DREAMers

Directed by Adam Odsess-Rubin

Written by: Alton Alburo, Krystal Ballard, Rachel Lin, Adam Odsess-Rubin, Reka Polonyi, Luis Restrepo, Aamira Welthy

On Monday evening, the cast of DREAMers, a work of investigative theater presented by Theater for the New City’s NEW CITY, NEW BLOOD Reading Series in association with The Civilians Education Program, presented monologues collected from interviews with undocumented youth in NYC.

The performance took the form of a scripted reading, with the actors portraying various anonymous interviewees and their monologues gradually overlapping to form an increasingly synchronized chorus of voices. The actors, who conducted the interviews themselves before editing and compiling them to create a final script, presented the stories with sensitivity and nuance, touching on themes such as family, home, and what it means to be “American.” Despite the anger, sadness, and fear felt by many of the undocumented youth whose stories were featured in the performance, an overarching theme of the night was hope, as many of the interviewees discussed their ambitions for the future and expressed the hope that their stories would make other undocumented immigrants feel less alone.

Luis Restrepo gave a particularly spirited reading of a DREAMer who, despite having his illusions about life in the U.S. shattered upon his arrival to the States, remained undaunted and hoped to pursue his love of dance and theater: “I told myself, I’m here, I have to keep on going.” Rachel Lin portrayed an interviewee who, faced with the threat of deportation, consulted lawyers who told her to be on the lookout for the DREAM Act: “The DREAM Act didn’t come through, but DACA did.” Others, such as the interviewee played by Reka Polonyi, were skeptical about DACA, which was instituted under President Obama in August of 2012. The interviewee recalled seeing friends crying at the news: “Why are you crying? It’s nothing. It’s giving you only one piece of the cake.”

The performance also addressed the term “undocumented,” which is considered to be less offensive and dehumanizing than “illegal.” “I’d rather be called undocumented than illegal,” said an interviewee played by Aamira Welthy, adding that being considered “illegal” is burdensome, “like a shadow on our face.”

Recently, activists like journalist Jose Antonio Vargas have also urged media outlets to refrain from using the term due to its marginalizing effects and its inaccuracy.

“‘Ironically, describing an immigrant as ‘illegal’ is legally inaccurate,’ he said. ‘Being in a country without proper documents is a civil offense, not a criminal one.’”

—Ted Hesson, via ABC Univision

The aspirations of the young DREAMers were also a focal point of the piece, with many wanting their own achievements to lead to gains for their community or family members. “I dream of opening a clinic. Not here. In my own country,” said one interviewee. “If one day I could get citizenship that would be – wow. I would feel like nothing could stop me,” said another.

Lin’s interpretation of one interviewee’s experience provided a powerful and poignant look at the psychological effects of being undocumented. The interviewee spoke of the isolation and bitterness she often felt about her status: “People don’t realize how much this status separates you from others.” As a child, she felt that she couldn’t discuss her dreams with others: “I hated talking about other people’s dreams because I couldn’t have it. I couldn’t have those dreams. . . . But you can’t say that to people.” When the interviewee heard anti-immigrant jokes and slurs, she felt she didn’t have the right to speak out: “I felt wrong. I felt like I was lying to this country.” She added that she would never want anyone else to experience what she did, and hoped that her story, through the DREAMers project, would inspire others: “You have a community. You have a voice. There’s this hope you have.”

That same hope was epitomized in the words of another interviewee, played by Krystal Ballard, who declared, “I love this country. I love New York. Something really great awaits me in the future.”

In a talkback after the performance, audience members had the opportunity to talk to and ask questions of the cast and two interviewees. In response to a question from the audience regarding whether people were on the whole willing to discuss their stories with the actors, director Adam Odsess-Rubin spoke of one interviewee who thanked him for taking the time to record his story, as otherwise no one would ever have heard it.

“You get so much about an institutional issue if you only get five to ten minutes of someone’s personal experience,” said Steve Cosson, founding artistic director of The Civilians, at the conclusion of the talkback.

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Gina Chung is a contributing writer at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.

9-Man, a sports documentary that tells the history of 9-Man Volleyball and its deep connection to Chinatown, has 9 more days to reach their Kickstarter goal. We caught up with Ursula Liang, director of the film. Read for her take on the game’s multigenerational legacy, its differences between volleyball, and Asian American swagger.

Why were some of the stories on Asian American athletes not covered?

There was a period of time where Asian American athletes weren’t seen as viable stories even when they were great athletes. In the same way that people make decisions about which sports are valid to put in a magazine or on TV, they were making decisions about which athletes were sellable. They were not necessarily putting Asian Americans in prominent placecs or covering them at all because they didn’t think people wanted to read about them.

How did the project originate? When did you realize it was important to do?

I was working sports and thought it was an interesting story but I thought it was a story that required a little bit of depth not just a quick hit story. I was early in my career when I encountered 9-Man and so the next time it came around was either 6 or 12 years later and no one had still done 9-Man and it shocked me. I sort of let the idea drop because it wasn’t the right time for me to tell the story and I assumed that somebody else would tell it in the meantime and that’s when I realized that many years later that nobody had told the story I guess I realized that I had to tell it.

What are some differences between 9-Man and regular volleyball?

