Listen with Your Heart, with Ryan Lee Wong

Annmarie Kelly:

Wild Precious Life is brought to you in part by Oblong Books, independently owned and operated bookstores in the Hudson Valley. Since 1975, Oblong has featured a carefully curated collection of books in all genres. Find your next great reader or shop online at oblongbooks.com. And we're brought to you by Greenlight Bookstore through knowledgeable staff, curated book selection, community partnerships, and a robust e-commerce website. Greenlight combines the best traditions of the neighborhood bookstore with a forward-looking sensibility and welcomes readers of every kind to the heart of Brooklyn. Learn more and shop online at greenlightbookstore.com. What do you value most? What are your deepest convictions, and who or what do you believe in fiercely? For some people it's religion or faith. For others, it's family and loved ones. For still others, maybe they feel their land or country is worth fighting for. Whatever it is that you believe, where did that come from?

And even more importantly, how do you know it's right? I think for some of us, we're raised within one set of values and then we grow up, and those values change as we embrace new beliefs. I know I was raised in one faith tradition, and I'm on a break from that right now. When I think back to some of my core beliefs as an 18-year-old, some of the values that were really important to me back then are less so now and vice-versa. Often when we become adults, we change, I think it's normal and even healthy to have our beliefs challenged. I don't always know if I believe in God, but I know I believe in good. I don't always know if I trust my state politicians, but I know that I have faith in my neighbors. Capitalism gives me trouble lately, but I still see hope for how we can take better care of one another within this flawed system.

But again, if our beliefs can be challenged, how do we know when we're right? That's why I wanted to talk to today's guest, Ryan Lee Wong's debut novel, Which Side Are You On, grapples with questions of social justice, core values, and how we communicate our ideas across generational divides? Let me tell you a little more about him. Ryan Lee Wong was born and raised in Los Angeles, the son of a fifth generation Chinese American father and a Korean immigrant mother. Ryan organized the art exhibition Serve The People at Interference Archive and Roots at the Chinese American Museum, both of which focused on the Asian American movements of the 1970s. He has written about the intersection of arts, race, and social movements. Ryan holds an MFA in fiction from Rutgers Newark and lived for two years at the Ancestral Heart Zen Temple. Ryan is based in Brooklyn where he's the administrative director of Brooklyn Zen Center. Ryan Lee Wong, welcome to Wild Precious Life.

Ryan Lee Wong:

Thanks so much. Nice to be here.

Annmarie Kelly:

I am always on the lookout for stories I've never quite encountered on the page before, and your debut novel, Which Side Are You On, was just such a book. It made me think about activism and whether any cause can truly be passed down from one generation to the next. Also, it made me think about home and how on the one hand every parent dreams of providing more for their child than they had. But on the other hand, parents also want to make sure that kids know where they come from and how hard it was and that this two-car attached garage didn't just build itself.

And at what point does providing for one's family become gentrification or hoarding resources or the continued inequity between the rich and the poor and all this big stuff, as if that isn't enough. Your book just also made me think about how whether we can even change people's minds. So amid all of these things, I just wanted to talk to the guy who created the book that was making me think so much and I think will make I hopefully hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. I'm just really excited for your book and much better if you introduce it than me. So will you tell us about the seeds of which side are you on? Which parts came to you first and what inspired you to write this story?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Yeah, thank you for that and I'm glad it resonated in that way. I first started thinking about this when in real life I was part of some of the organizing around a real case that happened, which was a Chinese American police officer shot and killed by a young Black man in a public housing stairwell. And this was of course around the time that the first Black Lives Matter movement was starting. And what happened is the Chinese American community, the Asian American community, split and tens of thousands of people in the community were coming out in support of the police officer. And this is really shocking to me and to a lot of people I knew. And then I remembered also that in real life, my mother had been involved in B lack Korean organizing in the 1980s in South Los Angeles. And so the genesis of the book, the premise of the book is very much based on real life.

