Transcript: Jay Kuo on Beijing's Gay 90s

My brother also talks about his book, our family's China connections, and TikTok

Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Jay Kuo, taped on April 25, 2024. Thanks to Cadre Scripts and to Lili Shoup for their work on the transcript! Listen above or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I am doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support, just as Wisconsin-Madison has. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com.

And listeners, please, please support my work on Substack at sinica.substack.com. There, you will find, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, a weekly essay from me, and now a wide range of offerings, like James Carter’s This Week in China’s History; Paul French’s Ultimate China Bookshelf; Andrew Methven’s Chinese Phrase of the Week; the good old You Can Learn Chinese Podcast from Jared Turner and John Pasden, and the outstanding China Global South Podcast. You also get a weekly essay from our good friends at the China Global South Project.

Today on Sinica I’ve got a very special guest, my brother, Jay. Say hi, Jay.

Jay Kuo: Hi, Kaiser. 

Kaiser: So, you might know him from his amazing newsletter, The Status Kuo. I’ve never quite understood that pun, the name, or whatever.

Jay: Stop it.

Kaiser: Anyway, The Status Kuo is a great daily newsletter on American politics. It’s a real must-read for its depth of analysis and its insights into the workings of this bizarre political system. Jay was trained as a lawyer and worked in law for years and years before deciding to pursue his dream and become a writer of Broadway musicals. His show, Allegiance, with George Takei, about George’s — it’s really George’s own story — about his time in the internment camps during the Second World War, it did indeed make it to Broadway. He’s gone on to create and produce other shows, including one that I’m really eager to see that’s on, right now in workshop, it’s called Indigo. And maybe later on, Jay, you can tell us more about that show. 

But this, of course, is a show about China, and like me, Jay spent a number of years living in Beijing from ’96 to what? What was it, like 2002? Is that right?

Jay: No, it was 2000.

Kaiser: 2000.

Jay: Right after the Nasdaq crashed.

Kaiser: Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, good time to get out. We had a little bit of a respite. It didn’t really destroy the Chinese internet for another year. But anyway, during that time, Jay was an active part of the burgeoning gay scene in Beijing and was not just a witness to, but a participant in some of the seminal events of that time. So today, we’re going to talk about the gay liberation movement in Beijing, as it were, during those years of the late 1990s.

Jay: Are you allowed to use the word “seminal” when you talk about the gay community?

Kaiser: You know, I caught myself as I was saying that. It was really completely not intended to be funny. Anyway, there wasn’t a Stonewall, maybe, but as you will hear, there was a lot of progress made during a few short years. We’ll talk about how it all happened. I won’t say how it all went down, but we’ll talk about how it all happened, the challenges that have arisen in the last decade or so, and where things might be going. We’re also going to talk about Jay’s thoughts on how issues around China are playing into domestic American politics in this election year and talk a little bit about our family, its involvement with China, and how that has shaped Jay’s perspectives. Jay Kuo — Jay Guo. I can’t say “Kuo,” it’s just weird. Wǒmen jiā lǎo sān 我们家老三

Jay: You are the only one.

Kaiser: I know. Why is that? I don’t understand. If you were C-H-A-N-G, would you say “Chang” or would you say “Zhang?”

Jay: I guess it’s what everyone else is saying.

Kaiser: Really? Okay. See, that’s the difference between us, man.

Jay: Well, I don’t say “Moskva,” I say “Moscow.” I mean, like-

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, but I mean, it’s different, right? I mean.

Jay: In a way.

Kaiser: I don’t say “Firenze” either, right?

Jay: Right. And my friend Lorenzo doesn’t say “Firenze,” he says “Florence” when he is speaking English.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah. But, hey, look, I work in the China studies field, so, you know, it would just be kind of weird for me to say “Kuo.”

Jay: Yeah, I understand.

Kaiser: Anyway, all that aside, welcome nonetheless, even though you mispronounce the family name.

Jay: I see how this podcast is going to go.

Kaiser: Yeah, I know. Anyway, welcome to Sinica.

Jay: I’m glad to be here.

Kaiser: Jay, so let’s start with a little bit of a backstory. What did you know about the state of the gay community back when you first came to live in China? Did you do any research into it before coming, had you gleaned anything about it from Chinese friends? I think you were still in San Francisco. You didn’t move to New York until much later.

Jay: You know, it’s funny because I had come right after breaking up with my then-boyfriend. So, the last thing on my mind was sort of, “I need to go out and meet a bunch of new gay people.” And also I was a little bit shy because my Chinese really sucked. And I thought, “Well, like, if I go there, how am I going to even talk to anybody?” So, I was a little reticent about it. I had heard that there was a scene. I wasn’t particularly interested at the time in exploring it. Also, the legality of it was a little bit up in the air, so I’d heard, so I didn’t want to have the first thing that happened to me is get arrested at a gay club. And so there was a lot of trepidation around it. But at the same time, some curiosity — obviously, when you go to a new country, you sort of want to find your peeps, right?

Kaiser: Yeah.

Jay: I wanted to know. I was curious about what the gay scene was really like. I heard it was very closeted; that people were very sort of uninformed; that there was a lot of unsafe sex happening because they thought AIDS was a Western problem. So, there was a lot going in my head.

Kaiser: Yeah. What were you able to sort of suss out about the legal status of homosexuality at that time? I mean, I don’t, I can’t put dates to it, but I remember at one point they went from being criminal, actually, to becoming classified as a mental illness. Wow. Big step up.

Jay: Right. Well, it was complicated. My understanding was, there were this overarching law about us being liúmáng zi 流氓子, “bad elements,” and you could be arrested for just being a bad element, which felt like a status crime, like, you didn’t actually have to do anything, you just had to be something. And so that was a little precarious. It wasn’t clear whether just hanging out with other gay people would be considered some sort of political statement or not, whether it would be considered rebellious or unsavory in some way. Certainly, there was a gradation. If you had public sex, that was one thing — very bad, probably no matter what sexuality you were. But if you had private sex, it was a gray area. Nobody really knew. And so I think everyone sort of tiptoed around that question for some time.

Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, Chinese society back then was still pretty prudish, right? I mean, it was still possible to get a knock on your door at night in 1997 for cohabitating with somebody with whom you weren’t married, right? That was still a thing.

Jay: Right.

Kaiser: But obviously, that changed much faster than norms and even laws around homosexuality. I mean, I remember though that there were parks in Beijing where gay men would cruise, and I got a sense that that was quite dangerous. What do you remember about that? I think it was like-

Jay: It was Dongdan Park, which is what I remember.

Kaiser: Yeah, Dongdan Park. That’s right.

