This week, we are joined by Gary Shteyngart, creator of the brilliant new novel, Our Country Friends. We talk about immigrant fiction, elite high schools, exile feelings, the Asian pop-cultural future, and Gary’s run-in with a fascist elementary school teacher.
Today we’re talking with Democratic pollster and Andy’s high school friend Brian Stryker of ALG research.
Recently, the Democratic Party circulated a memo Brian wrote about the Democrats’ poor showing in some of the November elections and their uneven prospects for the 2022 midterms. You can read his interview with The New York Times here.
The main topics we hit on are: how much do cultural wedge issues like critical race theory matter over bread-and-butter questions like jobs, wages, and inflation; the balance between a focus on economic versus social issues; whether emphasizing “social justice” concerns could (ironically) deter Asian and Latino/a voters; and Brian’s crystal ball for the 2024 election.
0:00 – Tammy in Korea update
6:40 – Brian explains his polling research on the Virginia elections and what it tells us about the state of the Democrats: CRT, school closures, the economy and Covid stimulus plans, and supply chains.
17:40 – The prospect of Asian and Latino voters going Republican (see Jay’s pieces on this topic) and why the Democrats struggle to convey economic messages.
34:30 – The gap between the Democrats’ “white woke consultants” and the reality and diversity of “voters of color.” Is there common ground between patriotic Democrats and the left?
45:30 – How can the Democrats speak to different racial groups in a more nuanced way? What’s the role of organized labor in the Party? Is the future of the Dems just a lot of moderate POC candidates? Is the average POC more conservative than the average wealthy white liberal? And some scary thoughts about Trump 2024.
This week, Jay and Tammy talk with Alex Rivera, a filmmaker, media artist, immigrant rights activist, and MacArthur genius, about crypto.
What is crypto currency? How does it work? And why is it often cast as a right-wing, libertarian, carbon-depleting project?
Can the left reclaim crypto for the people? How might decentralized financial networks power social movements? Post-national transactions? Worker cooperatives? Global decision-making?
The gold rushes occasioned the first mass contact between Chinese and Euro-Americans. Unlike other encounters in Asian port cities and on Caribbean plantations, they met on the goldfields both in large numbers and on relatively equal terms, that is, as voluntary emigrants and independent prospectors. Race relations were not always conflictual, but the perception of competition gave rise to a racial politics expressed as the ‘Chinese Question.’
This is a history of labor and migration, but it is also a book about race and racial ideology. Ngai traces the origins of politics organized around Chinese, and eventually Asian, exclusion at the turn of the twentieth century in the world’s white settler colonies. It’s a story most popularly known by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in the US, but it also had many parallels worldwide — a “global anti-Chinese ideology” that “gave rise to a global race theory,” as Ngai puts it.
We discuss the fine details of her research and then try to tease out some bigger implications of the “Chinese Question” for today.
(0:00): Mae’s own trajectory in migration and Asian American history and how she came to undertake this project.
(15:30): We dig into the Chinese Question: how did Mae wind up writing about Australia and South Africa? what was the “coolie myth” that dogged Chinese migrants in the 19th century? how did “free soil” and “anti-slavery” politics dovetail with racist exclusion laws? if Chinese migrants were not “coolies,” then what was life really like on the gold mines?
(44:15): The theoretical stakes of the Chinese Question: how to think about ‘race’ historically and the political value of doing so; Mae’s intervention into the headlines about anti-Asian violence during Covid; thoughts on the “racial pessimism” trend in academia and popular media and the relationship between “anti-Black” and “anti-Asian” racism; the “Chinese Question” today, e.g., the China initiative at universities, ongoing US-China tensions, and the flexible class politics of its racial ideology.
This week, a reunited, international podsquad talks K-quarantine, Enes Kanter’s Sinopportunism, and how the left should think about the “supply chain crisis.”
* Tammy’s first few days in South Korean quarantine:
* What’s going on with the Celtics center’s anti-China rants (and shoes)?
* How can leftists think beyond shopping in our relationship to global supply chains? Tammy wrote about this recently for The New York Times, with a focus on port truckers. (Photos below by Sean Rayford.)
While recording this episode, the Korean media reported the death of the murderous dictator Chun Doo-hwan. Here’s cartoonist Kim Wan’s take: “karma” on the left; “Gwangju massacre” on the right.
Guest episode this week with Andy talking to Brian Hioe and Wen Liu, writers and academics based in Taipei, with the online magazine New Bloom. We talk about the scary headlines warning of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, why the global left seems to dismiss Taiwan in favor of romanticizing the PRC, and what is the relationship between Asian and Asian American politics (if there is any)?
22:00 - Why the western left reflexively dismisses Taiwanese concerns. We explore a few: PRC romanticism, anti-Republican Party liberalism, anti-US imperialism (esp. among Asian Americans), all kinds of weird racial assumptions, horseshoe anti-war politics, etc. And what Brian and Wen say in response to these.
58:30 - Some takeaways: what distinguishes a “leftist” position on Taiwan? what is the ideal relation between Taiwan and China? what can people in the rest of the world “do”? what is the role of Asian American and Asian diasporic politics for Asia, and vice versa?
Tammy and Kori talk about the history of transnational, transracial adoption — and the special place of Korea and the Korean diaspora in adoptee activism and the contemporary architecture of family.
Note: Apologies for resending + reposting; some technical errors earlier.
Hi from TMZ studio!
Like all of Asian American Twitter, we’ve been talking about The Loneliest Americans quite a bit. But this week, Andy and Tammy get a full-on, personal Jay AMA.
Thanks to all our new listeners and everyone who joined our Discord subscriber book club last week.
Event announcement:
Next week, on November 3rd, Andy will be giving a talk at NYU’s Skirball Center (via Zoom), in conversation with Prof. Charmaine Chua of UC-Santa Barbara, Global Studies. He’ll revisit some themes in his “‘Chinese Virus,’ World Market” essay from March 2020 in n+1 — twenty months later, twenty months into the pandemic!
This week is, um, eclectic and slightly technologically challenged. Thanks for bearing with us.
4:15 – Jay’s book is out! Thursday evening, Oct. 21, Jay will be doing a Discord AMA about The Loneliest Americans. It’s for subscribers only, so if you want to ask Jay any burning questions about the book, sign up now via Patreon or Substack!
7:13 – MSG—we all love it, even though it’s bad for us. Or is it? We discuss a recent piece (short and fun) about the history of the seasoning, the veracity of “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” and MSG’s rebranding as umami.
27:49 – TTSG labor reporter Tammy Kim updates us on “Striketober.” From John Deere to Hollywood to healthcare, we are seeing record unemployment (quitting! switching sectors!) and labor militancy. Tammy is here to break it all down for us.
