SOO HUGH: I’ve always been interested in all the little ways that people can take a stand because so many times it’s so hard to be a hero. My kids, when they learn about heroes, they’re people who do big things. I wish I was a Rosa Parks. I wish I was a Martin Luther King. I wish I had that. I’m not. Right. So how does the everyday people make the little stands?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast. I’m your host, Gabe González. Today we are talking about ancestral history and you won’t even have to put your spit in an envelope. We can spend our whole lives trying to wrap our heads around the history of our own families. So how do you create a television show spanning four generations, multiple continents, and three different languages?
Today we will be talking to Soo Hugh who tackled that feat beautifully with the series Pachinko. As creator, writer, showrunner, and executive producer of the series, Hugh adapted Pachinko from a 2017 novel of the same name by Min Jin Lee. The story follows a Korean family with the matriarch, Sunja Kim at the center of the story.
The series chronicles the family’s experience as Zainichi, a term used for the community of Korean migrants who moved to Japan during the wars and postwar periods, often by force. Pachinko won a Peabody in 2022 for depicting a sweeping decade spanning family history that feels intimately personal and gloriously epic in equal measure. When we come back, we’ll talk to Soo Hugh about why she was wary of reading Pachinko at first and why the concept of home is at the core of this story. Don’t go anywhere.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. Today we’re talking to Soo Hugh about Pachinko, the Peabody award-winning show based on the novel of the same name. Here’s our conversation.
Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it, and I’m so excited to talk to you about Pachinko. How are you?
SOO HUGH: I’m great. Thank you for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I was reading a 2024 interview you did I believe it was with W magazine, where you talked about the reasons you were a bit reluctant to read Pachinko to begin with, partly because you didn’t want to revisit a history that had so personally affected your own family. I’m wondering what changed, and if you found any sort of power or catharsis in confronting those parts of you and your family’s past?
SOO HUGH: Yeah, I mean it’s something that I think we still go through a lot, whether or not it’s easier to erase things that we don’t feel comfortable with or confront them headlong. Right? And I remember when I read Pachinko, and I call it the shock of recognition, I did not grow up in 1915 or 1930, or 1950 or 1989. Well actually did grow up in 1989, but I obviously didn’t grow up like my grandmother or my great-grandmother; and yet reading the book and subsequently doing all the research around Pachinko in the world of these Zainichi Koreans who went to Japan, it was just, it was incredible how familiar the stories were in some ways; and I think it’s not even just about being Korean or being Zainichi or being Japanese, it’s about survival, right? Like, I mean, you pick up the newspaper today and you take any one of those stories, and that could be a Pachinko. I think the thing that I sort of had to wake up to, which is these stories are living and breathing narratives.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So I know one important factor for you as the writer’s room came together was that the team had a deep understanding of diaspora. And I think for many diasporic people, the idea of home is very much a defining question. Can you talk about the journey of tackling this both personally and creatively as you worked with your writers?
SOO HUGH: Well, so I asked that question, not just of the writers, but of the actors. And really like in any time we had discussions meeting where we were hiring the team, the question was, what is home for you? Where is home for you? And I loved hearing people’s responses. I mean, everyone has such a different, interesting. And for some people, home is like where my grandmother is or my mother is, or home is, you know where my photographs are, so, that tells me something that everyone defines home completely differently, and yet it is an emotion that we all can understand what home is. The other question I get often is, well, you have so much food in your show, in Pachinko. What does food mean? And for me, food is home. When I am feeling homesick or when I’m feeling sick, or when I’m not feeling emotionally up to my best, I want Korean food. I want the food that my mom made me as a kid.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That does feel like the role Kimchi very much plays in Sunja’s life toward the end of Season One and going into Season Two, it becomes a sort of outlet for her not to wallow, and it became such a strong kind of visual anchor for us being with that character throughout Season One and Two. But I love that. What were some of the foods that you grew up with that you wanted to incorporate in the show?
