In August of 1972, the Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal was working on an article about theatre in New York’s Chinatown. He was focussing on the challenges faced by performers who had recently emigrated from Hong Kong and Taiwan. They were shut out of mainstream productions, and the grassroots theatre scene was still maturing. Blumenthal’s editor asked a colleague named Frank Ching, who presumably knew a bit more about that part of town, to look the piece over. Ching felt that Blumenthal cast the broader Chinese-American population as foreign. He recommended some more interesting artists to Blumenthal, who ended up including a parenthetical mention of an up-and-coming playwright named Frank Chin. Ching likely believed that he was doing a favor for Chin, whose “Chickencoop Chinaman” had opened at the American Place Theatre months earlier. At the very least, Ching must have felt that he had helped sneak an edgier name into an otherwise drab roundup. But Chin was furious to be included at all.
Chin, who considered himself a fifth-generation Chinese-American, wrote Ching a letter complaining about seeing his name in Blumenthal’s piece alongside the “Chinese from China.” Ching didn’t understand why Chin felt so aggrieved, and responded that “the average person’s” conflation of newer immigrants with those who had been in America for generations was “understandable,” a reflection of ignorance but not of outright racism. Their interest in Chinatown was something to work with. Chin disagreed. “As far as I’m concerned,” he replied, “Americanized Chinese who’ve come over in their teens and later to settle here and American born Chinaman [sic] have nothing in common, culturally, intellectually, emotionally.” Ching reprinted their back-and-forth in Bridge, a magazine based in Chinatown that he helped oversee. As its title suggested, Bridge set out to explore the diasporic bonds of the Chinese in America. Although Chin had explored Chinatown in his plays and in a documentary, he also wanted to be recognized as something different. He and his friends were sketching out the contours of a new identity that had emerged in the late sixties: Asian-American.
I first learned how to journal from a story in the New Yorker. I’ve tried to find it since, without success. Here’s what I remember: in the apartment I grew up in, we had that continually growing stack of waterlogged and disintegrating copies of the magazine stowed next to a radiator in the bathroom. I was on the toilet, a teenager, flipping through one. I was reading an article about anxiety, or maybe addiction. I can’t remember if it was a profile or something more scientific. The article told me: So-and-so kept a list of things that stressed her out, and next to each item, she put a big X. So my attempt at honest writing began as a list of Xs—a list of the things that felt the most emotionally preoccupying on any given day. I could write them down furtively. They accumulated into a collage of my mental life.
The way we think about the present, and how long we think it is, can influence our outlook on life, as well as our behavior. Thinking of ourselves in suspended animation, in a present that’s never ending, is not only wrong according to research on the matter, but also isn't helping us make the best decisions for ourselves or each other.
By using science to realize that, technically speaking, right now is miniscule, we might be able to stop getting lost in the despair of the present.
Traveling is often delightful and stressful in equal proportions. The promise of seeing, eating, and drinking new things outweighs the bustle of airports (or trains), difficulty of language barriers, and effects of jet lag. Though eating well might be the best reason to travel the world, I’m going to suggest one easy way to feel grounded every morning while you’re abroad: Get the hotel breakfast buffet.
“I have not attempted to write what pretends to be a complete or comprehensive history of the oceans,” David Abulafia states in the preface to The Boundless Sea. As the book is over a thousand pages long, and is subtitled A Human History of the Oceans, the uninitiated reader, perhaps already wary at the prospect of the voyage to come, might wonder what a more comprehensive study could entail. Yet Abulafia steers us through the most surprising of waters.