pamonologues

Here are some radio shows/news channels on Youtube broadcasted in various Asian languages. 

Cantonese: RFA | VOA | Apple News | Ming Pao News

Mandarin: VOA | RFA | NTD Chinese | BBC

Taiwanese Hokkien: 台視台語新聞

Vietnamese: VOA | RFA | Người Việt TV | BBC

Tibetan: VOA | RFA

Khmer: VOA | RFA | Khmer News Daily Playlist

Burmese: RFA | VOA | BBC

Lao: RFA | VOA

Thai: VOA | Thai PBS News | Morning News | BBC

Uyghur: RFA | Istiqlal TV

Farsi: VOA | Euronews | BBC

Dari: VOA | 1TV Kabul

Pashto: VOA | 1TV Kabul

Urdu: VOA | BBC

Indonesian: BBC | Metro TV News

Malaysian: KiniTV Malaysian

Korean: KBS News | YTN News | JTBC News

Japanese: BBC News | ANN News | TomoNews Japan | FNN News

I am interviewed by Virginia Bell at Rhino Poetry. Here is an excerpt–you can read the rest of the exchange here.

Like this very body I possess, the act of writing is, to me, just a means of translation, a place to store the soul. What’s more is that I have to face the fact that the poem will never be what I intended it to be—I can only get very close (if I’m lucky). I have to accept the fact that the very material I work with will ultimately fail me.

Jack Gilbert perhaps said it most poignantly: “Love, we say, 
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words 
get it wrong.” They do, they get it wrong, and still we get up, we try to love each other, to resist our incredible ability to be cruel, and we try, we work and we mine language until it satisfies our need to make something meaningful. But the trying is what I fear. I pick up the pen and think: “could I be doing something better with these hands?”  As I fix the flaws of the poem, the flaws of a man stack up around me, often times unnoticed. This scares me more than anything: the idea that I will end up using this precious time on earth making poems very few people will read, while there is still so much I can do with this body I am given.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

NaNoWriMo can seem like a daunting task sometimes, for NaNo newbies and veterans alike. Fortunately, author Emily X.R. Pan is here to share her advice on how to overcome some of NaNo’s obstacles:

There are a few things about NaNoWriMo that are true for me every single year:

It completely reinvigorates my writing practice.

It challenges me.

It’s absolutely daunting.

The first point: I always refer to my writing as a practice. It works your brain just like a muscle training to lift more weight, or to play a piece on the piano. The more we practice, the stronger our writing muscle. NaNoWriMo is like a month-long boot camp.

Number two: No matter how many years I’ve spent writing book-length projects, it never gets easier. It’s my primary job now, and it’s still a struggle. Just like a marathon challenges a runner in good shape, NaNoWriMo challenges even those who write all the time.

Finally: We’re all doing this for the same reason. We want to finish a draft of a novel. Whether it’s your first book or your twentieth, there’s always the nagging question: Can I do it? The answer is: Yes, absolutely. Believing it is half the battle.

I guess I’m following the rule of threes in this blog post. So here are my three favorite tips from my years of NaNoWriMo-ing:

2020.7

This past summer, i took a course on the Geopolitics of Food. Raj Patel’s book Stuffed and Starved was one of the particular course reading material assigned. Needless to say I was quite amazed, the man is somewhat a prophet and here is his new book. If you’re interested in health issues, politics, social justice, and the movement of the world, you might just like to give this a read.

“My feeling ultimately is that there are more Asian faces, I’m just not sure there are enough Asian faces in roles that matter, that drive narratives. But I’m sure it’s changing.”

“One of the things I liked about the script was that it’s very confident in its identity. What I mean by that is that race and ethnicity- are such a - we obsess about it in America so much. And everything is either playing to a type or playing against a type. And it’s really just two sides of the same coin. You’re still ensnared by the trap of race. And as a story, race exists very naturally- it’s simply a component of a person’s identity and it doesn’t drive the narrative, but neither is it ignored.”

“For a while I was feeling like I was always playing characters that weren’t specifically Korean, or specifically Asian even. That they were characters who were originally written white and they would cast me. I used to consider that a badge of honor because that meant I avoided stereotypes. And then on the other hand, as I got older I started to become resentful that they weren’t written Asian. Their family history doesn’t quite match up. It exists in this cinema fiction that their name is “Smith” but they have an Asian face. And their character history doesn’t seem authentic. I was having a problem feeling like this doesn’t feel real. That’s where my impulse comes from exploring Korean American characters. Columbus did address that. The father/son dynamic feels very real to me.“

”[My father] was born in what is now North Korea. Of course, it wasn’t North Korea at the time. It was just Korea. As a boy, walked south when the war broke out. Whenever I meet a Korean I ask about their imigration history. It fascinates me to know all those red lines go back to the same place and it’s almost like a glass shattered and the shards went all over the place, and that’s intellectually interesting to me.“

"I had a couple of points in my career where it was tough to find the joy in acting. Once it becomes a job and you get checks and you have a mortgage and kids, you have to work at being delighted to work. And Columbus was just a real revitalizing project for me.”