SOO HUGH: Well, it’s funny that you mentioned kimchi because growing up I was really embarrassed by kimchi, right? Kimchi is now really popular, but you know, like 30 years ago people didn’t know what kimchi was and like when people saw it, it’s a strong smell. It’s a strong taste. And so when I was a kid and we would have friends over for dinner, I just would cringe and be like, please don’t bring the kimchi out. But to a Korean, like, if you don’t have kimchi on the table, it’s not dinner. Right? And it’s funny now, just to show you how much has changed. Like I, we have tons of kimchi in the fridge and my kids just bring it out and eat it.
Right? Sometimes a friend of theirs will come over and be like, what’s that? It’s like, duh, that’s kimchi. You don’t know? Like I can’t, the fact that that happens now, sometimes I have to stop and almost like breathe a minute because it’s just one generation and how much has changed, you know?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It’s amazing that so much can happen in that one generation. There’s such a moving scene between Solomon and the woman who refuses to sell her property in season one, where she’s shocked at his Korean, and she talks about not being able to teach her own children Korean and says, my children don’t even know the language in which their mother dreams, which was such a line that just pierced my heart. Let’s take a listen to that scene here.
CLIP: Pachinko
GABE GONZÁLEZ: But it is wild, right? That this character in 1989 could say this, and now here we are in the 2020s, and your children are proud of their culture and their food. I’m wondering, what do you think has accounted for part of that change culturally, at least in the United States?
SOO HUGH: I think. Well, there’s so many discussions about social media and the internet, and I am not an expert on this, on whether the good outweighs the bad and that stuff. I will say this, and I don’t do any social media, but I will say this. If I didn’t have the internet, I would feel the loneliest person in the world, right? Like when my kids see other Koreans, when they see Blackpink or BTS, like they see a representation of themselves that they would never have seen if the internet wasn’t available to them.
So I’m not saying the internet is the best thing in the world, but. It makes the world a little bit smaller and a little bit friendlier and a little bit warmer, so you don’t feel as much alone as you used to be.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. Watching Pachinko, I think it can be a huge history lesson for a lot of viewers in the U.S. who might not be Korean American or Korean. And I’m wondering how you tackled balancing the creative desire to tell the story, however it needs to come out, with understanding that there might need to be a bit of explaining or contextualizing for audiences. Was that a push and pull during the creative process for you at all?
SOO HUGH: In Season One, I felt it a lot more. You know, the amount of research that went into season one, I think I would’ve rather betted on overkill than to be crucified on worse, like ignorance, you know?
Like it’s one thing to take a stand, but when you get historical facts wrong, ’cause you were ignorant, just makes me cringe. I feel like you definitely see the work of that research in the show and anything from not just historical research, but like costume research, food research, language research. And everyone on our team really came at it with that perspective.
I think in Season Two I was able to, I think, let go a little bit just because I felt like we had earned our stripes in some ways, in Season One. I didn’t feel this anxiety to fact check every little thing, and in some ways it made Season Two– there’s a freedom in season two that isn’t in Season One, whereas in Season One there’s a more interesting intellectual rigor in Season One that isn’t in season two. So there’s a cost benefit analysis there.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That’s so interesting because Season Two does start off on a almost darker, more foreboding tone. I mean, we’re entering World War II. That’s a part of history I think a lot of us are much more familiar with. But again, from a very western perspective. Right.
So I also found myself learning so many things, but it is true that the characters, despite facing, you know, this American threat and ostracization from the Japanese folks that live around them, they do feel almost more empowered, more free. You know, seeing Noah grow up and go to school is such a, there’s almost a bit more jubilance despite the dark clouds in the background.
SOO HUGH: I’m so glad that you picked up on that. Thank you.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And what was that like too? I mean, I know even one of my comedy friends, Karen Chee, I believe was–
SOO HUGH: Oh my gosh.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Was also a writer.
SOO HUGH: Yes!
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And I was shocked. ’cause I was like, oh, Pachinko, is gonna be like an historical drama. And she was like, yeah, I know. Um, so do you find yourself really mining these moments where there can be levity and humor throughout the series?
