#It was for my immigration history class and I wrote a lit review about like

[fantasy-costco]

I just turned in my last assignment for my first semester of grad school and was it good? Absolutely not but good God at least I'm done

[citylightsbooks]

5 Questions with Megan Fernandes, Author of Good Boys

Megan Fernandes is a writer and academic living in New York City. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015) and the new book of poems, Good Boys (published by Tin House). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, the Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. She is a poetry reader for The Rumpus and an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She reads from her new book Good Boys with special guests at City Lights Bookstore on Tuesday, February 25th.

***

City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit? If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?

Megan Fernandes: Of all the places I’m reading this Spring (and it’s probably not politic to say this), I am most excited to read at City Lights. I’ve never been, but I understood at a very young age that the bookstore symbolized possibility, spontaneity, digression, lostness, community, etc. As a teenager, I read a lot of Beat literature, my favorites being Dharma Bums, In the Night Café, and everything Ginsberg. I was compelled by their portraits of America’s expansiveness. And I also just think as an immigrant kid not born in the USA, the Beats gave me some sense of American geography. I went to Colorado for the first time last year and I had this memory of my first impression of Colorado as a place described in On the Road. When traveling across the country, I often have Ferlinghetti’s feverish, twitchy, carnivalesque poetics in my head. I also think in this indirect way, Beat literature shaped some of my thoughts around feminist thinking as I was conscious of my orientation as outside certain privileges of the “male, womanizing adventurer” often romanticized in Beat lit. I had to interrogate what it meant to feel intimacies with Ginsberg and Duncan who were destabilizing masculinities and cultural logics of hate. 

And so what I learned from City Lights and Beat lit is really something about the relationship between myth-making and counter-culture communities. I’m understanding the truly expansive network of the movement in so much more detail right now while reading an advanced copy of a fabulous new book called The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto. 

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading a book called Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, co-written by Dapper Dan himself and my good friend, Mikael Awake. It’s a history of Dapper Dan’s iconic work in fashion, of course, while being really intimate. And it’s just as much a history of his family’s internal dynamics and, through his family, New York City at large. In particular, 1970’s NYC is so vividly, brilliantly wrought in this book.

There’s this one section where Dap is at Iona College at a lecture on protohistory and the professor, a Czech immigrant, tells the class that “In order for man to have survived during those ancient times… he must have had powers that he doesn’t have now. The only people that could possibly still have these powers today are the black and brown people on the planet” and when Dap hears this, he is transfixed. He says: “This is one of the most esteemed scholars at Iona College telling a packed lecture hall that black and brown people were the only ones on the planet who still had spiritual powers. How come this was my first time hearing about that? I looked around. I was the only black student in the class. I wasn’t tired anymore. He had my full attention… I said to myself, This is what I need to know. This is how I need to formulate myself.” I’m loving how the book captures these intense moments of transformation. I love that word choice: formulate. What poetic agency is modeled in that word? I needed that word the moment I read it. 

Recently, I’ve also read Samiya Bashir’s Field Theories and Edgar Kunz’s Tap Out. Samiya wrote this legitimately weird and imaginative book that feels like it’s made out of the time-space continuum. Some cosmic materiality is really showing up in that book. I remember this line: “A body. A zoo. A lovely savannah. Walls of clear, clean glass” and I’m just on a ride with the musicality of her shifting assonance. Plus, I know that writers like June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara are operating influences/specters of the book and you can feel that energy. Edgar’s book is more narrative and quieter, but so devastating. I sort of get what makes his speakers tenderize if that makes sense. I think it’s the same phenomena that tenderizes me, too.

Some of my favorite novels of recent years includes A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims, The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch, Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi, and very recently, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

What book or writer do you always find yourself recommending?

I think Jean Toomer’s Cane is the most beautiful book of the 20th century. I remember just being blown away by its call and response, the repeating imagery of sun and smoke and pines. That book is so stunning. Other astounding work that I always recommend includes Mebvh McGuckian’s Captain Lavender, Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, Evie Shockley’s The New Black, Franz Wright’s Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, Eleni Sikelianos’ Body Clock, Jorie Graham’s The Errancy, Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, and Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann’s translations of Rilke. Those are my hard-hitters. Those books are why I became a poet. 

What writers/artists/people do you find the most influential to the writing of this book and/or your writing in general?

You know, I collected poems while I was writing and editing this book. And I think those specific poems created a kind of constellation around me, almost protective, that kept me writing. Some of those poems include “The Long Recovery” by Ellen Bass, “A Matter of Balance,” by Evie Shockley, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I am Not Seaworthy” by Toni Morrison, “Becoming Regardless” by Jack Spicer, “A New Bride Almost Visible in Latin” by Jack Gilbert, “To the Young Who Want to Die” by Gwendolyn Brooks and many, many others. Definitely O’Hara as well. He never leaves me. The most important poem of that little self-curated archive is Frank Bidart’s “Visions at 74” where he writes: “To love existence / is to love what is indifferent to you.” I remember reading that line and just losing it. I have been guided by so much of Bidart. And maybe my book is a little bit about how to sustain rage in the face of that which is indifferent to you, what cannot love you (both personally and abstractly). How do you sustain rage so as to not fall into despair?