There are 9 people on each side. The court is different sized, the net is different height. You don’t rotate at all so there’s specialization. Smaller people can be in the back and the taller people can be in the front. If you play regular volley there’s a real musical rhytm to it: bump, set, spike. In this game you can get more than 3 hits on each side. You can pass the ball into the net and hit it again so you can hit it four times on each side. You as one person can hit it twice in a row so the rhythm is totally thrown off and if you’re someone who has played volleyball all your life and that rhythm is really built into your brain it’s really disorienting.

There’s a move called fai gok where the player basically dunks the ball which would be considered a carry in volleyball. The third way to pass is actually open handed. Imagine the early days when they weren’t using a ball; they were using a towel with rope strung around it and you couldn’t possibly have that bounce of your arm. So the way they passed was sort of like underhanded. One hand flips backward or one hand flips forward. It’s call chai balling and that’s their preferred way. They believe they can control it better.

This game is a lot faster. The rallies last a lot longer and it’s on asphalt so it’s super hard on the body. There’s rubble contend to with; there are things that are part of the asphalt to contend with like man hole covers, cracks in the road, and whatever debris didn’t get swept away. There’s also the outdoors to contend with and in Chinatown and places like New York, it’s super hot and sweaty. It’s really grueling and they’re playing from sun up to sun down. In the last couple of years the games have gone on so long that they are literally playing in the dark and you cant see anything and I don’t think any person playing volleyball would agree to that. But it’s really fun to watch and it’s chaotic.

Why has the game remained relatively unknown outside of the Chinese community?

It was a game that was born out of the social isolation of Chinese men and the bachelor society and stayed there. It’s a game that people outside of Chinatown don’t know how to play with a few exceptions. People have to be taught. There’s an oral history to it. Once somebody new comes in, an older guy is there to explain to him how to make that move happen and that’s one of the great things.

While the competitive people in the league are in their 20s and 30s, it’s really a multigenerational experience. A lot of old guys are out there all the time; They’re playing and they’re against the really old guys or really tall strong guys in their 20s. There’s this whole mix that is really fantastic. I think it’s one of the only places that I see where all this multigenerational interaction happens. And for a lot of guys its really great because older brother and father figures are built into this community.

How would you describe the swagger and masculinity that is not normally portrayed in mainstream media?

Swagger is the perfect word. I guess there’s a confidence and a playfulness that is not present in other portraits of Asian American men. When I give people comparisons about what 9-man is, how 9-Man compares to volleyball, I say it is like Rutgers park street ball basketball to Duke basketball as 9man is to indoor Olympic volleyball, but more than that.

What were the games like in the 1930s?

They started having intercity tournaments at that time so what I thought was interesting was that they were doing a reconnisaance between cities. They started between Boston and Rhode Island and one of these guys told me that they just wanted to see how Chinese were living in other cities. The environment was so hostile for them that they wanted to make sure that things were okay with the guys, maybe they wanted to see whether their opportunites might be better in other cities. There was this sort of need to connect. There was this small percentage of people who were ghettoized to the Chinatown but they wanted to connect to the other Chinatowns.

Hopes for the project?

Ultimately my goal is to promote the game and to show people what a great story this is. It should be to get people to care about the sport, to get people who are not part of the community to come out and watch these guys and change their opinions about what Asian American men can do or to be really proud of our culture. I think it’s really fun and kind of wild at the same time and it’s something if you go out and see you’re going to want to be part of it whether you are Chinese American or not. It’s this sort of palpable energy and specialness that I feel every time I am in that space. I hope that other people will come out.

Kickstarter: 9-Man – a streetball battle in the heart of Chinatown. The project has until Dec. 21 to complete their goal.

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Wen Hao Wang is a contributing writer at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.

On Monday evening, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU hosted a panel on the effects of community organizing in working class neighborhoods and ethnic communities that were devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Curated by Open City Creative Nonfiction Fellow E. Tammy Kim, the panel included staff attorneys Bethany Li of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) and Garrett Wright of the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center; community organizers such as CAAAV‘s Jason Chan and Aliza Pizarro of the Red Hook Initiative; and Damaris Reyes, Executive Director of Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES). Photos by Open City Creative Nonfiction Fellows Anelise Chen and Rishi Nath, photographer Yuko Torihara, and Our Chinatown contributor Gina Chung (a.k.a. yours truly) played on a slideshow behind the panelists throughout the evening, depicting post-hurricane scenes and images of Chinatown and LES.

A/P/A Studies professor Sukhdev Sandhu opened the evening with remarks on how the recent storm has brought the increasing inequalities of New York City into sharp relief, and the fact that New Yorkers will now have to grapple with the effects of extreme climate change in their own backyards. While New York City has certainly weathered its share of crises both natural and man made, Sandhu emphasized what would become a recurring theme of the evening’s talk: that natural disasters like Sandy do not affect all neighborhoods of this diverse metropolis in the same way, and that it is often the poorest communities, and communities of immigrants and people of color, that suffer the most.

In his introduction to the panel discussion, NYU Associate Professor of Journalism Suketu Mehta continued the conversation on New York’s diversity by comparing the city to its iconic pizza slice, which, in the days immediately following Sandy, was one form of sustenance available from the few food businesses that stayed open: “democratic,accessible, multicultural, tasty.” Mehta waxed poetic on the important role of New York’s immigrants and the contributions that they have made: “These New Yorkers always had a strong sense of identity. . . . Continuity saves the city in the bad years. They kept faith in the idea of New York, the possibility of New York.”