But I knew that these questions and these issues and these politics were so deeply emotional and deeply personal that I wanted to turn to fiction to tell the story. Fiction has the capacity to actually look at these kinds of issues without having to choose a side, actually. You can actually get really into the psyche and emotions of people on all sides of an issue.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, I think you really did that too, because throughout Which Side Are You On, I am thinking about how often we distill issues into two sides, which of course there are seldom two sides. We create these binaries, these very false binaries, but for the kinds of issues you are talking about, right? Unpacking why the Asian American community might come out on behalf of an Asian American cop who had created this or who'd shot someone that makes sense to us as though there's like four and against, that doesn't mean they're four justice or against justice or four Black folks are against Black folks. But when we distill it down to two sides, we do a real disservice to one another, don't we?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Yeah. So binary thinking is to me an incredibly powerful tool. It's incredibly useful. Sometimes I think in times of emergency it can even be necessary. Like a car is coming towards me, do I turn right or left? And I think if we reduce the world down to binary, if we reduce the world down to sides, we actually miss a lot of the reality of what's going on around us. And so much of the novel is actually about moving from a cerebral heady understanding of the world to a more heart understanding of the world. And in a more heart understanding of the world, there actually are no binaries, that's impossible.

Annmarie Kelly:

So in the book, for those who haven't read it, we are introduced to Reed who's an idealistic East Coast college student visiting his home in Los Angeles to pay a last visit to his dying grandmother, his harmony. And while Reed is there, he's also talking or trying to talk to his mom and dad about some of what you've just alluded to, the Black Lives Matter movement. In his case, he's organizing, he's been in New York City and he's talking about dropping out of college. He's at Columbia, he wants to pursue this work. And as we can imagine, his parents, they're not okay with this. And it's not just because they are typical parents stressing the importance of a college education, but it's because both of them, it sounds like your family, in this book anyway, his mom a Korean immigrant and Reed's dad a Chinese American, both of them were activists.

They themselves, we learned, dropped out of college to pursue that work. And we learned that that's something they've hidden from their son his whole life. It just got me thinking about family secrets and how often the things we try to hide from our children are often things they find out and probably most need to hear. I love how earnest, and I'm going to use the word insufferable Reed is at the beginning of your book, he's just got a whole lot of really important ideas, they're huge ideas, they're what our nation is wrestling with. But he's struggling to find the language to, like you said, perhaps move from his head to his heart and connect with people about these ideas that matter most. I guess I'll start with was it fun to write him this way or did it ever hit too close to home to you?

Ryan Lee Wong:

I started writing the book about six years ago in the thick of these protests. So I was looking for answers. I was looking for a way forward. And of course, I didn't find any of the answers I was looking for and didn't find any neat resolutions to this. And so the one of the reasons Reed is the way he is, first, I had to have enough distance from that moment to not be as caught up in looking for that answer. And then I needed the distance even further to look back and have compassion on who I was at that moment and to have compassion towards someone like Reed. So I think if I've done my job well in the novel, Reed is insufferable and he is in his head and he's a bit of a know-it-all. And at the same time, I think the reader feels underneath all that a really honest attempt at doing the right thing. The question in the novel is, can he find a little bit of space around his own thoughts?

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, you had me remembering some cringey family lectures from my own college years, not where I was being the one lectured, but doing the lecturing, I'm fairly certain I lambasted my white suburban parents over lunch at TGI Friday is about the difference between referring to people as African American or Black. And both of them had grown up in more racially diverse cities than I had. But somehow after a single semester at college, I basically declared myself the family expert on race relations. So I was looking at Reed and remembering myself and forgiving her for being a little bit overly earnest and not knowing, because we're always learning, and some part of us is always like that. No one in your book, there's not one conversation where everyone's like, oh, aha, yes, and now we understand and now we will move on and we all know.