SOO HUGH: Yeah, I mean like, if you had to take snapshots of your life, like I always say like. If we had this camera eye on our forehead that we just programmed every two minutes to take a snapshot of where we are, right? And you put that together at the end of your life and you watched it, it’s gonna be filled with ups and downs, laughs and tears. It’s gonna be that whole kaleidoscope of living, right? So I really wanted Pachinko to be that kaleidoscope of living.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And that Kaleidoscope visual is so potent after having seen this series, because you do jump forward and back in time a lot. The TV series is nonlinear unlike the book, and you do that to show the themes that kind of resonate across time as if the characters are kind of speaking to each other. In creating these sort of collage of snapshots, did you ever feel like there were characters that needed to learn things from each other throughout time that might not have been able to at the different points they were at?
SOO HUGH: So something that we really were very interested in is this thing pentimentos in Season Two a lot. Narrative pentimentos and visual pentimentos. So in pentimentos it’s when a painter paints over something and we only discover it later in x-rays when you x-ray, a famous painting and you guys, oh my God, there’s this whole section of the painting that we didn’t know that he or she painted over, and how that completely changes your notion of that work.
And we talked about how can we make –especially the conversation within past and present, right? How we move from past and present. How do we make it our narrative pentimentos, meaning you see the past in one event, but just by editing it next to a present day scene or dissolving it, all of a sudden that scene reads completely differently and an amazing, brilliant visual effects supervisor, Ashley Burns spent so much time really trying to make sure these dissolve so that no one will notice it. Right? And I always tell Ashley, like, we are spending so much time on something, no one will notice. But yet we always felt, we believe it, that people will feel, ah, that’s what this means. By doing this into the past or doing this in the present, they will somehow internally understand the relationship or their emotional balance.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Right. I love that they might not notice the technique, but the idea is to make them feel that same sensation, that discovery of a new layer. Right.
SOO HUGH: Exactly. Yeah.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I love that. Now you said everyone has a Sunja in their lives and she is obviously our connective tissue throughout every time jump, and I found her to be such a fascinating character because initially we meet her as a very young girl, right after her birth. And we also meet her as a grandmother, sort of the matriarch of the family.
And I think we often flatten our older relatives in our head and forget that they too were young, even if it was in a different time or place. So I’m wondering how this scope and structure of the series, right, these sort of pentimentos and these collages, how they might help us understand Sunja in a way that’s different than it might be if we saw her life in a linear fashion. Was this something you thought about?
SOO HUGH: Well it’s one of the reasons why when I read the book, I did not understand how it could be a TV show. And it wasn’t until I thought about cross-cutting time periods that I was like, ah, this is a show. I really wanted to make sure Pachinko felt, even though it’s intimate, as you said, I wanted it to feel thematically and emotionally epic.
And I felt that by being able to present our main character, our heroine, so to speak, in both timelines, gave her a bigger than life voice. You know? I also think it’s interesting, like we treat superheroes so differently than we treat everyday characters, right? Like, you know, when you have a Superman or a Spider-Man character, just by being a superhero, the camera and this canvas gives them this big, huge eye. But how do we make, you know, a little girl who comes from a poor fishing village in Korea feel just like a superhero? For me, I thought time was the way to do that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Now I’m so curious about the points in history we visit from the 1910s through the 1950s, season one and two. The show depicts a variety of ways that people resist forces like colonialism and racism from Isak’s secret anti-imperialist efforts early on, to the homeowner who refuses to sell her land to a giant corporation or foreigners that don’t understand her. Can you tell us how you sort of wove these bigger themes, right, these commentaries on imperialism and fascism into the lives of these individuals?