I also listened to a variety of music while writing and editing. A mix between contemporary sad kid hip-hop, old school jazz and blues, gospel, 80’s bands, pop culture queens, 1970’s hypnotic modal vamp, classical Spanish guitar, electronic pop, really pretty varied. A few names that come to mind: KOTA the Friend, NoName, Vince Staples, Travis Scott, Miles Davis Quintet, Bessie Smith, Sam Cooke, The Knocks, Solange, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Big Mama Thornton, Miriam Makeba, Kamasi Washington, Thompson Twins, Misfits, Bowie, Talking Heads, Tears for Fears, Cher, Whitney Houston, Portishead, Goldfrapp, Memphis Slim, Dinah Washington, Alberto Iglesias, Gustavo Santaolalla, Holychild, Blood Orange, etc.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

My grandpa played violin on a ship that sailed between Tanga, Tanzania and Goa, India. I never had the chance to meet him. He died when my dad was sixteen, but I always thought about what that journey might have looked and felt like, its many hardships, but also the wonder of gazing out at the sea playing strings. For that reason, I’d love to open a bookstore that focused specifically on Indian Ocean diaspora and sold books exclusively by authors working, uncovering, or investigating the literature of that oceanic rim. I think there is something rich in thinking about books not necessarily focused on nation-statehood but thinking more about a kind of social-imaginary with a literature that is messy in its conceptualization and crosses, migrates, misses, and mythologizes across many cultures over generations. You could have sections on food, underwater exploration, piracy, long-distance intimacy, trade routes, empire, transnational feminism. I like the idea of a bookstore that is anti-genre and instead, organized by associative thinking and imagination. It would be a logistical nightmare. You would never find what you were looking for, but you might find something you didn’t know existed.

So yes, I’d vote for a little homegrown network of bookstores in India, East Africa, and actually, maybe one of them in Lisbon which is a city that has a long (and problematic) history with the Indian Ocean. I’ve spent a lot of time in Lisbon the past eight years of my life, spending time visiting family and researching the history of the Portuguese empire especially as it relates to my family history (my folks are third generation East African Portuguese colonized Indians). I have a lot of conflicting homelands which is a way of saying that there are times when I feel like I have nothing but a rootless present. That’s something I investigate in my work, that weird (a)temporality. And I’m drawn to the particular light of Lisbon which is quite unusual. I’d call the bookstore “Malaika” which means “Angel” in Swahili and is the favorite folk song of my parents who grew up in Tanzania. I like the idea of a bookstore in Lisbon with the name in Swahili run by a Goan-Canadian-American woman. That’s the world I grew up in… one of multiplicities. 

[study-with-aura]

September 20, 2022

Today was a difficult day. Yesterday was too. I can't decide why I feel sad, but my brother always makes me smile. I enjoy studying and staying busy with dance. It doesn't matter why I'm sad, as long as I know I am, and it's okay. That's what my mom tells me. It's okay to feel sad. Maybe it's because Julien is going to start applying to universities soon. He's in his last year, and Mom and Dad have talked to him about it. They want him to apply to Princeton because that's where they went as well as the two universities my parents work at. Julien wants to go away from home, though, and I think that makes me sad. Next year, he might not be anywhere nearby, especially if he gets accepted to Princeton or closer to our grandparents. They live in New York, and he's also looking at universities there.

My brother and I have been practicing for Friday. We're performing together for this thing our church does a few times a year where people get to share any talent they have. Julien is going to play the piano, and I'm dancing. I choreographed it myself, and the music is composed by my brother! He stopped taking piano lessons when he started high school classes, but he still plays a lot. He also plays guitar and sings. He's very talented but doesn't talk about it to people much.

Tasks Completed:

Algebra 1 - Lesson on writing word problems in standard form + practice + reviewed writing and solving linear equations in standard form given a word problem + quiz

Lit and Comp 1 - Writing crossword assignment + studied vocabulary + read pages 20-49 of American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt by Edward Stratemeyer

Spanish 1 - Vocabulary paragraph writing assignment + reviewed for 15 minutes on Duolingo

Bible 8 - Read Isaiah 5 + wrote a summary of the first half of the chapter

Modern History 8 - Read chapters 23-24 of Facing Death by G.A. Henty + watched a video about immigration on Ellis Island

Physics/Chemistry 8 - Completed an experiment using water, wax paper, a paper clip, and a spoon to learn about cohesion and surface tension + wrote notes about surface tension and why water does not spill over even when a cup is full to the top

Computer 8 - Created diagram to describe fields, records, and databases and how they interconnect

Practice - 60-minute piano lesson

Chores - Cleaned my bedroom

Khan Academy - Reviewed algebra concepts

Reading - Read pages 1-42 of Becoming Naomi León by Pam Muñoz Ryan

Duolingo - Spent 15 minutes learning French

September Bible Study - Completed and discussed lesson 20 with family

-

What I’m Grateful for Today:

Being able to dance when I'm feeling sad.