Jay: There was also some cruising going on at Ritan Park and at the universities. So, you’d heard about it through word of mouth, and sometimes you just go with friends to go check it out because it was kind of funny. I mean, you would see men standing around, just standing there. We called them “the statues,” right? Because they stood and they didn’t move, and they just watched with their eyes. It was a little creepy, but also a little desperate and sad, in a way, because these folks were definitely in the closet, and they were on the lookout, not just for men, but also for undercover cops. And so our understanding was that there were some undercovers walking around pretending to be cruising. It feels like a bad movie, right? That’s what they would do. And then they would entrap you basically by making a proposition and then seeing if you would accept. I actually dated a cop who explained the whole thing to me once, and I was like, “Wait, wait. So, you’re an undercover cop, but you’re also gay?” He’s like, “Yeah, that was my job.”

Kaiser: You know what I mean? He’s more effective at it, I suppose.

Jay: Very convincing.

Kaiser: Avoids that false positive on the gaydar, right?

Jay: Right. When we set about with some foreign… Well, I set about with some foreign friends to figure out how we could sort of do a number of things. One was to reduce the amount of unsafe sex that was happening in the parks. This was actually a big danger. China and the Chinese believed somehow that they weren’t going to be affected by AIDS. This was 1996, and so AIDS was in the country, but it wasn’t very widespread. But it was starting to spread more, particularly among gay men, just as it had in the United States in the early days of the epidemic. And so, I had a friend who worked in the United Nations in health, and she was very interested in trying to find a way to get the word out to gay men who were having unsafe sex. Except the problem is, when you send folks like that underground, it’s really hard to reach them. How do you reach them with educational materials and the knowledge that they need when they’re afraid to talk to anybody? 

So, we decided that we would use a club in the Sanlitun District, which already some gays were already using sort of as a community center to host safe sex workshops. And these were actually sponsored using UN money. But to go out and find people who would come to these workshops, we would have to go out into the parks. And so that was a little bit weird. But the way it was done, we had cards printed up, and on the cards, it said, “Are you G or L?” Very coded. And it had two women inside of a heart. So, they could have been sisters, they could have been friends — we don’t know. But then it said, “If so, call this number.” It was a pager number, basically. And when the beeper would sound, somebody would go to a public phone and call the number back and tell them if they wanted to get information about safe sex, that they could come to Half and Half bar in Sanlitun on the following nights.

Kaiser: I remember that place.

Jay: So, that was sort of a recruitment tool, but also an educational tool, and a little bit sneaky, like, we felt very rebellious doing this because it felt like if we got caught somehow, we were doing something wrong.

Kaiser: Even though you were really just doing HIV/AIDS education.

Jay: Right. Definitely, that was the pretense. But also, we just wanted to build the community, too. We wanted strength in numbers. We knew there were a lot of gay people out there. There was no way to gather them together. This was pre-internet, right?

Kaiser: Yeah. 

Jay: So, there was no way to reach people other than the old-fashioned way, which is physically actually hand them a card. So that actually work, it was a slow trickle of people who would… And then word of mouth sort of spread that there were tóngzhì 同志 at Half and Half.

Kaiser: Tongzhi of course is the word for “comrade.” And that basically was a… I mean, it became code for “gay” in, what? Around that time. Yeah, in the mid-’90s?

Jay: Yeah, around that time I think.

Kaiser: So, you talked about this bar Half and Half and you mentioned that it was in Sanlitun. I imagine there are a lot of people who are familiar with that area of Beijing, and they’re thinking that it was the Sanlitun that they knew and loved back, say, in the early 2000s. But it wasn’t anything like that at that point. It wasn’t a bar street yet. I mean, it was like this pretty nondescript place just on the edge of the diplomatic compounds, right? And it was hardly a place that was going to get a lot of foot traffic.

Jay: No. In fact, it felt like they discouraged foot traffic because the roads were dirt back around where the bar was. So, when it would rain, it would just be mud everywhere. It was way hard to find.

Kaiser: It was way set back from the street, I remember.

Jay: Yeah. It wasn’t on the main street. You had to go down an alley, and so you had to be very purposeful in finding it, and you had to know where you were going. My understanding was that the local police knew that this was being used by gay people, but somehow had been paid off. I can’t verify that, but everyone is sort of… That was the understanding, what the bar owner said, “We’re fine, we’re fine. As long as no drugs or sex is happening here, we’re fine.”

Kaiser: It’s still something of a risk that they were taking. I mean, either they were really simpatico or they were really desperate for business. I mean, which was…?

Jay: He was desperate for business. This bar had two rooms, dimly lit, concrete floors. A very tiny bar, so you could really only make one drink at a time, so everyone’s ordering beer. And anyway, their mixed drinks were nothing to write home about. And the foreign gays and lesbians found this place pretty quickly through word of mouth as well. And so there was a coterie of us, probably I would say “regulars.” It’s about a dozen of us that would regularly come to this on weekends, sometimes on Thursdays also and just hang out — talk about what was going on in the gay community, do some planning, remark on how quickly our numbers seemed to be growing, make new friends with a lot of the locals, and even start dating. So, it was a heady time. It was like you’re the first to start a gay community.

I called it “the Mattachine Society,” based upon the old group in the ’50s, but Matta-“chine,” “-chine” being China, of course. So, we sort of joked about the fact that we were creating something that had been created in other countries long before, and it felt brand new and it felt daring, and it felt a bit…

Kaiser: Transgressive..

Jay: Underground. So, it was fun.

Kaiser: So, you told me that that little card that you guys would hand out had two women inside of a heart and the question “Are You G or L?” Presumably, then, it wasn’t just gay guys that were at Half and Half, there was the lesbian community too, the whole LGBTQ?

Jay: Yeah. I probably made a lot more lesbian friends in those days than I have now. Like, in that early community, the lesbians were really taking the lead, partly because the UN employee who had the money was a lesbian. She knew a lot of people through her networks, and so-

Kaiser: It was like right after the UN Women’s Conference that had been held in Beijing in ’95 in Huairou, right?

Jay: Right. And the most outspoken people at these meetings were usually the lesbians. I think that they had sort of been empowered as women to speak about women’s rights, and then there was a lot of overlap between what we were trying to do for LGBTQ rights. So, a lot of the guys were just showing up, one, hoping to get laid, two, just a little bit fearful and not really understanding that there was a political, rather than just a social component to this.

Kaiser: Huh. So interesting. I really wish somebody had documented this better. 

But things changed pretty quickly. I know that we talked a little bit about sort of the regulatory environment, but I remember there were a couple of kind of groundbreaking rulings that had happened. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jay: Sure. I remember two that came down sort of back to back that had everybody talking. And one was… It went up through the Public Security Bureau, which apparently has its own sort of quasi-judicial proceedings. Then one went through an actual judicial panel. The one I remember was, and I think it was the PSB one, the father had sued his daughter’s lesbian lover for leading her astray and had said that he wanted her held responsible for the way that his daughter had turned out. It was paired with this other case about… I think the other case was about people getting caught having consensual sex inside their home, two men. I don’t know if it’s two men, it could have been two women. 