SOO HUGH: I’ve always been interested in all the little ways that people can take a stand because so many times it’s so hard to be a hero. My kids, when they learn about heroes, they’re people who do big things. I wish I was a Rosa Parks. I wish I was a Martin Luther King. I wish I had that. I’m not right. So how does the everyday people make the little stands? And we really wanted to show those little things. And my favorite one, I think was in season two when little Mozasu is eating the Korean food and he’s being made fun of by his classmates for the stinky food. And he gets up on the table and he’s like, you know what? This is my food. I’m gonna tell you about it. Right. Does it stop the war? No. Does it change the course of history? No. But that little kid saying, this is who I am, and that really felt like part of the Pachinko language.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We actually have that clip to share.
CLIP: Pachinko
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. I love that. It was so sad he was punished for it afterward. I was very upset. Right. He’s trying to do good as well, but he ended up breaking the rules.
SOO HUGH: Yeah. Oh, he is so adorable.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and I mean, the actors across the board are really incredible. You worked with so many children on the series, too, and I’m wondering, was it difficult to sort of explain to these younger kids kind of what the story is and the era they’re living in?
SOO HUGH: It was like incredible. Like you didn’t need to explain anything. In some ways, I always tell, you know, some of our other older actors like, look at this.
He got it in one take. What going on here? Right? One, take! Children, child actors, if they’re really good. They just get it. I don’t know how. I don’t, I mean, we had the Young Sunja season one, right? Yu-na. Oh, she could just cry and you would believe it, and it would just come out of her, and afterwards, the minute the director says, cut, she’d smile. I was like, wait, wait, what just happened? You were just crying and now you’re smiling. She’s like, but that’s acting. Yeah, you’re right.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Speaking of Sunja, I would love to talk about the finale of season one, which ended by showing interviews with real life Korean women who moved or were forced to move to Japan around the same time as Sunja between the 1910s and fifties.
Much like the show, these interviews ground a history that can feel so far off from us. In terms of time, very much in the present, people are still alive, who went through much of what Pachinko depicts. So I’m wondering why it was important for you to show the real life Sunjas of the world at the end of season one and how you sort of tackled incorporating that part of the finale into the rest of the show thematically?
SOO HUGH: So a book that was a huge reference for us, this is book Hidden Treasures by this historian Jackie Kim. And she has studied, you know, it’s really spent her life studying and interviewing, especially the first generation Zainichi women. I think by the time we were filming that in season one of the registered first generation Zainichi and fact check me on this, but only 20 some are left alive, right?
So all of a sudden, and Jackie really gives voice to this, there’s this urgency to make sure that we get their stories. And the crazy thing is when, you know, when Jackie interviews them and she spent decades interviewing them, they feel like they don’t have a story to tell. They’re just like, I don’t understand. Like, why are you asking me about my life? My life is not interesting at all. I’ve done nothing with my life. I’m not a great person. And I remember like just feeling a little bit gut punched. You know when Jackie was telling me this, that these people feel like they’ve done nothing with their lives. Right?
So Jackie filmed the footage and sent it over to us and we edited it. And sometimes I would be live, I would stream in live while she was interviewing. Now. I can’t understand any of it ’cause they’re speaking this bizarre, wonderful language that’s neither Korean nor Japanese. It really is this amazing language that is forged between the mixture of the two.
And you just hear in these women’s voices like just being recognized for the life they lived. How. Just how special that was. And so like when we put it in the show, at first I was really worried I was gonna feel manipulative. I really was worried that it was gonna feel gimmicky. And then once we saw it edited in the finale, it’s like, no, this works. It just is. And that felt right.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Well, thank you so much, Soo, for joining us today. I really appreciate it. I am so excited to assure this series with my friends who have not seen it, and I very eagerly await a season three.
SOO HUGH: Thank you so much. This was fun.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Man, what a thrill. Getting to talk to Soo Hugh about this series, Pachinko really swept me up in its world almost immediately. It is both intimate and ambitious, in effect. I had a hard time wrapping my head around as a viewer until Soo talked to me about the idea of Mentos. These aren’t dispersed stories about different family members.