Quote of the Day:

Right here in my mind. The monsters were inescapable because I’d created them myself. And they seemed like giants only because they were so close to my eyes.

-Turtle Boy, M. Evan Wolkenstein

🎧The Nutcracker, Op. 71, Act II: No. 12e, Divertissement. Dance of the Reed-Flutes - Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky

[ozzygonza]

EXCHANGE

Chapter 1.1

Despite dad basically being a complete shut-in and only wanting to stay home all day working on his next novel, he actually wanted to drive me to school; most likely to avoid emails from his agent regarding the next installment of his Blackened Rooks series. He even woke up earlier than pop, which kind of surprised me. The drive to school seemed like any other drive to school: quiet and only should last for fifteen minutes-ish. I kept my attention outside my car side window, We stopped at a light on the main street behind a white sedan and then I could hear my dad’s thoughts clamoring all at once to a halt as well.

“How are you feeling…?” he asked aloud, which already sounded like the wrong question that beat the other ones in his overactive head. He cleared his throat and exhaled. “It’s going to be a new year of high school. Obviously this past summer was not the best, what with that mess happening, but this will be a new year for you to start again with the knowledge from the year before.”

What he lacked in being social, he excelled in being eloquent and very well-spoken. He would have been valedictorian in high school if it hadn’t been for Clara Vaughn basically beating him and writing a just as good speech; he was never bitter about it since the two remained best friends even after high school.

I frowned, recalling for a moment what happened last summer. Only one photo remained saved in a folder of my current phone of me and her being happy. A small wave of sadness returned from the incident of the end of the school year. I didn’t want to remember.

“Thanks Dad, I’ll keep that in mind,” I told him, noticing him smiling a little and a hint of fatherly pride. “Now, I’m gonna go, so that I can get some education.”

“Huh? Y-yes, s-sure sure,” he stammered, not realizing he had already pulled in the student drop-off.

I gave him a shadow of a smile and headed into the campus. I stepped into the high school building, already catching sight of friends hugging each other and a couple or two saying hello for the first time after a long summer. After I grabbed my school schedule from the line in the cafeteria, I sat down near the entrance to give my legs a rest and to read the list of classes, with the first being English Literature with Mr. Perez. The rest of the school day seemed pretty steady ending with Geometry class with Ms. Fields.

“There he is.”

I looked up to see Keisha, my best friend. We’ve known each other since we were twelve, having met during a joint musical recital; she used to play the violin and I had played in a piano duet with my friend Nico. We had shared a moment of pumping the other up backstage. We remained inseparable since that day. She opened her arms out and gave me a “C’meeeere” look. I returned with a smirk and gave her a big hug, returning her embrace, despite feeling extremely despondent.

“You have been in radio silence this whole summer,” she muttered in my ear, squeezing me tighter. “You could have texted me at least once while I was at my nana’s.”

“You have my dads’ numbers, so I knew you checked with them,” I responded as we pulled away from each other. “As you can see, I’m okay. Kickin’, sorta.”

“Well, your epic of Summer of Mope is over, and it’s now time to enjoy a new year of fun, excitement, and emotional instability that comes with being in high school.” She pushed me to the stairs and held up her schedule, most likely getting the schedule ahead of time from her mother, who worked in the school. “Let’s go upstairs to Mr. Perez’s room and have our first boring class together.”

I gave her a little smile and went up the stairs. We talked about our summer, rather she talked and I listened to her. Her time with her nana had been an uneventful one. Most of it spent doing with her brother and nana doing minor chores and going to the beach every other day. She tried to make it sound terrible but I knew better than that. It sounded way better than mine, which was spent in my room with the curtains drawn, listening to some depressing and melancholy music during the time of only showering when I smelled a little rank for my liking.

I didn’t want to give her insight of that, even though she had a hint of that earlier from my parents. When we reached the classroom, a few familiar faces regarded us for a moment, one of them Colton, a guy who just hated me for the sake of it. We took our seats at the back of the classroom to see who else joined our class this first period.

When we started our talk about a TV show we showed an interest in, Mr. Perez stepped in classroom, greeting everyone in an enthusiastic Good Morning. He gave everyone a heart-warming smile and placed his materials on top of the desk. He scanned the room for a moment with his gray eyes and raised a brow.