But the rulings are very curious. They didn’t come out trumpeting, saying, “We are approving gay rights.” They said, “We don’t find anything on the books prohibiting this.” So, it was a sort of negative sort of gloss on it. It’s like, we don’t… And maybe even a wink to the National People’s Congress saying, “Maybe you should pass a law, but there’s no law now.” And they were trying not to have these status crimes, like liumangzi, and the Chinese were trying to modernize their criminal code to come up to standards of more developed countries, especially because China was trying to win the Olympics. Anything that seemed really backward or extremely anti-democratic or anti-liberal would’ve been condemned, I think, by the Western press or Western leaders, and the Chinese government just didn’t want that. This seemed like a small thing at the time.

It’s about, you know, “allow more sexual freedom,” and, in this case, more gay sexual freedom. When those came out, I believe it was printed. It wasn’t even printed in front page news or anything, it was like way in the back, but everybody was talking about, all of a sudden, it was like a cloud lifted. People felt like they could hold hands in public, they could kiss, they could say they were gay, they could say they were lesbian, and not worry about being sued or taken in. And so, there was sort of this blossoming that happened right after those rulings came out. And I think that it changed, it felt like the sun peeked out from behind the clouds and shone very brightly for a while on our community there.

Kaiser: Yeah. There were rainbows. My sense was that by the time you were getting ready to… By ’99 say, things had changed quite a bit. I remember there were a bunch of bars, and it wasn’t just Half and Half anymore. Half and Half maybe had its heyday in ’96, ’97, but by like ’98, ’99, it felt like there were a bunch of them. I mean, there was money to be made, obviously.

Jay: Well, that was the key driver. I mean, what happened was all of a sudden, Half and Half was having overflow of business. Well, if you’re an entrepreneur and this is legal, then the first thing that happens is another bar opens up. I think it was Butterfly, I know kind of around the corner. You know how the Chinese often open right near each other and steal each other’s business as the first move? So, that happened. And there was another open called One Plus One, which is sort of like a take on Half and Half, I guess.

Kaiser: Yeah. I remember that one especially. I mean, so I think it was Butterfly turned into One… Oh, no, no. You know what, it was One Plus One turned into a bar called Half Dream. Do you remember that? It was like in Xingfucun.

Jay: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Kaiser: So, it’s like off of Sanlitun, off of the main drag there. But that one was actually opened by the first out trans person in China that I was anyway aware of, who, by the way, now is constantly hosting shows and stuff like that. So, she’s sort of…

Jay: Right. You’re talking about Jin Xing?

Kaiser: Jin Xing, yeah. Yeah. She was a former dancer with a dance troupe with the PLA, actually.

Jay: Well, you remember Zhang Yi, my ex? He was very close to Jin Xing.

Kaiser: Yeah, Zhang Yi was great.

Jay: He would take us to her shows all the time. He was a huge fan. He was certain that she was going to break the mold and make it big.

Kaiser: She did.

Jay: And he was right. He had an eye for talent. I think a few things happened. Obviously, more bars opened, and people started thinking of Beijing sort of as the center of gay life for all of China, which was great. I mean, people would come from outside the city and come in. And then the foreign tourists would hear, “Oh, there’s gay bars.” So, that doesn’t take long to get around. And so all of a sudden we went from huddling in this dank, dimly lit place with bad drinks, worrying if we were going to get arrested, to having big clubs. I mean, there was Destination Bar, eventually, which was this gigantic club and it had people like-

Kaiser: Directly across from my apartment. Yeah.

Jay: I think Paul Oakenfold even played there once. I mean, there was a sense of international attention upon the community, and it was growing by leaps and bounds. But it wasn’t without controversy and setback. I remember, I think it was about six months in, apparently somebody didn’t get the memo at the local police, or somebody didn’t get paid off, and they came and they raided a bar. I can’t remember which one it was, actually.

Kaiser: Were you there?

Jay: I was not there.

Kaiser: Oh, okay. 

Jay: But I got instant pager requests from…

Kaiser: You got tipped off.

Jay: … some of my foreign friends who said this raid had happened. They were not arrested, but a lot of local Chinese had been. We need to get the word out immediately to all the foreign press. And so they started… Because obviously, China’s first raid on a gay bar could be front-page headlines in certain communities. And so when those press reports came out within 24 hours, all the local Chinese were let out. And so that, well, it felt like a victory. It felt scary, but it also felt like a victory because we had stood up as a community and worked together and gotten everybody out, and everybody was safe, and nobody got beat up, nobody died. 

It was not Stonewall, but it was a police action that we resisted. And so it was kind of thrilling. I can’t say I took much of a part other than to coordinate some people talking behind the scenes and making sure that reporters… I think I may have given out a reporter’s name or connected them to somebody. It was so long ago. It was definitely a moment where you wondered, “Are we backsliding?” I mean, could this go south? Were we too cocky or too really naive to think this could progress so quickly without backlash?

Kaiser: I’d like to have seen them try to raid that place if Mom was there, right? I remember, is it in your book or did you just tell me at one point that you took Mom there to, I think it was probably Half Dream?

Jay: I took her to One Plus One. 

Kaiser: Oh, okay. Okay.

Jay: Yeah. I took her to One Plus One. It was sort of one of the nicer clubs. Ma, she really liked Zhang Yi, and she started to meet a lot of my gay friends. And she liked to boast that she was very liberal, so progressive, and that somehow she would earn a lot of points for being so tolerant. She would ask me if this person or that person was a “butterfly” or was “trendy.” Those were her two favorite words to describe gay people. She couldn’t say the word “gay.” And eventually she would come around to saying it, but she would use it incorrectly. She would always ask, “Is he a gay?”

Kaiser: “A gay,” right. I remember that.

Jay: Well, she held court. It was very, very unusual for someone to bring their mother to a gay bar in China. And so everyone believed that I was indeed really fortunate, and that was indeed very special, which she was. I mean, she was doling out relationship advice to all these lesbians because her own mother had been, I guess, wooed or courted by a number of women that she had taught who had really admired her and sent her love letters. So, Ma felt that she was somehow…

Kaiser: Wait, wait. We gotta flesh this story out a little bit. So, Laolao, this is our maternal grandmother, she was actually teaching courtesans, like sex workers, in Nanjing at the time, teaching them KMT patriotic songs. That’s the story I remember.

Jay: Right, music generally. She actually went into those districts, and it was pretty bold for a woman of her stature and her beauty to do that kind of work. But she also felt like she was fulfilling some sort of Christian mission.

