APEX Express – 3.21.24 Community in Time of Hardship

KPFA - APEX Express

A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists.

Host Miko Lee speaks with Asian American creatives and Pulitzer prize finalists performance artist Kristina Wong and playwright Lloyd Suh. They reflect on how the covid lock down impacted their work and ruminated on how built communities can arise in times of hardship. One is creating work that explores the times we live in and the other is delving into the past. Each share their creative process and why art matters to them.

Show Note Links

Kristina Wong’s Website

Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, at A.C.T.’s Strand Theater (1127 Market St., San Francisco) March 30 – May 5, 2024.

Kristina’s Radical Cram School

Lloyd Suh’s bio

The Far Country BY LLOYD SUH at Berkeley Rep. March 8 – April 14, 2024

Show Transcript

Opening: [00:00:00] Apex Express Asian Pacific expression. Community and cultural coverage, music and calendar, new visions and voices, coming to you with an Asian Pacific Islander point of view. It’s time to get on board the Apex Express.

Miko Lee: [00:00:28] Good evening and welcome to Apex Express. I’m your host, Miko Lee and tonight we get to hear from two Asian American creatives. Both are Pulitzer prize finalists who have had their work presented around the country. They reflect on how the COVID lockdown impacted their work and they ruminate on how built communities can arise in times of hardship. One is creating work that explores the times we live in and the other is delving into the past to lift up stories that might be missing in history. Each share their creative process and why art matters to them. Tonight, join me as I talk story with performance artist Kristina Wong, whose show Sweatshop Overlord opens at ACT’s Strand Theater on March 30th and with playwright Lloyd Suh whose show The Far Country runs at Berkeley Rep until April 14th. First up is my chat with Kristina Wong.

Welcome Kristina Wong to Apex Express.

Kristina Wong: [00:01:24] I’m so happy to be here. Thank you.

Miko Lee: [00:01:27] We are so happy to have you as the performance artist, writer, creator of Kristina Wong’s Sweatshop Overlord, which will run at ACT from March 30th through May 5th. Yay!

Kristina Wong: [00:01:36] Yes, that’s eight shows a week, one body. Just me, everybody. Just me.

Miko Lee: [00:01:43] One woman show. Excellent.

Kristina Wong: [00:01:44] No understudy. I’ve been looking for an understudy. But apparently the theater doesn’t think it works as well if someone else goes around saying they’re Kristina Wong. So, I gotta stay healthy. For you!

Miko Lee: [00:01:54] That would be interesting, though. I would actually love to see a multi-people Kristina Wong version. That’d be really interesting.

Kristina Wong: [00:02:02] Yeah. There are enough Kristina Wongs on this planet to do that, but can they do what I do? I don’t know.

Miko Lee: [00:02:07] I don’t think many people can do what you do. [Kristina laughs] Okay, so I want to start with the question I ask many many people, and this is a big one: who are your people and where do you come from?

Kristina Wong: [00:02:21] My people, so many questions. Well, the people that I was born into, I’m third generation Chinese American, Toisan on my father’s side and Cantonese on my mother’s side. And we were a San Francisco family. Both my parents were born in San Francisco, went to San Francisco high schools. I went to San Francisco. Now I live in Koreatown, Los Angeles, my alternate Asian universe. I will say that those are the people I was born into. When I was growing up in middle school and high school I was somewhere between a theater kid who also liked making prank calls and was constantly trying to figure out who my people were and what my clique was cause I don’t even know if I would totally fit in with the theater kids. And then when I got to college, I discovered radical solo performance work and activism and finally could put, like, words around things that I had been told, “We don’t talk about it. You just get really good grades and then just become successful and that’s how you deal with that,” you know? But was introduced to interdisciplinary art and naked performers and people putting all their trauma out there in beautiful theater ways. Now as an adult, as I tie it back into the show, Kristina Wong Sweatshop Overlord, my people are the aunties. This community of aunties that I found myself leading for 504 days during the pandemic. I somehow found myself, as many artists did, non essential and running a mask sewing group and needing people to help me sew masks. And a lot of those happened to be aunties, a lot of them were Asian women who had mothers and grandmothers who were garment workers. And we had learned how to sew as survival skills that were passed down to us. And those of late have become my people. And that’s the story of the show.

Miko Lee: [00:04:16] Kristina, can you step back for a moment and just tell how that got started? How did Auntie Sewing Squad in the very, very beginning, how did it get started?

Kristina Wong: [00:04:24] March 12th, I was doing what I thought was my last show on earth. For some reason, there was a community college in Sacramento, American River Community College that had not canceled its classes, that had not taken its classes online and I had one last show on the books at 12 in the afternoon. I was doing a show called Kristina Wong for Public Office. I actually ran and served in local office in Koreatown, Los Angeles, where I live and was doing a big campaign rally show about what it meant to run for local office. And the idea was the show was going to tour all of 2020 as we led up to the November 2020 elections. And I sew my set pieces and my props. So you imagine all this American flag bunting made out of felt that I’ve sewn on a Hello Kitty sewing machine. And so this really ridiculous, like an American flag threw up on the set. Like that was my set. And the show is not going well, the students are very distracted. As it turns out, they are receiving a text in the middle of my show saying we’re going online until further notice. So I suddenly have no income. No tour. I’m back in LA. I’m hiding inside my apartment as we all are. Going, “Why did I choose to do this with my life? Why was I so compelled to become an artist? What is my purpose in all this? Why, why did I choose this unessential work?” But then I couldn’t feel sorry for myself because there were people who are risking their lives to deliver mail, to work at the grocery store, to go to work every single day at the hospital. And I see this article that I’m tagged in on Facebook saying that hospitals have no masks and are looking for home sewn masks. And the whole culture of mask wearing was so, you know, unheard of at this point and I looked at my Hello Kitty sewing machine and I was like, well I’ve never sewn medical equipment before. I’ve sewn my sets. I’ve sewn a giant vagina costume. I think I can make medical equipment. And I was just sort of called like Joan of Arc to sew. And I made this very naive offer to the internet where I said, if you’re immunocompromised or don’t have access to masks, I’ll get you a mask. I didn’t have the materials to do this, but I just offered this because it felt like that’s what you were supposed to do in this moment. We were all connected and as strong as our weakest link.