“I know you guys would rather have stayed home today, rather than be here today, but I will try to make this as painless as possible,” he said and wrote his name “MR PEREZ” on the board. “I am Mr. Perez your English Lit teacher. I hope you guys read the pieces from the collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s work and the select works from Walt Whitman.”

A few collection of groans arose from a select students, except for myself and Keisha; I had first editions of the books from both works what with my dad having a small library of these already in his collection.

“However, today, we’re going to meet each other and get to know your peers. I am Mr. Ricardo Perez, and my parents are from a small town just north of Mexico City. They, including my brother Carlos, immigrated here.” He took a brief pause when he heard the back door of the room open.

A young man with bluish hair and horn-rimmed glasses walked in the room. Just as we all did, he also scanned the room. For a moment, our eyes met. A chill ran down my spine and the hairs on my arms stood on end. The feeling was eerie and didn’t know what to make of it. He broke our gaze first and walked to the front of the classroom, handing the teacher a piece of paper.

He scanned through the paper and muttered something to himself. “Okay, class! This is a transfer student from our exchange program,” he responded and motioned to the young man. “I believe you will be the first one to introduce themself to the class.”

The boy grinned. “Alright, my name is Trent St. John, please to meet you all,” he said, a faint accent heard in certain syllables, projecting his voice to the back of the room. His gaze fell upon me, our eyes meeting again. “I cannot wait to be acquainted with you all.”

“You can take a seat, looks like we have one in the back next to the young man in the green t-shirt,” Mr. Perez stated, clearly indicating me.

“We should be nosy and say hello,” Keisha whispered in my ear. As soon as Mr. Perez turned his back to the class to write on the board, Keisha gave me a little wink and I couldn’t help but grin as she quickly went to Trent’s desk. She took a seat right next to Trent and nudged him with her elbow in his ribs. “I’m Keisha and that’s Abram, “she motioned to me with a slight nod. “You are definitely new around here and I think you should hang with us.”

Keisha didn’t know the definition of subtle or even hearing no as an answer to one of her demands. She propped her chin on the heel of her palm and smiled. “Everyone else isn’t as cool as us.”

Now you are being crazy, I thought to myself.

Trent nodded regardless. “I actually wouldn’t mind hanging with you guys,” he said to her. He turned his head to me. “What about you? Do you think we will get on? Or am I awkward?”

His words sounded strange but I couldn’t place them anywhere. I returned a smile. “Awkward or not, it shouldn’t matter.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Trent stared ahead and smiled.

Mr. Perez had spent the rest of the hour having us introduce ourselves. It was dumb and elementary school-ish. We practically spent most of our time on our phones; Pop had sent me a reminder to do chest workouts, either at home or the gym, via text. He should have been working in whatever warehouse or secret mission.

Once hour had ended, Mr. Perez reminded everyone to review the select poems by Poe for tomorrow’s lesson, but clearly his direction had fallen on deaf ears. Keisha snatched Trent’s schedule from his hands and scanned the page. She counted two with her fingers and then four.

“So we have second period photography as well,” she stated and looked at me, “but you guys have Geometry, American History, and free period.”

Trent raised a brow. “Sounds like we’re going to be seeing more of each other,” he stated and chuckled.

Keisha hooked her arm around his elbow and started tugging him towards their next class.

(Previous, Next)

[kidsviral-blog]

MC Jin's Second Chance

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/mc-jins-second-chance/

MC Jin's Second Chance

Over a decade ago, MC Jin was signed to Ruff Ryders — the first Chinese-American rapper to approach mainstream success, only to vanish from the scene as quickly as he arrived. Now, after becoming an unlikely star in Hong Kong and overcoming stereotypes he helped promote, he’s attempting a comeback. But is anyone listening?

The Chinese-American rap artist MC Jin is the last act scheduled to perform on the final evening of the Orange County Night Market, a series of outdoor festivals inspired by the culture of strolling open-air, dusk-to-midnight bazaars in Asia.

Jin, 32, bounds up the stage erected at the center of the fairgrounds. His voice booms from the speakers, shouting for those standing near the back to come closer, while he glides across the length of the stage to slap palms in the pit. He wears black and gold high-tops, black cargo shorts, and a black long-sleeved tee printed with a glossy white Mercedes-Benz logo across the chest but parodied by the words MERDERES DEMZ. A black five-panel cap sits backwards on his head.

A natural performer, Jin stalks the stage with charisma and confidence. Watching him rap is a delight. It all feels effortless, the sprezzatura with which he spits rhymes, the intimacy created between the rapper and the legion of upturned faces that Sunday night. Jin basks in the glow of attention. He conscripts the crowd in singing, chanting, and clapping along throughout the first few songs; he hams it up admirably for all the phones bobbing in the air. When he snatches one out of a young woman’s hands and plants a kiss on the screen, she shrieks with glee.

