Author: Time To Say Goodbye

Hello!

Today’s subscriber episode is a wide-ranging conversation Asad Haider, one of the founding editors of Viewpoint Magazine and the author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. Jay talked to Asad about his concept of “depoliticization,” his book on identity politics, and political exhaustion.

*- note from Jay: When we started the podcast, Asad was at the top of the list of guests I wanted to invite onto the show. I was really excited to talk to him at length. Mistaken Identity was a very eye-opening book for me to read and everyone should read it, although with these recent pieces.

On Depoliticization, in Viewpoint.

Emancipation and Exhaustion, in Saaganthology

Dismissal, in The Point.

And a little housekeeping: we tried something different with the audio levels for this one, so please let us know if it sounds better.

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Hello from Jay’s backyard Easter egg hunt!

It’s just Andy and Tammy this week, with special guest Naomi Murakawa, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton and the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.

Naomi talks with us about her J-A roots in Oakland, how her dad’s career in the criminal-legal system got her thinking about carceral politics, why police reform has long been a trap, and the history of hate crimes legislation in the US. She shares her observations on Black Lives Matter, the emergence of abolitionist thinking, and the discourse around “anti-Asian violence.”

What can crime statistics tell us about the world? How do we stop ourselves from thinking like cops? Which groups are pushing Asian America in a more punitive direction? And how should “Asian American history 101” inform our analyses of recent violence?

“The we-ness is something we make through struggle.”

Naomi shouts out:

– Mariame Kaba’s new book, We Do This ’Til We Free Us (foreword by Naomi; and check out the rest of the abolitionist series Naomi curates for Haymarket)

– Victoria Law’s new book, “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration

– Christina B. Hanhardt’s Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence

– Chandan Reddy’s Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State

– Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order

– The work of Dylan Rodriguez and Ruth Wilson Gilmore

– The abolitionist organizing of Incite!, AAAJ-Atlanta, and Red Canary Song and allies

Thanks for listening, supporting, and spreading the word. Stay in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), Twitter, and/or Patreon—and see you in our Discord!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello!

This week, your intrepid hosts had the pleasure to speak with journalist Daniel Denvir and his podcast “The Dig,” with Jacobin Radio.

Daniel engaged us on a number of topics we’ve touched upon recently, including: the Atlanta shootings and the question of anti-Asian violence; the connection between anti-China foreign policy and domestic anti-Asian racism; the potential for an Asian backlash against liberalism and the Democratic party; affirmative-action fights and the enduring mythology of “model minorities”; and the coherence and usefulness of “Asian” identity.

If you’re curious, please check out The Dig’s other podcast episodes, found here:

https://www.thedigradio.com/

As always, please reach out to us with comments and questions:

timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com

@ttsgpod on twitter

and you can support us through:

https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

https://goodbye.substack.com/p/support-the-show-through-substack

Addenda: some sources referenced by Andy.

1) Alien Capital by Iyko Day, named on the show.

2) On the link between Japanese and US “comfort stations” in Asia, see Sara Kang’s work in this article last week (Harper’s Bazaar).

3) On the role of Asian American ‘model minority’ fantasies in the infamous 1965 Moynihan Report on “the Negro family,” see Ellen Wu’s The Color of Success.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello at the end of a sleepless week.

In this episode, we analyze the many responses to the murders in Atlanta — in a spirit, of course, of solidarity.

Should the murders be viewed as a white-supremacist hate crime? An occasion for more policing? Or less?

Are we guilty of assimilating the Atlanta shootings to general headlines about anti-Asian racism? Do we risk losing the specificity of class, gender, and the massage industry in particular?

Were the killings rooted in misogyny and fetishization? In histories of empire?

Are there too many historians on twitter? (yes)

And are geopolitical and economic tensions between U.S. and China in the mix? Is this a moment for solidarity between Chinese, Korea, and other Asian diasporas, or a moment of splinter?

Plus: Tammy reflects on a rally in Brooklyn (thanks to the Patreon Discord chatroom).

Thanks for listening, supporting, and spreading the word. Stay in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), Twitter, and/or Patreon.

Quick plug: This Friday morning NY time, join Tammy and a stellar group of labor leaders for a mini conference on the present and future of workers’ rights. Register for free here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

In light of the harrowing news out of Atlanta this week, we spoke with Yves Tong Nguyen, an organizer with Red Canary Song 红莺歌 (@RedCanarySong), a grassroots collective of Asian sex workers & allies who push for for migrant justice, labor rights, and full decriminalization. 