Suketu Mehta [Wen Hao Wang]

The lack of an immediate response from the government came up frequently throughout the evening’s conversations. “I feel the government doesn’t care. I don’t know why they wasn’t there. Some people in Manhattan had lights the second day. Some in Red Hook waited two, three weeks. Freezing, no electricity, no elevator. Regular people – this is how supplies and everything came to our neighborhood. Where was the government?” said Pizarro.

From left to right: Bethany Li (AALDEF), Alisa Pizarro (Red Hook Initiative), Jason Chan (CAAAV), Damaris Reyes (GOLES), Garrett Wright (Community Development Project), Sukhdev Sandhu (A/P/A Studies at NYU) [Gina Chung]

For denizens of Chinatown, a lack of language and translation services, as well as little support from local officials, complicated relief efforts on the part of organizations like CAAAV. In fact, Chan said, police even tried to shut down food and phone charging distribution in Chinatown on the pretext that residents were liable to start rioting. “There are no new issues: poor housing conditions, no one paying attention, landlords do what they want - This is a better excuses to push people out now. It makes our work even more important now,” said Chan, who expects poor landlord-tenant relationships to be exacerbated by the storm.

Public housing units are particularly at risk, with some fearing that the storm will encourage developers and builders eager to capitalize on a weakened resident population. “Developers have already issued a survey [asking] ‘Did your opinion change after Sandy?’ And people still want to live here,” said Reyes, citing the Lower East Side’s proximity to the water as a draw for developers.

All of the panelists agreed on the need for organizing and community involvement in the long-term, not only in times of crisis. “We need  to have the community come out and tell the government that they want these changes. Long-term organizing is necessary for structural change,” said Chan. “Where’s the plan that was supposed to come out of 9/11?” said Li, recalling when Chinatown and LES communities were not considered to be in need of  relief supplies after 9/11. “In Jersey City, [residents] had to protest to demand government services. What is the back-up plan for disabled government agencies in areas that have been hit hard in the past?”

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Gina Chung is a contributing writer at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.

Update:  Police reportedly have the suspect in custody (via NBC 4 New York)

Yesterday afternoon, Elmhurst, Queens resident and father Ki Suk Han was struck and killed by a subway train after he was pushed onto the tracks.

The New York Post reports the victim, identified as 58-year-old Ki Suk Han, was attempting to “protect fellow straphangers from a deranged man” at the 49th Street station when he was suddenly shoved onto the tracks by the suspect.

…

Before the incident, onlookers say the suspect and Han exchanged heated words.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the suspect was believed to have been “talking to himself” and most likely instigated a fight with Han.

“At least one witness felt that the aggressor was emotionally disturbed,” Browne said.

Han was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital where he was pronounced dead. He is survived by a wife and college-aged daughter.

—Huffington Post

Officials have released a photo of the man believed to have pushed Han onto the tracks, who fled the scene.

NYPD

[Warning: Following image is disturbing and may be triggering for some] The cover of today’s New York Post, which shows Han struggling to lift himself back onto the platform, has also drawn ire from many. Taken by freelance photographer R. Umar Abbasi, the photo has led readers to ask why the photographer took the pictures instead of helping Han.

Some are questioning why the photographer took photos instead of trying to help Han up. (This is part of a never-ending debate about photojournalism.) The photographer, freelancer R. Umar Abbasi, tells the tabloid, “I just started running, running, hoping that the driver could see my flash. The most painful part was I could see him getting closer to the edge. He was getting so close.”

—The Gothamist

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Gina Chung is a contributing writer at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.

DREAMers, a new production presented by Theater for the New City’s NEW CITY, NEW BLOOD Reading Series in association with The Civilians Education Program, is currently seeking interviewees. Directed by Adam Odsess-Rubin, DREAMers is a work of investigative theater that aims to capture the stories of young undocumented immigrants in the NYC area.

The title of the play refers to the undocumented youth who fall under the stipulations of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program – students who have been in the U.S. since they were under the age of 16 and have a clean criminal record.

Cast members have been transcribing and editing stories from interviewees and creating a script to be read at a final staged reading. The performance, which will include a talkback afterwards, will take place at 7:30 pm on December 10^th at the Theater for the New City (155 1^st Avenue, between E. 9^th and 10^th Sts). If you are undocumented, under the age of 30, live in New York City, and would like to contribute your own story, be sure to contact aodsessrubin@gmail.com. All interviewees will remain anonymous.

Our Chinatown sat down with the director and cast of DREAMers this past weekend and got an inside look at the process of putting interviewees’ stories together. The actors discussed the challenges of documenting stories while making sure that dramatic “flow” was retained.

While Odsess-Rubin’s original vision was to create a series of monologues around the different stories, he found that he wanted to address the complicated issue of interviewing people about their life experiences by examining what it meant “for actors to go in and ascertain these stories, and maybe not have any more connection to those communities.” Inspired by a combination of The Breakfast Club and the making of A Chorus Line (in which the director took the actors’ actual life stories into account when developing the script), Odsess-Rubin’s objectives for the project have been to “make it real and…compelling” while not having the final product be “showy” or “preachy.”

