Hello from Tammy’s snowbank! This week, we welcome TTSG friend Hua Hsu , a professor at Vassar and a staff writer at The New Yorker , who just wrote an excellent pre-election story: “Are Asian Americans the Last Undecided Voters?” The piece digs into stuff we’ve been obsessing about, on and off the air, including the fuzziness of the Asian American label, the rise of East Asian Republicans, organizing on ethnicity-specific chat apps , the OC , and Asian-Latino “immigrant” identities. Our discuss...
Oct 27, 2020•1 hr 52 min
Bonus pre-election episode! Two weeks ahead of the last judgment, Andy talks with two organizers about the “existential battle” over the soul of the Democratic Party. Brooke Adams , a second-generation Taiwanese Seattleite, worked for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign in Iowa, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania before joining People’s Action this summer. Tobita Chow , a Chinese-Japanese-Canadian-American (not making this up, we swear) Chicagoan, is director of “ Justice is Global ,” part of the Peo...
Oct 23, 2020•1 hr 14 min
Welcome to the Terrordome! This week, we have a brilliant guest, TTSG pal and Korean literature scholar Jenny Wang Medina , who grew up in her family’s beauty-supply store, to guide us through a mini-PhD on Korean hair, the Black hair market, and Cold War commodity history. Then, a brief look at the ongoing democratic uprising in Thailand. 0:00 – HAIR! * The New York Times’s coverage of the Na family and their Black hair shops in Chicago, one of which was destroyed in the recent Black Lives Matt...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr 38 min
A bonus deep-dive episode into the culture and politics of Big Tech and Silicon Valley! Today Andy chats with the writer Wendy Liu (no relation) about her recent book, Abolish Silicon Valley . A programmer, former Google intern, and startup founder, Wendy has written on a host of political-economic questions swirling around Silicon Valley today: how to organize contract workers in Silicon Valley ; Andrew Yang and UBI ; and why we should socialize Amazon . Above all, she is interested in spoiling...
Oct 16, 2020•1 hr
Hello from the National Speech & Debate Tournament! This week, we unpack the idea of court packing, look for common cause with working-class whites, and ask what’s up with the Taiwanese military. 0:00 – Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation proceedings began Monday. Will the questioning be more Acoustic Lindsey Graham or Lindsey Graham Unplugged? Inspired by a recent episode of the Dig podcast (Hi, Dan and Amna!), we wonder: Why does the US democracy—or, why do ACLU-cheering liberals—depend on an ins...
Oct 13, 2020•1 hr 24 min
Happy belated Mid-Autumn Festival! We pried Andy away from doomscrolling 45 to bring you this late-night episode of semi-coherent thoughts on the American regime, post-wet market theories of Covid-19, and listener queries on class. 0:00 – What is, even, anything? The big, maskless T has Covid, as does everyone around him. We talk conspiracies and sad, middling fantasies of functioning government. Is it time to give up on electoral politics? Will there ever be another Bernie? 28:30 – Twitter warr...
Oct 06, 2020•1 hr 15 min
Hello from Andy’s Zoom lecture! This week: the class politics of the Netflix K-drama “Itaewon Class” (이태원 클라쓰), success and failure in leftist utopias, and “slouchy Asian” fashion. 0:00 – Happy Birthday, Mama Kang! Plus: Tammy introduces Andy and Jay to Eileen Fisher. 6:10 – Jay binge-watches (the notably progressive!) “Itaewon Class,” which Tammy inhaled long ago; Andy makes plans to catch up, and offers his commentary anyway. Why do so many K-/Asian dramas reflect the same theme of capitalist ...
Sep 29, 2020•1 hr 13 min
Hello from the TTSG drop-out commune! This week, a longer-than-we-intended show about the TikTok saga, Chinese/US hegemony, and nationalist traps. We also respond to a few of your brilliant emails and DMs. 0:00 – Jay explains his obsession with the history of Jonestown, and we toss around a few theories of left (and right) millenarianisms. 5:30 – After all Trump’s blather about security, TikTok, USA looks to be headed toward Oracle and Wal-Mart , with no promises of Internet liberty. Plus: will ...
Sep 22, 2020•1 hr 20 min
Whither memory: Guantanamo W. Bush paints over his legacy. Hello from the future! Inspired (triggered?) by last week’s commemorations of 9/11, we get a bit contemplative. How will future generations remember (or suppress) the events of the Trump era, especially the mass death of Covid-19? We discuss state-sanctioned memory in the US and China, how Trump has effectively rehabilitated George W. Bush, and Paul Krugman’s tweet threads ( 1 , 2 ) about 9/11 and Islamophobia. We conclude with a listene...
Sep 15, 2020•1 hr 37 min
Greetings from Jay’s 95-degree basement! This week, we start, inevitably, with our takes on Jessica Krug, the historian caught assuming a series of brown and Black identities. We then respond to a provocation by Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels : that talk of racial disparities distracts from the universal thievery of neoliberal capitalism. Finally, we dig into the live-action remake of Mulan —or, um, since we haven’t seen it yet, a human-rights controversy over its partnership with the Chin...