Each person is a new layer on the same painting, tracing their story. Along the curvatures and colors of the one that came before forging a new path that couldn’t exist without the previous ones. I’m gonna be real. I cried a lot while watching Pachinko, like good, cathartic heaving sobs. But our next guest is here to remind us there’s a very fine line between tears and laughter.
When we come back, we’ll be talking to comedian, podcast host and author Youngmi Mayer about her own Korean heritage, why she enjoys a playfully confrontational approach to comedy, and the consequences of laughing while crying according to her mom. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. We’re here with one of my favorite New York based comedians, Youngmi Mayer. She’s best known for hosting the podcasts, Feeling Asian and Hairy Butthole. Yes, you heard that right. As well as her new book. I‘m Laughing because I’m Crying. A memoir which traces Youngmi’s own experiences with her family across generations touching on many of the same historical moments that punctuate Pachinko.
She prides herself on being transparent, talking about uncomfortable topics that most people would avoid, and has spent most of her career interviewing other Asian American comics about things like generational trauma, cultural identity, and combating discrimination with her signature comedic flair. Of course, please welcome to the podcast Youngmi Mayer.
Youngmi How are you?
YOUNGMI MAYER: Hi, Gabe. I’m good. How are you?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Great. So Youngmi, thank you for joining us today. I’m really psyched to have you. We’ve been talking about the series Pachinko, but we also wanted to bring you on because you are the author of a book titled, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, which is very much about you, your ancestors, your perspective on the world, and touches a lot on the Japanese colonization of Korea.
So those are themes that obviously overlap with the series, but I kind of wanted to kick things off talking to you about your comedy and your work specifically. One project in particular, the first time I heard about you, you were hosting a podcast called The Harry Butthole Podcast, which is also the name of a show that you recently took to Joe’s Pub, which was presented by Margaret Cho.
And when I’ve seen you do standup, you’ve explained that this title was inspired by a Korean idiom. Could you explain how that saying kind of came into your life and why it felt like the right title for your projects?
YOUNGMI MAYER: So the name Harry Butthole is based on one of my oldest standup jokes. And I think part of that joke was talking about how, you know, my Korean mom, she would say all these like really intense roasts when I was growing up and she would like beat me.
So what, like the joke was basically like she would beat me and I would cry and then she would tell me jokes and I would cry and laugh at the same time. And then while I was crying and laughing, she would say, do you know what happens when you laugh and cry at the same time hair grows out of your butt hole?
And I just thought that was my mom’s like weird little thing that she made up to make herself laugh. But I started saying that joke on stage and a lot of Korean people in the audience would come up to me and be like, oh no, like all of our parents said that to us. That’s just like a really popular Korean saying. So basically the book is about obviously my life and I talk about sad stuff, but then I try to make people laugh about it. And get a hairy butt hole.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Exactly. That’s what we’re all working toward naturally.
YOUNGMI MAYER: Yes.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And you do talk about that in the forward of your book, how there’s a kind of difference that you can sense broadly between maybe Asian folks who are born in Asia, for example. You mentioned you were raised in Korea for the first few years of your life and then moved here and you kind of talk about maybe not having to grow within a lot of the racism that dominates and the white supremacy that dominates growing up in the United States as a person who is not white, right. How does it feel to sort of be one of, or what can seem like one of the few voices trying to like really push for a more accurate or whole understanding of Korean history and culture into the zeitgeist, like into modern media.
YOUNGMI MAYER: I do talk a lot about like Japanese colonization and like how that impacted my family directly, ’cause I come from a really poor, like rural family and as we all know, that’s who gets it worse like in the world. I can see the shift happening, obviously not from my work, but it seems important. ’cause when I first started standup comedy, I had a few jokes about like Japanese supremacy I like to call it, and like how they treat other Asians. Like they’re better like white supremacists, you know? And every time I made a joke like that, this is like, you know, like 2018, 2019, I would get the like an intense barrage of people being like, how dare you say things like that, you know, Asians fighting other Asians is bad and you’re harming other Asians. And I was like. I’m not trying to like harm anybody or like divide us. I’m just telling you like a big part of the history of my country. But to that point, like now, if I say a joke like that, people are like on board because now it’s like part of the public discourse and everyone kind of knows about it.