“We are in New York City and trying to be actors – and what is that but the American Dream? We are privileged youth who can do this, but we’re talking to youth who have a lot of weight on their shoulders,” cast member Alton Alburo said, articulating what has been particularly compelling about the DREAM Act for all U.S. residents, undocumented or not – the fact that the convenient acronym and its implications parallel the myth of the American dream.

Many cast members felt a personal connection to the project beyond their roles as actors: “I’m from California, so I have friends with undocumented family members. One of my good friends, his grandfather was deported. My friend is a citizen, so he can still leave and visit him. But [undocumented] kids here, if their grandfather gets deported, they can’t go visit. … I wanted to learn more,” said Alburo. Born and bred New Yorker Krystal Ballard cited her curiosity about the issue as one reason she was drawn to the project: “In New York City, you’re gonna come across immigrants.” The actors also brought up a recent quote from the journalist José Antonio Vargas, who spoke out last year about having lived in the U.S. without papers for over 10 years: “You know someone undocumented, even though they might be scared to come out.”

Trying to find people to interview has been the most notable challenge for the cast of DREAMers. While they have been able to find some leads through various organizations and most of their interviewees have been willing to talk about their experiences, Ballard said that bureaucracy has made getting in touch with people difficult. Actress Aamira Welthy said that one resource has been Make the Road New York (MRNY), a Latino and working class community advocacy organization that also has a program that works with undocumented youth. One challenge Welthy identified was dealing with the emotional fallout during the interviews: “The reality of their situation sets in, and [you feel] a mixture of sadness and guilt.”

“One of the people we’ve been working with – he still doesn’t qualify for deferred action, but he’s helped people at that organization. He hasn’t been here for ten years, so he’s constantly questioning, like ‘What am I doing here?’ But others are excited and hopeful that this could create a pathway to citizenship,” Welthy said, when asked if the results of the election had impacted conversations with undocumented interviewees.

“It would have been a very different play if Romney had been elected,” Odsess-Rubin added. “We want to show people that these are real people – it’s people’s lives we’re talking about, not just political stories. How we speak about immigration affects their day-to-day life.”

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Gina Chung is a contributing writer at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.

Spoken word poet and former slammaster Beau Sia has been performing and writing since the early 1990s, and since his beginnings in NYC at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, he has gone on to perform at the National Poetry Slam and on Def Poetry Jam, among many other venues. Last Monday evening, he performed at the Museum of Chinese in America for the NYC launch of his latest book, The Undisputed Greatest Writer of All Time, his first in over thirteen years.

Our Chinatown recently caught up with Beau to talk about the process of writing Undisputed, the significance of being loud, and how the Internet has changed the landscape of poetry.

The Undisputed Greatest Writer of All Time is your first book in thirteen years, and you wrote it after suffering from post-concussion syndrome. What was the writing and editing process like for you?

I didn’t start writing it till my post-concussion syndrome improved. I wrote a draft, then when I looked back at that first draft, I realized that my cognitive level had changed dramatically since then. So then I had to rewrite that whole draft ’cause I wasn’t satisfied with it. And even then, looking back at poems before the accident, I was concerned about a lot of difference of ability. But then I realized that the book was not about showing off my ability. It wasn’t to try to show all the things I knew about writing, or how I could show you that I’m a really amazing writer. I mean, the title in itself is a trick, you know? But that process, besides being an amazing opportunity to be able to test within this last year where my cognitive levels were, was also a great experience in considering what all of the work I had done internally for the last seven or nine years was about. Sometimes in the past, I was caught up in the idea of wanting to be embraced by other writers and stuff, so they would call me a genius or brilliant or some shit like that. And that’s not really what it was about this time around.

How did coming to New York from Oklahoma affect your development as a poet?

I left Oklahoma in ’95. At that time, I didn’t have a lot of access via the Internet to all the different voices and performers that were out there. The only performers that I saw were at the open mic I went to. That was my only real gauge or reference besides this MTV special they had once called Spoken Word Unplugged, which has been so influential to me. So I moved to New York, and I knew because of MTV Spoken Word Unplugged that The Nuyorican was a hub for New York poetry. I went there, and just being around those people opened me up to so many different ways one could perform and share their work, as well as so many different ways that one could write, because then all these new writers I’d never heard of before introduced me to all these books I never knew existed.

Would you say moving to New York also had an effect on your consciousness of Asian American identity?

When I first moved and went to The Nuyorican and stuff, no. There wasn’t other Asian American voices I was aware of, so I was performing and sharing my work predominately in front of non-Asians at the time. And for the most part, most of my life has been that way. A majority of my audience that comes to my shows has been non-Asian, especially because I was in Def Poetry for three years. I would say the thing that influenced my awareness of the depth of my identity and started getting me to think about the possibilities of who I am as an Asian American, and what that is, and how that is in relation to the world, actually probably came from me just starting to hang out at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Several of the people who worked there embraced me with open arms, invited me to stuff, and introduced me to other Asian American artists. That helped me start formulating those things and being aware of that stuff.

Photo by Dante Basco

I noticed during your reading on Monday night that a lot of it was very physical and loud. Did that develop naturally over the years?