MC Jin at the Orange County Night Market instagram.com

Photos and video footage later proliferate Instagram and Twitter with the hashtags #MCJin and #JourneyTo1459, a nod to his new studio album entitled XIV:LIX, or 14:59, which references the dwindling seconds of a clock counting down the proverbial 15 minutes of fame.

More than a decade ago, Jin freestyle rapped his way to sudden stardom on BET’s flagship hip-hop television program, 106 & Park. In 2002, Jin Au-Yeung was 19, the baby-faced newcomer on “Freestyle Friday,” the show’s weekly battle segment for aspiring emcees. Swimming in an oversize navy blue sweater, the brim of a bucket hat angled over one eye, the 5-foot-6-inch Chinese kid from Queens annihilated the returning champ that first week, and went on to collect six more consecutive wins to earn a spot in 106 & Park’s “Freestyle Friday” Hall of Fame.

Touted the first mainstream Asian-American rapper, he had the ears of the hip-hop world and the devotion of every Asian-American kid with even a passing interest in rap music. Following the BET run, Jin scored a deal with Ruff Ryders, the label that developed artists Eve, DMX, and Jadakiss. To say that hype surrounded Jin’s studio debut is an understatement. Back then, he endured constant comparisons to Eminem, as much for a shared history of coming up the freestyle battle circuit and because of his race. Jin was another outsider trying to come up in a genre dominated by black artists.

You might count a handful DJs and producers — Q-bert and Invisibl Skratch Piklz, DJ Babu of Dilated Peoples, the Fifth Platoon crew in New York — but Jin was undeniably the only rapper out there calling himself “the original chink-eyed MC.” In a New York Times Magazine profile, Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote of Jin as “the Great Yellow Hip-Hop Hope.”

In 2003, Rolling Stone had named him one of the year’s top new artists to watch. The producer credits on Jin’s The Rest Is History reads like a murderer’s row of hitmakers — Just Blaze, Wyclef Jean, Swizz Beats, Kanye West — but when it was released in 2004, the record received tepid reviews and underperformed in sales.

“I didn’t realize it, but when I first got into battling, as early as age 13, 14, that [freestyle battling] would be my gift and my curse. There’s this stigma about being a battle rapper,” Jin says. “There was a chip on my shoulder, like, ‘Yo, I gotta prove that battle rappers can make songs.’” He shakes his head. “It was just one more thing to add on to the distractions that pulled me away from being able to be truly creative.”

We’re sitting in The Arche, pronounced “ark,” the recording studio at the SEED Center, the vast warehouse in downtown Los Angeles that Jin’s manager and longtime friend, Carl Choi, stripped and transformed into the home to the Great Company, the artist management and event production venture Choi heads up. The Jin in front of me now is toned-down version of the boisterous, ebullient rapper stomping around on stage at the Orange County Night Market a week ago. He is easygoing, and quick with spitfire wisecracks. He speaks fast, sometimes interrupting himself to clarify a detail, jumping forward or looping back to the topic at hand. Jin is always in command of the conversation, even while his mouth appears to rattle on extemporaneously.

In the decade and some years since his 106 & Park and Ruff Ryders days, Jin’s star has blotted, if not faded entirely. Word spread that he’d quit the rap game and had moved to Hong Kong to capitalize on all that new China money.

Jin is back, though in truth, he’d never quite arrived in the first place. “What was driving me then? Fame, money, self-glorification,” Jin admits. “The difference between now and 10 years ago is that [I have] so much more clarity now. So much more purpose. The XIV:LIX mind-set is ‘Yo, Jin, this could be the last interview you ever do, so be honest, be authentic, be grateful, be sincere. This could be the last song, the last album.’”

View this image ›

Photograph by Jon Premosch for BuzzFeed News

Jin and Ruff Ryders parted ways after the disappointing reception to The Rest Is History. “It was looming in the air. We all knew it was a matter of time,” he says of being released. A few independently released mixtapes came out to little notice. By 2007, he was living back home in Queens, the Au-Yeung family of four (Jin, his parents, and younger sister Avah) all crowded into a desolate basement apartment.

“It was the darkest two years of this whole past decade,” Jin says. “I was in the depression zone — and I don’t use that word lightly.”

“I was on the verge of hanging it all up: Maybe troop on over to Best Buy and see if they’re hiring.“

“I was on the verge of hanging it all up: Maybe it’s time to really let this music thing go, and troop on over to Best Buy and see if they’re hiring,” he says, describing his mind-set then. “At least I’d know I have a job, and it’s not based on popularity and acceptance and hype. I just clock in, stock the TVs, and clock out.”