So just in that very short period of time, like people are like, oh, like this is factual and we understand it. And like there is room for humor you know, like for this historical event that happened. And it’s still like obviously a very complicated subject because so many Japanese Americans have gone through so many like horrendous things in this country that I am a citizen of, you know? So like it makes me feel like confused that people don’t know it. And then also like glad that people are talking about it.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Oh, sure. Absolutely. I mean, I think that was a big aspect of talking about Pachinko this episode as well, right? That it, it follows a Korean family throughout generations and sort of tracks how this Japanese violence in Korea reverberates.
And one of the main characters we follow is Korean American, mostly raised in the US and then moves back to Japan to visit his grandmother, who’s Korean, living there. And it’s so interesting to see those sort of threads tied throughout generations. And you also do something kind of similarly. You write about the experience of your ancestors in really vivid detail. And I’m curious, how did you research the stories of your family and what can you share about the process of how you navigated that emotionally?
YOUNGMI MAYER: The Korean American friends that I have, their number one thing is that they’re like, I don’t know about all this because my parents never talked about it. And I think the reasoning for that, my, you know, my assumption is that most, you know, immigrants when they do move to another country and they struggled and like they wanna protect their children from knowing about these bad things.
But I think in that like protection, like hiding, they do hide a lot of like what actually happened, like some good things and like parts of their culture, they might not know. And so the only reason that I have these stories and they’re so detailed, is because my mother is a very talented storyteller and you know, like in a lot of ways I am just like my mom and my grandma.
And I think just in my family, like my mother always had that talent and she was like a very outspoken person and she enjoys it. And so she tells like these very long, intricate stories and she remembers a lot of details. So essentially when I was writing the history of my family, these are stories that I heard all throughout my life growing up. You know, the only difference between me and all my like Korean American friends who are like, I don’t know anything about my country is that my mom just so happens to be a yapper, bitch. She loves yapping. She’s just yapping around like she says, she’s saying stuff that she should not have been saying, you know? But she just tells, she’s just like an open book. She loves attention and she loves talking.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I love that. Yeah. So your mother, is the archivist really behind the book?
YOUNGMI MAYER: Yeah. See yappers are good for one thing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: One of those stories that I think really stuck with me was you writing about the death of an uncle at the hands of the Japanese because he was perceived to be of high standing. He was a postal worker. And you write about the effect that this kind of traumatic experience had on your mother and how she might have a hard time may be heaping praise on anyone for fear that could lead to danger for a loved one again. In hearing that kind of story, you know, how do you sort of feel hearing it through your mom? And I’m also wondering where do you and your mom stand in terms of compliments today?
YOUNGMI MAYER: When she told me that story, it clicked to me on my own that, oh, that’s why when I was a kid, she would always tell me every single time I did well, she’d be like, don’t show off. And I think culturally that’s a very popular position for Koreans.
That was a theme of my one person pay – it’s based on the saying in Korea, [ Korean] like don’t show off. But in Korean it literally translates to don’t pretend that you’re high born because it’s like, don’t tell them that you’re high born like government worker, rich mans son because they will kill you. Like it’s like that kind of thinking.
And so there’s like this big cultural understanding in Korea that you should always be humble. And be like never proud. And I personally like for my mom and my grandma, like I believe so deeply that this definitely came directly from, you know, my grandmother losing her first son, which is like a big deal in Korea and probably after he died she was probably like, everyone, just keep your head down.
Don’t ever show off. Don’t tell them that you have a good job. I have worked on that to make sure that I unlearned that, you know, like this feeling of like shame whenever I do something well. But I know where it’s from now. You know, you hear these stories from your mom and you’re like, oh, no wonder, you know, now I know it’s ’cause my uncle died ’cause he worked at the post office.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I have read, I think you might have posted on social that you’re sometimes criticized for laughing at inappropriate times, like during funerals, but you see it as a tool of survival that you’ve maybe inherited from your family throughout generations. Can you tell us about maybe the power of comedy to confront grief and trauma and how that’s played a role in your life?
