KILLED - Episode 6: The Blueprint

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

A journalist unlocks a secret in New York’s Chinatown; This American Life drops the hammer. Featuring Aaron Reiss and Stephanie Foo.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

From Justin Harmon and audio chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Episode 6, The Blueprint You've probably heard of this American life. The long-running, weekly public radio show from WBEC Chicago. This American life from WBEC Chicago, I'm a reglass. So there's a whole infrastructure. I reglass and his award-winning team practically invented that conversational, conspiratorial, narration style thing that we're all doing now. In the wake of that, that nothingness, that non-response.

It is literally impossible to listen to an episode of This American Life and feel nothing. Everyone has their favorite. The one about coincidences or hope or breakups or the girls who were switched at birth. I think mostly the stories that I'm driven to are about things that I care about. I always tell people don't get mad, get tape. That's Stephanie Foo. She's a journalist and author whose recent memoir,

What My Bones Know, a memoir of healing from complex trauma, was called A Reckoning by the New York Times. And for five years, she was a producer at this American life. Stephanie's motto, don't get mad, get tape. As in, if something pisses you off in the world, record it. Like if there's something that's really bothering you about society, life, like you have a real issue and you're like I remember you know being really mad about getting cat called Wallscape boarding so I like did a story on it. At this American life producers like Stephanie were charged with finding, advocating for,

and occasionally repackaging stories to better suit any given theme. The nature of it is that each show is themed and so we would get themes like that maybe a few weeks ahead of time or maybe even a few months ahead of time like you know find stories about libraries or find stories about dads or something. A story didn't just have to be good. It had to fit. Find it this very life. And if it didn't, it got relegated to the infinite scroll. We would have pitch docs that were 50 pages long with everyone on staff giving two or more pitches every week. And of that document, you know, with that amount of pitches, probably maybe two or three would actually get greenlit. It's a super high kill rate. I think

just in terms of the pitches, a lot of it gets called there. Some stories would just be on there for months or even like a year because we just couldn't find the right framing for it and that's like an unfortunate side effect of the just the very nature of the show. So picture that framework, but in the year 2016, in the fall specifically. Stephanie's working at the most competitive radio show in the biz, they've got 50 pages of suitable story ideas, but everything really seems to be about just one topic,

the divisive election. And of course, that's the Hillary that is often described as the kind of the opportunist issue. They've been trying to square their conservative ideals with their game-changing nominee. It's been a year where it feels like the two sides are so radically far apart. And now, here comes a self-fashioned multimedia journalist named Aaron Reese with an idea. Not about big picture America or politics, but a microcosm of the immigrant experience in his adopted neighborhood.

This story started because I was living in Chinatown, and I was very early in my career I just graduated college a couple years ago, and I wanted to become a map maker. And so I started researching Chinese maps and through the process of finding Chinese maps of New York City, I came to the understanding that there is no fixed name for streets, that map-to-map names would change. When you look at English language maps,

you don't look at map-to-map and be like, oh, this map calls it Broadway and this map calls it, you know, the very large avenue. You know, it's always Broadway. And so that, that like, surprised me and confused me and intrigued me. And so that kind of set me off on a personal research journey of walking around Chinatown and interviewing people on the street to ask them what they called certain streets.

It's not a written story he's peddling. Not exactly audio either. More of an observation, a slice of life so specific that you might spend your life living and working in a place and never see it. Aaron had noticed something subtle but amazing. All around him, there were two Chinatowns, the one that English speakers know with its division and Mulberry streets, and then another with informal Chinese names like Hatseller Street and Dead Person Street. And the connection between the two was fading. There were 155 bilingual street signs in Chinatown in 1985.

These days, there are about 100. I came to the realization that it was a really interesting topic, at least to me, and that it wanted to be a visual story that would be told through a map that you could click and listen to. But I didn't know how to make that. So I enrolled in, I like, shelled out a bunch of my own money to enroll in night classes at Pratt if for like a visual storytelling class

that taught you the basics of coding. And so I took that class, which was wonderful. And my final project for that class was a first version of a map of New York City through the lens of Chinese names. And I liked what I made and I thought it was cool, but at the same time, I had been trying to be a journalist for many years and was getting to the point where my savings were doing delaying.

