From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. And when I think of, well, first of all,

it's always good to have old friends and somebody I haven't seen for a very long time sitting across from me, my old friend, Hwasu, who I worked with at Harvard.

And I knew him when he was DJing it. He always had a kind of a gleam in his eye.

And the lead character in his terrific cultural history of floating Chinaman, basically, at one point, you sort of described his delight.

And as I was reading, I thought, well, that's what Hua's like.

And I can feel your sense of pleasure in that there is a sense of excitement you have that you bring to cultural history.

And for you, there is no higher low in this.

And that kind of Venn diagram is what really I find so exciting about the stuff you do to the New York and certainly

about this book as well. Well, thanks so much for having me, Elvis. It's real thrill. It's really

awesome to see you once again. And yeah, that's exactly what the book is sort of about. It's about sort of this collision of really popular sort of monoculture stuff,

and then the people who are on the margins who don't really get their stories told. And usually

we think of these two entities in isolation, but in my book I talk about, it's about sort of China

and American in the 30s and sort of the big name authorities. And yeah, it focuses on this guy, H. T. Tong, who was, you know, throwing spitballs from the margins.

And every now and then, he would, one of them would land somewhere close to the conversation.

It's interesting because in reading the book, I found myself thinking about black culture of the 60s and 70s.

And some of his poetry, you know, Chinaman laundromen almost

could be something written by Ameri Baraka, you know, that sense of who owns this culture?

Totally.

And how do we claim it?

And I thought that must be one of the things you found so interesting about his work, too.

Yeah, definitely.

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