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Chinatown 2.0

Richard Yan

24 episodes

7 months ago

Olivia Xing is an actress, standup comedian, artist and student based in LA, and she recently did a one-hour comedy special called Party School where she told jokes about China, the US, politics in both countries, and the immigrant experience. 00:00 Teaser 00:44 Intro 02:48 How Olivia got started with her Party School comedy special 08:19 Chinese debate show 奇葩说 12:12 How Chinese comics and rappers deal with censorship 16:26 Olivia's biggest takeaways from her comedy special 18:38 Rich...

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Society & Culture

All content for Chinatown 2.0 is the property of Richard Yan and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Olivia Xing is an actress, standup comedian, artist and student based in LA, and she recently did a one-hour comedy special called Party School where she told jokes about China, the US, politics in both countries, and the immigrant experience. 00:00 Teaser 00:44 Intro 02:48 How Olivia got started with her Party School comedy special 08:19 Chinese debate show 奇葩说 12:12 How Chinese comics and rappers deal with censorship 16:26 Olivia's biggest takeaways from her comedy special 18:38 Rich...

Show more...

Society & Culture

Episodes (20/24)

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 24: Comedian Olivia Xing discusses her Party School special, ESL comics and how to handle bombing on stage

Olivia Xing is an actress, standup comedian, artist and student based in LA, and she recently did a one-hour comedy special called Party School where she told jokes about China, the US, politics in both countries, and the immigrant experience. 00:00 Teaser 00:44 Intro 02:48 How Olivia got started with her Party School comedy special 08:19 Chinese debate show 奇葩说 12:12 How Chinese comics and rappers deal with censorship 16:26 Olivia's biggest takeaways from her comedy special 18:38 Rich...

2 years ago

51 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 23: (Mandarin) Weibo co-founder Indigo on China's startup scene, NFTs, life in Japan/Vancouver

Indigo was co-founder of Sina Weibo, or China’s Twitter. After Weibo, he started doing angel investments and incubating new projects. One of his main investments included the largest off-line art selling platform in China. Recently he got into the world of web3 and NFT. He writes a blog about frontier tech, and teaches online courses on stock investments in these areas. He is based in Vancouver. I spoke to him about China’s startup environment since 2009, his takeaways from doing angel inves...

2 years ago

48 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 22: Comic Peng Dang tells American jokes like a native, learned English from listening to rock

Peng Dang is a standup comedian based in Texas. Peng moved to the US from China in his twenties, speaks absolutely impeccable English, and more importantly, tells jokes like a local pro. I find his sets funny, educational, and wholesome. I’m not sure if a comedian wants to hear their jokes described as “wholesome,” but I mean that as a compliment. We talked about how his English got to be so good, what life was like for him in Alabama, Atlanta and Dallas, how he honed his comedic skills, his...

2 years ago

40 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 21: Bilingual comedian Amy Yu sees stand-up as life-changing, discusses role of AI in art

Amy Yu is a bilingual standup comedian based in Canada. We talked about how standup comedy changed her life, how she thinks about telling jokes in Chinese vs telling in English, and how to properly tell a dirty joke. I also had a pretty serious debate with her about the role of artificial intelligence in comedy. 0:00 Amy’s standup set 01:04 Debating the role of AI in art creation 22:31 How comedy helped Amy with mental health 28:17 How to deal with bombing on stage 31:48 Amy’s (and Ric...

2 years ago

46 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 20: Magician Dan Chan Performed for Elon Musk, Plans to Build Magic Mansion in the Bay Area

Dan Chan is a magician that has performed at corporate events at fortune 100 companies and lavish parties hosted by celebrities. He recently got to perform for Elon Musk at the PayPal 20-year reunion party, hosted by Peter Thiel. Prior to his illusionist career, he was an employee at PayPal, where he met Thiel. Dan has also been grooming his 14-year old son to become a magician, who has been doing his own $1000 shows in the San Francisco Bay Area. We talked about how Dan decided to become ...

2 years ago

25 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 19: Career coach Alec Sorensen helps dreamers of biz ideas take action via habit-building

Alec Sorensen is a career coach who helps people take action on life-changing business ideas they've been putting off. Alec is also a follower of the Mormon church, a Japan-living American at one point, a California-to-Texas transplant, among other things. We discussed how he got into career coaching, his faith, cultural shocks in Japan, why he moved to Austin from the Bay Area, and more. 0:00 Intro 1:20 Alec as a Coach: His thoughts about the coaching industry, and how he uses habit buil...

3 years ago

2 hours

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 18: Entrepreneur Karol Guan discusses creativity at art school and in her beauty AI startup

(Episode in Mandarin) Karol Guan is an entrepreneur. This interview was recorded in Nov 2020. At the time she was co-founder of HelloAva.co, a startup that recommends skin care products based on a combination of AI and doctors. Karol studied Fashion/Apparel design at Parsons School of Design in New York City. We discussed how the 2020 Covid both helped her startup grow and presented challenges to the way she worked, how she felt about being a woman in the male-dominated startup space, how h...

3 years ago

1 hour 31 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 17: Operations mgr Erin Cuellar moved between five states in 13 years for manufacturing career

Erin Cuellar is Director of Operations at STERIS, a manufacturer of medical devices. At the time of the interview, she was senior operations manager at the same company, and her role was essentially that of a plant manager. Her responsibilities included supervising teams, managing KPIs, and maintaining quality controls. Erin comes from a very different world than I do. She dropped out of college, worked at a local manufacturing site, joined an apprenticeship program, got her journeyman’s ca...