Becoming as slow and there are jolts and starts and you get it and unget it and you move forward and backwards and sideways. And I think the way that you portray that in the book is so incredibly real. I'm grateful. And I also wondered, were you ever the kind of person who found yourself preaching abrasively to family and friends? Was there a part of you that remembered you that way?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Sure. Yeah. So my thesis advisor, Alice Elliot Dark, and I developed this pet theory that there's actually something evolutionary about humans where somewhere between the ages of 18 and 25, if you're exposed to new ideas and to new politics, and if you have this inclination, you become that person who divides the world of the binaries, who becomes a little preachy, who becomes radicalized. And in a way, this is not all a bad thing. I think this is why so many movements throughout human history have started on college campuses or young people because there's a certain energy and force at that age that's actually quite powerful.

The question is how do you manage and sustain that energy over the long-term? Because in my experience, you can't actually stay that way. It's not healthy, it's not good for you, it's not good for the people around you to continue that. It's almost like a second adolescence in a way. And so I was very much this way. It was a little later for me, it was really getting into the working world and feeling alienated for the first time in that way and feeling how big these systemic issues were in a bodily sense. That's really when I started to get into my politics and become radicalized and start delivering my little lectures.

Annmarie Kelly:

Reed becomes the kind of person who can't have a drink at a bar with a friend without thinking about the dangers of capitalism, consumerism, racism, sexism and homophobia, which are very real, but also make it hard to just step back and have a drink with a friend. These big things are for him almost paralyzing. And what I love about his relationship with his mother is she recognizes that and yet also doesn't explain it all to him what she's seeing. So her solution is, well, let's go to yoga. And I've actually copied this down from the book that he's like, yeah, sure, let's address the racialized exploitation between Asians and Blacks by having them do yoga together. And mom's just saying, but that's how you actually connect with people. And I like that he listens to her. She says, organizing is person to person.

And do most people like to sit around in meetings talking about blah, blah, racial capitalism or do fun things like sharing food or exercising or listening to music? And I do think there's a place in the world for both. We need the meeting so that we can organize so we can all know what we're talking about. But to Reed's mom's point, some of the best connecting that people can do is not about this tough issue we're talking about, but is about these shared experiences and sometimes freeing our bodies which are locked. And again, Reed can't have a drink with a friend. He is locked into seeing the isms around him that he feels trapped by. And mom recognizes that because she herself experienced it. And the gap between the two of them of course, is that she didn't tell him much about that time. He didn't know. You talked about your own parents organizing. Is this a place where the book diverges from your biography? Did you know what your parents had been through or as you wrote this book, were you unearthing their stories simultaneously?

Ryan Lee Wong:

It was a little bit of both. So in real life, my parents similarly made the choice not to tell me that much about their pasts. And I think that's because I had to be old enough and ready enough to hear it. And especially in this country where certain kinds of politics and certain forms of organizing are actually really pushed to the margins, if not actively attacked or diminished. It actually takes a lot of emotional maturity, I think, to hear those histories sometimes. And when I turn this into fiction, I very much dramatize that. And one of the lessons that Reed's mother learned from that difficult past is that fun is important, pleasure is important. These aren't actually separate or extras to movement work, they're very much integrated within it. And Reed in the beginning is very much of the mind that you must suffer essentially in order to be a good activist. The measure of your activism is how intense and how austere you are. And that has to really be broken down.

Annmarie Kelly:

Well, early in the book it's about haircut, right? Reed has traded with a friend or they're interested in trying to sidestep consumerism. And so I'm going to help you hang a shelf and you're going to cut my hair. And Reed doesn't care what it looks like because it's out of my face and I can now see. But his mom's pointing out, are the people whose minds you're going to try to change, going to look at you and see a homeless person? Are they going to look some at someone who they can't trust, or who doesn't look the right way? And how are they going to listen to you? I mean, Tiff makes this point, you do have to work within the existing rules that you're at the same time trying to change. Reed doesn't want to do that, reed wants to just jump right to everybody having these values.

But you have some beautiful conversations about difficult issues both ways. So when Reed tries to talk to his mom about transgender pronouns, for example, or just the pronoun they, he says to his mom, he's talking about his friend Tiff. Tiff goes by they pronouns mom. And he says, his mom's reply was, well, I don't get all this stuff in Korean, we don't have pronouns. And there's this beautiful moment where Reed gets to decide, am I going to harangue at my mother for not getting this or am I going to listen? And he takes a breath and he does his Reed talk. He says, all right, instead of accusing my mom of heteronormativity, after all, I've only learned this. Mom, your generation made a big deal about not being called quote "orientals" and now we're Asian Americans, which at least doesn't sound like that carpet store we just passed.

Our generation feels like gender is a social construct, not a biological fact. So we need pronouns to reflect that. And his mom says, okay, so she says they? And Reed's response is that they say they. And again, it's this inching, his mom unwraps a little and says, well, it's different than I learned it. And instead of him jumping on her, he's thinking about, yeah, I only learned this too, and you've got these really beautiful moments of understanding, true understanding for a moment, and then they move on to a different argument. But it's there, and I think sometimes we get, especially young people can get impatient with older folks because they're not changing fast enough, right? But reminding ourselves that we change is slow, and it evolves not just within families, but certainly within groups. And when there are multiple sides to a problem, we need to pace ourselves. I don't know, does that make sense?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Yeah, no, I think one of the critical issues of our time actually is having conversations across generations. This is something that social media has made very difficult, it's something that the modern workplace has made very difficult. It's something that the accelerated flow of information in general has made very difficult. But for the vast majority of human history, we lived in very intergenerational contexts, the village structure, the family structure, and we were around people of different ages a lot more than we are now. It's part of what Reed is unconsciously doing is he's essentially around other college students or other people in their twenties who have similar politics to him. And he thinks that's the world. And so he has a very hard time stepping out of that to talk to anyone else, including his own mother. One of the questions of the novel is what does it take to actually see each other or meet each other across that difference?

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, these are questions that I think every generation also asks as though when you're talking about intergenerational wisdom, it's like every generation invents music as though we've just invented it, forgetting that it's built on the wisdom of folks who came before us. And I think the same is true for the kind of work that is being done in this novel. I was interested, especially in Reed's mom's story and where it's similar to your mom's, was your mom indeed a Korean immigrant who was, I'm going to use the word radicalized, was someone who came to do this kind of work with the Black community between Koreans and Black folks in the '80s? Is this pretty accurate to the mom we meet in the book, not like all her man mannerisms, but the work she did?

Ryan Lee Wong:

In real life, my mother came to the country when she was 15. She went to UC Berkeley where she was quickly politicized in the '70s. And then in the '80s she co-founded a Black Korean alliance in South Los Angeles. She was working at the LA County at the time. And that was always a history and a story that on some level I had known, but I'd never quite had the language or the ability to contextualize. And so, you talked at the beginning about looking for stories we haven't seen on the page, and that of course was a driving force for me. But it's not just about representation, it's not just about like, oh, I've never seen this on the page, so let me write it down.

It's a deeper question about what does it take for that Korean immigrant woman to develop and work in such an intense political environment? What does that person sound like? How does that person act? What is that person's worldview? It's very much about this deeper exploration of a character's inner life that even though the novels first person in the son's account, I think in some ways the money character really steals the show. And this is a story about her accumulated wisdom and her accumulated experience coming out through these conversations and through these interactions. So what was interesting to me about writing this story and writing this character is like, how will this person's worldview collide with for what most people, people is the biggest challenge of their lives, which is raising children.

Annmarie Kelly:

And I'm old enough to have lived through the Rodney King riots, so I knew the time you were talking about, and I've also lived in Los Angeles, and yet Reed's mom was the first embodiment of an Asian American woman activist working across divided racial lines in the Black community in South Central, I had never met anyone like her. I've lived through that time, I've lived through those places and yet was ignorant of the existence of this person. And I was so grateful to meet her. Part of the novel takes place in Koreatown, and I recently read Gabrielle's Evans Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. And one of the things she talks about is how people in Los Angeles only ever know the part of Los Angeles where they live. And at first I'm like, that's not true. And then I was thinking about it, I'm like, nah, that's true. You think that you know Los Angeles, but I was looking at a map of Koreatown, I for real lived a few miles away and maybe drove through once. So can you tell us about Koreatown?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Well, to that point, one of the genres I actually grew up loving was Nora. I love detective stories. I love all those really over the top old movies about LA with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Beau. And in a way it doesn't really make sense because I don't connect to those characters or that world at all. But one of the points that people make about Nora is that the great thing about the detective in those stories is that he's one of the few people who crosses these different neighborhoods and these different, so social strata because he has to find something out. So in all the good Nora stories, there are these amazing scenes of going up into Beverly Hills and knocking on the doors of these mansions and then also going out into the gritty streets of downtown LA and fighting someone in the back alley. And in a subtle way, this book actually is that story.

It's a young person who's on a detective quest who's on a mission to find out the truth. And in order to do that, he has to crisscross the city. And so Koreatown is one of those locations for him because of course without Koreatown he can't really understand why his family is there and how they settled there and what brought them to America, let alone Los Angeles. And so Koreatown is this place full of all these characters who are somewhere between family and business people who they're in exchange relationships with. So there's like a familiarity with the hairstylist, with a guy who gives the scrubs at the Korean spa with the waiters and the restaurants.

And that is very much like my experience of Koreatown, this web of connection that's at once very intimate because there's this shared experience as Koreans, but that's also can be very removed and separate because you're in a wage relationship. A lot of the interactions I've had are people who are on one level being paid to interact with me. And that's a dynamic that I found really, really interesting and wanted to bring forward as Reed is looking for these questions.

Annmarie Kelly:

Also, early in the story, they go to a Korean barbecue place, but some of the people who are employed there are Latinx folks and that Reed comments on who employs who in Koreatown, who stayed and who left. And the capitalistic striations that again, if you're just breezing by, you're not going to notice. And I think this speaks to a larger LA-ness about the book. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and I was basically dragged to California on a cross-country move a few years ago. And I had always assumed I was a northern California person, never did in a million years, I think I would live in southern California where it seemed like every day was 70 degrees and sunny. And every woman I met was five foot nine and spelled and expensively sunglass and wealthy and beautiful, or at least four of every five. But again, there are many Los Angeles's within Los Angeles.

And I saw something that you had written down that I'd also loved and hated about Los Angeles and then came to really appreciate it was the strip mall was that if you've never been to Los Angeles, you maybe don't fully understand the strip mall culture. Here in the Midwest, we have them and they're usually chain restaurants. But one of my favorite things about living in LA was the amazing restaurants and deli's and little markets that you would find from all around the world, Thai, Armenian, Ethiopian, Korean that you would never know are there and that you will drive right by that poke bowl or that taco stand with the H law. You never will find it unless you find it. And that LA is always remaking itself and feels like your own, I don't know, secret gem of treasures and places from everywhere. I'd never lived anywhere lik it. Do you have favorite LA strip malls? Am I alone in this?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Yeah, totally. I mean, one of the questions I have with this novel was how is it that I've grown up my entire life watching movies about LA said in LA reading books about LA? And there are so few strip malls in any of them. There's always palm trees, there's always the beach, there's always the hills, but so few strip malls when in fact it's like I grew up in strip malls. My life has been lived in strip malls in Los Angeles. It is very much in the novel where growing up strip malls were where I got my haircut, where my mom would drop off her dry cleaning where we would go for many, many, many meals, more meals than I could possibly count. And they're always very non-descript. It's this very functional, very unromantic way of using public using space. They're very much built around car culture, but they work and they actually provide a livelihood in a haven for immigrant communities who don't have the capital to have their own standalone place with a parking lot in the back. And so they went to strip mall storefront.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, I actually did a deep-dive because I was trying to remember some of my favorite places to go. And I stumbled across, I think it was a New York Times article from a few years ago talking about the fact that even some of the Michelin trained chefs, even they will sometimes go to strip malls because folks are abandoning these places and they're leaving all the equipment. And so even if I'm an upstart, if I'm someone who's a first generation restaurateur tourer, I go to this restaurant and all the stuff is there, 80%, 90% of the big mixer I might need, or the ovens I'm not going to have to retrofit anything.

