Editor’s note: This is the twenty-first entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Shin Yu Pai (@shinyupai on Twitter) is a writer, event producer, podcast host, and artist. Here’s how she does history.
What’s your current position?
I am currently a podcast host and producer for KUOW Public Radio in Seattle. I’m getting ready to launch a new podcast in July about Asian American stories told through objects and artifacts. I’m also working on a couple of book projects and taking some time to rest after a long pandemic.
Last month, I transitioned out of my role as Program Director for Town Hall Seattle, a producing venue in the Pacific Northwest that hosts touring authors, scientists, and civic leaders, while also producing a variety of musical concerts and theater-inspired performances. I oversaw an artist-in- residence program that invited local artists to engage with Town Hall programming. I also produced a poetry podcast series for Town Hall called Lyric World. I hosted conversations with contemporary poets, such as Arthur Sze, Yona Harvey, Prageeta Sharma, and others, about the themes and social issues embedded with their work. I also designed and produced ongoing racial equity workshops for the public at Town Hall.
What’s your typical work week look like?
I run for three miles, five days a week before starting my day. I spend the morning catching up on emails and then dig into writing — whether for a radio script or for one of my various book projects. My best time for writing tends to be the morning hours when my mind is a little sharper after a run. I book meetings and calls in the afternoon. I don’t like to talk to anyone until 1:00 pm or later, in order to optimize my best window of time for creative thinking. I turn off my cell phone alerts. I try to take a mid-day break to walk down the street with my partner to pick-up our 8-year-old from school. And then go back to my backyard cottage for a couple more hours of work before dinner time.
Shin Yu reading to her son in her backyard cottage, 2018. Photo by Joshua Huston.
Tell us about some of the programs you worked on or supervised at Town Hall Seattle.
I brought musician Julian Saporiti of No-No Boy out last fall to perform a multimedia concert of his research on the Japanese American incarceration experience. Julian and I taught together for a small arts incubator program in Oregon, where I got to first learn about his work. When Smithsonian Folkways brought out his latest album, I invited him to perform on our stage. In addition, I worked with the University of Washington’s Taiwan Studies program to produce a concert with Small Island Big Song — a global music collective of artists from Taiwan, Hawaii, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, The Solomon Islands and other island nations, with an urgent message on climate change and its impacts on island peoples.
As an Asian American arts leader, I focused my work on amplifying the work of Asian creators and produced programs with Jeff Yang, Phil Yu (aka Angry Asian Man), Philip Wang, Gish Jen, Frances Kai-Hwang, Ruchika Tulshyan, Don Lee, and others. I also curated the authors for Bushwick Book Club’s Ink Aloud program which featured local BIPOC authors Thomas Hitoshi Pruiskma, Anne Liu Kellor, and Robert Lashley who have ties to the Seattle region.
Shin Yu Pai pulls a letterpress print during a studio tour of Expedition Press in Kingston for a Seattle Obscura Society event for Atlas Obscura.
What other previous public programs or program officer work have you done or led?
For four years, I worked at Atlas Obscura, a digital media company that produces tours, workshops, trips, and experiences, and established their presence in Seattle and Portland, while also managing event teams in Denver, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. My signature events included an annual lecture in the Henry Art Gallery’s James Turrell skyspace with a local astrophysicist; a book launch for Atlas Obscura in the Seattle Underground (the subterranean tunnels and speakeasy spaces that exist as part of Seattle’s early history); a concert with accordion players and sea-creature themed musicians aboard the tall ship The Lady Washington that sailed around Seattle; and a concert in the derelict Georgetown Steam Plant with the Seattle Phonographers Union. I also produced poet Janaka Stucky’s Seattle performance of his book Ascend, Ascend with cellist Lori Goldston.
At the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation at Hendrix College, my foundation was very well-resourced and I produced events with Michael Ondaatje, Jonathan Safran Foer, Arthur Sze, Louise Gluck, theater director Moises Kaufman of The Laramie Project, and many blockbuster visiting authors and artists.
What is your earliest memory of a historical event?