March 20th is when I sewed my first mask. March 24th, I was like, okay, I need help because there’s no way. One day when I was sewing nonstop all night, I made about 30 masks. That’s not enough to fulfill the list that was exponentially building in my inbox. So I thought, okay, I’ll make a Facebook group, and sort of offload some of this work to other people who might be sewing who could help me. And I make the group in a rush. I call it Auntie Sewing Squad. I don’t realize our acronym is ASS. I start to add my mother into the group, her friends into the group, all sorts of folks are in the Facebook group. And as it turns out, you can’t just start a Facebook group and expect people to just sew, so I, [laughs] so I find myself having to figure out how do we get the materials? How do we teach people how to sew these masks that none of us have sewn before? How do we teach people how their sewing machines work? Because some of them haven’t touched their sewing machines in decades. And how do we vet these requests for masks, because a lot of people are panicking in our inbox, and we kind of have to create a system where just because someone’s going, “Please send as many as you can,” as many as you can might mean 10 masks, it might mean 300. And are they just panicking right now and they think they need that many masks, or, you know, like, so we just had to make a lot of decisions and it felt like in those first days we were playing God, trying to figure out well, If we’ve only made a finite number of 15 masks today, who gets them, right? And obviously you’re going to look at who’s at most risk. So, so this was supposed to just be a two week thing, right? This was supposed to be a thing until the government got the masks off those cargo ships and got them to everybody. This was before masks became a bipartisan thing and a politically polarizing thing. And the group just kept going because we found beyond hospitals there were a lot of very vulnerable communities that could not even afford the cheap masks that were showing up on the market. And we’re talking about farm workers, folks seeking asylum at the border, indigenous reservations. We sent a lot to the Navajo Nation and to the Lakota tribe in North and South Dakota. So this ended up going on for over 500 days. It became a community of over 800 volunteer aunties, all sewing remotely, all working remotely. We developed this whole system in which we could respond to the high COVID rates that we were witnessing and to communities that were being adversely impacted, either because they had no access to healthcare or no access to clean water.

Miko Lee: [00:09:03] That’s an important one.

Kristina Wong: [00:09:05] Yeah.

Miko Lee: [00:09:06] How many masks did you end up creating?

Kristina Wong: [00:09:08] We ended up sewing in total, what we recorded was 350,000 masks were sewn and distributed. We also rerouted hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of medical equipment to a lot of those places. The thing is, like, in a crisis, and I have to remind us, even though it was four years ago, because we forget so many of the details, if you saw an article that farm workers were getting hit by COVID, you don’t, you’re not going to just send a bunch of masks to some address you find online, right? Because not everyone’s checking their mail, not everyone might be at that office address, you’re not clear who might distribute those masks once they arrive. So we had to do a lot of work in terms of calling and working with other mutual aid organizers and these communities and figuring out like, well, what is the actual impact? How are you getting these masks around and how many can we send you at least to hold you over for a week or two, right? Like, yes, there are you know, hundreds of thousands of farm workers, but we’re not sitting on a ton of masks that we just, you know, that come out of our butt and that we just have like we actually like sit down at our sewing machines and cut and sew these things. So—

Miko Lee: [00:10:13] And you had to research and make the connections—

Kristina Wong: [00:10:16] Make the connections. Yeah. And some of those requests shifted into full on other kinds of aid. So the Navajo reservation had volunteer sewing groups, but they didn’t have access to sewing supplies. I’m in Los Angeles where we have a garment district and we were looking at a map going, well, in theory, someone could drive round trip across a very long day, you know, to, to lessen the risk of exposure. And so our first truck over wasn’t, you know, just a van filled with masks, but a van filled with the supplies that they could use to sew masks. And then we learned that only 30 percent of that reservation has running water. That when multigenerational families were getting COVID, there was nowhere to quarantine, so they requested things like tents to quarantine and buckets to make homemade hand washing stations. First it was sewing supplies, but we did about eight runs back and forth to the reservation during the pandemic to get supplies to those mutual aid organizers who could get it to people. I helped secure like a big soap donation from Dr. Bronner’s. It was like, we just thought it was just the masks, but we basically stepped in all of structural racism and systemic you know poverty and all the ways the system was broken and it had already left behind a lot of indigenous communities and people of color who are getting hit like super hard by this pandemic. So ASS, our unintentional acronym, Anti Sewing Squad, that’s sort of what we fell into was going from, okay, we’re going to make a few masks to full on shadow FEMA.

Miko Lee: [00:11:51] Yeah, not even just sewing squad, but sort of a superhero squad. Let us come in where the government has failed and help where we can. It’s incredibly powerful. Thank you for doing that.