So it was a good jumping off point. I remember my kid started loving sushi when we lived out west. And so she loved one place because it had crunchy, crackly, seaweed paper and it was absolutely right next to a subway and it was right down from Ralph's grocery store and I never would've stumbled into it except she was hungry that day and her dad took her and I assumed they were both going to get food poisoning because we were new.

But it's just the opposite. You find these storefronts and I guess they're amazing. But I don't just mention this because it's lunchtime and we're talking about food and the food in your book Sounds so good, I mentioned it because that small family owned business in your book is again a metaphor for the kind of activist work I think Reed wants to be doing. He wants to connect with people across these racial divides. He wants all of us to see and one another in commune, but he is also from Los Angeles, a city divided, and he has also grown up divided from the very people he's trying to help. So I thought at the same time that your book taking place in these strip malls of LA that were very recognizable to me also demonstrated the divisions that Reed had grown up with, not even realizing he'd grown up with them. So I was in love with your setting, to be honest. I love that. If there were palm trees, I don't remember them.

Ryan Lee Wong:

Yeah, no, I very much wanted to portray an LA that was not a romanticized Los Angeles. And part of the other big influence in terms of strip malls was I had this distinct memory of a strip mall that was maybe a two-minute drive away from us growing up on Marciana, which is close to the west side. And for my childhood it was rubble because it had burned down during the Rodney King uprising in 1892. And my parents would point it out to people and say, oh, that place burned down. And then it was rebuilt and there was also a subway sandwich in it. And I would go there to eat and I would go there to buy art supplies.

And looking back, I'm like, well, who's going to remember that? Who's going to remember this history of the risings, the fires? Because it flattened this huge portion of the city. And then those places were rebuilt almost as if to hide that that ever happened. And so much of this novel is kind of trying to scratch at the surface of LA and the image projects out into the world and really look at the actual histories and people.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, no, I was grateful for that. I've seen the Watts towers, but until I read your book, I hadn't thought enough about just how much of the city burned and what I would've driven by. And you're exactly right, it would've been described to us as, oh yeah, that burned down a few years ago. But no one would've said what burned it down, what led to it. The city has, many cities, all cities I suppose have these histories that folks are so eager to move beyond. But we also often haven't done the work or had the conversations about why it was that something burned in the first place. We are still we're this year in 2022, I think, reckoning with what was happening in 1992 in Los Angeles. We've not solved that. It's still a conversation. We might as well pointed the thing that burned and call it what it is if we're ever going to, I think do the kind of reckoning that Reed and his mother both were working for.

Something else that I thought about was just, I think it's Reed's father who talks about having been involved in the movement he was involved in for 12 years or something like that. And then he does actually continue to be an organizer. And I was tired on his behalf. I was thinking about trying to eat a meatless Monday and you go to the farmer's market and you were going to ride your bike, but then you drive and then you forgot to bring your reusable bags and now you've got plastic bags. And when we try to do even the smallest bit of individual activism, how it can be exhausting to do good, do you ever find that, and how do you unplug and recharge yourself? Yeah.

Ryan Lee Wong:

I think the key is exactly what you just said, which is that when we act as individuals, when we think as an individual, I can solve this problem or I can develop the best theory about this, we are bound to fail because no individual could possibly undo these massive systems. And so the only way to actually affect sustained change is through and as a community. And I think that's something that Reed also has to learn in the process of this book is it's not going to be his brilliant idea or some brilliant idea that he parrots, it's really going to be about relationship building, starting with his own family.

So he needs to figure these things out and they need to figure these things out as a collective, as a community. And that's the only way that this work is sustainable. We have to rely on each other. We have to learn from each other. And the conversations themselves are the work. It's not that the conversations are in order to convince the other side and wear them down until they listen to me. The conversations themselves are what sustain and build and bring energy into a movement.

