod  of Incompetech.com – Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses / by 3.0 At Rest The Curtain Rises I Knew A Guy SOUND EFFECTS: Freesound.org  Applause Crowd Clapping Crowd Cheering Flaw and Disorder Gavel - 3 Strikes with room reverb Eighties synth beep  Success Jingle Wind Chime Monte 00 ukulele lick SoundEffectsArchive: Traditional Chinese Flute   T-SHIRTS, MUGS, AND OTHER SWAG - NOW AVAILABLE! Just click here!   HEY! CAN YOU HELP US?!   PLEASE HELP THE FORGOTTEN NEWS PODCAST TO COVER THE COSTS OF RESEARCH, INVESTIGATION, AUDIO EQUIPMENT. AND PODCAST HOSTING FEES.   ANY DONATION - EVEN A DOLLAR - WOULD REALLY HELP US OUT! Just click on this PayPal link, to contribute. PAYPAL Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!   HEY!  CONTACT US: E-Mail:  ForgottenNewsPodcast@gmail.com Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Forgotten-News-Podcast Twitter: @NewsForgotten @KitCaren @WhisperedTrue (kit caren)

This week's Saturday School is about the 1987 Mabel Cheung-directed film "An Autumn's Tale," starring Chow Yun-fat and Cherie Chung. We revisit a period in the '80s after the British have made a deal to hand over Hong Kong to China in 1997, there is a fear of of losing freedoms, a wave of emigration and a curiosity about what it'd be like to be an overseas Chinese. "An Autumn's Tale" is about Hong Kong woman named Jennifer who follows her boyfriend to New York to study, only to learn that he's found a more "liberal minded" Chinese American woman and thinks she should broaden her horizons. Her family has arranged for her to stay with someone who's a rumored to be a stand-up guy, the leader of the community, and it turns out it's Chow Yun-fat, a rambuctious working-class drinker and gambler with a soft side. Many Hong Kong films set in America at this time are martial arts action movies depicting it as the wild, wild West. "An Autumn's Tale" also shows New York's Chinatown as a grimy, slightly dangerous place, but one with the possibility of romance, especially if there's a handy fellow immigrant around to help you navigate it.

On an all new Cooking Issues, Dave and Nastassia are joined in the studio by Chef Richard Blais, a restaurateur, cookbook author, television personality, and winner of Bravo's Top Chef All-Stars. Chef Blais has also written a new cookbook, So Good: 100 Recipes from My Kitchen to Yours, which is out today! Tune in to hear them discuss ukuleles, bagpipes, Braveheart, the Ninja Turtles, how one procures frog legs in New York's Chinatown, miso, when to salt your eggs, anchovies, beets, searing duck breast, and more!

Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, curator, and writer. He is a founding principle, with Adam Michaels, of the New York design studio Project Projects and founder and curator of P!, an experimental exhibition space in New York's Chinatown. Additionally, Prem is an editor for the art journal Paper Monument and on the board of directors for Triple Canopy. In August, I visited Project Projects's office to talk with Prem about these range of projects. Over the course of the conversation, we talk about the relationship between design and writing, the role of authorship, the false divide between form and content, and the writers he's been enjoying lately. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm.

New York City's Chinatown is known for its restaurants, shops and festivals, but what about gang violence? Rewind to the turn of the 20th century and you'll find the neighborhood was riddled with it. On this week's Cityscape, we're talking with Scott Seligman, author of Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money and Murder in New York's Chinatown.

From the 1870s to the 1930s, New York City's fabled Chinatown was the site of a series of vicious wars between two rival tongs, the On Leongs and the Hip Sings. Scott D. Seligman, author of "Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money and Murder in New York's Chinatown" joins me to chat about the origins of the animosity, and how their rivalry escalated into incredible brutality for both sides.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today Ken welcomes actress and international martial arts superstar Cynthia Rothrock to the show. Ken and Cynthia discuss cartoons, The Wonderful World of Disney, American Bandstand, growing up in Pennsylvania, moving to LA, becoming a Hong Kong movie star, Michelle Yeoh, The West Coast Demonstration Team, Golden Harvest, "finding the next Bruce Lee", Corey Yuen, Enter the Dragon, watching Kung Fu movies in New York's Chinatown, a love of a uniform leading to a lifetime in Martial Arts, how Bruce Lee changed the world, picking up Cantonese, being on the poster, the Eastern difference between acting and voice, Shaw Brothers Theaters, Yuen Biao, Righting Wrongs, Jackie Chan's karaoke, Sammo Hung, real life super heroes, fighting through an injury, not having a stunt double, watching hotel TV in Hong Kong, weird international gameshows, pre-looping yourself, TVB, missing out on Armour of God, China O'Brien, late night TV, Showtime, the golden age of cable, being on the cover on Karate Illustrated, Fast Getaway, being a voice Eek! The Cat, Robot Chicken, when the Matrix changed the world, classic cowboy stuntmen fights, bad fight choreography, The Kingsmen, Ken geeking out on the martial arts styles in The One, Santa's Summer Home, shooting a movie in three days, rarely going on auditions, The Dukes of Hazard Reunion movie, Hercules, being defeated by a too tight wig, working with Stacey Keach in Irresistible Force, re-watching your own work, Hong Kong comedy, why there's no kissing in fighting films, the terror of the Hong Kong Midnight Movie screening, singing happy birthday, fighting your way into pop stardom, comedy, Salem, American Idol, The Bachelor, extreme sports, I Love Lucy, being terrified by the Twilight Zone episode "The Masks", The Wizard of Oz, the horrors of the Lollipop Guild, Charlie Brown Christmas, a love of Christmas TV, the nostalgic warmth of old commercials, being an embarrassing parent no matter how cool you are, Betty Boop, Adventure Time, and a love of dancing skeletons.