Kaiser: Right, because she was profoundly Catholic. Yeah. That was crazy. Mom also, I remember, she would throw parties. There were gay parties, right? I remember seeing some pretty shocking things when I’d wander into the house in Xisi once in a while. She was home. I was really surprised. I thought, “Hey, did they go somewhere and you threw a party?” But no, they’re…

Jay: I mean, you think about it, where in China could you go to somebody else’s private residence and just be yourself as a gay person? It just didn’t happen. 

Kaiser: And not with like 80 other people, certainly. Yeah.

Jay: Yeah. You could literally let your hair down and hold your boyfriend’s hand and everybody else around you is part of the same community. That was the kind of house that Ma allowed us to have. I was living with her at the time and throwing these parties and barbecues and other things, and people just loved it. It was along the lines of what Ma would do wherever she went by throwing big parties and opening the doors to everybody.

Kaiser: I think there’s a sitcom in this. I mean, this gay guy in Beijing who’s taking his mom to gay bars and throwing parties at her house.

Jay: Well, I remember you were at one of those parties, and my friend Zhang Mingbo came in and we were talking about guys. And I said, “Well, what’s your type?” And he looks around and he sees you and he says, “That guy over there.” I’m like, “That’s my brother.”

Kaiser: Why didn’t you tell me about this? I would’ve been flattered. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, I mean, when you told me you liked the decor in my house at one point, I went around for days saying, “You know, gay men like my house.”

Jay: A gay man. A gay.

Kaiser: No, no, no. It was you and Blair. It was like two or three-

Jay: Well, if Blair likes it, well then that’s something, because he’s got taste and I don’t.

Kaiser: That was that basement place in Sanlitun, and it was really nice, but that had nothing to do with me. 

Alright. The community, though, I mean, that was kind of a golden age that you’ve just described, but things didn’t stay, I mean, I think they improved in a lot of ways, but there were other ways in which, as all scenes do, it lost some of its shine. Talk about how things evolved by the time you were fixing to leave China.

Jay: Sure. One way to describe it is that money ruins everything. So when they first started, everybody was there because they believed in community and they wanted to meet other people, and they wanted to fall in love and they wanted to live authentically. And what folks realized after two years is that with that open window came in some flies and mosquitoes. So, part of it was male prostitution started to become a thing, because especially with a lot of…

Kaiser: Oh, it was always a thing, right?

Jay: …foreign gay men around, they realized, well, a lot of local gay guys realized that they could earn more in one night than they would earn working an entire month. And so, you started seeing what we call “money boys” around the bars, and they would always have their beepers on them. And so you had to make sure that when you’re talking to somebody that you weren’t about to enter into a transaction. 

Funny story, I don’t know if you can include this on the podcast, but I actually picked up a guy at a bar, we didn’t have a discussion about whether it was just a hookup or whether he was going to charge me. Then at the end of the night, he said, “Well, that’s going to be 500.” And I got very angry and I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, that’s my going rate.” I looked at him and I said, “Well, my going rate is 700, so you owe me too.” He said, “What do you mean?” It’s like, you see how we have to have these conversations ahead of time? I said, “So we have to…” And so we fought about it, and I agreed that I would just pay for his taxi ride home. But I was furious at the time, and now I just think it’s kind of a funny story.

Kaiser: Speaking of money boys, there was a film, it was fantastic. It’s called Lan Yu. I don’t know if you’ve seen it before, but it was like 2000 or 2001. And I actually did the subtitles for it. That’s how I… So I’m very, very familiar with it. It starred Liu Ye as Lan Yu, a gay prostitute, and then he falls in love with this other guy. This actually won the Golden Horse for Best Actor for Liu Ye. And it screened at the Beijing Gay Film Festival in ’01. I felt like that was part… I mean, it was really wonderful working with Stanley Kwan, the director, he’s from Hong Kong. It was a great film. I mean, it’s just absolutely fantastic. And I started to notice a real change, I felt like, in not just public attitudes, but also in awareness, a tolerance toward LGBTQ people. And I think it actually got pretty good through the mid-2000s.

Jay: I would agree. I mean, there were even gay publications.

Kaiser: Oh, yeah.

Jay: Yeah. Was that Man Box or M-Box? Which is an unfortunate name.

Kaiser: M-Box, yeah.

Jay: But I actually heard about that publication because my ex, Zhang Yi — my then-boyfriend, actually, he wasn’t my ex by that point — he actually showed up in the centerfold spread. It was tastefully done, just his backside, but it was entirely shot at the Great Wall. So, it was kind of a startling thing to open a magazine up and see your boyfriend in the nude, in the wild.

Kaiser: I mean, he had really nice musculature.

Jay: Oh, he was very, very fit. He used to run from his apartment on the south side of town to visit me on the west side, if you can imagine.

Kaiser: That’s just nuts. I mean, that’s like…

Jay: Zhang Yi was very instrumental in assembling our community outside of the clubs. He would put together these trips, like one very memorable one, he put a whole busload of gay and lesbian people up to go swimming at a lake. The thought of that was like, again, sort of us out in the wild — gays in the wild, it was fun. I mean, we sort of descended upon this small resort where they allow swimming. And I don’t know that the people realized, because there were men and women both, that this was a gay and lesbian busload of people. It was, but the locals were certainly delighted by us. We were very loud and very funny, and we had a lot of characters and people singing Beijing opera and things like that at the top of the lungs. It was really hilarious.

Kaiser: So, when did you feel like you started to see the writing on the wall, I mean, that the “golden era” was coming to an end? When did we start to see the closure of those magazines? I know that it was quite a bit later that we finally saw Xi Jinping talking about how men needed to be more masculine and he was going up against the effeminacy of… I mean, that wasn’t until much later. But my sense was that things had fizzled out a bit by even like 2010 or so.

Jay: Well, for me personally, I saw a sign that… well, a really, really stark one that sort of burned into my memory. I wasn’t at the club when this happened, but two of my interns were there, these two women actually from America. They had gone with one of my other company officers to, I think it was Dragon Bar. And they were just having drinks there, and all of a sudden, ruffians entered and they were holding machetes. And they went straight for the bar owner, and they cut him up badly. 

Kaiser: Jesus Christ.

Jay: People were screaming, hiding in the bathrooms. It was chaos, bloody chaos. And it turns out, after they did a police inspection and got some confessions, don’t ask me how, that another bar owner had hired the ruffians because they were jealous of how much good business Dragon was doing and wanted to send a message. So, there was sort of a gang-like atmosphere sort of creeping in. The owner, he literally had to go to the hospital with his guts hanging out. He lived, they didn’t intend to kill him. They just went and intended to send a message to scare everybody who was patronizing that bar into never going back again. And when I heard that, I remember telling my friend Mike, I said, “Well, I think we just saw the beginning of the end of the gay community that we know and love because…”

Kaiser: That wasn’t a government thing, though.