No, I think I’ve always been loud, since my first open mic at the age of seventeen. I’ve always been even louder than that. The reason for the volume at the age of seventeen was, I had felt quite silenced in Oklahoma. I didn’t feel like I could really say or share the things I wanted to say without feeling criticized for being too sensitive or being told “No, that’s not racist,” or whatever. So you know, imagine not being quiet for so long and then you get on the stage and you can unleash all that volume. I was a swimmer, so I had tremendous lung capacity. I come from a very loud family, which also obviously contributes to that. I would say the other factor of that is that I just naturally had a lot of anger because of that experience of living in Oklahoma. But how I developed that volume over the years really comes from people teaching me, people like Saul Williams, who went to NYU’s graduate acting program, teaching me about projection. People like Lemon from Def Poetry helped me develop my physicality to another level. I was also always quite physical in general just because I was a dancer. Not a professional dancer, but I pretty much can dance my ass off. But how do you craft that as a way to share your poetry, that physicality? I think I learned a lot from all the poets around me. These guys didn’t just study poets. They studied actors, performers, soloists. And I wanted to do what they did, so I had to learn as much as I could. I want people even in the back to feel the resonance, the vibration of the tones, because words have sounds not for our intellectual mind alone, but also for what is within us, our body. You feel those words.

What topics or subject matter do you find yourself tackling more over the years as you continue to write?

I think that more than subject matter, how I address the same subjects, or why I focus on those subjects [has changed]. Maybe an example would be, at 24, I wanted to tell people when I wrote, “The Asians Are Coming, the Asians Are Coming” that yes, we belong here and we’re a part of this world, and if you don’t see that, you need to fucking recognize that this world is changing fast, and we’re a part of it. Whereas, on Monday, when you saw me [perform] a poem addressed to Asian America, or Asian Americans, it’s more of a challenge to say, now that we know we have a place – and you may not feel it, but at this point you should have seen the signs that we belong here –what are we gonna do with that belonging? As a confident, dynamic participant vital to the outcome of humanity, what are we gonna do with that? It’s a different approach to the subject.

How do you think the Internet and the increasing use of social media have possibly changed poetry?

It’s a part of society, so it has an impact, and it’s like any tool, it depends on what you do with it. Because I go to the Brave New Voices conference every year, I get to see the impact of the Internet on teenage poets each year. I would say that today, young people have more access to books and performances on videos, and they can learn how other people did it, but I think that what is difficult is they rarely get a chance to sit back in the quiet and spend time developing their voice before they share it with the world. I feel like one of the challenges for a lot of young writers is to grow out of sounding like a fixed imitation of the writers that they grow up watching and reading. I think that the challenge for them is to be able to find more time to develop their own voice while being inspired by those things. Because I didn’t have a lot available to me, I was forced, in my loneliness, to develop what am I trying to say. I think one of the benefits is that clearly, young people have a stronger sense of possibility. They see that they could go further than they’d ever imagined. But I’m not sure they’re being shown how to get there, and I think that they’re limited without having mentors to let them know that getting to those places are not a matter of imitating the past but really developing you, in the now.

You mentioned at the MOCA reading that this might be your last show for a while. So do you plan on focusing on writing or other pursuits in future?

I’m doing a show for Giant Robot on Sunday, but then after that I’m going to wait until 2013. I realized after MOCA that, to perform that physically is very costly to me. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully recover from this injury. And I don’t think I want to risk it just to do more shows. So it’s more likely that I’ll be doing fewer shows per year, turning down a lot more shows, and also at some point, not performing anymore. I’ve been doing this since I was seventeen, and I’m thirty-six now. For three years, when I was on Def Poetry, I did this eight times a week. I’ve performed in every type of venue you could probably perform in. I’ve performed in most of the English-speaking world. I’ve done all of these performances and the cost of it to my body and to my relationships has been a lot. No regrets, but there are different things that I want to do, and to do them requires me being around my family more, requires me being helpful to my friends more, requires me taking better care of my health. I really have done thousands of shows, so I don’t know how many more I’m supposed to do, right? [laughs]

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Gina Chung is a contributing writer at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.

“I seriously wanna get naked with all of you,” spoken word poet Beau Sia told a captivated audience last night at the Museum of Chinese in America at the launch of his new book, The Undisputed Greatest Writer of All Time. Perched on one of the eight wooden stools at the front of the MOCA’s lobby (“Yo, y’all are f***ing with me,” he’d said sternly to the same stools earlier in the evening. “First of all, there’s eight of you – that’s unlucky in my culture!”), Sia sighed and crossed himself, head lowered.  “Let’s do it,” someone in the back whispered. Without looking up, Sia pointed towards the back in agreement. “How did my hearing get so good? Is it because I’m a cylon?” he joked, before launching into the poem “Seriously Wanna Get Naked with All of You,” which discusses the conflicts of sexual desire and the human condition of loneliness. The speaker of “Seriously” proclaims his desire for an unnamed other, only to reluctantly withdraw it, telling himself to “stop engaging in gestures founded on lonely.”