I was a high school sophomore when Rodney King was beaten by the LAPD. I grew up in Riverside which is about 60 miles outside of Los Angeles. All the news channels broadcasted the footage. I’d never seen that kind of brutality. The injuries that King incurred at the hands of four police officers had shocked and sickened me.
My parents did not talk about the event with me or my brother. We were Taiwanese-American kids that performed the model minority identity. So there wasn’t a big discussion of violence or bias against black people in our society. Or that we should use our own voices, as Asian Americans, to speak out against violence and to examine anti-blackness in our own communities. There wasn’t the kind of solidarity and movement building across racial lines that characterizes the time in which we now live. This is in stark contrast to how I have approached actively engaging with my young son about Uvalde, the Atlanta spa shootings, and the murder of George Floyd.
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate experiences.
I studied English at Boston University in the late 1990s, where I minored in Spanish and Eastern Religion, studying with M. David Eckel and Livia Kohn. During those years, I worked as a publishing assistant at Agni Magazine and for a photo gallery. From BU, I went on to the MFA writing program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. I studied Japanese tea ceremony and meditation in the vipassana tradition and took refuge vows, while also studying poetry and translation.
I left Naropa after a year and finished my MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I studied photography with Joyce Neimanas, Robert Clark-Davis, and Aimee Beaubien. After working in museums, nonprofits, and advertising agencies, in 2007, I decided to apply for a PhD program in Sociocultural Anthropology. I enrolled in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington and did a year of doctoral coursework before moving over into the Museology (the study of museums) program, where I studied oral history collections and community-based museums as change agents.
Shin Yu performing with musician Steve Peters at The Bitters Barn in Mount Vernon, Washington, 2019.
For someone who might not know, what are oral histories and what do they mean to you?
Oral histories are stories from the community. Documents of lived experience from everyday people. In the context in which I’ve worked with oral histories, they are often the basis of digital collections that may be used for research or exhibition design in museums. Before studying museology, I’d understood oral histories in more of an ethnographic or sociological research context — they were histories that you gathered for the purpose of writing a paper or book. But there’s a broad practice of using oral histories at institutions like the Museum of Pop Culture, Northwest African American Museum, Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), and The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle. I worked with Lorraine McConaghey, a former chief historian at MOHAI, and I loved that she used oral history transcripts in “reader’s theater” — a theater-inspired approach to animating oral history materials.
Tell us about some of the oral projects you have worked on and where?
Tom Ikeda at The Densho Project in Seattle trained me in collecting video and oral histories with survivors of the Japanese American incarceration experience. At the Wing Luke Museum, I collected stories from the Chinese American community, mostly related to changing foodways and labor in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. That was the basis of my graduate thesis work. After I finished my program, I also conducted independent research on Taiwanese American identity and donated those oral history recordings and transcripts to The Wing for safekeeping.
Shin Yu with her embroidered poem “same cloth” at the 2017 So Bazaar Festival.
For you, what is the toughest part of conducting an oral history? Also, what do you believe is most rewarding about the experience?
Honestly, I find it hard sometimes to stay silent. For me, the occasion of an oral history is more about collecting a story than about engaging in a conversation. Sometimes, I really want to respond or follow up with a comment or verbalize or vocalize a reaction. But for the purpose of the recording and tape, I’ve trained myself to really limit my responses to eye contact, head nods, and smiles of affirmation or empathy. I think the most rewarding part of the experience is receiving the story. Sometimes, I’ve noticed in radio, that a person’s story serves as a piece of content — a piece of tape that can be edited or inserted by a reporter to reinforce a larger message or theme — it can be appropriated. An oral history is different. It stands on its own and the person that narrated the story is integral to understanding that narrative.
What’s the best advice you have received or tell people about conducting oral histories?
Take time to establish a relationship with the oral history subject before the interview. I like to schedule pre-interview conversations that help to break the ice and build the relationship. I make sure to get to know my subjects besides just going over paperwork and asking for a recording waiver and release. I want my subjects to be comfortable and at ease talking to me. I like to meet them in a neutral place or in their home environment. I prefer not to record in a studio setting.
