Ten Thousand Things: An Object, a Story, and a Podcast

In the photo, a solitary Asian man in a dark blue J. Crew suit and surgical mask focused on the task of picking up empty water bottles and garbage. Congressman Andy Kim from New Jersey was unknowingly photographed on January 6th as he collected trash in the Capitol Rotunda after rioters were cleared from the building. Something about this photo remained deeply within my consciousness.

It’s not unusual to see images of Asian American laborers performing acts of service. But an image of an Asian American public servant quietly going about picking up the pieces of a failed insurrection is something else. The image depicted a humbling activity. Cleaning up after others and picking up the pieces after the unthinkable happened.

I wasn’t the only person who was moved by Andy Kim’s image. Letters from constituents and strangers flooded the Congressman’s office with messages telling him what the photo meant to them. When the mainstream media announced months later that Congressman Kim had donated the blue suit that he had worn in that photo to The Smithsonian Museum of National History as an artifact of January 6th, I was excited. There was another story to tell besides the violence and failure that marked the day.

When KUOW (Seattle’s NPR station) put out a call in Summer 2021 for podcast ideas from the community—I pitched an idea to put together a series about Asian American stories based loosely around the idea of Andy Kim’s blue suit. As you can imagine, the title of the series was The Blue Suit. 

I wanted to tell stories from Asian American activists and artists that represented the opposite of the model minority identity and myth. Make a series about off-brand and outspoken Asians who have made contributions to the cultural life of the place where I live. And I wanted those stories to travel widely, which is a benefit of audio stories. I made a pilot. And then I made a full season of stories.

From its beginnings, I wanted my podcast to focus on objects and artifacts in the personal collections of their respective storytellers. Through using an object, I could employ a red herring. The listener would be intrigued by the story of the object, not realizing that they’d also receive a story about a culturally specific person. Sometimes the artifact would suggest a collection of objects. Like a record player, which points to a song. And the notion of a song as object, while abstract, also has a poetic quality of being a thing.

At some point, the listener might realize that they’d made it through an entire season of stories. And it wasn’t a coincidence that all of the project’s storytellers were Asian American. In that first season of my show, I talked to Etsuko Ichikawa about the uranium in her handcrafted glass orbs as a nod to her anti-nuclear activism. 

Other guests included Cambodian-American performance artist Anida Yoeu Ali talking about a beautiful sequined red chador which she wore during performances that explored anti-Muslim sentiment, until the garment went missing at an Israeli airport. And Andy Kim even agreed to talk to me about his famous blue suit which he bought off the sale rack at J. Crew for President Biden’s inauguration.

Those early episodes of the show focused on activism. But they also focused on love. Appreciation for home, one’s cultural heritage, ways of expression, and the love that is passed between generations. And the love that I feel for the Asian American diaspora, of which I myself am a part. 

Now we’re in our second season. We evolved from calling my podcast The Blue Suit to its present name, Ten Thousand Things, as a wink towards its cultural origins. Ten thousand is a number that appears throughout Chinese culture as a metaphor for the infinite and unfathomable, like the unending permutations of Asian American identity that are possible.

With this second season, we’ll return with stories about a bicycle, Japanese America’s first novel, a fish, a name, and a voice, among other things. Make sure to follow Ten Thousand Things for free on your favorite podcast app to receive the new episodes as soon as they’re available, and you can explore the past season’s to the show’s website at https://www.kuow.org/podcasts/tenthousandthings.