Extended show notes after the break. First, here are some groups to learn about and support:

* Red Canary Song, New York City

* Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Network, Toronto

* SWAN, Vancouver

* Massage Parlor Outreach Project, API Chaya, Seattle

* Make the Road, greater New York

* Sex Workers Project, Urban Justice Center, New York City

0:00 – Yves tells us about herself and Red Canary Song, and why they push for decriminalization rather than legalization. Plus: the material conditions, transnational history, and political rights of massage workers, sex workers, and other low-wage workers; and Red Canary Song’s connection to Song Yang, a Chinese migrant sex worker killed during a police raid in Flushing in 2017.

18:15 – Yves’s criticism of anti-trafficking NGOs, most of which partner with the police; why arguing over the labels “sex worker,” “massage worker,” etc. distracts from a broader assessment of criminalization policies; the respectability politics of separating and ranking workers; and why massage workers have common cause with other low-wage migrant Asian workers in food, nail salons, and service and manufacturing. 

“Whether or not they are sex workers, they were harmed by the criminalization of sex work”

29:30 – Long before Atlanta, workers in the massage industry experienced violence from neighbors, ICE, police, savior-complex NGOs, and clients. Yves responds to the argument that we need police to “protect” Asian communities.

“The system itself protects itself. It is white supremacy itself, and it is made to protect white supremacists.” 

38:30 – What does “justice” look like in Atlanta? Is calling murder a “hate crime” or “terrorism” helpful? Plus: how migrant workers and sex workers have reacted to the news this week.

“I know that people really want to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, if we put them in prison, it’ll be justice. But then are we also owning that every member of our community put into prison is also justice?’”

43:30 – Yves’s surprise at the media attention this week—and frustration about the status quo of ignoring this industry. And how we should all do better.

50:50 – Does this week connect anti-Asian stigmatization during the pandemic? Plus: why blaming Trump and racist rhetoric is mostly unhelpful. 

“People want to say that that is the problem, that that is the root. But really it is a symptom. Trump’s rhetoric and people saying this and doing this is a symptom of things that have existed for such a long time. But people want to say that Trump is the problem, because then they can be like, if we can get rid of Trump then it’s good.

“Which is partially what I fear. I think that people might stop caring and think that we’ve solved it until the next awful thing happens.

“When you asked me about what I would tell people to take away from it, I want us to stop building and organizing in reaction to when people die. I want us to organize to keep people alive.”

Thanks for supporting Time to Say Goodbye. Please stay in touch:

timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/ttsgpod

https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Happy belated Pi Day (3.14)!*

*Also Stephen Curry’s birthday and the anniversary of Marx’s death! (Guess who’s drafting today’s notes?)

0:00 – Seth Berkman’s NYT article on Subway product placements in K-dramas (don’t forget: Subway is evil!), Fatima Bhutto’s book on non-Western entertainment gone global, and whether Taylor Swift listens to BTS.

16:00 – The $1.9 trillion “American Recovery Plan,” or ARP, was signed last week. Is it a new era of Keynesian governance (Zach Carter in NYT) and/or a reversal of a half-century of austerity (Eric Levitz in NY Mag)? We talk: $1,400 checks, childcare credits, and, boo, the failure of the $15 federal minimum wage, and what all this could mean in the long run. (Also, is the new paradigm shift partly a nationalist response to the threat of China?)

44:00 – Covid reflections. What were we doing one year ago when Rudy Gobert’s positive Covid test shut down the NBA (and Tammy’s neighborhood library closed)? Plus: Covid Asian nationalism, loopholes in the vaccine rollout, and retrospectives on last summer’s protests. 

Thanks for listening! Please write in with questions and comments, and join our growing community: timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, @ttsgpod (Twitter), https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod.

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P.S. – If you’re free Thursday night U.S. time, come to Tammy’s presentation on Camp Humphreys, the U.S.’s largest foreign military base, with poet and translator Eunsong Kim, sponsored by the Heung Coalition, UC Berkeley, and U Mich.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from the imperial U.S.A.!

Our special guest this week is the CHamoru activist attorney and writer Julian Aguon. Julian calls in from Guam to talk about his new book, The Properties of Perpetual Light, which comes out at the end of the month. (Pre-order it for you and a friend!)