I didn't have a clear understanding of what my path forward was. I had this idea that I thought was cool, but like many of my ideas that I thought were cool, none of the editors were returning any of my emails or my repeated shout-out side of their windows of their homes. Like nobody was responding to me and wanting to publish anything. So, or when they did, it was for so little money that it was just, you know, I wasn't making a living. Erin put the map project down. It didn't seem sensible to keep pouring money into it. At that point in my career,

my wife was going into law school in California, and so I decided to take a new job, and I became like a corporate design researcher. And then after two years of working in corporate America, I was ready to try again in journalism. And by happenstance, I was in the same city as a really talented map-based journalist named Jenny Yee, who I had met many years ago in China. And we got lunch, and I told her about this idea, and I'm like, I really think it's a cool idea, and I want to do it. Would you do it? I basically asked

would you do it with me? Because she's from Chinatown. She knows Chinatown. She already knew that there were these interesting names for Chinese streets. And so her signing on and saying, yes, I want to help you with this thing was like the new gallon of gas in the tank where I took a sabbatical from my job and I'm paid sabbatical and I was like, I want to go make this story. I'm moving back to New York and I kind of like on a hope and a prayer, moved back to New York City for a summer. Jenny and Erin kept developing their idea. What if there was a way to show what Chinatown looks and sounds like to people who don't speak English? And then one conversation changed everything. Basically, in the process of researching, I ended up getting put in contact with the two people who ran radio ambiolante. And PR's Spanish language podcast about Latin America.

I actually just wanted a job at radio ambiolante, and I also speak Spanish. So I was telling them the story and I'm like, oh, here's this other cool thing that you guys might get a kick out of. And they were like, oh, you should really talk to our friend Stephanie Foo who was a producer at this American life. The notion of talking to this American life producer was a very big deal for me. And so, you know, I wasn't counting on much, but I sent her this idea for the story. In 2016, this American life producer Stephanie Foo was on the hunt for a very specific kind of story. I needed to be surprising.

I needed to be something that we hadn't heard before. I needed to have consistent beginning, middle, and end plot. And there needed to be one main character who's emotional, arc that we could follow, like a bull or at least relatable, but that's a bull in some way. So when an inexperienced but eager journalist named Aaron Reese pitched her a story about a colloquial Chinatown, one that only exists to native speakers. She was listening.

I don't really remember the very first time we met. I mean, we talked on the phone and we talked through the story. Maybe the first time we met was in Chinatown and he was sort of telling me things about Chinatown that I didn't know. And I remember us getting lunch at this place where that he thought was really great. And yeah, the noodles were really good. Being Asian-American and New Yorker Chinatown is a place that means a lot to me. It's a place where I kind of was able to feel at home in New York City when I first moved here. So doing a cool story about the underground sort of nicknames for all of the streets there

really was up my alley. I would say I'm probably opposed to like gentrifiers living in Chinatown, but he is really committed to preserving the neighborhood and yeah, went to some great lengths. I think, you know, as someone who's Chinese is really, really not very good, I think there's always like some form of feeling of like, oh my god, what is this white guy? And speaking Chinese better than me, this is some embarrassing. But, you know, I got over it, it's fine. My ability to speak Chinese, I think,

is a disarming and like ice breaking tool just because there's a level of surprise and also humor. You know, like my Chinese is fine, but it's not great. Stephanie was surprised by Erin in a good way. This would be a great story to fit in some place. She saw some sort of spark in it. And so I pitched it. I remember I was leaving a diner in Soho.

Everybody else was interested. And I got an email. And so we wound up pursuing it. We're greenlit for the story. It's going to happen for this American life. I was like jumping up and down on the side of the street just like so blown away because it was very unexpected that the story would become something

for an outlet like this American life. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. After years of channeling his own money into an interactive map of Chinatown, the story was a go for the biggest show in radio. There was just one tiny little hitch. So when I pitched it, one of the caveats was people were like, we need a central character. I mean, this is a great idea, a great concept, but in order for things to work on this American life, you need a central character or speaker or somebody to be rooting for, somebody to

ground that larger idea in. Oh yeah, that's another ingredient in the this American life special sauce. You need a central character. Did Erin have one of those? Hmm, shit. We came up with the idea of going to these black car services in Chinatown because we're like, who uses street names all the time, right? And we're like, okay, like traffic radio people

