Ten Thousand Things with Shin Yu Pai

Before we return for our THIRD season of Ten Thousand Things on April 30th, we wanted to share a special recording. In September of 2022, we celebrated the first season of our podcast with a live event at McCaw Hall at the Seattle Center. Back then, our podcast was called The Blue Suit ( as you’ll hear ) . We evolved to become Ten Thousand Things . But we had the same goal of telling compelling st...

Fans of Ten Thousand Things might enjoy Books and Boba from the Potluck Podcast Collective. Books and Boba is a book club podcast all about books written by Asian and Asian diaspora authors. Today we are sharing one of Books and Boba’s interview episodes, featuring writer and translator Anton Hur who was recently revealed to be the lead translator for K-Pop megastars BTS’ upcoming memoir. In the e...

We want to introduce you to a new podcast you may like, "Shoes Off". Join hosts Susie An and Esther Yoon-Ji Kang as they hang out with badass Asians and ask them to redefine “sexy” on their own terms. "Shoes Off" is a podcast celebrating badass Asians who are making a mark on pop culture and entertainment. In this episode stand-up comic, Atsuko Okatsuka, is taking the world by storm with her first...

This is a story about the way we make a statement.  Alice Wong, a Chinese-American disability activist, came into her own as a public personality through creating and hosting a podcast on disabled voices. Her status as a person with a disability in an ableist world gave her access to a world of perspectives and voices that we don’t usually hear on public radio. And she prioritized putting dis...

Anti-Asian hate crimes spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic. And then the Atlanta spa shooting scarred a community already suffering. But Kae-Lin Wang turned the Atlanta shooting’s aftermath into an opportunity for healing. And she used bikes to do it. Today, Ampersand Bikes Club is still going strong. It’s co-organized and co-run by some of its 100+ community members. In this episode, we hear from...

Shawn Wong discovered the first Japanese American novel, No-No Boy, at a used bookstore for 50 cents, after being told by his English professors that Asian American literature didn’t exist.  He sought out the author, John Okada, and he fought to have the book republished and distributed far and wide, to unearth the legacy of Asian American writers. But all the mainstream publishers rejected i...

During the mizu kuyo ritual for pregnancy loss, a small Jizo Bodhisattva statue enshrines ceremonial remains of a lost child. Following Shin Yu’s miscarriage in 2012, she had a mizu kuyo ceremony to process her grief.  Miscarriage is a socially taboo topic that many people have difficulty talking about. It’s often laden with grief, shame, and self-blame and is a loss that has not been very no...

Dylan Tomine has a passion for steelhead trout. Or an obsession. Or an addiction. His steelhead passion has brought him close to beautiful places, driven him far from stability, and lost him some loving relationships. This is a story about how an obsession can take priority over everything. How it might provide both purpose and isolation. And how it isn’t guaranteed to last forever. Related Links...

On the eve of selling her family’s house, Donna Miscolta’s daughter had a special request: Go to the stairwell and pull back the loose board on the bottom step. There, Donna found a box of treasures that 9-year-old Ana Miscolta Cameron had hidden for future children living in the house.  Rediscovering this time capsule allowed Donna and Ana to revisit memories from the past, hopes for th...

Eason Yang was on an ambitious career trajectory, helping tech companies like Uber change the world. Until he got cancer. Eason spent two years actively fighting for his life. This meant two years spent outside of the job market, creating a gap in his resume. Potential employers often look down on such large resume gaps.  But stepping away from work helped Eason see his resume in a new way. N...

When we come into this world we are given a name. It is etched in ink on our birth certificate, pasted onto our cubbies in pre-school and signed onto paper to acknowledge our union with a beloved. A name has power.  A name is an object that defines who we are. But what if our name is wrong? Poet, educator, and cultural worker Ebo Barton tells us a story about the power of names and their jour...

In many Chinese sayings, “ten thousand” is used in a poetic sense to convey something infinite, vast, and unfathomable. For Shin Yu Pai – award-winning poet and museologist – the story of Asians in America is just that. Introducing Ten Thousand Things, a special series about modern-day artifacts of Asian American life, created and hosted by Shin Yu Pai and produced by KUOW. The initial name of the...

Congressman Andy Kim was photographed on Jan. 6 2021 picking up trash in the Capitol rotunda, in the aftermath of that day’s chaos. The indelible image of a congressperson in a blue suit, kneeling on the ground and tidying the detritus of an insurrection went viral. The blue suit was donated to the Smithsonian, forever a physical marker of the values and actions on display that day. It also inspir...

The vintage Califone record player allows sound artist Paul Kikuchi to access and share songs that he inherited from his great-grandfather and other 78rpm records that were left behind by Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Paul Kikuchi got to know his great grandfather, Zenkichi Kikuchi, through the records he'd left behind: 78s of Japanese music from the 30s and 40s. Zenkichi im...

  After his father’s death, Byron Au Yong turned to paper folding.  Chinese paper folding revolves around making objects for the dead. Byron folded some of his father’s personal belongings like vintage textbook pages, magazines, and even retired receipts. The process was meditative and comforting and helped Byron mourn his father. It also helped him connect to his own Chinese American he...

In this episode, our host, Shin Yu Pai, revisits an object from her own life.  Shin Yu gave her toddler son a stuffed toy from her own childhood. He played too roughly with Poo-Poo, and Shin Yu had to take the toy away to be repaired and rescued. It sent Shin Yu down a rabbit hole that took her into the world of online Ebay and Etsy vintage toy vendors and a Facebook group for reuniting peopl...

In a small clear box, Etsuko Ichikawa keeps a small piece of vitrified glass that was given to her on a tour of the Hanford nuclear site. This vitrified glass encases radioactive material before it is disposed of through burial. As an artist trained in making glass, this object becomes something of a totem for Ichikawa, who turns her eye towards nuclear legacies,environmental degradation, and huma...

Tomo Nakayama usually puts his creative energy into his harmonious music. But when the pandemic hit, he found a new outlet: cooking. Cooking his way through various Japanese comfort dishes was a way to be creative in an upended routine. And it helped him address the homesickness and longing for family that he was feeling. Miso, a foundational element of Japanese flavor, taught him a lesson about h...

In this episode, we learn about how Jessica’s passion for plant collecting developed. Currently, there are more than 365 specimens in her collection; her plant babies even have their own Instagram account.  The night-blooming cereus, aka tan hua, which is also known by its more poetic moniker - the queen of the night - entered Jessica’s life as a gift. The nocturnal cactus smells like gardeni...

 A chador garment worn by some Muslim women is usually black. Not Anida Yoeu Ali's. Her chador is red and sparkly. As a performance artist, Anida created the glittery chador to embody her Muslim identity and confront Islamophobia. The red chador invited reactions of curiosity, spectacle, fear, respect, anger and gratitude from strangers on the streets of Paris, Seattle, DC, and Palestine. In...

In a world full of stuff, what is worth keeping? What do we treasure? Explore modern-day heirlooms with The Blue Suit, a new KUOW podcast hosted and created by PNW poet Shin Yu Pai. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.