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no no wallowing seattle spirit of place is made possible by grants from the king county arts commission and the seattle arts commission the more creative input of the reasons i moved here in the point my life i always know i can reach out and find comfort in the geography of this place is a place of course that is not extraordinary to have a number of artists more asian american conference texas law known as an activist here in seattle when everything really
changed as well is they started and since i chose to write about chinese american witty outrageous melissa block one of bling remix out why you know so much about china you know so much about chinese immigrant you like you'll love my people you go take your clothes double our laundry we want to avoid if you come into our restaurants and you get your food you know when i get angry at you when my god called you don't know that's exactly how much you know about us some people are surprised that i don't look to the east is what mlb all that what happened was here a wise of us who are here sporting suspicion that chinese culture
manages of live without asian american year chinese american group has not exist in english like for me nineteen seventy six when your drive more slowly american bicentennial scientists appear in a great event it set down in nineteen seventy four and wrote a play called just enough year of the dragon play is about a chinatown tourist most despised profession whoa oh oh ah ah ah ah oh year for eighteen and freddie and nick and fan of our poll in trouble we know john of the water go up by the air although we find new is chef
oh what they would leave our regret at that but you're my last tour of the day fell on my last tour of the day will who like let my hair down drop of forty actors you love everyone's a day i eat so tonight i'm going to take you where it imperial silver jp uppers good home cooking and souvenir shops i figure you folks will come after dark when you really want to know you want to see the china melbourne codes their sites only chinatowns top dr joe show i lie
the point here we get colds jonathan cott oh cause global mobile is the classic image doesn't like an anthropological explanation justification of themselves that he's accepted me boy then but he says no it isn't and that serves as a model but my first writing job are running on tv stations in the production because they rescued me from her a portrait
of an image of chinese american men you know many in this country isn't dead but those railroad workers caught they're both have six inches of sewage that sort of there's no doubt about the reward and it was pretty close to the room my great grandmother's service workers in a whorehouse my grandfather was to enroll in an actual interaction just the smell smell of steam miles since you're out there this month it was the first time i was the first to be patient sit up there watching nina a walking along the scenes of a sudden her with
a walkman and it was it was a different atmosphere than sentences for what's known as hostile one reason i came back and keep coming back to get in touch with that metaphor or like american tradition or life is well known and war and we're going to die it cannot win the war and win on a quite a bit more asian tour tradition stop at this phone a mysticism or aiding he needs or wife or every two traditions especially that but in china people and more traditional weapons and to the state that all over
china you always see one thing almost every shot every restaurant every place in chinatown red face phoenix eyes fierce eyebrows like into ivory silk worms on goal is the goal for god of literature and i think whites had no appreciation for what it is and the shopkeepers really don't want you to we are he's a plant i'm working on my definition of a story involving animals live a moral issues at stake are i think the issues that i was from japanese american concentration camp experience and the whole question of racial acceptance of assimilation workshop turned into an acting class while largely because of the actors so it was yesterday and in many cases
very talented you are confronted with not human characters but animals and i think this through all obsolete just a little and wisdom then i've gone from making quite a bit of money to no money at all but the making of inferior to forge i kept the work is i'm in la for a while and i come back to new york for a while and when i come back and there's a lot of history here my history the very best
or work came out of here is a place of cost most visible ahead i think and more towards conflict and call the highest forms of meditation segmentation motion i have more in july after meditation life's energy and critically sources when you are really working well to me the story is is if you are just the kind of fun thing comes in the world and it's amazing i will if i can quinlan writing actually begins there is nothing more through
because all of your militia operating in lebanon all humans is particularly focused on a single object so that life is life is curious enough when the prices are just so odd the first thing that i wrote was called tryst with infantry which are shown on pbs in nineteen seventy eight the first show and second season last season of division series it was about a man with a cowboy who had hundreds of different jobs who was aware of was a raconteur a tale teller and on top of all that was at the time we shot show hundred and thirty seven years old thank you very
good we need to close really love because it gave him a chance to open up our friends are all
possibilities of surrealism and impressionistic qualities and in historic trial his life off the larger than life matter i came here from new york city to be rescued washington's department i have no question of the northwest as my creativity it's a supportive nurturing environment wonderful right the chance is in his way he's now as we talk about our in that way and that you will make your friends univision's i write an article about you this is an aleppo often are not going to
restore our goal for his wife on the notion as a lamb ribs as well so it was a wonderful place to raise children they lived in a cave if there's a cross section of all races peoples classes own family life is very important to me and i can't imagine not being married we've been together almost half of our lives at this point since the age of twenty i am i suppose in a certain way that everything i do is my family on a writing ultimately is my way of trying to put something back in to live which i think at that ranch oh and not just take out when one way to give a little that that is through art through teacher i love teaching my students a
wonderful unless one sort of help someone with no one was was hoped years ago they're now in their feet if you've stolen from i've never given that anything i think we should stay with the boys if you know the first novel i wrote was terrible for a second and referred only twenty six books i read i can do something good thing and that's the first one was published i've ever so often i get together with five or six riders on my condo in the area west has traditionally had an inferiority and to your stuff is generally go into your greatness get away from the family anywhere because of those and the artisan and i'm pretty tied people are if you had was to generate from here supported by
you wouldn't be picked up on another place in the series here you have to support it so i so my first exposure to eastern philosophy was through martial artist alison hours today food but the solo is doing then have me emphasize buddhism for example thousand others for the chinese philosophy are high flying between the sport's