Annmarie Kelly:

I'm thinking about your bio. I read that you'd spent several years at a Zen temple. Is that a place where you feel like you were building a new community or is that a place where you felt like you were retreating to regroup? I'm trying, I maybe you could just tell us about why you chose to go there and what that was like.

Ryan Lee Wong:

Sure. So I had been meditating with a place called Brooklyn Sun Center for a number of years. And then the organization received a grant actually to start a residential temple a couple hours north of New York City. And so I signed up to go and live there. And what you do is everyone follows the same schedule. So you all get up together early in the morning and you start meditating and then you'll have service and breakfast and work practice and cleaning, and then you'll go to bed at the same time. A little bit like family life in a way, except everything is intentional and everything is transparent, what you're doing and why you're doing it. And the amazing thing about living this way is that the point is community.

It's not like a lot of the spaces where I've been in, which is at the door of someone asks you, do you agree with this thing? Then you can come in. Or if you want to stay around you, you better get on board with the program here. The point is that we are actually vowing and intending to move together as a community to learn together as a community, to work together as a community. And all of our differences and disagreements are allowed there. But it's not that we all have to get on the same page about what change means or what freedom means.

The point is to be together and it actually takes something as powerful and sustained as that kind of schedule and that meditative practice to make it work. Cause if you've ever lived with a roommate, it's hard, let alone 10 roommates who are maybe strangers to you maybe have different ages of different political beliefs, of different genders, of different worldviews. And so that was a really profound experience in terms of living in community.

Annmarie Kelly:

Were you ever a bad meditator? I've tried on many occasions to learn to meditate, and I always feel like I sit down and then I'm making lists, laundry lists, grocery lists, lists of things to do. Were you just good at meditate? Is everyone just good at meditating there or is there anyone? Do they let in bad meditators?

Ryan Lee Wong:

My understanding is actually that there's no such thing as being a bad meditator. So even if you sit there and you make a laundry list the entire time, or you sit there and think about what you're going to have for dessert the whole time, that's actually fine. That's just what the mind does. And so what happens though eventually is if you keep sitting there and you keep making the attention to be present is those forces, those habit patterns of the mind will actually loosen up a little bit. And you may start to think about dessert, but it won't dominate your thinking in the same way. You won't believe your thought in the same way. And that usually happens after a little bit. But yeah, there's no such thing as doing it wrong or being a bad meditator. Everything that happens during meditation is what has to happen.

Annmarie Kelly:

All right. I like that. I like the permission slip. I feel like sometimes I can find that meditative space walking, looking at trees, and I struggle to find it sitting there on the carpet. But that might have something to do with the fact that the laundry is not with me when I'm out, so that's fascinating. Well, I always try to close with just some questions that have nothing to do with the books and nothing to do. There's just sort of multiple choice here and the questions to just give people a sense of you that maybe we haven't gotten. So I'm just going to start with a few multiple choice, if you don't mind. Which do you prefer, coffee or tea?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Oh, tea, I'm such a tea drinker. This is another thing I got into at the temple because tea was one of the few areas where we had a lot of options. The meals are all provided and they're wonderful, but you don't get to choose at all, which is part of the point. And so tea was the one area where we could say, ooh, could we order some Earl Grey? Could we order this pure and get to try these different things? And when you're waking up at five in the morning in the den of winter, it really helps to get up and get to that meditation cushion.

Annmarie Kelly:

Absolutely. Mountains or beach?

Ryan Lee Wong:

That's a great question. I grew up on the beach and now I am a mountain person. They're both so much a part of me.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, early bird or night owl?

Ryan Lee Wong:

I've become an early bird.

Annmarie Kelly:

Nice. Are you a risk taker or the person who always knows where the band-aids are?

Ryan Lee Wong:

I think I'm somewhere in between. I'm not a daredevil, but I'm also not like the person who keeps the first aid kit, I'm more of the make a plan than take a risk.

Annmarie Kelly:

I like that. All right. This is the fill in the blank. If I wasn't working as a creative person, in your case, a writer, I would be a...

Ryan Lee Wong:

Gardener.