The atmosphere on Monday night, however, was far from lonely, resounding with communal energy as people laughed and nodded along with Sia, who, dressed in bright pink pants and a black t-shirt with backwards lettering (“So you can only see what it says when you look in a mirror!”) kept up the banter throughout the evening between his emotionally charged, often hilarious, and always insightful poems. His performance was visceral and physical, involving full body gestures, jumping, and shouting. While he recited some of his poems from memory, Sia also read from printed sheets of paper, which he proceeded to strew around the floor as he paced. Perspiring profusely with the physical strain of his performance, Sia grinned as he toweled off the sweat with his T-shirt, quipping, “All these years, no towel, same shirt.” At one point, while wiping the sweat off his face with his hands, Sia waxed poetic on The Karate Kid (pun intended), much to the audience’s amusement: “This is my wax on, wax off s***. That original Karate Kid is so f***ing brilliant. Minus the parts that’s f***ing racist.”

Upon bringing up the title poem of the collection, his first in thirteen years, an audience member offered, “Modest.” In response, Sia casually said, “Yeah, I think so,” before turning to face the audience with a mock-threatening stare while dribbling tea from his mouth. In fact, the collection’s title piece is actually an indictment of epithets like “The Undisputed Greatest Writer of All Time,” and the poem not only skewers the notion of any writer achieving such a position, but also posits that wanting to be the greatest at anything is “an easy way to deny responsibility.”

Sia’s writing in this collection is full of pithy, cautionary statements, which, he explained was part of the goal of the book: “to help me live up to my convictions.” Before reading the lovely “Give Yourself Permission,” Sia discussed how, after a car accident in 2011 that “made me learn s*** about my brain,” the process of writing his book had been fraught with daily tests in which he had been forced to ask himself, “Can I respond instead of react?”

Part of Sia’s response has been to incorporate humor in his discussion of serious issues. In one memorable piece, for example, titled “Letter to a Mentor,” Sia explicitly warns teachers and mentors everywhere against the temptation to “f*** your students”: “If your rationalized lust / too dominant in your choices, / choose differently. / the trauma you can’t see / is not absolved by the workshop’s success.”

Much of Sia’s body of work also discusses Asian American identity, and before reading his poem “Asian Americans,” Sia joked about how appropriate the poem was given that his book launch was taking place at MOCA: “How did I write this perfect poem? I must have precognition or something. Or, have played Dungeons and Dragons and know how to use words like precognition.” The piece discussed assimilation as well as many other racial issues in terms of how they seem to apply to Asian Americans today: “We’re so American, / we often get split into being more black / or being more white. / we’re so American, / we understand other cultures just enough to get by.”

Before the evening came to a close, Sia announced that this could be his last show for a while, as he is still in the process of recovering. He ended with the poem, “This Is a Test,” explaining that one of the other goals he had while writing the book was learning to be more emotive “in my real life, and not just on stage.” While Sia’s poems run the emotional gamut and often explode off the page with their energy and passion, his overall message of the importance of compassion and understanding remains prominent in each piece, proving that, in terms of our relationships with one another, striving to be the greatest is essentially missing the point.

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Gina Chung is a contributing writer at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.

Congresswoman-elect Grace Meng celebrates her victory at the packed Plum Restaurant in Bayside, Queens. Photo by Christina Santucci

by Melody Ju

Congress got a shot of color this past Tuesday, when the electorate voted a record-high number of Asian-American candidates into office.

Among the fresh faces is Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who’s always been one for firsts – at 21, she became the youngest person elected to the Hawaii state legislature, and at 28 she was the first woman to be presented with an award by the Kuwait Army National Guard. Gabbard, who was also the state’s first elected official to voluntarily resign from her post in order to go to war, will now go on to represent Hawaii’s second U.S. House District as the first Hindu congressperson. According to Jezebel, when Gabbard is sworn in this coming January, she will take her oath of office over a Bhagavad Gita.

Big wins were also celebrated on the West Coast, where Democrat Mark Takano captured the seat for California’s U.S. House District 41 by a double-digit margin over Republican opponent John Tavaglione. Born and raised in Riverside, California, where his grandparents and parents re-settled after WWII internment, Takano is a teacher and recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visionaries Award. He will be the first openly gay person of color elected to Congress and the first LGBT member of the California Congressional delegation.

Defeating incumbent Joe Walsh 57 to 43 percent, Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth also joined the wave of firsts. In January, she will take her seat in the House as the first Asian-American woman elected to Congress from her state and the first congresswoman born in Thailand. Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who lost both her legs as a U.S Army helicopter pilot, will also continue to serve as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard.

Joining Duckworth as the first Asian-American congressperson from her state is New York’s own Democrat Grace Meng, who defeated Republican City Councilman Daniel Halloran with a decisive 67 percent of votes. Born and raised in Queens, 37-year-old Meng, a Taiwanese-American lawyer and member of the New York State Assembly, will represent the state’s sixth congressional district next year.

Hawaiian Democrat Mazie Hirono also made history on Tuesday – she will be sworn in January as the first Asian-American woman in the U.S. Senate and Hawaii’s first female senator. “I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate,” Hirono said during the campaign. “I’m a woman. I’ll be the first Asian woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I am an immigrant. I am a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said, ‘Yes, but are you gay?’ and I said, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’”

While racial factors (or, for that matter, any concerning a candidate’s personal traits) are certainly not the most important to consider when selecting a candidate, Tuesday’s turnout is an encouraging sign that Asian-Americans – a group still growing its potential for political participation – are increasingly exercising their political rights. “It’s about time we had more members of Congress,” said Duckworth. “It opens the door in other Asians’ minds.” Hopefully, the presence of these fresh faces in Congress will set an example of political participation for Asian-Americans, not just as candidates but as constituents as well.

