Author: Time To Say Goodbye

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 discussion also complements Andy’s bonus episode with Bernie folks, Brooke Adams and Tobita Chow, from last week. Then, a quick look at the global crisis playing out in Vietnam.

A long episode, but a good one. Big props to listeners who make it all the way through!

0:00 – Why does Hua eat “adult pouches”? Can he bring Jay and Andy over to his side?

13:00 – California Governor Gavin Newsom “tiniest dog-whistled” Asians in the early days of the American pandemic, by blaming transmission on nail salons. Who’s Janet Nguyen, and how did she fight back?

41:00 – “Education and opportunity” are Asian values, right? But are they a sufficient basis for organizing? And are they liberal or conservative, right- or left-wing?

1:05:00 – Do Asian American voters care about foreign policy?

1:26:55 – Maybe Asian American politics can just be, well, politics. How do we make a universalist political program our own?

1:37:55 – You still with us? Tammy gets the guys to talk about the historic, deadly floods in Vietnam, and what they tell us about climate change. What are the overlaps with the Vietnamese economy and the coronavirus? Could the climate catastrophe replicate Asian refugee routes once caused by war?

Get woke:

* Tomorrow! “Anti-China politics in the US election” (Register here.)

* Tomorrow! “Uprising in Thailand” (Register here.)

* Thursday! “The Gwangju Uprising and Its 40-Year Global History” (Register here.)

* Jay, on musical labor and 30 years of repetition, on This American Life

* Andy, on the “China Virus,” in Feral Atlas

* Tammy, at a Montana gun range, in The New Yorker

Thank you, thank you for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com). Please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your comrades and frenemies to subscribe.

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

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 People’s Action network.

0:00 -- Brooke and Toby discuss their respective experiences organizing while Covid hit the US in March, then we speculate why Sanders was so successful among Asian and Latino groups. Andy has dark fantasies of seeing Trump win again and discrediting the Democratic leadership, while Brooke and Toby think more productively about how progressives might shape a (potential!) Biden-Harris presidency. A WWII analogy.

37:20 -- Toby expounds on moving politics in a more internationalist direction, i.e., don’t do a trade war with China. Also, how Toby and others pushed back on Biden’s bad China ad this spring.

59:20 -- We look ahead to the election. If (!) Biden-Harris win, how will progressives and centrists square off over the future of the party? Over climate? Covid relief? Electoral strategy?

More links and plugs

* Brooke and Toby talked “deep canvassing” strategies. Learn more here and here

* More from Brooke: People’s Action will hold a deep canvassing event on October 27, featuring appearances from AOC, Bernie, IL state senator Robert Peters, and artist/activist Vic Mensa. If interested, click here!

* Justice is Global’s deep canvassing experiment talking to voters about China

* Toby and friend-of-show Jake Werner’s nerdy memo on the US-China trade war

* Hear Toby and Jake and other great speakers at this Critical China Studies event on October 28, 7-8:30 ET: “Anti-China politics in the US election” (direct link to registration here)

* Tammy has a new feature out on the crucial Montana senate race (and she tells us that anti-China politics are alive and well there). Will labor unions and Native Americans make the difference for the state and, by extension, the body politic? Check it out in The New Yorker.

* Andy has a new academic/public piece riffing off the “China virus” stuff in the springtime and tracing Covid’s spread from China to the rest of the world. Some talk about “just-in-time” / “lean production” models, from 1960s Japan to China to the US, from the auto industry (think that “American Factory” documentary) to grocery stores and hospitals. Here on Feral Atlas, a new digital humanities project on human-nature-infrastructure relationships. Anthropocene. Synergy.

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

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 Matter uprising, launches us into an exploration of harvested hair, nation building, migration, and race relations, from Hong Kong and South Korea to India and Sacramento, CA, where Jenny’s brother now runs her parents’ 40-year-old wig-turned-beauty-supply stores. To enrich our discussion, we draw on a very sharp “commodity history” of Korean hair, by Jenny and Andy’s friend, Jason Petrulis.

How did Jenny’s family, and so many other Korean immigrants, come to dominate hair and beauty-supply markets for Black American women? And how does the intimate nature of hair and beauty products shape race relations?

What role have hair exports played in the developmental economics of Hong Kong, South Korea, and, more recently, India and Indonesia? How did US Cold War policy shape these markets?

1:14:30 – THAILAND! * In a new segment called “Something you should know,” a.k.a. “What Tammy forced Jay and Andy to talk about,” we bring you an update from Thailand, where a democracy movement that began in 2014, after a military coup, has recently exploded on the streets.