Jay: No. Yeah, it was not a government thing. It was internal. It was just business. It had lost to me, compared to how things were five years ago before the community had changed so quickly, not for the good. It was much bigger, certainly. And there was a lot more to do, but at the same time, a lot of that innocence was gone. A lot of that initial community was gone. People were leaving. A lot of folks left sort of when the tech bubble burst too. Some people went home. I went home. And I was a bit of a glue for that first set of folks. There was a big going away party, and people were crying. They were saying, “What are we going to do?” I said, “Y’all can handle this.”

Kaiser: Yeah, they did. I mean, look, Destination was still open when I left in 2016. 

Jay: Oh yeah, Zhang Yi went out to manage that club, I mean, yeah.

Kaiser: Oh, he did? Oh, that’s interesting.

Jay: This kid who had grown up in complete poverty, when I went back and visited, he took me out to lunch and paid for it with a credit card. I was shocked. And he said he was going to Amsterdam for the Gay Games. The gay community literally changed his life.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah. No, he was remarkable. I mean, this kid, I mean, he’d grown up not just in poverty, but in rural poverty. I mean, I remember him talking to me quite earnestly and wondering how somebody as dumb as you could be a lawyer in America, because he believed that since you couldn’t speak Chinese well, you were actually dumb. I mean, like profoundly dumb. And he was trying to be polite about it.

Jay: It was kind of a funny shift because as my Chinese got better and better, I think Zhang Yi started realizing, oh, this is actually someone fairly intelligent behind there. And then the tables turned. My Chinese was terrible. And the thing is, living with Zhang Yi and learning his version of Chinese was not exactly helpful for my Chinese.

Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, he was from Zhejiang.

Jay: Because he only had an eighth-grade education.

Kaiser: Right. But I mean, it seems to me that despite the setbacks and everything, there has been so much more acceptance of LGBTQ people, in younger generations especially and especially among women. You look at the fiction, the internet fiction, and it’s overwhelmingly… The gay themed fiction is extremely popular. There is still blatant homophobia on social media among the anti-woke reactionary types, the type you like to throw around the word “Báizuǒ” 白左. But on balance, it strikes me there’s been a huge attitudinal shift, maybe like we saw in the U.S. in the early ’80s. I mean, you’ve gone back many times since, you keep tabs on what’s happening there. What’s your sense of the progress that’s been made and what some of the drivers have been?

Jay: Well, the last time I was back was 2019. I went to some of the newer gay clubs. They felt pretty much like a gay club might feel elsewhere in another part of the world. And so China caught up very quickly when it comes to that. And everybody had game, I would say. In other words, they were more sophisticated. And I think it was… These clubs also became a place where local Chinese could interact with foreign gay guys. And it became more multinational in that sense, international. There’s also a sense that while society has progressed, definitely attitudes have changed, there’s sort of a hard-line still to cross with the government. And things like same-sex marriage are not legal. And that’s why there’s a lot of attention and interest to what was happening over in Taiwan…

Kaiser: Yeah, of course.

Jay: …with the legalization of same-sex marriage there. Nobody thought that was going to happen. And it happened very quickly. And so it sort of injected this hope for all of the gay, the greater Chinese gay community, into thinking that if one Chinese community, a cultural center like Taiwan, can achieve that, then others could follow. Singapore could follow, perhaps China could follow, Hong Kong.

Kaiser: My sense, though, unfortunately, is that because Taiwan has been so progressive on LGBTQ issues, it’s only reinforced, it’s kind of made the kind of hard-line nationalism and the reactionary gender politics fuse among a certain type in China, right? Where they reinforce each other, like the kind of homophobia and the strident nationalism. I mean, I don’t think it’s gotten like Russia yet, but I really worry sometimes that it heads in that direction.

Jay: I think it’s sort of a global phenomenon.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah.

Jay: Not just Russia, but you see it on the MAGA right, in the United States too, sort of the anti-LGBTQ, certainly the anti-trans movement is very much paired to right-wing ideology and sort of a return to patriarchal systems and Christian systems. And so, the gay community is an easy target for almost anybody because we are discreet, but lack political power in many places and are easily bullied, scapegoated. And so, it’s not surprising that if they’re looking around for a target to vent at and to say, “This is the cause of fill-in-the-blank decline,” right? The LGBT community is right up there. And it always has been.

Kaiser: But I mean, Chinese people weren’t always, obviously, so homophobic. I mean, I don’t know if I’ve told you about this, but you know Nainai, our paternal grandmother, totally knew you were gay when I was in high school, or maybe even before that. I remember one summer I was out in the pool a lot, I’d come in, I’d make a baloney sandwich. She’d be sitting there at the kitchen table just waiting to talk to me about something. And she’d do this long preamble about Peking opera actors and how this one role, the dànjué 旦角 was always played by a man, but it was a woman but played by a man, and this man was often not like other men, she’d say really euphemistically. And I’d be like, “What are you talking about, Nainai?" I mean, finally, she’d come out with it and say, “Your brother is like one of these Peking opera actors.”

I mean, I’d be like…. So, it was always some variation on that, but the punchline was always, “Your brother is gay,” right? Anyway, it was always like, “You need to be okay with it.” I guess she sort of picked up on that kind of dumb teenage…

Jay: Well, Ma has talked to me about this too. And after Ba passed away, she told me, “Well, Nainai’s father, he was-"

Kaiser: A gay.

Jay: I was like, “Well, okay, well, I gotta sit down for this.” Ma told me that Nainai had confessed to her that when her father had turned 40, that he had taken a male shūtóng 书童, you know, a lover. And everybody knew about it, and they would just disappear for a week at a time, sometimes into the opium den.

Kaiser: Oh, right. He was an opium addict.

Jay: And that he just preferred the company of this male lover to everybody else. And so Nainai had sort of witnessed all of this and was very attuned to the question of, does a man love other men? Because apparently her own father did. So we are all fortunate enough that he actually did his duties as a husband and sired her children because we wouldn’t be here if the gay rights movement had come to China a bit earlier.

Kaiser: Yeah. Thank God. Well, I mean, she was extremely progressive, right? I mean, she was very influenced by the May 4th Movement and she was college-educated. She was like the first woman in her village not to have her feet bound. And yeah, so she was an amazing person.

Jay: Right.