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Melody Ju is an editorial intern at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.

On New York and the Knicks: “You can’t ask for a city or a fan base to embrace somebody more than they embraced me,” he says. “I know it’s kind of silly to talk about it with only two years under my belt in the league, but going in before free agency, I was like, ‘I want to play in front of these fans for the rest of my career.’ I really did. I really wanted to play in front of the Madison Square Garden fans for the rest of my career, because they’re just unbelievable.”

On race and expectations: “There’s a lot of perceptions and stereotypes of Asian-Americans that are out there today, and the fact that I’m Asian-American makes it harder to believe, even crazier, more unexpected,” he says. “I’m going to have to play well for a longer period of time for certain people to believe it, because I’m Asian. And that’s just the reality of it.”

On the next season: “People are always saying, ‘He’s only started twenty-five games, there’s so many uncertainties.’ And I agree. I totally agree,” he says. “I don’t know how my next season’s going to turn out. The things that I struggled with before last year, I’m going to struggle with next year—there’s that learning process. Just because you have x amount of good games doesn’t mean that you have drastically improved as a player. It just means that what you could do is finally being shown. But I have to get better.”

Read full cover story here.

Two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and National Poetry Slam finalist Bao Phi wears many hats; he has performed throughout the country, appeared on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, and is also a community organizer and a program director at the Loft Literary Center. His first book, Sông I Sing, was published by Coffee House Press in 2011. Sông I Sing is a powerful collection of poems covering topics such as war, racial profiling, and the racial dynamics within pop culture. His poem “Reverse Racism” is an impeccably executed examination of contemporary racial politics in the United States, while “Dear Senator McCain,” a response to John McCain’s infamous comment about his hatred for “gooks,” explores stereotypes about Asians with a frankness that is both laugh-out-loud funny and devastating (Two standout lines: “I am indeed a gook, polished gold-yellow / at Yale” and “I am gook, / I ate your motherf***in cat”).

At the heart of the collection are the Nguyễn poems, a series created around fictional characters who all have the same last name: “not related / but…more related than any of them will ever know.” The cast of characters is a dazzling and diverse one. In “Love Angel Music Baby” Bao discusses Gwen Stefani’s uncomfortable “Harajuku girl” obsession by writing in the voice of young fangirl Cathy, and “Prince among Men” follows Quincy, who finds freedom and self-expression as a Prince impersonator.

Bao will be doing a series of readings on the East Coast later this month, so be sure to check him out at the Museum of Chinese in America on Saturday, October 20 at 7  pm!

How did you get involved with poetry, and with spoken word in particular? 

I was a refugee from Vietnam from a poor family. I was born right before the Fall of Saigon, and we came to Minneapolis, and I was raised in the largest, poorest, and most racially diverse neighborhood in Minneapolis, and when I came of age during high school, coming from that environment, I was trying to make sense of all these different things happening around me. You had crack cocaine, police brutality, gang violence, the deterioration of urban inner cities, trickle-down economics, the Persian Gulf War… And there was stuff like hip-hop and a renewed interest in the Black Panthers and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and also poetry that came out of that era. That would be Gil Scott-Heron, and Ntozake Shange, the Last Poets. And there were also poets of color like Quincy Troupe, Alvin Eng, Li-Young Lee, Nellie Wong – all of these folks were part of my development in a way.

I feel like as a young man of color, in an urban, poor neighborhood, trying to make sense of all this stuff, I gravitated towards poetry because I had always been interested in art. I’d been interested in poetry, in fiction especially, and theater. And when I started doing this thing, performance plus poetry, I started competing on speech team in high school, and it kind of just, it all went from there. So, I can’t say it’s any one thing – I believe it was a collision of all of these different things.

Anna Min

How does humor play a role in your work, and how do you think humor can be used to combat racism and prejudice?

I have to say that I would give props to Sherman Alexie, because when I was a freshman, my freshman seminar was Native American Literature, and my mentor Diane Glancy, who’s also a Native American writer, told me about this young Native American poet who was coming up, Sherman Alexie. She was like, “You should go to his readings.” So I went, and First Indian on the Moon had just come out, and it struck me that Sherman Alexie was very funny, but he was able to talk about some very serious subjects with humor. To me, it was kind of a wake-up call because it showed me the strategic effectiveness of humor, but it also made me think on a personal level – you know, I don’t want to be the guy who’s angry all the time. I’m a person who likes to laugh. I’m a person who likes to joke. Just for those of us trying to make sense of stuff, for our own psychological well-being [laughing] – it’s really important, to be able to laugh and have some humor.

What does activism mean to you, and would you say that you continue to be an activist when you’re writing or performing your poetry? 

It’s really hard to say. I’ve always kind of resisted the word “activist.” I’ve always considered myself more of a community organizer. I feel like that’s closer to what I do. I’m in the community, I try to organize within the community, and I try to think of ways that I can, within my capacity, create positive change. I feel like poetry is a platform through which people listen to me. Poetry has given me an opportunity to reach a lot of people, and that’s part of my activism.