We discuss the aims and culture of these Thai protests, the nature of Thailand’s (ostensibly) constitutional monarchy, the economic effect of the pandemic on the nation’s tourist economy, how the current prime minister and monarch are different from those who ruled a decade ago, and the Milk Tea Alliance—the pro-democracy bonds among Thai, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese youth online. (Thanks to TTSG friends Reena and Nick for their insights.)

Big thanks for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com). Please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your comrades and frenemies to subscribe.

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

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 the myths that Silicon Valley tells itself and sells to the public. This episode focuses on her individual reckoning with the reality of Big Tech and capitalism: her distaste for corporate identity politics, how her social position (second-generation Chinese-Canadian woman) shaped her growth, the contrast between STEM and political education, and the mythology of meritocracy.

0:00 – Wendy’s own trajectory from youthful adherent of the cult of Silicon Valley (Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes) to disillusionment and critique.

19:30 – Wendy’s thoughts on entering the tech world as a woman and an Asian-(North) American—from minimizing her feelings of difference in order to fit in to gaining a structural understanding of gender and race. Some choice words for White Fragility-style corporate diversity measures. And a brief discussion of the mind-blowing history of Chinese labor migration to the West Coast.

41:30 – Our thoughts on a previous listener question: why so many Asian-Americans opt for STEM education and career paths. Parental pressure? Culture? 

48:00 – We discuss friend-of-the-show Immanuel Wallerstein’s classic, Historical Capitalism (Verso, 1983), and his criticism of the concept of meritocracy. Why is Silicon Valley’s cult of meritocracy a “sham”? How should the rest of us try to process and make sense of this critique?

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 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 institution as ridiculously undemocratic as the Supreme Court? Should leftists support court packing or other legal reforms? Plus: Jay’s double-SCOTUS-clerking high school nemesis.

36:48 – At the height of the opioid epidemic, and right after Trump’s election, we seemed to talk incessantly about the “white working class.” Not so much anymore. Who are these people, and how can we build a program of social change that benefits everyone? We read Helen Epstein’s analysis of despair and death among “non-BA whites” and a piece by Adam Rothman and Barbara Fields, arguing that “a successful national political movement must appeal to the self-interest of white Americans.” Can we replace our oppression olympics and racial whataboutism with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition or William Barber and Liz Theoharis’s Poor People’s Campaign? 

1:04:18 – So many anxieties, real and imagined, in the Taiwan Strait. How imminent is the threat of military action by China, and will Taiwan continue to spend billions on its armed forces? Why do younger generations of Taiwanese men resent their mandatory military service? We talk about Taiwan and South Korea’s grudging reliance on the US military and the persistence of neocolonial camptown relationships. Bonus: Andy introduces us to 高粱酒 / 고량주.

1:17:05 – Outtro recap: Do we care if people have “racism in their hearts”? And why must Asian Americans borrow other people’s “whatabouts”? Mike Davis continues to school us.

Very cool digital conference alert!

Join our friends at New Bloom, New Naratif, and Lausan for “Transnationally Asian,” Oct. 19 through 22, which takes its title from an article Tammy wrote over the summer. The sessions will consider postcolonial solidarity, local and global labor movements, and the role of the media in political activism. Tammy will moderate the opening panel, so please tune in. You can register for free here.

Many, many thanks for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com). Please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your comrades and frenemies to subscribe.

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 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 warrior and coronavirus prophet Zeynep Tufekci is out with a provocative new piece at The Atlantic. We reminisce about the bad old days at the start of this podcast, which we nearly christened “Pangolin Power Hour.” What does it mean for Covid-19 to be an “overdispersed pathogen”? Who is Pareto, and why does nationalized health care matter?

55:40 – We address a composite (brilliant! erudite!) listener question about class and class cosplay. Why do upper-class wokesters downplay their families’ money? Do upper- vs. upper-middle-class distinctions even matter in elite spaces? Should our class backgrounds influence our career choices or social politics? And why do we tell and retell Asian American immigrant tales of overcoming? Thanks to Janis Jin, @Soledad_Kyrie, and Lisa.

And thanks to all of you for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com). Please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your friends and enemies to subscribe.

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 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 overcoming? Is chaebol / keiretsu resentment baked into all contemporary cultural production (and mass protest)? Why are the protagonists so often middle-class instead of working-class? Other shows mentioned: “Terrace House,” “My Mister” (나의 아저씨), “Dear My Friends” (디어 마이 프렌즈).

32:35 – We discuss Wes Enzinna’s recent piece in Harper’s, “The Sanctuary,” about a group of abolitionists who transform a Minneapolis hotel into a mutual-aid encampment after George Floyd’s murder:

In the end, the fight fizzled out, but I wondered what Steve or anyone else would have done if the violence had escalated even further, as it was clear the volunteers didn’t have the ability or willpower to intervene…. 