Sep 08, 2020•1 hr 13 min
Greetings from our virtual union hall! This week, we talk protest and death in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, and consider what to make of the longstanding, but local, street confrontations between the far right and “Antifa.” We then turn to the recent NBA players’ boycott(?) / strike(?) / demonstration(?): What does it mean, in labor terms? Why do we get so excited about bajillionaire athletes’ activism? (Check out what Jay wrote in NYRB and Andy, in n+1 .) 0:37 – Inspired by the Mil...
Sep 01, 2020•1 hr 15 min
Hi everyone: Today we’re presenting a conversation between myself (Andy) and my college friend Merlin Chowkwanyun , assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. For years I’ve peppered Merlin with questions about how to understand the never-ending debate over “race versus class” in the US -- for instance, this New York Times piece from two weeks ago -- a subject that he’s studied for years. We focus on a critique of “racial disparity” dis...
Aug 28, 2020•1 hr 11 min
Hello from behind the Great Firewall! As summer winds down and election season begins to heat up, we reflect on the political prospects of Asian America and the mess that is the Democratic Party. We discuss AOC’s speech at the DNC last week as evidence that the party has lost the thread. We then examine Trump’s WeChat ban and the many uses of this Chinese super app. This leads to a concluding conversation about whether first- and second- (and third-...) generation Asian Americans could trend rig...
Aug 25, 2020•1 hr 12 min
Hello! We’re very excited to have Pulitzer Prize winner and Macarthur Genius Grant recipient Viet Thanh Nguyen on the show. There was a lot to discuss and a lengthy conversation that I (Jay) found absolutely fascinating about the role of academia, especially during a time of national protests. A lot of history in this one as well — if you didn’t know about AAPA and Third World Liberation Front, there’s a short primer at the beginning of the episode. 1:05 - A conversation about the promise of the...
Aug 20, 2020•1 hr 15 min
In a late-Sunday-night mega-recording session, we discuss the big news of the past week: Kamala Harris, the first major vice presidential candidate who’s Black, Asian American, and a woman. Commentators have tried to pick apart her identity from countless angles: Is she Black enough ? Indian enough ? Caribbean enough ? An Asian-immigrant icon? In other words, the kind of juicy s**t you KNOW your podcast hosts are ALL ABOUT. 0:44 – Our promise to improve TTSG ’s audio quality is followed by a rec...
Aug 17, 2020•1 hr 48 min
In this episode, Tammy gabs with her old friend Radhika Natarajan, a professor of history at Reed College and low-key brilliant TV critic. Radhika talks about her childhood in Ohio, her parents’ emigration from Tamil Nadu (relevant spoiler: an arranged Brahmin marriage), and her scholarly work on post-colonial migration, citizenship, and multiculturalism in Britain. (Bonus: BAME = POC/BIPOC?) She schools Tammy on Portland’s Black and immigrant communities (the city isn’t all white, Radhika softl...
Aug 14, 2020•56 min
Hello from the ledge of cancellation! We have some heady stuff for you this week—on school segregation, the perennial struggle between historians and journalists, and religiosity in Asian America. 0:40 – After a quick update on Tammy’s new life of canoeing in Missoula, Jay describes his roundtrip between Berkeley and Whidbey Island, when he listened to the newest, most Upper West Side podcast ever: “ Nice White Parents ,” by Chana Joffe-Walt. We discuss the first three episodes of that series—tl...
Aug 11, 2020
Hello from three time zones! This week, we mull the Covid-era classroom (fears of contagion and falling behind), the meaning of Trump’s attack on TikTok, Nike-brand kneeling (and not kneeling) in the NBA bubble, and universalism and particularism in the Black Lives Matter uprising. 1:40 – Will Tammy find an Oriental market in Missoula? How does Andy plan to teach through his screen? What will be the impact of these lost semesters on poor and working-class students? Also, should we blame diversit...
Aug 04, 2020•1 hr 28 min
你好 from cyberspace! This week, Jay scuba dived the depths of Asian American TikTok to engage Andy and Tammy in a critique of gendered home-cooking videos . How far have we really come? We then get a bit more serious, with a discussion of the continuing Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Portland and lessons in coalition-building from the 1970s Combahee River Collective . 4:10 – TikTok Cooking Jay plays several TikTok videos of young Asian Americans cooking their favorite dishes. The men see...
Jul 28, 2020•1 hr 16 min
Hello from 1997! This week, we start by crate-digging our souls, with a discussion of Lilith Fair-era feminist (and feminine?) music. We then ponder the ongoing Black Lives Matter rebellion in Portland , an op-ed on “white fragility” and its race-baiting subconscious by the country’s most lucid Catholic conservative, and what it means to be (or cosplay being) “transnationally Asian .” 2:22 – Jay reveals why he’s been tweeting so much about his 1990s playlist. What was Lilith Fair , and is its fe...