Kristina Wong: [00:12:02] Yeah, I don’t know if I would have done it again, honestly, even though out of it came this incredible show, but if you told me at the top of this, this is actually going to go on for 500 days, I don’t know that I would have done it. Like, it was so exhausting, and that’s also sort of a joke in the show, is people kept going, “Oh, you aunties, you’re heroes, you’re heroes!” and I’m like, oh my god, like, heroes are what you call the people who do the work no one wants to pay for apparently, because [laughs] this is, this is, this is, this sucks. This sucks. Like, we don’t want to be heroes. We want our systems that, like, we, we just saw how everything failed us in this moment. Capitalism failed us. The medical system failed us. Just all these things that we’re supposed to step in, in these moments of crisis didn’t work. What I witnessed and why I made a show about this, is I’ve witnessed how community steps up and I witnessed how these aunties showed me this generosity I’ve never witnessed in my life. Like most of the friendships I have in Los Angeles are because someone does something for a living and that, serves me and my job in a certain way, right? They’re very transactional relationships. And I witnessed people who I had no idea who they were before this moment, willing to come to my house, brave this very unknown pandemic, to pick up a roll of elastic, to sew for a total stranger, risk their life going to the post office to mail these things, right?

And so to me, that’s, what’s worth celebrating is this opportunity that I think that we all had as humanity to witness that this was our moment to all come together, I would say we lost that opportunity and we’ve just become resentful and whatever, but I, I feel like Auntie Sewing Squad showed me a glimmer of the generosity that was possible. And for me, that’s worth celebrating. And the only reason why I feel like it’s worth reliving the pandemic. In a 90 minute show.

Miko Lee: [00:13:54] Every night for multiple nights.

Kristina Wong: [00:13:56] Yes, eight nights a week. What am I doing? The show is so, you know, people are like 90 minutes. So long. It’s like, it’s because the pandemic was so long. I would have loved to cap this at 45 minutes, but this kept going. It kept going.

Miko Lee: [00:14:09] How many members are there in the Auntie Sewing Squad?

Kristina Wong: [00:14:12] I would say. We had and they were all involved in different capacities. I mean, like some of them may have been involved for all of a week before, they got pulled away by their families or job obligations. But we had about 800 different aunties coming in and out of the group. Not all of them were sewing, some of them were organizing spreadsheets, making phone calls, some of them were driving aunties. We had a huge system of care aunties, led by our Auntie Gail and basically, people who couldn’t sew who felt really guilty would [be] like, “Can I send you all a pizza?” Which was really necessary because a lot of these aunties were operating on survivor’s guilt, right? Of feeling like, well I have this privilege of being able to stay at home while my mailman risks his life to get, you know, get me the mail. Because it’s really hard to go to sleep when you know that you at your sewing machine an hour longer could possibly save someone’s life. But we also needed to encourage these aunties to stop and rest. You can’t just tell people, okay, sew a bunch of masks and expect them to stay motivated to do it. We had aunties who lost family members to COVID. We had aunties who are falling into their own depression and getting isolated. So much of this group wasn’t just about like, while we joke it’s a sweatshop, a lot of it was this entire community that supported each other, cared for each other. We’d have zoom stitch n bitches where we’d, you know, the aunties would, I was working out this show on Zoom, never thinking that it was going to premiere off Broadway, to basically just entertain the aunties while they were at their sewing machines. Like we were this whole system this became this weird ad hoc family that supported each other through this very strange time. And that was sort of the staying power of why people stayed involved is because they’d never experienced community like this either, which was just all pure generosity. I feel like I’m describing a cult, and I sort of am, but whatever. It’s a cult called ASS, so it’s fine.

Miko Lee: [00:15:59] Well, a unique community that came together to address the harm that was happening. It’s beautiful. Can you go back in time, roll us back in time, to how you first got politicized? I heard you say that about college, but is there a moment that happened for you?

Kristina Wong: [00:16:16] I think I was always a little politicized. I just never really had the language and education around it. When I was 12 years old in our middle school, there was a science lesson plan contest and we basically prepared a science lesson plan and taught it to another class. And my partner and I, we did something about saving the planet and just doing a deep dive. This is the nineties, right? Like how much we were screwing with our planet. And I think I still don’t know that we all know the lesson, but I was like a little Greta Thunberg, you know. I just didn’t know how to be an activist. It was like, do I collect cans that are thrown on the street? Like, how do I, how do I do this? Like, how does this equate to actual change? And I think that’s, I think we have some more of those tools and we’re also cognizant about how frustrating those tools are to implement and see happen. But that’s, I think the first time I realized I was an activist and it wasn’t until I got to college and was introduced to, I didn’t know what Asian American Studies was I was like, what? Why would you study that? Like, what is that? I had no idea that Asian Americans have had a whole political history that has worked alongside the civil rights movement and, I had no idea I could put words to the microaggressions I’d expressed my whole life and that I could actually challenge them as not being okay. I went to UCLA. I feel like that’s where a lot of people figure out that they’re Asian American. That’s also where I began to understand the political power of art. What I had understood of activism before that point was marching in rallies, screaming at people, berating people to recycle. But, you know, it’s not sustainable. It’s exhausting. It makes people want to avoid you. And it’s an emotionally depleting. And so being introduced to artists, just sort of sharing their lives and their lives as having political power to put forward and to put meaning to was really incredible to experience like performers. I think some of the first performers I saw just like put themselves forward and all their flawed ways was actually kind of profound and incredible. That’s where I was drawn to making art as my sort of form of protest and activism.

Miko Lee: [00:18:26] Is this where the roots of the Radical Cram School came about?

Kristina Wong: [00:18:29] Oh, yeah. Yeah. So Radical Cram School is my web series for children. You can find it on YouTube. And where that started was one of our producers, Teddy Chow, his daughter Liberty had come home and they, at that point they were living in Ohio where they were one of the few Chinese families there. And the daughter said, “I wish I wasn’t Chinese.” And Teddy was like, “Can you go talk to her and her friends and make her proud?” And I was like, “You know what? I said that too when I was a kid.” And so somehow this blew up into us like, well, let’s create a web series for kids, specifically for Asian kids, because I feel like Asian Americans and kids don’t really. We just sort of, the tools we are offered politically don’t really have our face in them. Like, we don’t really understand where we fit in a political movement, and how to be an ally to black and brown movements. And I was like, let’s do a web series where we gather Asian American kids and it to me was a little tongue in cheek. And I feel like a lot of me being in a bubble of other progressives in Los Angeles feels like I can lovingly poke at this idea of a cram school where we’re trying to quickly teach Asian kids about the entire world of what’s overwhelming and oppression in the setting. And so that became Radical Cram School which went on for two seasons and was completely decried by right wingers like Alex Jones. So I would say that’s a success.

Miko Lee: [00:19:53] I think it is so delightful and funny. It’s a little mix of like drunk history with Sesame Street.

Kristina Wong: [00:20:00] Yes. Yes. That’s exactly what we were going for and I feel like I’m very lucky at some point in my lifetime. Yes, it didn’t happen until college and like post college was introduced to all these incredible Asian American activists, many of us who are still with us right now. And this history and I feel like it’s worth sharing.

Miko Lee: [00:20:21] The child that inspired the whole series. Was she actually in it?

Kristina Wong: [00:20:26] Liberty. Yes, she was in it. She’s in it. She’s both in the first and second season.

Miko Lee: [00:20:29] Was it mission accomplished in terms of having a sense of pride of being Asian American?

Kristina Wong: [00:20:35] I think so. It’s always ongoing, right? Like I think pride, you don’t, you don’t get it once and it stays forever. It’s something that we like, as we constantly learn to like love ourselves and appreciate what we have. And we’re also part of growing a community too, right? Like, it’s not just like, Oh, I’m proud. I found my pride at 13 and it stayed. Like, we always feel like kicked to the curb constantly and challenged. And I think, like for me, this pandemic was a really challenging time for Asian Americans. As we witnessed like the backlash, the hate, like how backwards it was that people would equate. Do you remember early on when people were like, can you get COVID from Chinese food? Like, it was just so like, what happened?

Miko Lee: [00:21:13] I mean, the whole Kung flu virus.

Kristina Wong: [00:21:15] The Kung flu, China virus, like all these these just sort of racist associations with it are like, are constantly challenging to our sense of pride. So hopefully having that web series out there will be these touchstones to remind Asian American kids that we exist. We’re here. There’s a basis. We’re not building this from scratch and we may be recording it from scratch or constantly trying to remember this history into existence. But, to me it’s a verb, right? The verb of finding pride is always active.

Miko Lee: [00:21:44] I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about how you, you often in your work play with gender expectations around Asian women from, you know, like you mentioned before sewing on your Hello Kitty sewing machine, which I have a Hello Kitty sewing machine too.

Kristina Wong: [00:21:59] Yes. It’s a good machine. I don’t know if it’s a Janome.

Miko Lee: [00:22:02] It’s actually incredibly practical. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles, but it works. Yeah but I remember your big vagina MC for Mr. Hyphen America. I can’t believe you sewed that on one of those tiny machines. And then, you have this web series about taking down how white men can date Asian women. And then the other thing is your fake porn site. Can you tell us about that?

Kristina Wong: [00:22:23] Oh, that’s like That’s 20 years of projects you’ve just named. Well, my very first project out of college, year 2000, still had dial up internet, my friends, was called BigBadChineseMama.com. You can still look it up. And this is before there were search engines, SEOs. And if you look for Mail Order Bride on Yahoo, because Yahoo was the search engine of choice at the time, it showed up in the top 10 search results for Mail Order Bride. Now, you know, if you look for porn, clearly outnumbered, yeah. So that was like my first project. And a lot of that came out of like me being kind of a depressed college kid and trying to use this thing called the internet to research stuff for my Asian American women class. And all I was finding was pornography and was like, Oh my God, [laughs] we have to like intercept this somehow. And like always feeling like I was not good at being a girl, right? Like the standards for being a good Asian girl, were the extremes. It was like Miss Chinatown, Connie Chung, and then these porn stars that would show up, you know, on these Google, on these searches and that was, that’s it, right? So a lot of my projects have been about like being awkward out loud and being uncomfortable out loud and leaning into publicly embarrassing myself, but saying that it’s my work.

Miko Lee: [00:23:45] And how has your family responded to your work? You grew up in San Francisco.

Kristina Wong: [00:23:49] Yeah. Oh, they didn’t like it at first, but they love it now because I’m a Pulitzer Prize finalist, my friends.

Miko Lee: [00:23:54] Oh, how did that feel to get?

Kristina Wong: [00:23:56] So crazy! You know, I entered, anyone can become a Pulitzer Prize contender. Like you just need 75 dollars and then you mail your entry in and the committee reads it. And so six years before I was a Pulitzer finalist, my friend Brian Feldman and I, we entered our respective plays. Mine was The Wong Street Journal, his was a very experimental piece called Dishwasher. His entry was like two pages long and we were up against Hamilton, which ended up winning. And my mother was so excited because she’d only seen my play, you know, like that was the only play she’d ever seen that year. And she was like, “You’re going to win. You’re totally going to win.” Which was great that I had her confidence, but I was like, probably going to go to Hamilton. And I actually got a press pass, and I went to Columbia College, where they announced the winner just for press in person, and I happened to just be in New York at that time, and I had prepared three speeches. One, if I won, a speech if I was a finalist, and then the speech if I lost. And I read all three speeches outside after Hamilton was declared the winner of the Pulitzer. So that day when they were announcing it, my, that same friend Brian was like, “Good luck today.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And he’s like, “They’re announcing the Pulitzers.” And then they were announcing it online because you know, it’s 2022. And I was like, they’re not going to give it to me. I do solo work. I’m an Asian woman. They’ve never given an Asian woman anything in the drama category and my phone just started exploding at lunch when I was in Chinatown having lunch with some friends and I couldn’t believe it. I was just like freaking out and it just feels so dignified, right? And I’m not exactly a dignified person. So I’m like, [laughs] you know, I was like, “Oh my God, this is going to look so good on Tinder. Holy crap, this is crazy.” So it’s, I’m still shocked when I look at that by my name. I’m like, this is so weird. But it’s just funny because yeah, I entered as a joke six years before, and then I was on the committee the following year reading the applicants. So crazy things happen, folks. Crazy things can happen.

Miko Lee: [00:26:06] I have one more question, which is, you started ASS, Auntie Sewing Squad, in the very beginning when you were making this piece about running for public office. Even though that was created in 2020, you know, we’re basically having the same election again.

Kristina Wong: [00:26:19] Yeah, I know. It’s a sequel. Why are we in the sequel? I hate sequels.

Miko Lee: [00:26:24] So are you reviving that piece as well?

Kristina Wong: [00:26:27] I did, I have done it a little earlier this year. There have been some requests to maybe do it before November. We will always have elections, so it’s a little bit evergreen. I actually had a reality television pilot that didn’t get picked up by Trutv. And it was a very self satirizing version of myself that I was going to be playing in this pilot, which was basically satirizing myself as an activist. And it did not make sense once Trump took office to satirize myself, because as it turns out, most of the world have very two dimensional visions of what an Asian American is like and would think that that’s who I really was and not get that it was a loving poke at myself. And I think looking at Radical Cram School and how I play myself there can give you a sense of, this won’t make sense to everybody. Right. And so I was an out of work reality TV star, and what do you do when you’re an out of work reality TV star? You run for public office. So there’s a lot of that humor around that era. Just, I think we’ve just gotten so exhausted with, right? [Laughs]. Like, why, why are these two people still here? Oh my god. This is the best we could do? But there’s still a lot of public offices to run for. It doesn’t start and end with the presidency or the Senate. The story of the show is like what can happen locally? There are so many local offices that would surprise you. You could literally just go to the meeting and go take the vacated seat and go around saying you’re an elected official. For better or for worse, whatever that means. So, but yeah, it did get recorded for Center Theatre Group, but it’s not available for streaming anymore. So they did stream it right before the election during the pandemic. And maybe it will have a few more runs right before the election this year, but I’m not sure.

Miko Lee: [00:28:07] Okay, well, keep us posted so that we know. Is there anything else you’d like our audience to know about your upcoming play at ACT, Kristina Wong’s Sweatshop Overlord?

Kristina Wong: [00:28:19] I just want to say it’s such a special show and I feel very lucky I feel like there’s not a lot of this. There’s literally pushback in the publishing world and the network TV world where they’re like, we do not want you to pitch anything about the pandemic. We are sick of the pandemic. So I feel like this record of this time came under the wire. I’m told it is not annoying as many things about the pandemic are [laughs]. And to me, it’s really I find a lot of humor, not at the expense of like how tragic that time was, but in that a group of aunties came together and formed this ad hoc sewing army to protect the country. And, and so this really plays out like a war movie on stage and I think really kind of gives us something to reflect on and appreciate of each other in that moment. And so that’s really what I hope brings people out is this need to feel that there’s something sort of comforting that we can take from this moment, because I don’t know that we got that. I think we just sort of ran from that so fast that we never really reflected. I hope to see everybody at ACT, The Strand Theater on Market, March 30th to May 5th, I believe is when I close. I do shows eight days a week. I do them on weekdays. I do them on weekends.

I am living in that theater, folks, and I am living there for you. So please come out. I’ll see you. It’s Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord. Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Miko Lee: [00:29:44] Kristina Wong, thank you so much for sharing your time with us. And we look forward to seeing the show and learning more about the Auntie Sewing Squad. Thank you so much.

Kristina Wong: [00:29:54] Thanks Miko.

Miko Lee: [00:29:54] This is Apex Express and you are listening to 94.1 KPFA and 89.3 KPFB in Berkeley, 88.1 KFCF in Fresno, 97.5 K248BR in Santa Cruz, 94.3 K232FZ in Monterey, and online worldwide at kpfa.org. Next up, listen to the Radical Cram School where kids learn about the story of Detroit activist and American revolutionary Grace Lee Boggs. This is the project that Kristina Wong was talking about creating to help young Asian Americans have a sense of pride and an understanding of their history. Take a listen to the Radical Cram School.

Radical Cram School: [00:30:43]

Miko Lee: [00:35:24] That was Kristina Wong’s Radical Cram School. You can check out more of that on YouTube, which is linked in our show notes. Next up, take a listen to my interview with playwright, Lloyd Suh. Welcome award winning playwright Lloyd Suh to Apex Express.

Lloyd Suh: [00:35:41] Hello.

Miko Lee: [00:35:43] Your new show, The Far Country, is premiering at Berkeley Rep through April 14th and we’re so happy to have you here.

Lloyd Suh: [00:35:52] Thanks for having me.

Miko Lee: [00:35:53] Okay I’m going to start with a big question, which is who are your people and where do you come from?

Lloyd Suh: [00:35:58] My family immigrated to the United States, from South Korea in the early 1970s. I was born in Detroit, Michigan and grew up mostly in the South suburbs of Indianapolis, Indiana but I’ve lived in the New York City area for the past like 25 years.

Miko Lee: [00:36:17] Thank you so much for that. I noticed that many of your plays are based around the Chinese American experience and less on your Korean American background. Can you talk a little bit more about what has inspired your artistic play choices?

Lloyd Suh: [00:36:30] Yeah. In the past, like, almost decade, really, I’ve been writing about these kind of forgotten or underexplored moments in Asian American history. It’s kind of very accidental and almost involuntary. I was doing research on one play and it would lead me down a rabbit hole into reading about a story that I just couldn’t shake, that I needed to, you know, get in a room with peers and explore. And so one play would just kind of lead to the next, I was writing a play under commission for the National Asian American Theater Company in New York called Charles Francis Chan Jr. That play kind of accidentally became about the history of the stereotypes that kind of permeate around Asian America to this day, and where those stereotypes came from. And in researching that history, there’s just so much more scholarship around now, around Asian American history than there was when I was in school. There was just so much to read, and so much that was new to me. And in the process of researching that play, I came across the story of Afong Moy, regarded as the first Chinese woman to set foot in the United States. And there was something about her story that just haunted me, that I just couldn’t shake and I knew I needed to get in a room with peers and like really wrestle with it. So in the process of that play, I was researching the exclusion era and it’s unavoidable, right? The way in which the Chinese Exclusion Act and the experience of people on Angel Island really serves as kind of a fulcrum for so much of what Asian America is now, right? It created geographical restrictions, legislative, economic, not to mention cultural and stereotypical. Like, it’s just the foundation for so much of what we’ve had to navigate as this obviously, socially constructed, very important sort of attempt at solidarity that we call Asian America. What that led to was just feeling like I’m just following, you know, I’m just following this impulse. I was doing it kind of subconsciously at first, but once I became aware that I was writing this history, it became really clear that what I was looking for, in total was trying to place myself on this continuum, trying to understand, where have we come from and where are we going and where are we now. The Far Country and another one of my history plays, The Heart Sellers, which is kind of a bookend to The Far Country in a lot of ways. were written largely during the pandemic.

Miko Lee: [00:38:57] Oh, that’s so interesting. And so you’ve sort of been on this pathway, a timeline through Asian American history.

Lloyd Suh: [00:39:05] Yeah. It felt different during the pandemic, like, right. Like, before it was kind of impulsive and it felt very organic and I wasn’t always very self aware of that, about how one play connected to the other. But once you know, we were in this moment of deep self reflection just based on what was going on in the world at that time too—a pretty intense reckoning in this country over American history, over, you know, who we build monuments to, over our accounting of what it is to be an American

and a contemplation about like who we’ve forgotten. And so it became just more purposeful in that way. It became just clearer, especially as I started to think about the ways in which, you know, I have aging parents and I have growing children and wanting to understand how do I talk about one to the other? How do I place myself and my parents and my children on this continuum of this long arc of history? That doesn’t just go backwards, but, you know, it goes forward as well. That in each of these plays, there’s a gesture towards the future, and then thinking about the future and when, you know, when characters talk about the future in these plays, I like to think that for actors who are, who are playing those roles, that they can feel really palpably and recognize that when these characters are talking about the future, they’re talking about them. And then when audiences hear them talk about the future, they also could feel the ways in which they mean them.

Miko Lee: [00:40:24] So you’re both, as Helen Zia says, lifting up these missing in history moments, trying to tell these stories that haven’t been told. Also, I hear you’re reflecting a lot during that time of COVID during the lockdown time on how do we rise up our stories? I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the pandemic time and the impact on you as an artist and if the rise in anti-asian hate that really started happening around that time impacted your storytelling.

Lloyd Suh: [00:40:53] Absolutely. Yeah, I mean that whole period was, it was such a bizarre time to be a playwright. I mean, it was a bizarre time to be anything, right? But the idea of writing a play was pretty absurd because there were no theaters, right? And it’s like, there’s no sense of, hey, when will there be theater again? Right? It just seemed—

Miko Lee: [00:41:15] An unknown, an unknown field, right?

Lloyd Suh: [00:41:17] Yeah, so it was a little silly, right? You’re like, oh, your play is due. And you’re like, no, it’s not [laughs] nobody’s going to do anything. Like, why am I writing plays, right? And I think everybody in that time was thinking about, like, why do I do the things that I do? Why do I spend the time on the things that I spend time on? And, you know, our relationship with time was just very different. So very early in the pandemic, I was like, yeah, why am I, why would I write a play? There’s no, it just doesn’t make any sense right now. But then as I sat with the things that I knew I needed to wrestle with, and just knowing the way I wrestle with things is to write about them, that it felt like, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna do this anyway, even though there’s no sense that theater will come back anytime soon. I’m going to do this anyway. And it became an aspirational thing. Like to write a play became aspirational in the sense that it’s like, I believe that theater will come back, that we’re not all gonna die, that civilization will continue, and that this will matter, right? That what I’m exploring right now, will be meaningful to myself, to my peers and to strangers, in whatever the world looks like then. And so to write aspirationally is pretty, pretty cool. It’s different, you know. To be able to write with that aspiration was really valuable. And I think it’s part of why and how these plays came to be the kind of plays they are.

Miko Lee: [00:42:40] I appreciate the hopeful side that you are infusing into your plays, given the time that we were in was when many people felt so hopeless. I’m wondering if because you’re writing about the immigration station and Angel Island and also the Exclusion Act were, what was happening in the country around, you know, Trump saying Kung flu virus and all the stories about the elders that were getting beat up in Chinatown and, all over the country, the slurs that people were getting. Did that impact or help to inform how you’re writing about the Exclusion Act?

Lloyd Suh: [00:43:14] Yeah. I think that reading the news during that time, it’s very similar to reading the history, right? You can see where that comes from. I remember during that time, in a lot of news media, tended to make it seem or insinuate that this was new, that this was surprising somehow. Having been immersed in this history, it was frustrating to see the ways in which people, sometimes very smart people [laughs] not recognizing, hey, this is not new. This is ancient. This was there from the beginning. Yeah, of course, that absolutely informs everything. It feels like, yes, I’m writing history, but I’m trying to write out of time. One of the things about writing aspirationally at a time when there is no theater, is you also can’t write to a specific time, you know, in the pandemic moment, writing in the pandemic moment you cannot write to the pandemic moment, right? Because you know, oh, this will not be, this is not when these plays will be seen. So you’re writing for a kind of a future, right? You’re writing for a time that you hope is different, in good ways, but you also acknowledge may be different in, in unpleasant ways.