YOUNGMI MAYER: I think using comedy in that way, the power, I see it as a very loving, I don’t know, I’m getting emotional right now, but I see it as a very, very loving, selfless act to like when something’s really sad or hard that the person there are personalities, you know, like my mom and I think I’m like this ’cause of how I was raised, that in those moments when something’s really hard and bad, like there are people who, their first reaction is to try to make everyone feel better. Like, that’s how I see it, you know? And maybe that’s like that sometimes my mom takes it a little too far and she’s like joking.
I’m like, mom, there’s the casket is open still. Like, please. But like, it’s kind of a beautiful thing that that’s like where her mind goes to immediately, you know, like people are sad. Like, I see a sad face, I wanna make you happy. Like, I think that is like very powerful in like a very touching and beautiful way, you know? So in a lot of ways, you know, obviously I get really offended when people are like, why are you trying to make me laugh?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah.
YOUNGMI MAYER: But I’m just like. What are we gonna do? We’re gonna sit here and cry?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Oh, well, Youngmi, I think that’s like a perfect sentiment to end on. I am really thankful that you joined us today. As expected, I did laugh and cry while talking to you today, so thank you so much.
YOUNGMI MAYER: You did cry. I saw that. I’m sorry.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I know. So thank you again for joining us, Youngmi.
YOUNGMI MAYER: Thank you for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: What an amazing time I had chatting with Youngmi Meyer. If her mom was right, I am gonna need a serious waxing kit after that interview. We laughed, we cried, and we found power in being yappers. Thank you all for joining us this episode. I am so excited we got to spend time with both of these guests today.
Soo offered so much insight into Pachinko, not only by diving deeper into some of the series themes, but by sharing her process with us how she visualized the story using concepts from art historians, how crucial the set designers and location scouts and researchers were to telling the story accurately and why anchoring her adaptation of Pachinko between Sunja and Solomon helps ground this story in a simple but crucial question, what is home? And Youngmi was the perfect guest to join us for this episode, fearlessly and joyfully dismantling tropes while helping us learn more about why she values finding humor in moments of despair. Whether you’re facing generational trauma, a history of colonization that traumatized your family, or even the death of a loved one, sometimes you have to laugh first. It’s a cathartic and empowering act for Meyer. That seems to provide clarity and an incisive point of view as she recounts these experiences.
And ultimately, I wanna thank both our guests for their care and their patience. I’m sure it can be challenging to say the least, having to be both storyteller and history teacher when sharing your art with audiences that might know very little about Korean history and how it reverberates through generations to impact folks like Soo and Youngmi to this day, but by boldly diving into these stories and asking audiences to do the same, they’ve woven together projects spanning generations that find the universal in the specific.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Because the Peabody’s are decided unanimously, every episode I bring you the quote that we chose unanimously as our most disruptive moment. Behold:
YOUNGMI MAYER: Yappers are good for one thing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That’s it for this week. Please join us next time when our guest will be the multihyphenate Sharon Horgan, actor, writer, and creator of the darkly comedic Peabody Award-winning series Bad Sisters.
SHARON HORGAN: I’m inspired by the women I see around me. I am, you know, constantly have an open notebook of things that I think are stupid, little, intimate, almost banal moments that I think, well, you kind of hope that when an audience hears them, they relate to it, when they connect with it. And whilst it’s lovely to escape when you watch TV and to look at something that’s gorgeous and glorious and aspirational, and listen, I love that as well. I think there’s really nothing better than watching something that reflects how you feel and feeling understood because of that. I think it’s a wonderful thing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. The show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall. Producer Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. Associate producer, Bella Green. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Dreyer and Tunishia Singleton. From PRX: the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Edwin Ochoa and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.