Kaiser: I’ve been in this confessional mood lately. I don’t know if you’ve seen, I’ve been writing a series of pieces talking about “my China priors.” And, of course, you have just published this sprawling family memoir that focuses, pretty much, on mom’s side of the family. But there’s quite a bit of dad’s in there too. In fact, that story’s in there. Can you talk about how our parents’ politics, their changing attitudes toward China — well, maybe I’ll say my mom’s never really changed — our relationships with our grandmothers, right, both of them lived with us at various points, how they shaped, gay stuff aside, your perspectives on China.

Jay: Wow. That’s a big question.

Kaiser: I know, I know.

Jay: You know, I was younger than you at the time. And so…

Kaiser: You still are.

Jay: I don’t think that Ma and Ba’s sort of early fervent pro-Maoist stance seeped in as much with me as it did with you and John. I did read your essay, and I agree that our parents were sort of embarrassingly stricken with Mao’s vision for China. And then they brought a lot of propaganda home with them which they consumed without question and then sort of fed to us. But it didn’t stick.

Kaiser: Yeah. But I remember you sitting next to me watching Xiaǒ hàoshǒu《小号手》many, many, many times too.

Jay: Oh, yeah. I mean, I didn’t understand the politics of it. I mean, I just remember the theme music.

Kaiser: And the handsome Chinese man.

Jay: [singing] I still remember it, right? And so my formative years were when I became a teenager and went to China with the family, certainly for the first time in the early ’80s, and just thinking, “This place is dirt poor, the system is terrible,” right? There was no convincing me that this was the way to go. And I was also feeling a bit bad for Mom and Dad because they had hyped it up so much that it felt like this was a big letdown. And especially when we went back to the hometown and the people…  The kids were running around naked, they had no clothes. And so I was really shocked because if Mao’s grand idea of China was supposed to be prosperity for all or no poverty, that didn’t happen.

Kaiser: No, it didn’t.

Jay: The bloom was off the rose, right? I’m sort of somebody who looks around and wants to see how things can improve. And I think Ba picked up on that, and he was also a fixer. He was an engineer. I mean, he was really, really proud of China and wanted to see it on the path toward prosperity. And so he threw himself into these projects all around the country, and he took me to one of them that Ma had set up. Actually, you had gone there, too, with John. It was the copper mine deep in the hills.

Kaiser: Oh, in ’86?

Jay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kaiser: No, we went.

Jay: You all could leave there after a couple of days, but I stayed and worked there with Dad.

Kaiser: I remember. Yeah.

Jay: And it was really a bonding experience with the two of us, but I also spent a lot of time sort of getting to know the Chinese teams and also feeling sort of a bit angry at the American teams that were working there that seemed so arrogant and privileged.

Kaiser: Yeah, no, I remember those guys, like the big fat installation manager types who were just swilling báijiǔ 白酒.

Jay: And they just complained nonstop. And it just drove me nuts because I was like-

Kaiser: Was that place called, Zhongguangshan?

Jay: Yeah, Zhongguangshan.

Kaiser: Zhongguangshan.

Jay: Yeah, block caving. That’s what it was. We wanted to bring American technology for block caving, something that had been around for decades, over to China. And that wound up being an immensely successful project. Orders of magnitude, more copper, are coming out of that mine after Mom and Dad’s project was done, and they still received accolades from that mine. Ma got one, one of her proudest things was this urn, I guess, that she received from them, thanking her once again for their work.

Kaiser: That’s about all she ever earned from that.

Jay: Well, but, you know, I could sense Ba’s desire to see China modernize and also his frustration. There was a sense of duality at the time. They felt ashamed at how China was backward, but they also were fiercely dedicated and would immediately come to its defense if challenged. Over the years, that had to morph because China was developing, and so quickly sometimes that we would turn around and a new building or a new bridge or a new road was up, and Ma would remark upon it. And you could see the satisfaction on Dad’s face. He was fiercely proud of how quickly China was coming around, particularly since he was part of it. That journey, I think, that life journey was so fulfilling to Dad.

Kaiser: But he was also getting ripped off left and right. I mean, he was constantly being betrayed and constantly just being profoundly disappointed. I mean, he couldn’t believe what a low-trust society China had become. He was very disillusioned in a lot of ways.

Jay: And it kind of mirrored what I had gone through in a short period of time with the gay community there. Like, you could see money starting to come in and pollute everyone’s morality, and there was nothing you could do about it. But you still wanted to see this community succeed. That’s how Ba viewed China. He said he understood all the problems, but he was part of it. And he wanted to make sure that, to the extent that he could, he would help make it better. It was so admirable and he stuck with it. He didn’t give up. I went home when all this went bad, but Dad stuck it out.

Kaiser: No, he was not a quitter. I mean, he was nothing if not-

Jay: Right. And Ma, too, they got to the point that they had to start apologizing for China’s corruptness to us, right? And explain why it was that they couldn’t do a particular deal. I think the most admirable thing, I think, about both of our parents is that neither of them would ever, ever take a bribe or pay one.

Kaiser: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Jay: And that…

Kaiser: They were the most morally upright people ever. Yeah, it’s true.

Jay: It hurt them immensely trying to do business in China, right? It just did. But it also instilled a deep sense of purpose and meaning into their lives. And so, a lot of our projects failed as a result. They were offered it all the time, and they would turn it down. And it reminds me of the story that Nainai used to tell when she was offered money all the time from the family, gold sent up the river during World War II. It was part of her, it was Yeye’s share of the family’s wealth, and she would deny it and wouldn’t allow the family to take money that was not earned by the family.

Kaiser: Drove Dad crazy, right? I mean, it was tobacco money or opium money, as it turns out later.

Jay: Yeah. Well, she knew it was opium money but didn’t tell Dad. And Dad was furious with her because that kind of money could have changed things. But I think it instilled in Dad a deep sense of morality and honor that stuck with him throughout all his business dealings.

Kaiser: Yeah. Sometimes I…

Jay: Well, I agree. I mean, we would be really, really wealthy if Ba just had not been quite so honest, but that’s fine. We’re doing fine.

Kaiser: Yeah, I’d rather have him poor and honest.

Jay: Yeah, poor and honest.

Kaiser: Yeah, I’m totally fine with poor and honest as long as more people subscribe to my Substack, so please. 

Let’s shift gears a little bit here, Jay, and, and talk about your favorite subject, which is U.S. politics, where money never enters into… I imagine a lot of listeners are aware of The Status Kuo, your amazing newsletter. It’s free to subscribe to, I cannot recommend it more highly. You don’t talk too, too much about China in that newsletter, but China obviously figures a lot into American politics these days, perhaps now more than it ever has. I mean, even during the debates over permanent normalized trade relations in the ’90s in the Clinton era, it isn’t as part of our politics as it is. But nowadays, I mean, I still hear people saying, and I don’t know if this is just sort of optimism or whatever, that foreign policy never really enters into electoral politics. It’s never decisive in electoral politics in America. So, I don’t know how to feel about it. I’m hoping to draw on your wisdom about this.