Julian reads from the book and talks about: 

* Developing his voice as a writer and mixing genres: from poetry to political commentary to personal essay; 

* Guam/CHamoru identity and attempts to build solidarity with other colonized and indigenous peoples across the world;

* His work as a lawyer with Blue Ocean Law;

* Guam as a hotspot of climate change and militarization;

* How Guam, as a U.S. colony, is often stuck in the old and ongoing U.S.-China conflict.

For more, check out:

* Julian’s 2017 piece (In These Times) on Guam in the crosshairs of U.S.-North Korean saber rattling;

* Julian’s recent book talk at American University;

* Reporting by Chris Gelardi and Sophia Perez (The Nation) on how people in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are fighting U.S. militarism.

Thanks for listening! Please write in with questions and comments, and join our growing community: timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, @ttsgpod (Twitter), https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

We discuss the unfolding row over an academic article by Harvard law professor Mark Ramseyer, who argues, without evidence, that “comfort women” across Asia were not coercively indentured by the Japanese imperial army in World War II, but had legally consented to sex work. (For background on this debate, check out Tammy’s paper from 2006!)

Though typically irrelevant to the rest of society (lol), Ramseyer’s is the rare academic paper to invite public attention and, subsequently, outrage. His bizarrely unsourced work has triggered questions about Japan’s wartime responsibilities, unfree labor, sexual slavery, and ongoing geopolitical tensions in East Asia. And also, as Jeannie Suk Gersen, Ramseyer’s colleague, wrote last week in The New Yorker, the struggle at Harvard? 

Thousands of scholars have spoken out against the article, including five historians of Japan (and friend of the show Chelsea Szendi Schieder) who compiled an extensive list of Ramseyer’s errors and mistakes—far longer than the original paper! (N.b., economists have denounced the piece, as have groups at Harvard.)

* History of the ‘comfort women’ question 101, starting in the 1990s, thanks to the public testimony of survivor Kim Hak-sun and the support of historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki

* What does this story mean, especially, to those in Korea and the Korean diaspora? 

* What does it tell us about legal academia, the prestige of Harvard, and how TF it could get published in the first place?

* What is going on with the far-right in Japan? (cf. friend of show Adam Bronson’s piece on Abe Shinzō in Dissent)

* Why should people in the US, or around the world, care about a story seemingly confined to South Korea and Japan?

Good materials on the comfort women:

* Embodied Reckonings by Elizabeth Son

* Lolas’ House by M. Evelina Galang

* Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

* A Cruelty to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon

* Silence Broken by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson

* Comfort Women by Yoshimi Yoshiaki

* The Comfort Women by George Hicks

* Comfort Woman by Nora Ojka Keller

Some prints inspired by stories of the comfort women, by Tammy:

Thanks for tuning in. To further join the TTSG community, check out our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from a Chinese banquet! (If only…)

0:00 - “주먹만한 얼굴” (tiny face obsession)

2:48 – Reply All

We discuss the story buzzing throughout media: the hosts of the Reply All podcast, while reporting on the exploitative labor practices at Bon Appétit, had their own exploitative, anti-union activism exposed last week. What does this say about class versus race politics and the unionization movement in media? Plus, thoughts on the podcast-industry bubble.

(By the way, we are aware of the irony of talking, on a podcast, about another podcast that got canceled after talking about yet another podcast, so don't bother pointing that out!)

38:15 – “Minari”

Writer/director Isaac Chung’s “Minari,” starring Steven Yeun, has just been widely released. Is it a story about successful US assimilation or migrant ambivalence? Is it a universal or specific Asian-American tale? What is the state of Asian-diaspora storytelling in 2021, and when is the Forever 21 saga going to be made into a television movie?

1:01:00 – Three listener questions

* On ableism in our discussion of Covid-19 and “working women” (from Reena)

* Mixed feelings about the “decolonizing food” movement (from Jackie)

* On academics tweeting about political causes (from Jenny)

Thanks for listening!

* Email us your questions: timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com

* DM us here: https://twitter.com/ttsgpod

Become a patron! https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello!

Special unlocked bonus Patreon episode today with entrepreneur, TikTok cook, and hip-hop head Jaeki Cho. He and Jay talk about Jaeki’s quick rise to TikTok fame via his Korean cooking videos, Asian-American hip-hop in the 90s and 00s, and the ways in which immigrants acquire, imitate and then incorporate language.

You can find Jaeki’s TikTok here.

And a Friday throwback video for all of you.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe