AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature - Pachinko (ft. Min Jin Lee & Ken Chen)

Pachinko (ft. Min Jin Lee & Ken Chen)

03/13/19 • 76 min

AAWW Radio: New Asian American Writers & Literature

We're featuring audio from a 2017 event collaboration with the Tenement Museum. We celebrated the launch of author Min Jin Lee’s second novel Pachinko, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2017 and National Book Award Finalist. Pachinko follows one Korean family through generations. The story begins in Korea in the early 1900s and then moves to Japan. The family endures harsh discrimination, catastrophe, and poverty. They also encounter joy as they rise to meet the challenges their new home presents. Through desperate struggle and hard-won triumph, they are bound together by deep roots that are set as their family faces enduring questions of faith, family, and identity. Min Jin Lee reads from her novel and then is interviewed by Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers Workshop. They discuss her extensive research and interview process, how growing up in Queens, New York helped her write Pachinko, and much more.

Watch the full event on our YouTube channel, as well as our other past events.

Previous Episode

Insurrecto & Filipinx Resistance ft. Gina Apostol & Sabina Murray

Gina Apostol’s latest work of fiction, Insurrecto, is a tour de force about about the Philippines’ past and present told through rivaling scripts from an American filmmaker and her Filipino translator. The book was one of the New York Times’ Editor’s Choices for 2018 and won comparisons to Nabokov and Borges for its kaleidoscopic structure. With her trademark wit, uncommon humor, layering of forgotten histories and dueling narratives, Gina tells the story of the atrocities that faced Filipinos who rose up against their colonizers during the Philippine-American war at the turn of the 20th century.

Gina Apostol reads from Insurrecto and then is joined by Filipina-Australian writer Sabina Murray, author of the novel Valiant Gentlemen. Together they discuss weaving together nonlinear narratives, the uselessness of white guilt, Duterte reprising the role of the American colonizer in the Philippines through violence, and much more.

Featuring the songs Ang Lupa ang Dahilan & Agit Speech by Material Support, a Filipina-fronted agit punk band from New York City, agitated by state repression, government corruption, and patriarchy.

Watch the event on our YouTube Channel!

Next Episode

Vietnamese Ghost Stories (ft. Thanhha Lai, Vu Tran, Violet Kupersmith, & Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis)

In March, we co-presented a series of conversations with DVAN, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. For this podcast we’ll be listening to an introduction by DVAN founder and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer Viet Than Nguyen. Following this is a conversation around the concept of Vietnamese ghost stories moderated by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis and featuring authors Violet Kupersmith, Thanhha Lai, & Vu Tran. The order they’re listed here is the same order they answer the first question. Together, they dissect the concept of the ghost story, as a metaphor for the immigrant, a reflection of the self and one’s deepest fears and insecurities, and then broaden the conversation to talk about community and what a Vietnamese diasporic literary community looks like to them.

Violet Kupersmith is the author of The Frangipani Hotel, a collection of supernatural short stories about the legacy of the Vietnam War. She is writing a forthcoming novel about ghosts and American expats in modern-day Saigon. Thanhha Lai is the author of the National Book Award-winning novel Inside Out & Back Again and the novel Listen, Slowly. Her third novel, Butterfly Yellow, will be published this fall. Vu Tran is the author of Dragonfish, which was a NY Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and an NEA Fellowship. Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis is curator of Asian Pacific American Studies at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. He is also founding Director of the Washington, DC-based arts nonprofit The Asian American Literary Review.

Co-sponsored by the APA Institute at NYU.