It feels like, on the one hand, you can’t pass any legislation in this country without framing it as a way to compete with China. I mean, you look at the CHIPS and Science Act, you look at the Inflation Reduction Act, all major. Now, I mean, you couldn’t even move this latest Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan aid package without tying it to this “Let’s stick Beijing in the eye with the TikTok ban” thing. So, as everyone is so fond of saying, animosity toward China seems to be the only issue on which there’s bipartisan agreement. So, where are you on this? I mean, is China going to matter during silly season?

Jay: Well, I want to challenge the idea that China is the only political punching bag here on which the two parties can find agreement. If you think about it, there are others. The border is a good example. In order to achieve this compromised border bill, basically we… Democrats had to align with the Republicans and really bash on migrants and propose even changing the asylum laws, basically, and how we treat migrants. That’s a convenient thing to do because migrants don’t exactly have a strong lobby in the U.S. Congress and neither does the Chinese Communist Party. And you look at other examples of groups which become sort of the punching bags — the homeless, easy targets because they can’t really speak up for themselves. And so, in an election year like this, this tends to happen. The easiest targets, whether it’s… sometimes it’s trans people, and across so many red state legislatures, why are they targeting trans people? You know, it’s easy and you’ve got basic agreement, so you can look really tough, like you’re actually doing something when you’re actually just hurting a small group of people who can’t speak up for themselves. 

Now, obviously, the CCP is different, it can speak up for itself. And TikTok is a gigantic company. But it’s not popular to support either of those two things in the U.S. Congress today. And so what happens in an election year is a lot of tough talk. And we hope that after the election actually happens, a lot of that talk gets walked back. So, there’s this game that’s happening, and you are familiar with it, and the Chinese government is probably familiar with it, going, “Okay, so how serious are you? Is this just electioneering or do you really intend to do this?” I think that there’s what is said, and then there’s what is implied, and then there’s what is actually meant. And so parsing that out is tricky. And the problem is, the more you do this, the more to the right, so more hawkish, you have to sound in order to-

Kaiser: Yeah, the Overton window shifted.

Jay: Right. In order to not sound like you were sounding the last time you did this. You need to sound a little bit more forceful, you know?

Kaiser: Right, so they don’t think you’re crying wolf. But I mean, my sense this time, and from talking to people who are in the Chinese strategic class, is they think they were used to that old game. They don’t think that that’s the one being played now. They think that now this stuff really does translate into the way that they govern, certainly was that way during Trump. It certainly was that way during, so far, during the Biden administration. “Tough on China” is a reality now. It’s no longer just an idle threat.

Jay: Right. And I think that the U.S. loves to see things in black-and-white terms. And being able to position China as the threat is convenient for people politically in terms of their narrative. It’s also a convenient scapegoat when it comes to talking about protecting U.S. jobs and manufacturing, which the Biden administration is leaning more heavily into than before. And so if you want to talk about protecting U.S. jobs and manufacturing, if it’s a zero-sum game, where are you going to pull that from? A lot of it comes from China. And so you talk about buying American, targeting foreign-made goods, bringing manufacturing home.

Kaiser: I try to explain, for example, to my Chinese friends about that thing that… Biden signed about smart vehicles from China, right? He never actually mentions electric vehicles, interestingly, talks only about the big three automakers, not one mention of Tesla, for example, which has a bigger market cap than, I think, any two of them combined, if not all three of them combined. But it was really bizarre to a lot of people that that seemed to come out of nowhere. I just said, “No, no, no. There’s a direct line between October 7th through the Michigan primary to this announcement.” It’s because of the Arab populations of Dearborn, right? And all those people who filled in that little oval that said “not committed” in the primary, right, over anger over American or Biden administration support for Israel.

Jay: Right. You’ve got to make up those votes somehow, right? One idea is clearly to lean into the UAW and support for U.S. manufacturing, because you’re not necessarily going to bring back the Arab-Americans. You might get them to stay home, but there’s… And Michigan is pivotal for the election, so how much of that is real? It’s an election year, and it’s anyone’s guess.

Kaiser: So, TikTok, a friend of mine, Jeremy Daum with the Yale China Law Center, he said something the other day about the impending divest or ban law that they snuck in, like I said, with the Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan funding bill. He was frustrated, and I agree, I think this is completely… I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to say, but the media keeps asking China scholars about the issue. They really ought to be talking, at this point, more to constitutional law specialists, especially people who are First Amendment specialists, as that is going to be the basis of many of the coming legal challenges. Now, it struck me that, hey, my brother is a literal card-carrying ACLU member. I think, in fact, if you are still on… are you still on their board?

Jay: I’m not on their board, but I’m literally the right-wing’s worst nightmare. I’m a gay Chinese appellate litigator who was on the board of the newest Northern California ACLU.

Kaiser: Oh, you used to be. Right. Okay. So, what are your thoughts on the bill, and do you think that it’s going to stand up to First Amendment-based challenges?

Jay: Well, whenever I’m asked about TikTok or ByteDance, I have to first disclose, just for transparency’s sake, that our family company, which invests in a lot of companies, does have a small stake in ByteDance.

Kaiser: What? Wait, wait, what? What?

Jay: This has happened before.

Kaiser: We do?

Jay: Oh, yeah. I didn’t tell you?

Kaiser: You need to tell me this stuff.

Jay: I get presented with opportunities.

Kaiser: I mean, how small a stake are we talking about? I mean, maybe you should get rid of it now.

Jay: I need to add it to our list of right-wing nightmares because I’m part of this LGBTQ tech investor network called Gaingels.

Kaiser: Oh, right, right, right. Gaingels. Oh, so it’s through Gaingels?

Jay: Through Gaingels. Yeah. Well, actually through Gaingels and angel investment, or sister arm, but not relevant. But it doesn’t shape my feelings about the legality or non-legality of what’s happening. Obviously, that is a legal analysis. And so, well, we have to go backward in time. The Trump White House tried to do this in 2020, and it met pretty quickly with some stiff legal resistance. It made some of the same arguments that user data was at risk, that it could be accessed by the Chinese government because of that country’s security laws. Of course, that was all hypothetical because that actually hadn’t happened yet. So I think after Trump got knocked down by federal courts, ByteDance took the threat seriously and tried to come up with ways to reassure the U.S. government that there would be safeguards against user data being transmitted to the Chinese government directly.

Kaiser: Right. CFIUS and Oracle, and then worked out this Project Texas idea. Right?

Jay: Right. It was actually one of the most transparent things any tech company had ever done.

Kaiser: Oh, for sure. For sure.

