Shin Yu Pai (CAS’97) has been a poet and an essayist in Seattle for nearly 20 years; she was the city’s 2023–24 civic poet. Photo by Reva Keller

Arts & Culture

The Many Facets of Asian American Culture

Shin Yu Pai says her award-winning podcast, Ten Thousand Things, fills a void in the media

In Chinese, “ten thousand” is commonly used poetically to convey something myriad or vast or endless.

The Ten Thousand Things podcast produced by KUOW, a Seattle NPR station, explores the myriad facets of Asian American culture through quirky and poignant and funny stories reminiscent of the long-running public radio hit This American Life. Each episode focuses on an object—not ten thousand of them, yet—anything from a family heirloom to a secondhand novel to a blue suit worn by a congressman on January 6. Maybe it’s better to say it focuses through an object, like a lens, on the lives behind them.

“The object idea came to me very early on and was part of how I crafted the pitch,” says Shin Yu Pai (CAS’97), the podcast’s creator and host.

The show is getting noticed, with a 2024 Regional Edward R. Murrow Award and two 2023 Golden Crane Podcast Awards from the Asian American Podcasters Association. An exhibition at Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum will open in March, with objects from the podcast and others contributed by the community, and a companion book is in the works. The third season dropped this summer, and a fourth is in negotiation. 

Ten Thousand Things began as Pai’s response to the bigotry directed at Asian Americans after China was identified as the likely origin of the COVID virus. “It was the second year of the pandemic, there had been a significant rise in hate crimes, and then the Atlanta spa shootings happened,” she says. “I was in a lot of deep grief and I think pain around this moment of racial reckoning for Asian American women. And I really felt that there was a void in the media for positive stories about Asian Americans.”

But she wanted to bring in a wide range of listeners, which seemed challenging in a time before actor Michelle Yeoh won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once and Pixar released Turning Red, increasing Asian American visibility in the arts.

“Everybody owns objects and everybody has personal connections to objects,” Pai says. “There was still, for me, a lot of hesitance about saying boldly, ‘I’m making a podcast about Asian American stories.’ So the way that I designed it is, objects are really relatable, so I’m going to make a series about objects that happen to be owned by Asian Americans.”

Each episode is named for the object. “Bike” is about Kae-Lin Wang, who started Seattle’s Ampersand Bike Club—as a safe space for Asian Americans, including herself—after the 2021 spa shootings in Atlanta, Ga. “A Book Starts a Movement” tells how University of Washington professor Shawn Wong found the first Japanese American novel, 1978’s No-No Boy, by John Okada, at a used bookstore, years after being told by teachers that Asian American literature didn’t exist. He republished and distributed it himself, to unearth the legacy of Asian American writers. This episode won a 2023 Golden Crane Award.

Authentic Voices

Pai responded to an open call for podcast pitches from KUOW. Out of 75 pitches, hers was one of a handful that got sent to pilot and the only one that was selected to continue to production. 

It was originally called The Blue Suit for the bright blue suit that US Representative Andy Kim of New Jersey was wearing the day of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Kim was photographed in the Capitol Rotunda picking up garbage after the rioters were cleared from the building, Pai says. “It was a suit he had worn hoping to witness the certification of the vote and the election, and it became a very symbolic object for me.”

Pai is not the only Terrier behind Ten Thousand Things; Whitney Henry-Lester (COM’04) produces. “Shin Yu absolutely brings her creativity and writing and sensibility, and we bring the audio-first mentality, and that is when it works best,” Henry-Lester says. 

Podcasting, they say, is a space where public media can experiment with new approaches that will help it find its way into the future.

“I am not your typical kind of public radio media darling, in that I write really weird stuff,” says Pai, a published poet and essayist in Seattle for nearly 20 years and that city’s 2023–24 civic poet. “They knew the quality of my writing and its power to evoke emotion and the uniqueness of the stories that I tell. They wanted a podcast that was really going to lean into the lyricism and quality of a different kind of storytelling, and that’s what they got.”

“Essentially it’s grounded in authentic human voices,” says Henry-Lester. “It starts with finding a person who can tell their story and then creating the safe space to have a real human conversation. We don’t think of it as a formal interview; we think of it as a conversation. And talking to Shin Yu creates the safe space where they can talk about identity. Maybe they haven’t been asked some of these questions directly before.”

Editor’s Note: Just after this story was published, Shin Yu Pai reported that KUOW has decided not to produce a fourth season of  the Ten Thousand Things podcast for “financial and business reasons.” She plans to continue producing the show herself, and she says both the companion book and the museum exhibition are going ahead as planned.