Jin moved to Hong Kong in 2008; he released a Cantonese-language album through Universal, which led to acting gigs in Chinese film and television. Jin calls the choice to attempt resuscitation of his music dreams overseas a “no-brainer.” He says, “There was absolutely nothing going on for me here in the U.S. at the time, career-wise.” Around the time, Jin found a renewed faith in Christianity. He says, “God really allowed me to blossom. To me, that was the biggest thing to come out of the Hong Kong experience. The last thing I [expected].”

Though Jin was a household name in Hong Kong by then, acting on TV and in films, hosting variety shows, cashing checks for paid endorsements, even appearing alongside a top government official in a state-sponsored holiday greeting spot, he packed it all up and moved back to New York to be a full-time dad to baby boy Chance, who arrived in 2012.

He quiets, and his hands stop moving; he’s not scratching his head, pounding a fist into an open palm, shooting gun-fingers, waving a hand in the air while the other mimes holding a microphone. Mando Fresko, a radio personality on L.A.’s hip-hop station Power 106 who advised on the production of XIV:LIX, says of Jin, “He’s fast at everything. He’s fast at writing songs, fast at recording. Once he feels it, he runs with it. He doesn’t second-guess. He’ll hop in the booth and knock it out.”

In putting together the new album, Jin recorded 35 songs in total. Fifteen tracks ultimately made it on the record. The first single is “Chinese New Year,” a revelatory celebration of Jin’s Chinese-American identity, the story of his family’s immigrant, working-class roots, and a candid acknowledgment of the failures in his rap career thus far — including regret over “Learn Chinese,” the first single off The Rest Is History, and probably still the most recognizable song in Jin’s oeuvre.

“I’m at a point now where I don’t cringe if I hear ‘Learn Chinese,’” he says now. “But I don’t think there was ever one point when I was genuinely, genuinely proud of that song.’” He adds, “I definitely still cringe at that video.”

The video for “Learn Chinese” is a study in the hackneyed stereotypes of Orientalist fantasy. Jin plays two characters in it: the villain in an eye patch and thin mustache who leads a gang of karate-chopping henchmen, and the hero who rescues the sexy Asian girls from some den of iniquity deep in the bowels of a glamorized Chinatown ghetto. The concept is intercut with shots of Jin in a maroon jogging suit rapping underneath an arched, neon-lit Chinese gate, a diamond-encrusted “R” chain swinging from his neck, the famous logo of the Ruff Ryders.

Jin recalls the awe he felt collaborating with Wyclef, who produced “Learn Chinese” and makes a cameo in the video as hype man, bouncing and weaving with his palms pressed in prayer hands, and occasionally bowing, high-kicking. “If Clef said, ‘Yo, you should do this,’ whatever it would have been, I probably was like, cool, let’s do it. Everything he’s suggesting was gold to me.”

Oliver Wang, a music writer and professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach, has criticized the song for its failure to actually break racial stereotypes of Asian-American men. “It’s still wholly conservative in its ideal of what masculinity looks and sounds like,” Wang asserts. “The video still ascribes to all the same tropes of hegemonic masculinity that we’re familiar with in terms of capacity for violence, sexual prowess.”

“I had this opportunity to make a statement. My criticism of it now is: You had this opportunity and that was the statement you made?”

Jin blames his youth and industry naiveté for the misguided execution. “I look back, and I had this opportunity to make a statement. That was my first single to the world that the label was going to get behind. My criticism of it now is: You had this opportunity, Jin, and that was the statement you made?”

He has higher hopes for the single off XIV:LIX. “I have absolute peace when ‘Chinese New Year’ comes on right now. Whether I’m in a room by myself or it’s in a room full of strangers, or people I do know. Just that alone tells me it’s different from ‘Learn Chinese.’”

At least one critic is cheered; Wang writes to me by email, “It’s like Jin made an 180. On ‘Chinese New Year,’ it’s all about looking inward via introspection and he basically apologizes for his 21-year-old self on ‘Learn Chinese,’ which is striking since it’s rare to see many rappers walking back their own earlier catalog.”

Steven Y. Wong, curator at the Chinese American Museum, is more skeptical. Wong has written about the challenges that artists and arts institutions, like the one where he works, face when addressing culturally specific stories. He says, “Too often, our own ethnic communities celebrate the four F’s (famous people, festivals, fashion, and food), with good intentions, to perhaps demonstrate success, acceptance, and assimilation.” In his estimation, these themes fail to present the nuanced complexities of a community of people, and actually perpetuate “the misconceptions and cultural reductions that prevail in the American imagination” when it comes to Asian-Americans.

The song hits three of Wong’s four F’s: Bruce Lee (famous people), Chinese New Year (festival), and wontons and dim sum (food). The musical production, too, grates Wong’s ears, with its “guzheng- and erhu-sounding pentatonic loops,” stringed instruments that Wong dismisses as “a stereotypical strategy to incorporate an essentialized Chinese-ness.” And that “gung hay fat choy” chorus? Wong calls it “cliché.”