Jay: But that was never going to cut it, I think, for people who really wanted, one, to sound like they were serious on the question of data privacy, and two, sound like they were serious about standing up to China. So, this is like a wet dream for somebody who wants to be a demagogue when it comes to these issues. And unfortunately, you’re not going to find many people in the Congress willing to stand up for the First Amendment when it comes to questions of national security and the threat that China hypothetically poses. 

But looking back at Trump’s order, there were two different federal courts that halted it, I believe, saying not only that he had exceeded his presidential authority... Back then, there was something called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and that actually dates back to like 1977. And that act allowed the president to issue orders to deal with unusual threats to our national security from foreign powers, like China, but it had a limitation when it came to personal communications because that obviously would start to impact the First Amendment and also any information or informational materials. And that happens to be the core of what TikTok has and allegedly could transmit to the Chinese authorities. So, the court slammed the Trump administration for exceeding its authority under the EEPA. And the new ban, the one they’re talking about today, gets around some of this by having this clever thing saying, “Oh, we’re not banning, we’re just having TikTok sell, forcing TikTok to sell its U.S. operations to a buyer that is not Chinese.” And that’s the way they will get around this.

But it’s not clear that the other problem is solved, which is a First Amendment problem, because basically they’re saying, “We don’t like this content because of who owns it or who could have access to it.” And so that sounds like the government coming in and making or staking out a claim around content, or around the speaker of the content, or the provider of the content. Now, it gets complicated because obviously the people who are doing the content are not TikTok itself. TikTok is providing the platform, but you have all these other people whose First Amendment rights are going to be impinged upon if TikTok were actually to disappear. You’ve got 170 million Americans who use it. And so the question that courts are going to face is whether what the government is doing is sort of limited enough in scope or if it has overreached. And I don’t know the details of the law well enough to know, or how they plan to implement it, but I know the ACLU is opposed to the bill, and I know a lot of First Amendment absolutists are absolutely not. So, it’s going to be interesting. There was a federal court in Montana… 

Kaiser: Yeah, I remember.

Jay: … that took on the Montana Privacy Act, which sounds a lot like what they’re trying to do now. And that act was designed also to protect consumers from unsafe data collection. But at the same time, and this is an interesting parallel, Montana passed the TikTok ban, but it also passed the data privacy law. Coincidentally, and what’s not talked about is, the U.S. passed the TikTok ban, but it also passed the data privacy law, one of the most sweeping ones ever. It’s called the American Privacy Rights Act. And if their goal is to protect consumer information from being misused, doesn’t the APRA, the new APRA, actually already do that, and isn’t anything beyond that just overreach?

So I think it’s going to be an interesting legal question. I don’t know ultimately how the Supreme Court might rule on that, but certainly the U.S. is taking a path that was already rejected by a federal court in Montana. So, the odds are not strong that it’s going to survive completely intact.

Kaiser: Well, Jay, I’ll send you the transcript of this conversation, and you’ll already have one of your columns written for The Status Kuo. It’ll save you some time. Hey, what a fantastic time talking to you, my little brother. And I just want to shout out your book one more time. It’s called Ma in All Caps. I actually read the audiobook version of it. I narrated that, and that was a ton of fun, I have to say.

Jay: You get very high marks from the people who bought the audiobook. The people have told me, “Oh, I’ve listened to that on long drives. Kaiser’s voice is so cool."

Kaiser: Ha! Well, I mean, I had a good time doing the accents. That was fun. I did like this Jesuit German priest at one point where I had to work up a good German accent. And I think I did like… I don’t know. I came up with accents for the different characters, like Laolao had to be speaking English, so I gave her like a Transatlantic, kind of 1930s-ish accent. Anyway, it’s a lot of fun.

Jay: Well, we’re billing Ma in All Caps as sort of David Sedaris meets Amy Tan. I know you might not like Amy Tan, but this is-

Kaiser: No, I love Amy Tan. I think she’s great.

Jay: The genre is humor with sort of a gay twist compared with rich Chinese history as told by the indefatigable Ma.

Kaiser: Yeah, indefatigable. Well, our late mother would be… I mean, she’d be tickled and horrified to actually read the book, but I’m not sure which would be more.

Jay: I think that describes a lot of how she feels about her children. 

Kaiser: Yeah. Tickled and horrified. All right, Jay, let’s move on now to recommendations. And before I do that, let me just quickly thank the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the generous support. The Center for East Asian Studies has given me a little bit of money to help out this year. And it’s a great start, but subscribe to the Substack and help me out a little more. I really want to be able to put my kids through college and not put them out on the street. 

All right. Recommendations. Jay, what do you have for us?

Jay: Yeah, I recently got turned on to a historical drama based upon the assassination of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, and it’s called Manhunt. It’s on Apple.

Kaiser: Oh, right.

Jay: It’s a series, I think in eight or nine parts — riveting and historical. I learned a lot, including, I didn’t know that there was an alleged conspiracy that tied the assassination all the way up to Jefferson Davis. So, I didn’t know that. And I’m sort of a history buff, at least when it comes to that era, so, that was enlightening and, really, it’s really, really well done. And you won’t regret starting episode one.

Kaiser: I bet you, Heather Cox Richardson knew all about it.

Jay: Oh, yes.

Kaiser: Oh, no, great. I actually have a TV show to recommend too. It’s the new HBO adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 2016, [The Sympathizer] which I actually recommended on this show when I read the book because it’s just a great, great, great book. The fidelity to the novel, to the novel’s themes, to the whole spirit of the thing, it’s fantastic. Robert Downey Jr. plays a bunch of roles in it, wearing different wigs and facial hair configurations and whatnot. It’s a comedy. I mean, the book was also really darkly comic. But so far, it’s just fabulous. I hope everyone enjoys it.

Jay: I’ll have to check it out.

Kaiser: You must. Have you read the book?

Jay: I have not.

Kaiser: Oh God.

Jay: Now I have two things to look at.

Kaiser: Oh, the book is just great. Actually, get the audiobook. I don’t know if you know the actor François Chau, C-H-A-U?

Jay: Yes, I do.

Kaiser: Yeah. So, he is the narrator of this, and he just knocks it out of the park, like one of the best audiobook narrations I’ve ever heard.

Jay: Amazing.

Kaiser: It’s great. Anyway, thank you, Jay. That was a ton of fun.

Jay: Well, brother, let’s do it again sometime.

Kaiser: Yeah, let’s do it again. I mean, there’s all sorts of other stuff we can talk about. And yeah, I’ll talk to you soon, man.

Jay: See you soon.

Kaiser: You’ve been listening to the Sinica Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Kuo. Support the show through Substack at sinica.substack.com, where there’s a growing offering of terrific, original China-related writing and audio, or email me at sinicapod@gmail.com if you have ideas on how you can help out. Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week. Take care!