"That identity s**t, that’s old news, man": belated Capitol takes + "Chan is Missing" with Hua Hsu

Greetings from the deep state in our heads!

This week, we talk some oldish politics (January is moving so fast…) and welcome back our first repeat guest, Hua Hsu, to dig into classic Asian-American cinema.

0:00 – Andrew Yang is running for mayor of New York City. Last we saw him, he was buying Ito En green tea at a bodega and calling the worker “bro.”

8:20 – The better Asian Andrew, our Andy, wrote about the 1.6.2021 Capitol attack in our newsletter last week. We talk fascisms and how to combat right-wing extremism without further expanding our military-police industrial complex. Plus: this short Samuel Moyn essay in The Nation.

41:00 – In part two of our film club, scholar and critic Hua Hsu joins us to discuss director Wayne Wang’s classic, Chan is Missing (1982). (Check out Hua’s essay from way back when.) Wang is better known for The Joy Luck Club and Maid in Manhattan (J.Lo, anyone?), and more recently made a documentary on Cecilia Chiang, the godmother of stateside Chinese haute cuisine, as well as an adaptation of an essay by Chang-rae Lee. But Chan is Missing is totally weird and singular—and changed Jay’s life, he explains. Bonus: check out “Juke and Opal,” a sketch by Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin that Tammy sees as a precursor of a key scene in Chan is Missing. (Hilton Als has written beautifully about it.) And here’s A.K.A. Don Bonus, a Spencer Nakasako documentary Hua loves.

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