So, no, it wasn’t that the fight showed that we needed the police, or that the abolitionists were naïve idealists—they didn’t want a thousand Sheratons, they wanted a world in which no Sheratons were necessary—but it did show that the abolitionists weren’t yet sure what to do when the actions of some threatened the well-being of others.

What do recent attempts at utopia reveal about young people’s attachment to, or abandonment of, the welfare state and organized politics/Politics? Also: Jay’s time at Standing Rock and his Avakian-loving friend at Revolution Books, Andy’s critique of critiques of corruption, Tammy’s dream of an unemployed people’s union, and a collective boost for a candidate for Oakland City Council: Carroll Fife, of Moms 4 Housing.

Big thanks for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com), and please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com)! Get all your comrades to subscribe, too.

Finally, don’t miss Andy’s webinar, tomorrow night (September 30, 7-830P EDT), with the Critical China Scholars group: “China’s Rural Capitalism: Land, Labor, and Environment.”

Sign up here for the link and details!

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 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 $5 billion from the deal somehow fund “The 1776 Project” aka Patriot Education aka Uncritical Race Theory?

14:10 – Enter the American splinternet? Or is that what we’ve been surfing all along? We ask why the past couple generations of US leftists seem so local in their thinking. Is a new kind of internationalist organizing possible?

34:20 – Our humble (and not-so-humble) takes on listener comments and questions:

1) How to support Chinese international students in this xenophobic age? And what to make of parents on conservative WeChat? Bonus: the surprising demographics of GOP Asian America. (Thanks, Elaine!)

2) What to make of the cops’ courting of Asian American communities? (Terima kasi, Megan!)

3) What does it mean to “organize,” and do upper-class people have any right to get involved in labor struggles? (감사합니다, Ollie!)

4) Is ethnic studies a force for good in politics, or does it just produce diversity aesthetics? (Salamat, Jael!)

ありがとう for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com), and do reach out any time via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com)! Get all your friends to subscribe, too.

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

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 listener question about how a “corporate Asian” should be.

0:00 – Yet another 9/11 anniversary provokes an imagined retrospective of the Trump era. How will we remember, or try to forget, these years under 45? Andy compares Chinese and US history and how state-sanctioned political narratives have domesticated personal memory and trauma. Tammy and Jay disagree over how we remember the 1960s, and we wonder how the explosive protest movements of 2020 will go down in history: will they be reduced to aesthetic commodity? Bonus: plugs for W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers.

47:38 – Economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman got in trouble for Twitterasing/ retconning the Bush administration’s Islamophobic policies and wars in the Middle East as genteel by comparison to Trump. Do his arguments have any merit? Plus, Jay previews his libretto for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s forthcoming coronavirus musical (coming to Broadway in 2026), and we examine the absurd unreliability of hate crimes statistics (tsk tsk, Krugman) in the context of anti-Asian violence.

1:19:05 – TTSG listener Gestational Yuppie asks how Asian Americans should deal with their guilt for outwardly working corporate jobs while inwardly harboring leftist politics, leading all three hosts to do some soul-searching.

Thank you for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com)! Please reach out via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your friends to subscribe.

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

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 Chinese government.

3:20 – Did Jessica Krug respond to market incentives for minstrelsy? Do white people feel the need to justify their interest in non-white/Eurocentric fields? Should Andy start using his Chinese name to gain more cred in the academy? Bonus: Jay and Tammy place bets on the number of “academic Dolezals.”

23:30 – In a recent paper, Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels explain the “trouble with disparity.” What does a focus on racial disproportionality—in regards to state violence or poor health outcomes or poverty (see Andy’s interview with Merlin Chowkwanyun)—really get us? What, or whom, do we risk losing along the way?

49:40 – First, the cast of Mulan was doing takedowns of the Hong Kong democracy movement. Now, journalist Isaac Stone Fish reports that the production did business in Xinjiang, the site of Chinese internment camps and widespread abuse of Uyghur minority groups (see Andy and Tammy’s interview with Darren Byler). How do we feel about the human-rights strategy of “naming and shaming”? Is the American critique too selective? Frightening reveal: Andy 同志 goes tankie/CCP plant.

Thanks for listening!

ICYMI, check out Tammy’s newsletter Q&A on San Quentin State Prison’s COVID-19 disaster, with Kony Kim of the Bay Area Freedom Collective.

And support us by subscribing and evangelizing to your friends! You can reach us any time via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com).

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