Annmarie Kelly:

A gardener?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Or a farmer. I think getting to work in the soil and with your hands outside of the pressure of having to produce commercially or anything, I think would be a great joy.

Annmarie Kelly:

Joy. That's excellent. What's something quirky that folks don't always know about you? This could be alike, could be a love, could be a pet-peeve. I don't know. What did people not know about you?

Ryan Lee Wong:

I have a soft spot for K-Pop. I think K-pop is really incredible. So I'm old enough that I didn't grow up with, it was just starting to be popular when I was a teenager, and now of course it exploded. And the most popular groups in the world are K-pop. And as a Korean person at the Asper, it's been really fascinating to watch. So I don't know if this is music I would've chosen otherwise, but I'm so captivated by what that means for myself and for Korea and for Korean people around the world that I watch those YouTube videos and they're really, really addictive.

Annmarie Kelly:

Nice. So you're like behind the scenes with black pink, although the people are very divided if they like black pink or not, there's a whole world of it. My daughter's a teenager, so I hear the scoop.

Ryan Lee Wong:

Yeah, I'm not going to say on record my feelings not back tape. 'Cause I know that the fandom is really fierce.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yes. We could do a whole episode on that. What's one of your favorite books or an author whose work you just really admire?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Sure. I'll go ahead and shout out Grace Paley. She was a major, major influence on this novel, and I love how her stories are often really short, sometimes two pages, but as she pointed out, sometimes she could do as much in those two pages as some people could do it in a novel. And her work is very much conversation based, of course, which is a big influence and very much about politics and how to be a good mother and how to talk within the family about these big systemic issues. I really love her work.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, absolutely. I'll make sure to link it for folks who don't know Grace [inaudible 00:46:09], I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes. Favorite movie or television show?

Ryan Lee Wong:

I really love The Godfather part one and two. What I mean a lot of people do, I think there's such amazing movies and the reason is they're very much immigrant stories. So even though my family was not an organized crime, so much of that story of becoming American and the determination and the violence it takes to really start to belong in this country, I think it's a metaphor that resonates deeply from me and for a lot of people who are maybe second, third generation.

Annmarie Kelly:

My mom's side of the family was Italian and they didn't like The Godfather because they thought that it made everyone think that they were all mafioso or something like that. But my dad's family was Irish and they loved it. So it's fascinating to the story within those stories. Okay, two more. What's your favorite ice cream?

Ryan Lee Wong:

Pistachio. I actually studied abroad in Italy and really fell in love with all the gelato, of course, but something about pistachio, it's the right amount of nuttiness, not too sweet, creamy, it just is a perfect flavor to me.

Annmarie Kelly:

There aren't many strip malls in Italy that I remember, but I do remember that, that inside baseball, the notion that you had to look to see what color the gelato was. All right. Last one. If you were to take a picture or if we were to take a picture of you doing something that you love, just really happy, what would we see you doing?

Ryan Lee Wong:

I think I'd be hiking back to the mountains question, but I would do this hike almost every day when I lived at the temple. And it was this space where I felt there was never anyone around and it was a space where I felt totally free and at ease. And something about being alone in the woods is a really special experience that I wish on anyone who wants it.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, agreed. Absolutely. Well, Ryan Lee Wong, thank you so much for stepping by today. It was really a pleasure to meet you.

Ryan Lee Wong:

Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thanks for talking with me.

Annmarie Kelly:

And folks listening, Ryan Lee Wong's debut novel, Which Side Are You On is available wherever books are sold. I urge you to check it out and think about our obligation as readers and storytellers to have honest conversations, to think about the multiple and varied sides to most of our struggles, and to find connection not just with our heads, but also by using our hearts. And to everyone listening, we're wishing you love and light wherever the state takes you. Be good to yourself, be good to one another, and we'll see you again soon on this wild and precious journey. Wild Precious Life is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Special thanks to executive producers Gerardo Orlando and Michael [inaudible 00:49:20]. Producer Sarah [inaudible 00:49:22], and audio engineer Ian Douglas. Be sure to subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.