or taxi drivers. And so we're like, cool, let's check people or taxi drivers. And so we're like, cool, let's check out the taxi cab places in New York City. And so we just like walked around and on foot going to every black car service in Chinatown with a microphone and headphones being like, hi, like can we talk to you? And I'll never forget when we found Mona,

we were walking up, I think it's Ludlow Street. It's either Ludlow or Church, I think it's Ludlow. And we come and there's like a window facing the street. And Mona is literally sitting there through the window with two phone receivers on either ear. So she's like yelling into one receiver in Mandarin being like, Pommens, I forget what street it was.

We're like, Pommens, I'm a guy, and then she like turns to the other phone and she's like, I know, I know you're on Ma Street, I'm telling the driver, but she's like, neither phone ever leaves her ear, so she's just rotating her hand to bring the talking part in front of her face depending on if she's speaking in Mandarin or English.

Erin had his central character, Mona, a multilingual cab dispatcher at the Good Luck Car Service in Chinatown. Now all he had to do was convince Mona to share her story on the radio. She was like most people I start talking to really confused and didn't really understand why we would want to talk to her and did not want to talk to us really. And so I remember we left that conversation me and Jenny being like, damn, like she would be perfect, but I don't think she

really wants to talk to us. And then I had to go uptown to visit my cousin that day, so I waited online to the M15 bus on Allen Street, I think. And as I got onto the bus, she got on to the same bus through a different door, and I just realized that like the universe was sending me the character for the story. And so I literally just sat down next to her and was like, hi, you just met me. I cost to do it your workplace.

I was talking about this. And she was going up to Harlem. I was going up to like 86th Street. So I had like 90 blocks of a captive audience to like pitch this story to her. And so, you know, I was trying my best to be charming and nice, but I was also just like, how do I get a yes out of Mona to be like, yes, I'll be your character. And so, you know, I talked to her about her life, and you know, we got to know each other a tiny bit while we were just, you know, going to visit our respective families. And through the course of the conversation, I had enough time to like, tell her and explain to her what I was doing to a point where she was like,

okay, fine, you know, come talk to my boss and if she says it's okay, then we can talk. And so I remember getting off at 86 street and being like, holy shit, like I got her phone number. And she said, yes, this might actually happen. And then that's that's how I first got permission to come record with her. Erin wanted to remember every little thing Mona had said to capture her main character energy. OK, I am at 103rd Street and first Avenue.

He pulled out his mic and hit record. And I just dropped off Mona Hway at her apartment. and hit record. And I just dropped off Mona Huay at her apartment. Mona Huay has been a dispatcher at Lucky Car Service for 10 years. In fact, she met her husband there. He used to be a driver and the owner before I sold to somebody who then

sold it to Mr. Bing and Luisa. She only learned Mandarin last year because she was saying there's more and more people speaking Mandarin, so she had to learn it. She's kind of like the go-between the translator, you know, so people will tell her in English I need to go to Blosset Street and then she'll tell the drivers in Mandarin. She grew up on Orchard where her mom and dad still live. Soon, Erin and Stephanie were embedded inside Mona's humming office on Ludlow Street.

And even if Mona didn't exactly want them there, she didn't tell them to leave either. Erin was kind enough to share some of his reporting with Kilt. This is Mona's colleague, Luisa speaking. Luisa, are you busy right now? Yes, I can't answer your question. I'm so busy, I'm so sorry. Is it okay if I just sit here and listen? Okay, we just want here and listen? Okay. Yeah.

You can see that. Okay. We just want to hear the busy day. Every day, baby. I kind of remember it just being really busy and loud and multiple people sort of being in this little cramped space in this unassuming joint in Chinatown, and I remember I think we went to a basement, and I think there were stacked chairs or something. That was the one quiet place in that office was the basement.

Mona, she was just a little bit indifferent to us, honestly. I think she wound up being a great willing participant, but I think she was not particularly like, oh, I'm so excited I'm gonna be on the radio. Erin had found the story. He'd even found the character, but Stephanie gave it that this American life edge.

I've came in at certain points to sort of ask a little bit more in depth about like, if she told me a little bit about how she was feeling, I would sort of dig down on ask a little bit more in depth about like if she told me a little bit about how she was feeling I would sort of dig down on that a little bit deeper to try and get depth to her struggles and emotions and that was really important was getting her conflicting emotions about her job because we wanted it to have some sort of conflict or nuance. because we wanted it to have some sort of conflict or nuance. The two wrote a script, reading it out loud while playing selected bits of tape, moving this bite up or this line down.

They polished, revised, and hacked away until they had their own little, one-act play. Personal, surprising, empathizable. A window into a hidden world through the eyes of the woman who keeps it all on track. I was like literally on the way to record what they called pickups, which I learned later were like, you know, some small things have changed in the script, so we need you to come in and like re-record the word like conclusion or whatever it is. You know, something small.

I like, look down and I had missed a call and I pulled up my voice now and I listened to it and it was like, you know, like, a sentence like, hey, Aaron, you know, it's, it's I, you know, I, I hate to say this, but this happens sometimes. We had some scheduling things come in and, you know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna need you to come in for pickups because we're not gonna be able to publish the story this week. Kill, kill, kill. He's dead. Holy shit.

You know, I was clung my way back from giving up on journalism. I get this, this American life story, and this is gonna turn around my life. And I'm gonna be a real journalist and then like, in a sentence, it's like, actually not, it's gonna happen. And so, you know, it was devastating, it sucked. and I was devastated, sucked. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. After his story was killed,

via an eight second voicemail from Ira Glass, Aaron once again folded up his map. In between that point, you know, like I tried to talk to Stephanie and some of the other producers to be like, what's going on? Like is this ever going to get published? And the story was kind of like, yeah, I'll get published someday. Who knows when? And I remember being really disappointed when it didn't make it into this show because I think it was like very last minute that it got cut. And I don't really remember the reason, but I've seen stories get cut because, you know,

other stories just got too long and there wasn't room for it. Or the mood of the show, it just was off, you know? It didn't quite fit in terms of, we just came off of something really sad, maybe if you put something to silly at the end, it just would feel a little off or something like that. Like, you could get cut

for a million different reasons that aren't entirely personal. And I do remember my editor there feeling like he wasn't satisfied with the story that Mona's emotional arc wasn't like quite compelling enough, which was very disappointing to me. I was like, I think this is a great story. I don't know what you're talking about. If it was banal in retrospect, it wasn't at the time. Any time, especially earlier in my career, any time I got a rejection, whether it was because of a completely boring reason, like, this is a great story, but it doesn't fit for this week's episode, it always felt like a referendum on my talent. You know, it always felt like it just wasn't good enough

or like they're being nice, but the story sucked. So I think at the time, getting a story killed just feels bad. So I went back to my life. I went back to my job in California. And then, you know, maybe like a year later, if I'm remembering correctly, me and my wife are moving from California to New York City

and we're driving and we're driving through the middle of nowhere in like rural Montana and we're at a drive-through at some burger shack. And I got a phone call from Stephanie being like, hey, the episode's coming off the shelf and it's gonna get published in three days. Like, can you get to a recording studio tonight to record like a new introduction? Yeah, you know, it was like kind of a last minute hustle to get Aaron's tape for it.

And I like hung up the phone and then like me and my wife and whoever and my friends that we were with the time started like frantically googling like recording studios flat head lake Montana. And we found a place that was like two hours drive away on the other side of the lake that was just a barn that a guy recorded bands in. But he had like a setup and so we drove up there the next morning, I recorded like a single sentence and this guy's barn and then they sent it back to Stephanie.

I mean, it really felt like my career rested on this thing for a long time. And then I gave up on my career and then it came back. And I was just, yeah, the whole time I was just like, I'll do anything to make this happen because I want to be a journalist. And I feel like, you know, getting a story on this American life is the launch path that I need. It really felt do or die for me at that moment in my career.