4 years ago

52 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 16: Kunming-native American cowboy Bruce Wang speaks English with perfect Southern accent

Bruce Wang is a Chinese cowboy. Not an ethnically Chinese person that was born in Texas, but someone born and bred in Yunnan, China. He came to the US as a college student. He adopted a Southern accent, started dressing like a cowboy, and started making videos about how cowboys spend their time. We talked about why he decided to become a cowboy, why he felt the cowboy culture reminded him of his hometown of Kunming, how he felt different when speaking a different language, and how he dealt ...

4 years ago

1 hour 2 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 15: Restaurateur, Food & Beverage businessman Chris Tay hustled nonstop for three decades

4 years ago

2 hours 37 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 14: Crypto CEO Stephen Tse on community-development, culture-building, nongreedy parenting

4 years ago

1 hour 3 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 13: Government data scientist John Stevenson overcame homelessness and plans to run for governor

John Stevenson is a Black American who grew up home-insecure, but later graduated valedictorian of his high school. He went to Dartmouth and later graduated from the Political Science program at the University of Chicago. He now owns a yoga studio, does contracts for various government agencies. And he has ambitions to run for governor of Maryland. Today we talk about his experience as a homeless person growing up. So he would be adding his unique perspective from that particular angle as we...

4 years ago

2 hours 18 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 12: Conservative mayor candidate Ellen Zhou wants to end 50-year Democrat rule in San Francisco

On today's Chinatown 2.0, I speak with Ellen Lee Zhou, or 李爱晨, a two-time candidate for San Francisco mayor, in 2018 and 2019. She ran as a conservative in a city where the mayor had been a Democrat for the last half a century. On top of her “non-mainstream” political ideologies, she had zero experience holding public office and raised very little money compared to her competition. Despite all this, she won 4% of the votes in 2018, and 13% of the votes in 2019. And in 2019, she was second p...

5 years ago

55 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 11: Howard Schultz communications manager Lin Yang started hometown newspaper to fight misinformation that harms local election

Lin Yang is a grassroot political organizer who also works in tech. Lin had a full-time job working for Howard Schultz, helping him explore a presidential run. For those unaware, Howard Schultz was the founder and previous CEO for Starbucks. Lin also participated in campaigns for President Obama and Senator Ted Lieu from California. He also worked as a journalist in Asia for a while, writing articles for various newspapers like New York Times when was stationed in Taiwan, and the Strait Time...

5 years ago

58 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 10: (Mandarin) Entrepreneur Wei Luo quit coding to build vertically-integrated home renovation business

Wei Luo quit his software engineering job to become a contractor in 2006. After 14 years, he had a business (based in San Francisco Bay Area) consisting of 50+ employees and multiple business lines, including home renovation, interior design, cabinetry and appliances. Wei shared with us how he persuaded his parents to pursue a new career with seemingly low barrier to entry, challenges and turning points of his business, a severe problem of labor shortage in the contracting field, a squeeze o...

5 years ago

45 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 9: (Mandarin) Stuyvesant ex-Principal Jie Zhang taught American prisoners, fixed U.S. schools, returns to China to lead two international schools

Jie Zhang has been an instructor, administrator and leader of American education institutions for more than three decades. She began her career teaching math to prisoners on Rikers Island (New York). Her most well-known positions included principal of the Ivy League feeder Stuyvesant High School, and principal of the now Chinese company-owned New York Military Academy, which US President Trump attended. She recently returned to China to run two international high schools. Besides recounting ...

5 years ago

2 hours 36 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 8: (Mandarin) "Chinese son-in-law" 中国女婿 Morgan Jones talks being Black in China/US

Morgan Jones is a Black American that previously spent six years in China as a radio host, movie production assistant and EMBA English teacher. He is a “Chinese son-in-law” (中国女婿), a self-described Tiger Dad (“虎爸”) and a fluent Mandarin speaker. He got his EMBA from Cornell and bachelors from Middlebury College, or 明德大学 in Chinese. This episode was recorded in Mandarin. We discussed Morgan’s adventures in China, takeaways from his marriage to a Chinese woman, his relationship with Chinese i...

5 years ago

1 hour 5 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 7: China historian Anne Chao grew up on four continents, archives oral history of Chinese Americans

Professor Anne Chao is a Chinese modern historian that lectures at Rice University. She is also manager of the Houston Asian American Archive, an oral history archive that looks to document the challenges faced and contributions made by the Asian American community. As the daughter of a Taiwanese diplomat, Anne moved between Congo, Australia, Washington DC, and Taiwan as a kid. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on the social networks of Chen Duxiu, co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party and publ...

5 years ago

55 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 6: China Tech Podcaster Rui Ma talks TikTok ban, Sino-US decoupling, female expat life in China

Rui Ma is an investment banker (Morgan Stanley) turned VC (500 Startups) turned podcast host (Tech Buzz China). Her show covers current tech trends in China, with a focus on power players such as ByteDance and Alibaba. Her diaspora journey included a childhood in the China countryside, college and grad school education in the US, a career of finance/tech in Shanghai/Beijing, and podcast operations from Silicon Valley. We discussed Bytedance ban, Niall Ferguson's "TikTok = China's digital imp...

5 years ago

1 hour 34 minutes

Chinatown 2.0

Ep. 5: (Mandarin) Children's Chinese Magazine Publisher Jing Cheng believes the power of print media

Jing Cheng is the co-founder and CEO of the largest North American Children's Chinese magazine, Pipa Magazine. She shares her inspirations for starting the publication, the challenges of running the business of print media against digital headwinds, and her philosophy and suggestions for Chinese immigrants raising bilingual kids. To learn more about Pipa Magazine, visit: pipamag.org You can also subscribe to their WeChat public account by searching for 小枇杷 Jing shared with us: *...

5 years ago

48 minutes