Miko Lee: [00:44:15] Right.

Lloyd Suh: [00:44:16] But it’s also like all of this is out of time, you know, the phenomenon of violence against Asian Americans or against anybody or against a culture is so pervasive throughout history. Right. So, it’s not hard to make that or to let that exist out of time. Right.

Miko Lee: [00:44:35] I mean, the violence against the culture is deeply American.

Lloyd Suh: [00:44:38] Yeah. And feeling like it’s not something you have to force. It’s just something that you have to acknowledge and reckon with on its own terms, which is to say, it’s not about 2020. It’s not about a particular moment. It’s about a long arc of history where these things come from, how they’ve brewed, how they’ve festered, how they’ve lingered, how they’ve been ignored and forgotten and buried over, and how they might be transformed. How they might be diagnosed, you know, like I think of them as wounds. In a few of these plays, characters refer to, like a sense of historical trauma as a wound, a wound that you can’t recognize if you don’t know where it comes from. You can’t diagnose it and you can’t heal it if you can’t diagnose it. So part of it is like saying, “Hey, there is a wound.” When I think for a very long time a lot of cultural tradition has been to say, “Push it away, push it away. Move on.”

Miko Lee: [00:45:31] “Keep working. Don’t, don’t think about it. Just keep working.”

Lloyd Suh: [00:45:33] Yes. Yes. Bury it. And even generation to generation, you don’t want to hear those stories.

Miko Lee: [00:45:38] That’s right.

Lloyd Suh: [00:45:39] If I have a thesis in any of this, [laughs] it’s that, no, we need, you need to know. You know, I think that these characters, this is too early for them to have a name for the concept of epigenetics, but I see it. I see it in tradition, this idea that it does pass down.

Miko Lee: [00:45:54] The trauma through the bloodline.

Lloyd Suh: [00:45:56] Yeah. And so like, if you’re going to feel the pain, you got to know where it comes from. If you know where it comes from and if you can deal with it with people, right, with a community on a deep level, then it can be healed. And if you don’t, then it never will be.

Miko Lee: [00:46:10] So do you look at most of your plays as a healing modality? Is that what you want from your audiences?

Lloyd Suh: [00:46:15] That’s a great question. I mean, I think about that for myself, I would say on a certain level. I mean, I think about it as many things, but that is part of it. Yeah. Like I think about it as I need to understand this. Like, you know, like just thinking about the exclusion era. I felt like, okay, I know I need to write about this because I know we need to make sense of it for myself. I need to understand how it manifests in my life, how it manifests in what is possible for my children, how it manifests in America. So that’s part of it for sure for me and for my peers, the people in the room. For audiences, I would say, especially as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to redefine my relationship with audiences in that, like, I had a playwriting teacher once talk about how a playwright’s job is to unify an audience. That no matter where an audience comes from, like whatever happened to them that day, they’re all coming from different places when they gather in the theater. But through the course of the play, a playwright wants them to become one organism and have the same discoveries in the same moment.

Miko Lee: [00:47:13] Oh, that’s interesting. Do you agree with that?

Lloyd Suh: [00:47:16] For a long time I did, but then I had this moment when I was writing a play for young audiences, when I found this really useful tension between like the adults who, you know, thought that the fart jokes were juvenile [laughs] and the young people who would just not understand these references that are there for the adults. And it was kind of cool because you’d feel pockets, different people reacting in different ways. And especially as I was doing some of these early history plays, I found this useful tension between people based on socio location. That Asian American audiences were just naturally responding to different things in a way that was kind of interesting. And so what I realized is if I manipulate an audience so that they’re operating as one organism, they’re not responding as themselves. They’re not responding in as deeply personal of a way, right? So what I want is for people to bring something of themselves to it.

Like, no matter what happened to them that day, no matter what happened in the news, no matter what happened in their personal life, that through the experience of watching a play, they can relate something of themselves to what they’re watching, and they can bring that into the theater with them.

and so, like very purposefully in these plays, I try not to unify an audience, right? Which is to say, I’m not trying to divide them, but I’m also trying to make them respond as individuals.

Miko Lee: [00:48:37] Right, because the first one actually feels like you’re trying to get a cult together. Everybody should think the same way and feel the same way, as opposed to individually responding about where each of us are at and how we take in that information of the play.

Lloyd Suh: [00:48:52] Yeah, yeah. And I just find that so much more satisfying because I like to leave a lot of room in my plays, for actors, for directors and designers to personalize.

Miko Lee: [00:49:02] All the other creatives to be able to have their input to put it into their voice.

Lloyd Suh: [00:49:07] Yeah, and just even to make choices like there are moments where you could go many directions like if somebody were to ask me, “Hey, what does this line mean?” I would say, “Well, you know, like, what does it mean to you?” Right? Like it’s make it yours. Every character can have secrets that I don’t need to know.

Miko Lee: [00:49:22] Oh, you’re doing therapy speak with the actors [laughs]. What do you think it means?

Lloyd Suh: [00:49:26] Yeah, I mean, I think it is. It’s like making choices, making big choices that allow for any production to be an amalgamation of many people’s real personality, their history. Like if I were to go into a rehearsal room and just spend it making everybody do what I already know, I want them to do. Then watching the play is just watching something where I already know what’s going to happen.