expression that is very meaningful return to begin again my own fiction our interest as a passion has produced short stories three times and when i think about this novel oxford and now before i move to seattle i had what was coming was one large in my life was a nine month period of being completely happy when i was writing when i got after that writer's block blow and i do associated with zero because i suspect there was a time where i think i don't have a real sense of rage are anger resentment because it's i'm going to say how can you despair an open in france where there is always going to be change
are and i think we are in control of our destiny is we live in a world where ultimately things are inherently good yeah i had a number of very good years everything was rewarding we bought a farm my kids were growing up it was a warm very close family and i was teaching and writing but suddenly i was thirty nine and things were not going as i had expected them to go i had everything but nothing's right i felt i was falling apart on at the same time the marriage was falling apart i had to go through a very unsettling period and that was the period is reflected in the book winter's without snow my first homes were poems about
one day you stepped into my horoscope bringing summer and a view of the mountains i had never know i tried to fly tandem you're a wing tip to mine last summer you left my life whether you like about it i like headaches like garments i tell myself live with memories the sky filled with your shadow of rain heavy cloud the thirty five northbound blues i was thirty nine today and the air repeats is gone he is gone all day i swayed to its can't but have not yet learned to move with the rhythm has a certain magic about the landscape of the northwest that helps me shake my poetry i always feel i can reach out and find some comfort in the geography of this place and so and in many
respects i make the landscape of person the landscape in a sense becomes a lover of free and foreign enemy but something and tells me to write poems and becomes a part of the poetry that i write a check pa pa pa pa after writing for a number of years i learned certain things or a current i've written poems about my children and each book i have a poem dedicated the two children one to each child one such home is a poem that i wrote for my son called reporters to live and the poem begins with a on kevin as a child as a baby and then moves into kevin as a young man this is what is important a first birthday picture the rubber bath time toy question your fat fingers you deeply and myopic you're traveling from nowhere to
displace everyone follows with india slots you're out there now a young man walking quickly to some of the show i am here when nights in their ladies don't walk through his storied books one of the poems i think his most successful is a poem i wrote about my daughter twenty called a welcome change but when she was younger she used to apologize by bringing a rose and in its signal that something had happened and she wished to compromise or apologize for it and she was a teen we had been friends right up to that point and suddenly we were friends anymore because she was eighteen and that was very important to her to be your own person and so we had iron many disagreements which sort of ended with i'm not speaking to each other for a couple years than at twenty she showed up at the door one day with a rose my daughter is still
stealing flowers from the neighbor's garden she arrived at my door her mood pace reflecting mind yet still filled with little girl in a sense i limp rose in one hand it's blunt stand latvian thumb and forefinger ragged as her fingernails each year i welcome her return her stories of sleeves and strangers route dark and sweet hail and bitter to seeing my daughter involved in dancing the job always love that gives me such a feeling dissatisfied she gives you know the curriculum was saying when she when she moves it is as if you had learned as an ad
after year mostly because so many years she was my best friend and i want her to continue to be my best friend people are constantly asking me whether or not i consider myself but you know i think the answer to that is on the inside than anything else i try to make sure that the loans ai right knee reflex lyin that's where i've been and obviously that has to include something about my blackness something about my family and something about my surroundings and so i write when he owns about seattle and the people in seattle some that i need accidentally and some that ive known for quite a while we're going this way with that
bus tell them about a home it starts this way a small lumbering thing turning the corner she stares straight on her black face tired her arms remembering forty offices not handled temperance still cling to her palms her eyes are all before her time say for a poem tell her dreams of places where she is always young smiling and sitting straight like that picture that stares out from her dresser ignore the drunk that staggers on lurching toward the wing box he hands at an angle against seattle's fading sun one of the nicest things about having lost my mind in order to find it is that i need i kind of wonder of life on a rushing toward fifty one twenty fifty it's not that fifteen marks the end of anything is just that
kind of a wondrous feeling of my car and fifty to become something i have a number of friends who are writers and sometimes it's simply a scouting trip to find something to write about the don't have to drive as far to find a change from one neighborhood to the other i find different ethnic groups because i got a lot out of myself writing poems about how i i find black people all over the world in the middle of the room i turn a corner and theres someone who looks like a cousin i sometimes take notes when i'm somewhere else that i'm always aware that i'm coming back to the northwest and i come home too right any
time spirit of place was made possible by grants from the king county arts commission and the seattle art commission i know yes
Program
Spirit of Place
Producing Organization
KCTS (Television station : Seattle, Wash.)
Contributing Organization
SCCtv (Seattle, Washington)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip-581a617515c
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip-581a617515c).
Description
Program Description
This item is part of the Chinese Americans section of the AAPI special collection.
Program Description
Half-hour special documentary featuring three Seattle-based writers: Charles Johnson and Colleen McElroy, African-Americans, and Frank Chin, Chinese American. Broadcast, November 1983. Partial funding by Seattle Arts Commission.
Segment Description
To view the segment on Frank Chin, visit https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-581a617515c?start=46.63&end=587.53 or jump to 00:00:40.
Broadcast Date
1983-11
Asset type
Program
Genres
Documentary
Topics
Literature
Race and Ethnicity
Biography
Media type
Moving Image
Duration
00:27:54.707
Embed Code
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Credits
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Executive Producer: Rubin, Ron
Interviewee: McElroy, Colleen
Interviewee: Chin, Frank
Interviewee: Johnson, Charles
Producer: Walkinshaw, Jean
Producing Organization: KCTS (Television station : Seattle, Wash.)
AAPB Contributor Holdings
Seattle Colleges Cable Television
Identifier: cpb-aacip-3e6c3152fd4 (Filename)
Format: Hard Drive
Duration: 00:30:00
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
Citations
Chicago: “Spirit of Place,” 1983-11, SCCtv, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-581a617515c.
MLA: “Spirit of Place.” 1983-11. SCCtv, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-581a617515c>.
APA: Spirit of Place. Boston, MA: SCCtv, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-581a617515c