Storytelling Through Voice and the Written Word with Shin Yu Pai

This article is part of Mochi Magazine’s summer issue on Art: We invite you to expand your perspective of what art is or who an artist can be. As you check out the rest of our issue here, we hope you are inspired to find your own form of artistic expression.

Shin Yu Pai knows where to find stories, coaxing them out of obscurity. During the first season of her podcast “The Blue Suit,” she spoke with Asian American guests about the unexpected values and histories that transform commonplace objects into the remarkable. The podcast returned in April, renamed as “Ten Thousand Things,” on the heels of Pai being named Seattle’s latest — and first Asian American — civic poet. In all of Pai’s identities, storytelling shapes her vision and her work.

In the summer of 2021, KUOW-FM (Seattle’s National Public Radio station) invited listeners to pitch podcast ideas. This came after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the Atlanta spa shootings. Pai couldn’t shake the viral image of Congressman Andy Kim from New Jersey cleaning up trash at the Capitol wearing a blue suit .

“I felt very motivated to see different kinds of stories about Asian Americans in the media,” Pai recalled. “Could I figure out a way to tell some of these stories about my [Asian American] community through objects?”

As an artist, Pai was already embedded in a community of artists, many of whom had incredible stories about their work and lives. She contemplated the framework for a broader range of stories about Asian Americans beyond the anti-Asian discrimination and violence that flooded mainstream media. She pitched her idea to KUOW and was among the ones to be piloted and later commissioned for a full season. 

The outcome was the first season of “The Blue Suit,” named after Congressman Kim’s suit, which has been donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Each episode highlights a different guest who talks about a personal object or artifact and the memories around it. A Chinese-English dictionary is no longer an object of utility; it’s an emotional connection to a loved one who has passed away. A Califone record player becomes a time machine, transporting people to the sounds and songs beloved by Japanese Americans before their incarceration during World War II. As listeners hear the intimate histories and personal significance bestowed on the objects presented on the podcast, they begin to see their own belongings through a different lens.

Even with a clear connection to Asian heritage, KUOW felt that the podcast could reach a broader Asian American audience. For season two, Pai relaunched the podcast as “Ten Thousand Things,” referencing a number used in Chinese sayings to convey the infinite and unfathomable, hoping the new name would also attract the intended audience.

With a rebranded podcast and new stories to tell, Pai’s excitement is noticeable when she talks about the second season. The first collection of episodes highlighted artists and activists close to Pai’s own sensibilities, but the second season connected Pai with new individuals and communities. Among those featured: Seattle’s Ampersand Bike Club, a collective of Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander bicyclists; Designer Eason Yang’s cancer story and his organization, Not Entirely Dead; and disability rights activist Alice Wong. As Asian Americans, our stories are, indeed, vast and unmeasurable.

A “New, Powerful Direction” as an Artist

For much of her life, Pai has been a wordsmith — translating Chinese poems with her dad, authoring 11 books (and counting), giving her poetry visual life, and contributing to local, national, and international publications. However, writing radio scripts for an audio format introduced her to a new way of storytelling.

“What I’ve learned along the way is that the writing has to be really concise and not too opaque,” Pai said. “The way that I write poems can be very nonlinear and associative, versus reported writing, which is more of a straight line.”

Having a writer’s voice now takes on a double meaning, as Pai has learned that poetry and radio are mediums made for the voice. Both rely on diction and rhythm to capture the audience’s ears. But besides developing her audible voice, Pai said writing for radio has forged a stronger connection with her authentic voice — the one that emboldens her to become more vulnerable about personal experiences.

The podcast also provided Pai with a “new, powerful direction” in her work. A poet’s engagement with their audience is often limited to people who buy their books or attend poetry readings, but a podcast has a broader reach. “It’s so different with radio, where people write to tell me that they see themselves in the stories; it’s just a different quality of relationship with the audience,” Pai said.

Sometimes, the impact hits very close to home. One of the episodes in season one focused on Pai’s relationship with a precious stuffed dog from her childhood, which meant disclosing more about her early childhood as the daughter of immigrants and the profound loneliness she felt as a young person. Upon hearing the radio story that Pai had written about her childhood and family, her father felt inspired to expand his views of storytelling. 

“In [my dad’s] generation, he was really acclimated to hiding who he was or hiding his perspectives and experience, but the storytelling style or the voice [in the podcast] made him feel like there’s another way for him to tell his stories or to think about how he writes,” Pai said.

Listeners often tell Pai that the podcast feels universal. They see themselves in the stories, even if they are not the same ethnicity as the guest. At the same time, she has received feedback about wanting greater representation, since many of the guests were Gen X and East Asian — very much like Pai. For example, one listener commented on the absence of any Vietnamese presenters or objects. But season two returns with broader intersectional representation, including the disability perspective, a generational spectrum, the experience of a new immigrant, and a mixed-race Asian transgender, non-binary guest. 

“It really comes down to the story that sparks the most intrigue and curiosity,” Pai explained. “I know that people are looking to see themselves in the kinds of representation of the guests that I book and that I craft stories around. I am continually evolving how identities are represented on the show. At the same time, if listeners slow down and pay attention deeply, there is an incredible breadth of perspectives that is represented.”

An Art Form Grounded in Place

In Pai’s new two-year role as Seattle’s civic poet, storytelling takes on yet another form. Pai will be a cultural ambassador of poetry, represent Seattle’s diverse cultural community, and foster dialogue and engagement around literary arts. So far, this has included highlighting Seattle-based poets (nearly half of whom are Asian American or mixed-race Asian) every day in April for a special poetry feature with KUOW. Pai also wants to create opportunities for the Seattle community to stumble upon poetry — for example, poetry posters or video projections.

“I’m really interested in the expression of poetry in the public space that confronts readers and audiences with poetry in different ways, so they can see poetry as something beautiful, as something political, as something engaging, heard, and seen — in lots of different applications,” Pai explained.

As the former poet laureate for the city of Redmond, Washington, Pai wrote haiku navigational texts about Redmond that were activated by rain. When raindrops hit the pavement, texts and images would become visible, turning the sidewalk into an art experience. Another project included writing and animating a poem that was projected on the city hall building.

Pai wants people to realize that poetry is not simply text read in a book. It is grounded in the place where we live, something we interact with. And that is true for her vision for “Ten Thousand Things” and her other artistic endeavors. The stories she tells, the art she creates, and words she crafts aren’t simply to be enjoyed — she uses them to invite us all to receive, to examine, to reimagine, and to inspire.  

Follow Shin Yu Pai on Instagram at @shinyupai, check out the “Ten Thousand Things” podcast, and learn more at shinyupai.com.