It's this American life. I'm Sean Cole. Today's later, the story now titled A Road by Any Other Name, and cleverly wedged into an episode called Who You Gonna Call, Finally, Eard, on August 4th, 2017. We used a real old-fashioned radio at this cabin in Montana to listen to the story like actually come out over the air. I started looking into it and I learned the streets in Chinatown all have these Chinese names and not just one. Streets can

have four or five different names each used by a different population in Chinatown, long-time Toysanese residents, recent immigrants from Fujian, Cantonese, and there are actually these different Chinese maps of the city, with the same streets, but different names. I always believed in the story, like I never, but it was about advocating for it, and I tried to slip it into like a few different episodes before I finally was able to stick it in that one, and I definitely feel really proud that I fought for it so much. People love the intimacy of the peace. The clattering energy inside Monos cramped office

on Ludlow Street. They also loved how ambivalent Monos was about her role as a human street name Almanac for Chinese people in Chinatown. But she doesn't quit. I wish I could. Won't you in this dang for a long time, you addicted to it. Stephanie felt vindicated. She'd been right. All the beats were there.

It was good radio. After it aired, my editor wound up actually saying, like, you know, this did save the show. Like, it was really needed. It sounded really great. We needed that. He wound up being really satisfied with the way it sounded. And I was kind of like, well, I told you so. I've been telling you this. But Aaron still felt like there was more to the story. There was always a feeling that it was unfinished

because in the brilliant, you know, narrative sort of like zeroing in that Stephanie did of being like let's focus on one character, one piece of this, what was lost was this whole other story about Chinatown and the history of Chinatown that I had known I wanted to tell from the very first moment that I pitched Stephanie. You know, it was in my pitch. She, a very talented producer, was able to see my massive pitch and identify the piece of it that would make a good radio story for this American life. But I was still convinced that everything else was still fascinating and worthwhile, even

though I had this whole reservoir of research and story that I wanted to tell. As a journalist, it's exhausting to go through the process of pitching and convincing somebody it's a good idea and then making the thing and editing it and everything is just by the end of it, you're ready to just be done with it. And so I just was done with the project and there it sat for, I don't know, three years or something like that. I moved to Mexico. I got married.

I had a baby. My whole life moved forward. And then I got this Twitter message from a graphics reporter at the New York Times, named Denise Liu, who basically said, like, hey, listen to your This American Life Story from whatever, however many years ago, would love to like get those maps you talked about. And I remember getting the message of being like, this is a woman who works in the graphics department at the New York Times, is interested in Chinatown, has a personal connection to the Chinese language. There's absolutely no chance I'm going to just like give her the

maps and not have a conversation with her. So I was like, let's talk on the phone. So I kind of brought the story back from the dead because I saw an opportunity for another person who could help me build the version of it that it was maybe supposed to be from the beginning. With a variety of committed collaborators, Aaron had brought his idea full circle. He created a blueprint of Chinatown as it was and is, but likely will never be again.

Denise Lue declined to be interviewed for this episode of Killed, but the piece which they co-authored ran both in print and online and was a comprehensive multimedia immersion into the history and nomenclature of Chinatown. You know what, this story for the New York Times has definitely changed my career. I think that it marked my transition from an early career journalist to a mid-career journalist. Yeah, I think I'm a mid-career journalist now. That's what I keep telling my wife. I'm like, I'm a mid-career journalist now. Yeah, which feels great. I love being a mid-career journalist. It's awesome. For the first time in my career, I have a lot of fancy publications, editors from fancy publications, sending me emails being like, hey, clearly you know how to make interesting multimedia stories about New York. Like, what are you working on?

I'm working on a story about the history of the payphone, a sort of like cultural history of the payphone in New York City because the final street payphones are being removed this month. I also just finished my first story for the children section of the New York Times. There's a new dad that feels very meaningful for me, which is about a hot wheels shop shop in Mexico City, a place where like people like hit my ride but for tiny tiny tiny tiny little rides. And then I'm working on what might end up being kind of like a gamified interactive story about the sounds of the Mexico City streetscape, which I'm really excited about. It's a story that I I did like a

street skate, which I'm really excited about. It's a story that I did like a one-minute version of for Pop Up Magazine. And then there's the Knife Sharpener guy. And his sound is probably my favorite because it's like a little musical performance. He has a pamphlet and all the Knife Sharpeners have pamphlets at play. And Aaron's more than happy to be a conduit. A travel guide to hidden places. It was like a tiny little thing, but like with many of my stories, I feel like sometimes they're just waiting for the editor to see what I see. For whatever reason, the things that like spark my interest often miss other people's attention, but then they find it interesting once I bring their attention there.