Miko Lee: [00:49:47] Right. What’s the fun in that? [Laughs]. Um, so let’s come back and talk about The Far Country, which is at Berkeley Rep right now. Tell us about this play. I heard you saying that each of your plays, the rabbit hole of the journey that one discovered the other, but can you tell us very specifically about The Far Country?

Lloyd Suh: [00:50:07] Yeah, The Far Country is a play that takes place during the exclusion era, about a very unlikely family that spans across a couple of decades navigating the paper son system, and the experience of a young man on Angel Island Detention Center. The journey leading up to that and the journey leading away from it as this very unlikely family tries to build something lasting in America, despite the extraordinary legislative restrictions that were in place at the time.

Miko Lee: [00:50:36] Lloyd, can you speak a little bit more for audience members that may not know what the Exclusion Act was?

Lloyd Suh: [00:50:42] Yes, totally. The Chinese Exclusion Act was legislation passed in 1882, that restricted all Chinese laborers from entering the United States. And this was a period of time when China was, specifically Toisan was ravaged by natural disaster, war, economic disenfranchisement, horribly one sided trade agreements with the West. There was an extraordinary wave of Chinese laborers who were immigrating to the United States in the years preceding. Partially through the gold rush, partially through the opportunity to work on the transcontinental railroad. In the United States, it was a period of such xenophobia and such anger and hatred towards these incoming Chinese laborers that these extraordinarily restrictive laws were passed, the Page Act, prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act. But what also happened is the great earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco destroyed all the government records pertaining to birth records and who was there. So it created this really odd opportunity for Chinese currently residing in the United States to claim birthright citizenship, to claim to have been born in the United States because there was no documentation to prove otherwise. And if somebody was able to obtain birthright US citizenship through that process, they could then bring their children to the United States. And so what it did was it created this system whereby people who had obtained birthright US citizenship could then pretend to have a son or a daughter that they would sell that slot to so that somebody could enter the United States. And so it created these really kind of patchwork unlikely families of people connected only by paper, only by false documentation. And the navigation of that system, ultimately created this very weird community.

Miko Lee: [00:52:32] Expand on that. What do you mean by weird community?

Lloyd Suh: [00:52:36] People who were not able to be themselves, who changed their names, who at least on paper were pretending to be somebody else. Families that were not connected by blood, but pretending to be connected by blood. A community that was almost entirely male, a community that was in the United States, but not really permitted to travel outside of a particular geographical area. This was a community that was constructed in reaction to legislation, in reaction to imprisonment on Angel Island. And in reaction to the horrible conditions of that time. What’s remarkable to me is the ways in which they built a community anyway, they built families anyway, they built opportunity anyway, and the resilience of that, the bravery of that, the sacrifice of that, is something that I am simultaneously in awe of, but also feel a responsibility and an obligation to build on to honor, to try and illuminate in some way to try to share with others. But also just to recognize the incredible pain of it, that they gave up everything, like really everything. They gave up their name, they gave up their family, they gave up their identity, in order to pretend to be somebody who belongs. That’s the only way to build any kind of future. These were pioneers who did things that it’s hard for me to imagine. But I know that they did it for us. Not just us, but for the future, for future generations, for you know, those who come after, and that is very powerful to me.

Miko Lee: [00:54:03] I appreciate that as a fifth generation Chinese American, whose family comes from Toisan, whose grandmother was on angel island under a different name because her husband, my grandfather had bought papers from her great grandfather so that they could not actually be married because on paper they would be brother and sister. So even though she had a legal right to actually be in the U. S., she had to take a whole new name and a different identity on Angel Island. So we all have these complicated stories that are part of our history. Thank you for rising that up and bringing that to the world. I’m wondering what you want the walk away message for folks coming to see The Far Country.

Lloyd Suh: [00:54:49] Yeah. I mean, that’s a great question. The only way I can answer it is to go back to what I said before about wanting people to respond personally. Like I think everybody has a history, everybody has a family history, and everybody’s is different, but I hope that anybody who watches this play has moments where they can think about their ancestry.

About the things they know and the things that they don’t know and just change their relationship to that somehow, just really reflect on it and reflect on not just their personal history, but how it relates to their definition of what it is to be an America. To add this really huge, but underexplored moment in American history and add it to their accounting of what it is to be a citizen, what it is to be an American. Cause one of the things about this history, as I’m describing the paper son process, depending on a person’s particular relationship with the concept of immigration and depending on a person’s political leanings, you know, some might hear my description of that and say, “Well, these are criminals. These are people who abused the system.” And I think that is a part of this history. One of the reasons it’s buried. One of the reasons it’s not talked about is because there is a sense of shame, societal shame, cultural shame, that these things were necessary, right? Shame is part of it. I don’t want to pretend it’s not, but I also want to acknowledge that in addition to whatever that sense of shame is, is a sense of pride. A sense of bravery, a sense of dignity, a sense of aspiration, what people were willing to do in order to build something for the future, for us, for their families. So a part of that is like just knowing that many of those stories still are untold, and wanting to uplift and honor, and, acknowledge, the beauty in these pockets that have historically felt painful.

Miko Lee: [00:56:48] Thank you Lloyd Suh for joining us on Apex Express.

Lloyd Suh: [00:56:51] Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Miko Lee: [00:56:52] Please check out our website, kpfa.org to find out more about our show tonight. We think all of you listeners out there. Keep resisting, keep organizing, keep creating and sharing your visions with the world because your voices are important. APEX Express is created by Miko Lee, Jalena Keane-Lee, Preeti Mangala Shekar, Anuj Vaidya, Swati Rayasam, Aisa Villarosa, Estella Owoimaha-Church, Gabriel Tangloao, Cheryl Truong and Ayame Keane-Lee.

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