Jul 22, 2020•1 hr 28 min
Credit: Carolyn Drake Hello from the greater Sea-Tac area! Andy and Tammy here with a bonus episode, interviewing Darren Byler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado and an expert on the Uyghur people, a Muslim community in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China. Darren’s years of anthropological research in Xinjiang will be published in a forthcoming book titled Terror Capitalism . Until then, you can find his work at SupChina , Made in China journal , and hi...
Jul 17, 2020•1 hr 11 min
Hello from our galaxy brain! This week, we begin with a brief chat about (social) media “cancel culture,” based on an open letter recently published in Harper ’s . We then discuss a workplace controversy at the Boba Guys chain; the suicide of the mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, and what his death means in the context of South Korean feminism , per Tammy’s reporting; and a telling exchange about the NBA’s rules of wokeness between Republican US Senator Josh Hawley and ESPN NBA reporter Adrian Wojn...
Jul 15, 2020•1 hr 25 min
Greetings from our USB microphones! In this episode, we discuss ICE’s recent rule prohibiting international students from staying in the U.S. if their colleges go fully online. We also dig into questions of cross-race solidarity in the Black Lives Matter movement, especially regarding Latinx/brown communities. Finally, we answer our first sampling of listener questions. As always, thank you for listening and subscribing. Please spread the word and continue to send feedback via Twitter ( @ttsgpod...
Jul 08, 2020•1 hr 25 min
Greetings from Berkeley, Philadelphia, and Tacoma! This week, we chat about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s recent essay on Asian America, race, and class ( Time ); the abolition of whiteness advocated by Jay’s former mentor, Noel Ignatiev ; and the dead-ends and possibilities of race talk in media. * Remember to keep sending us feedback and questions via Twitter at @ttsgpod or via email at [email protected]. * 3:35 – Nguyen’s article on the “trap of the ‘model minority’ stereotype.” In what way...
Jun 30, 2020•1 hr 7 min
Hi, all: Just Andy this time, with a Thursday edition bonus episode, in which I talk with Brian Hioe of New Bloom , a bilingual online magazine with radical analysis of Taiwan and East Asia. On Monday, New Bloom published an explainer essay on the very confusing phenomenon of “tankies,” aka people who argue that the true leftist position is to support the Chinese Communist Party as a check on US imperialism. Most famously, tankies denounce the Hong Kong protests as bourgeois and right-wing, as p...
Jun 25, 2020•55 min
Hello from Oakland, Philadelphia, and New York! It’s just the three of us this week, talking Koreaboos and soft power, protest goals, and, as promised, Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling book White Fragility . But before we get into all that, a belated shout-out to our long-suffering audio editor (and master gardener) James Nicholson. And warm thanks to you, our dear listeners and subscribers. We hope to make this podcast and newsletter more interactive, so please be in touch with feedback and questio...
Jun 23, 2020•1 hr 32 min
Hello from the American rebellion! A packed episode on the BLM protests from our vantage point as cynical Asians and former Seattle residents. (Yes, Mukilteo counts.) We discuss the evolving Capitol Hill Occupied Protest both at the top of the show and in the second half, when we interview special guest Dae Shik Kim, Jr. , a Seattle-based journalist and activist. We also get into the latest controversies on Asian American twitter, including a “chewy and bland” tweet about tofu and a handful of v...
Jun 16, 2020•1 hr 24 min
Hello! This is our freshest recording yet—part one made just hours ago. In this episode, we talk about the latest hotspot in the Black Lives Matter uprising: Seattle, near where Andy and Tammy grew up and where Jay has family; and Jay and Andy review the new ESPN documentary on Bruce Lee. We then welcome our special guest (and Andy’s friend and fellow Philadelphian) Nikil Saval, the presumptive winner(!) of a seat in the Pennsylvania State Senate. (There is no Republican in the race.) Follow the...
Jun 09, 2020•1 hr 25 min
A special welcome to all new subscribers! Today’s episode is about the murder of George Floyd and the actions around the country. A few days ago, Jay wrote in our newsletter about Tou Thao, the Hmong cop who participated in Floyd’s killing, and “the myths of Asian American solidarity.” Jay describes what motivated this post, and we discuss when Asian American self-reflection is useful versus narcissistic Tammy and Jay describe the protests they attended in Brooklyn and Oakland, respectively, ove...
Jun 01, 2020•1 hr 11 min
Hello! In this episode, we chat about relocating during the pandemic, reading (or, in Jay’s case, not reading) physical books, and the University of California system’s recent decision to suspend use of the SAT in admissions. We then give a transnational welcome to Jenny Chan , professor of sociology and China studies at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and co-author of the forthcoming book, Dying for an iPhone . Jenny has devoted the last decade to researching labor conditions and activism in C...
May 26, 2020•57 min