Other listeners are not as discerning and despite his long absence, still seems to have a core following interested in seeing how his Hong Kong detour might bode well for his revived music career at home. Not that he’s overly worried.

“To me right now, fun is taking a drive to Home Depot,” he says. “How’s the album doing, planning for this, got a gig there, social media, all that stuff is out the window. I’m just pushing the cart, Chance is sitting there. We’re talking about we need to get new shingles, whatever. To me, that’s living.”

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Photograph by Jon Premosch for BuzzFeed News

The night of the XIV:LIX launch party at the Sayers Club in Hollywood, a line of a hundred or so people stand listlessly against the brick-wall facade of the nightclub, waiting for a stoic woman with waist-long black hair to find their names on her clipboard. About 50 have been admitted into the front of the house, where a step-and-repeat is set up next to a long wraparound bar. There are men in vests and shirtsleeves, and brightly colored bow ties. The more casually dressed have affected styles of studied dishevelment; ironic logo shirts, cuffed jeans, Nike Air Force 1s. The women wear high-waisted shorts, sheer tops, and heavy gold necklaces, eyelids glittering in iridescent colors.

At 8:20 p.m., guests are ushered into the black-box theater space decorated in the manner of a 1920s speakeasy. Edison bulbs hang from the vaulted ceiling. Half a dozen chesterfield sofas circle the stage, leaving a small aisle for the cocktail waitresses in black hot pants to deliver bottle service. Private booths line the periphery of the room, but most of the attendees remain standing in the aisles or leaning against the massive stretch of bar at the back, dimly lit by a row of wrought-iron candelabras.

Mando Fresko, the Power 106 radio host, commands the DJ booth, spinning a mix of old and new hip-hop joints by Common, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Macklemore. Jin is somewhere in the room greeting old friends and fans, but when Mando jams Outkast’s “ATLiens,” he gallops to the booth and bumps fists, then raps along to every word in the first verse.

Jin runs through all 15 songs on XIV:LIX, performing parts of tracks live, wisecracking with Fresko, narrating the story of how the album was conceived and brought to light. He is accompanied by a drummer on stage. At one point in the night, he indulges the audience with a freestyle rap session over the snares and kicks, and the crowd goes nuts for it, whooping and whistling for more.

The morning after the party, Jin is visibly drained. “I wanna go home.” Then, he softens. “That’s how I feel, you know? Want to go home. See the fam.”

I recall a moment near the end of our first interview session, when he tells me that he’s not as confident as the persona he projects on stage. He’d just finished giving a blow-by-blow account of how he came to win his first “Freestyle Friday” battle on 106 & Park, from the open casting in Harlem, to how he felt about his chances after the audition, getting the callback (“The taping’s on Wednesday — that blew my mind right there. ‘Freestyle Friday’ isn’t even on Friday!”), the story on defending champ Hassan who stood over a foot taller than him, his strategy going into the battle, down to the David-defeats-Goliath moment when the judges announced him as the winner.

“Sometimes, man, these different chapters don’t always end up panning out the way you think.”

In those quiet seconds after this elaborate, detailed account, his eyes cast toward the rug on the floor, I glimpsed some vague, irretrievable sadness about him. The last thing he’d said, before we stopped recording, was this: “Sometimes, man, these different chapters, different seasons, don’t always end up panning out the way you think.”

I never see that Jin again, not once, in the two weeks I spend trailing him at radio interviews, meet-and-greets, and club shows where he’s mobbed by drunken, crushing crowds. (One determined young woman sidled up to me at Emerson, a nightclub in Hollywood, and demanded that I take a photo with her: “You’re MC Jin’s wife, aren’t you?”)

The day of the album launch, the accompanying XIV:LIX merchandise also arrives in office: CDs with 15 different covers, T-shirts, embroidered hats. Jin studies the liner notes in silence, then quips: “The Great Company, with two O’s, though?” A dreadful silence, then he says, “I’m just kidding!” The staffer in charge of merchandise wails and nearly collapses, while everyone else guffaws.

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Photograph by Jon Premosch for BuzzFeed News

“I would like to think that XIV:LIX will open up a lot of doors in 2015.” A tour is in the works and he hopes to pursue more acting, picking up where he left off in Hong Kong. Late last year, he appeared in Revenge of the Green Dragons, a crime drama directed by Andrew Lau and Andrew Loo, and executive produced by Martin Scorsese. Jin’s performance as a rookie NYPD detective is nothing spectacular, but he delivers his lines adequately and manages to hold his own opposite Ray Liotta.

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MC Jin in Hong Kong, 2008 Jerome Favre / AP Photo

I ask him if it’s a goal to be signed to a major label again. A long pause, then he says, “That’s a good question.” Another pause, and then he decides, “Yeah. It is.” His approach now, however, is vastly changed from the Ruff Ryders days — acknowledging that the industry, too has changed. “Now, I’m not in the mind-set of ‘I’ll do anything to sign, whatever deal you give me I’ll take.’ At one point, that probably was the reality. I was just thirsty for a deal, whatever kind of deal it is.”