Charissa Uemura

In “The Nguyễn Twins,” you discuss different kinds of accolades in the poetry world. The brother goes on Def Poetry Jam, while the sister is part of the world of literary journals and academia. Do you think that poets of color are often pigeonholed into one of these two categories, and is that something you’ve experienced yourself?

That poem in particular was me attempting to address the duality. I do believe that for right or wrong (I think mostly wrong), that there is a dichotomy. It shouldn’t be this way, but there is a dichotomy where people look down on spoken word or look down on what people consider academic poetry. And a lot of that is informed by things like race, class, gender. I think that that poem in particular was me trying to address that duality, but in a way that was poking fun at both sides. It was important for me that the two characters were twins, because even though they are a part of both worlds, they’re still part of the same family. I think that there’s advantages and disadvantages to everything. I feel like I have my toes dipped in both worlds myself, and I think about this a lot, especially now that I have a book out.

How do you think the model minority stereotype applies to Asian Americans in the literature and poetry world? And how do you think the model minority stereotype might be more harmful for Asian Americans than more explicitly virulent stereotypes have been in the past?

I think in all spheres, in the American discussion on identity, there’s always pressure for Asian Americans to conform to something, one way or another. The model minority, racially, plays absolutely into our pressures to conform. Asian Americans are either expected to go through the gatekeepers and become this “safe ethnic writer,” where you talk about how oppressive your Asia is, or, in spoken word, you’re expected to be this angry person, but you’re not necessarily expected to talk about race in terms of Asian American community. When you’re talking about Asian oppressive regimes, that’s the model minority stereotype very directly – the implicit understanding is, “Well, we have it better here as Asian Americans, even if we’re Asians.” But I think, going the other way, it becomes a model minority stereotype in which you’re on the left where you’re talking about all these things, but you don’t talk about Asian American politics, because you’re “the good Asian.” You don’t talk about yourself and your own community because you’re the exceptional lefty who’s down with everybody.

And I feel like in both scenes, they’re okay with one or two of us. But in terms of all of us doing well as a community or looking towards community empowerment and self-empowerment, I think that that idea is still very much, kind of a foreign idea. [Laughing] Pun intended. A lot of people are like, “Well, we’ve progressed beyond race,” and I really disagree with that, especially when it comes to Asian Americans, because I feel like we never had these conversations.

Charissa Uemura

I also think that the model minority stereotype creates a culture of silence in which people feel like they can’t talk about cases that aren’t exceptional in a positive way, as in the case of Fong Lee, which you discuss in your poem “8 (9).” 

That was absolutely a case of racial profiling for a young Asian man. But I felt like a lot of Asian leftists didn’t pick up on the case because they felt like it was an exceptional case. That’s another way that it hurts, that people don’t see that actually we have to deal with racism, and I feel like people internalize that.

But, if you actually dig, I have friends in Michigan, who were like, “You know, there was a young Hmong American man, Chonburi Xiong, who got even less attention than Fong Lee, who was similarly racially profiled and killed by police.” Even though we keep finding these examples of Asian Americans being racially profiled the way other young men of color do, somehow people don’t take it seriously because they just think it’s not a big issue for us. For whatever reason, this model minority thing becomes so deep, and internalized, that we don’t take our own issues very seriously.

Along those lines, and in relation to your poem “For Colored Boys in Danger Of…,” how would you explain the mainstream media’s silence on cases in which men of color are targeted? I feel like the opposite is true for women of color, where it’s actually just as oppressive in that it’s pretty much always talking about victimization.

I guess our dialogue is still very fiercely gendered. I want to be very careful here. I would in no way ever suggest that women have it easier than men. But I think that you are on to something in terms of how the discussion on how these types of things is very much racialized and gendered. It’s almost like, in order to have a meaningful dialogue about people who suffer, you have to make them a victim before they’re sympathetic. In a way, because we’re kind of used to seeing women as victims, especially among the left, it’s almost like a lot of that conversation can happen. Whereas I feel like, with men, we should have these discussions whether the women or the men are victims or not. Even with the Fong Lee case, they keep alleging that Fong Lee was in a gang. Even if he was in a gang, so what? Even if he was in a gang, he shouldn’t have been shot and killed by this police officer. But I feel like the way that we talk about it, it kind of insists on this victimization before we can have sympathy. And I feel like that’s very gendered, and that’s very racialized.

Gina Chung

I saw that you recently contributed to the Shattered exhibit at the Museum of Chinese in America. How was the experience of creating a comic character different from creating a character in one of your fictional poems? Could you tell us a bit about your character?

The two characters I created for Shattered are a Vietnamese American man and a Vietnamese American woman. With fiction you have a lot more room. You can take your time, whereas poetry is all about brevity. It’s all about compacting a lot of images and story into one line. So one line can carry three or four pages of prose. With poetry, sometimes you kind of tease that thing, but then basically that’s all you got. You can tease, and you can hope that people make the leap, but you have to take your chances. Whereas, creating the comic book character, which was based on a short story… I get to keep going. There’s more room; I get to play and create and flesh out the character more.

So do you think you’ll be doing any fiction or prose writing anytime soon?

Well, that short story, I’m actually toying with it and trying to turn it into a full-length novel. It’s a Vietnamese American post-apocalyptic zombie short story. So, we’ll see.

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Gina Chung is a contributing writer at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Continue the conversation by posting a comment here, on OurChinatown’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @ourchinatown.