Whenever a native Chinese speaker approaches me hesitantly in English with a question, I get really shy about even attempting to reply in Chinese, and feel like a voyeur for listening in on the subsequent conversation in Chinese
High Tech, Low Life (2012) - I remember watching this film the summer after my freshman year in high school and feeling so incredibly in awe + inspired by the fearless curiosity of the two chinese citizen reporters profiled in the film, and the current power and future possibilities of technology in journalism.
❤️🔥 Asian American Poetics as a Radical Possibility 🧨 🔗 Link for syllabus, signups, course information, accessibility: www.bit.ly/radfall24
🗓️ Sundays, 12-3p at @artogether__ in Oakland Chinatown
🔔 Enroll by: September 29, 2024
🕸️ Tuition: Sliding scale ($20-$50 per session) and scholarship options; we want this offering to be possible for anyone interested!
This course is for everyone: Asian diasporic people, QT/BIPOC, anti-imperialists, and anyone interested in deepening their writing practice towards themes of justice, solidarity, and liberation. We will learn through the fields of political education, Asian American studies, literary craft, poetry, and conversations.
Participants have the option of signing up for individual classes or enrolling for the full 6-class series, each class themed around a different topic:
10/6 Names 🪞
10/20 Anxiety 😵💫
11/3 Refusals 🙅🏻♀️
11/17 Mitski 🌠
12/1 Mothers 🌱
12/15 Freedom ❤️🔥
We believe in everyone’s capacity to articulate how they move through the world, to read and write poetry, with an eye toward how building this capacity helps us show up bravely and lovingly in our communities. We’d love for you to join us in building an intergenerational cohort and community of poets and organizers deeply rooted throughout the Bay Area.
We will highlight the connection between decolonial anti-capitalist perspectives and the craft of poetry, and offer this space to writers of all capacities seeking to ground themselves in such a position, and to imagine what the work of poetry might be.
💬 Which topic(s) are you feeling most curious about?
Introducing JESSICA YURU ZHOU (@fieldednotes )‘s two lyrical poems, “{}s of history” and “crush conference & craft lessons on the moon.” 🍊
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All this month, we’ve been sharing little glimpses into each of our 16 contributors’ words and worlds, including Jessica’s and her two poems, the first of which is a look at formation of the self in the vastness of one’s life through technical and intimate language and the second of which is a friendship love poem. 🫶🏾😍✍🏽
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Here, you’ll see some words from our poetry editor @elizawriteswords , the featured artwork by our art director @shytigers , and the first few lines of the first poem. You can tap the link in our bio to experience the pieces in full, and to read more work from Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting. 🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
Last but not least in our speaker series at Thee Parkside, Meet Group 3: Community Readers this Saturday from 3:00pm-4:00pm, featuring Evan Kennedy, Moazzam Sheikh, Brian Ang, & Jessica Yuru Zhou!
📚Check out these incredible speakers beside our Donation Center in Potrero Hill at Thee Parkside (1600 17th St.) 🎸❣️Get ready for literary magic!
This month, we’re introducing our newest contributors to TSW’s annual literary magazine. 🎙️🎙️🎙️.
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Next up is JESSICA YURU ZHOU (@fieldednotes ). Jessica is one of our 16 contributors for Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting, which publishes in June 2024. Over the past month or so, our contributors have been working closely with two editors to bring their pieces to life; it has been such a joy to dig deep with each writer and poet to get at the heart of their work, and we can’t wait for you to read these incredibly necessary pieces. 📝🤩🌊
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You’ll be getting a glimpse into each contributor’s work this month, like with JESSICA YURU ZHOU here. Because as you likely already know, we publish people, not pieces. Give them all a follow, because their words are leading the way. Welcome to the wave, @fieldednotes ! ✍🏽🤓🤗
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Tap the link in bio to get a glimpse into all 16 contributors in Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting. 🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
sitting in lots of starlight + sunlight + lamplight, walked around a plant shop and spotted the most magnificent bunch of venus flytraps and now have the grandest dreams for my baby flytraps 🤩🌸 instagram’s updates suck and i don’t want to go shopping, twitter’s updates make the tl feel like high school, but i guess it’s the same carrot i’m chasing after so not much gives. things can / could be so much better, i’m excited for new ways, fuller ways of being online together, to come. all of my digital identities are amorphous, disparately ill-defined blobs of history but i think that’s for the best! u can’t encode me 🤪
i thought september would take forever to get here, but then she came all of a sudden // first photo i walked out of an alleyway and was looking at the sun set as thomas mars sings: “do you remember when 21 years was old?” // the fourth “and everlasting, that’s what you want”
feeling tender for family-run restaurants whose existences were hard-fought for and are fighting especially hard now — shen zhou was one of the first places i wandered into when i moved to new york. not unkindly, the husband-wife duo immediately asked me where my parents were from, and we launched into a conversation in mandarin, like, two seconds later. it was one of my first interactions after moving there and one of the first times i really had a conversation with someone in mandarin outside of my family 👉👈👉👈 grateful for all the aunties and uncles whose spaces have made me feel comforted and at home in places that were unfamiliar (in jest but also in earnest, chinese/asian diasporas are the ultimate distributed networks 😳😳)
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revised a cute lil thing i wrote in 2019 about a ‘clean’ chinese restaurant and about jade, like the chinese name i gave myself arbitrarily in 6th grade, but also about jade, like the bratz doll, and the rock with a pretty epic origin story 🌸 so much has changed (spoiler, the restaurant shut down, i met andrew yang in austin, the week i published the original draft), yet other things persist (uncleanliness, unhealthiness, coded as chinese). sprinkled in links about history + resources ~ hoping this moment provides a deeper entry point into historical context, and encourages people to dig deeper into familial (my grandparents are enigmas to me), cultural, diasporic histories, and spurs action (i’m still working on this part! if you’re trying to figure out how to best align yourself too, let’s mind meld💆♀️💆♀️)