You have written a lot for the public, can you tell us about some of your favorite essays and where to find them?
I’ve done some informal travel writing based on my relationship of going back and forth to Taiwan, my parents’ native country. Those essays have been published in Off Assignment and Zocalo Public Square. I’ve also written about my relationship to Buddhism and parenting for Tricycle and ParentMap. Though my focus at Atlas Obscura was on producing experiences, I also wrote for them, including this piece on haiku poetry and Michael Stipe. I also wrote a personal essay for South Seattle Emerald based on writing exhibition text for The Wing on a beauty exhibition. They’ve been very supportive of my writing and also published my essay on taking a self-defense class during the pandemic.
Shin Yu performing her ritual poem “Embarkation” at the 2019 Ampersand Live! showcase at The Moore Theatre in Seattle.
Besides your public programming work and nonfiction writing, you also have written several books on poetry. Tell us about writing poetry, how long have you done it, and where can we find your poetry?
As an author, I’ve written poetry since 1996 and started publishing in 1998, beginning with a letterpress chapbook of Chinese poetry translations that I worked on with my father. My classmate Jerry Tumlinson from Naropa brought out Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers as a small handbound collection. I published Equivalence, my first full-length book, in 2003. Since then, I’ve published several other collections. Most recently Virga (Empty Bowl, Press, 2021). In 2020, Entre Rios Books published Ensō, a 20-year survey of my work across creative disciplines. You can find my books at Small Press Distribution. Those that haven’t sold out can also be purchased directly from the publishers. Letterpress editions are available from Convivio Bookworks and Filter Press. Sometimes, I make poetry objects and installations. I also frequently read and perform my writing.
Tell us about the KUOW Public Radio podcast you were recently commissioned to undertake.
“The Blue Suit” is about the commonplace things that touch our lives and are transformed by uncommon people. By exploring our emotional kinship with everyday objects, we shine a light on our cultural and personal values in these times. I reflect with others on what we own, what we inherit, and what we cherish. Along the way, we redefine what gets elevated to heirloom status. The series is told through the lens of objects owned by artists and activists with a connection to the Pacific Northwest. The storytellers that I interview also happen to be Asian American. The series was inspired by Congressman Andy Kim (NJ) and his blue suit, a garment that he was photographed wearing as he cleaned up trash on the Capitol Rotunda left behind by rioters, following the January 6th insurrection. The Smithsonian asked Rep. Kim to donate his suit to their collections, as a relic of the insurrection.
Shin Yu with a projection of her poetry film “heyday” at Redmond Lights, 2017. Photo by James McDaniel.
How has the pandemic affected you? In 2020, 2021, and now 2022?
I was laid off from a job that I loved three months into the pandemic and spent much of 2020 and 2021 scrambling around to recover. I went on a lot of bike rides with my son and spent time with family while I regrouped. After leaving Atlas Obscura, I helped to lead the MFA creative writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and then served as education director for a small community-based art school in Port Townsend, Washington. I live and work in Seattle and serving in these remote roles bought me some time to figure out my next position. The later half of 2021 was about getting stable again. Enough so that I could turn my attention back to creative projects. I’m working on a haiku comics project with my friend Justin Rueff and launching my new podcast project, “The Blue Suit,” in July.
Chlorophyll print of loggers, 2017. Archival image sourced from The Redmond Historical Society Archives. Image courtesy of artist.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
I think there’s a misconception that history is a purely academic topic without applications outside of academic study. There are all kinds of applications in museums and the humanities. I also think about historic preservation projects and public development authorities like Historic Seattle, which saves historic buildings. I’ve also used history in my creative work — mining historical collections for archival photographs that I then printed using antiquated technologies.
If you weren’t a scholar, what other kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
I’ve always wanted to study plant-based medicine and to expand my limited botanical knowledge. My husband is an acupuncturist and herbalist and I’ve always been envious of his knowledge of the healing properties of various plants and herbs (and foods). As a person working in the creative arts, I think a lot about the intersections between creativity and healing and would love to have explored an alternative path as a healing artist.
Daguerreotype of Shin Yu Pai. Photo by Daniel Carrillo.