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
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