Carl Choi, Jin’s manager, says “some sort of collaborative deal makes sense,” which means retaining creative control, but with a major label’s financial resources. Though Jin has been under Choi’s management for years now, the Great Company is a startup venture; XIV:LIX was made in part through crowdsourced funding via a successful Pledge Music campaign.

Choi is no neophyte, however. He has previously managed another Asian-American rap act to platinum success. For years, he was inseparable from the dance/hip-hop group Far East Movement. The relationship imploded after the quartet signed with Interscope in 2010.

At the time, Choi felt strongly that Far East Movement should’ve gone it alone, without the mainstream label deal. “Their songs were getting picked up on the radio, we had traction with touring,” Choi says. “I told the guys, I think we can do this indie, but because I was trying to get them out of that deal, I became the enemy.”

Since breaking with Choi, Far East Movement has gone on to open for Lady Gaga, Calvin Harris, and Lil Wayne. Their hit single, “Like a G6,” has sold over 2 million copies. Kevin Nishimura, one member of Far East Movement, declined to speak on his relationship to the group’s former manager, though he allowed that upon signing with Interscope, the label suggested a name change for the band.

“Right then and there, it really struck us, that’s something that’s not negotiable,” Nishimura says. All four members of Far East Movement are Asian, but their lyrics have never explicitly referenced race. Nishimura explains that that’s partly why the foursome from L.A., with deep roots in Koreatown, have insisted on keeping their original name. “It’s been our way of representing,” he says.

Jin, on the other hand, has never shied away from discussions of race. “People always want to debate, are you black enough or not-black enough, are you Asian enough or not-Asian enough. Like, how do you gauge that?” He chuckles, and continues: “These last few weeks, I’ve been at the OC Night Market, [which is] predominantly Asian. I’m there speaking Cantonese, being myself. And then there’s the Christian music conference I attended in Tampa. Completely opposite, totally not Asian, a good diverse mix of folks. To me, that authenticity, people can feel it. I don’t feel like I have to turn off or on something.”

Though he no longer suffers the comparisons to Eminem (“Number-one reason people don’t call me the Asian Eminem anymore is because he went on to sell billions of records, build this magnificent career, and I went the opposite way,” he says, with a wry laugh), Jin acknowledges that he is a “stan” of his, as well as Macklemore. But he distinguishes himself from another popular white rapper who’s been at the center of recent heated debates in hip-hop: Iggy Azalea. Last year, Azalea was derided by many rap purists, including Q-Tip, for being dismissive of the genre’s cultural roots. “I’m very vocal about saying that we have to remember hip-hop is black culture,” Jin says. “It can grow and evolve, yeah, but my own personal take is that we can never get to a point where we forget that, or not acknowledge it. It comes from respect, and I’m big on the history of hip-hop.”

A couple nights after his album release party, Jin is feted by chef Roy Choi at POT, the hipster Korean restaurant at the newly revamped Line Hotel. The comedic female rapper Awkwafina is there, eating dinner with Dumbfoundead, the Korean-American emcee who’s now going by the stage name Parker. Both are featured in Bad Rap, a documentary on Asian-Americans in hip-hop, directed by Salima Koroma.

In a glib deadpan, Parker says, “Asians in rap? That shit is a very hard mix.”

“If you don’t address race, then people are like, why don’t you talk about the elephant in the room,” says Awkwafina. She adds, “But you have to do it right. It can’t be gimmicky.” A native New Yorker, she calls Jin a “hometown hero,” and she remembers seeing him years ago, “rolling around Flushing with that Ruff Ryders chain, just chilling with friends.”

The two sit at the bar, drinking beers and sharing several plates of food between them. A few feet behind them, an Asian family tucks into their meal wordlessly: grandparents, parents, and two teenage daughters. Jin is on a break. In the meantime, the DJ spins old-school rap songs and cuts from Jin’s XIV:LIX. When he returns behind the bar and grabs the mic again, one of the teenage girls, her hair dyed a shocking pink ombré, turns around in her chair and starts recording with her phone. Jin freestyles a few bars, then leads off chanting, “What’s for dessert, Chef Roy? What’s for dessert?” The entire restaurant chimes in; one of the waitstaff dances exuberantly for a moment by the host stand, popping and locking.

Later, Choi answers by handing Jin a round cake with white icing. The rapper grins, then looks around, and asks innocently, “What do I do with this?” His eyes widen, as if threatening to dump the cake over one of his team. Someone takes the cake from him, and then Jin runs off again, ready to grab the mic and entertain the restaurant’s staff and guests.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jeanho/mc-jins-second-chance