Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed.

Juan Felipe Herrera: I also read poems that it’s just language that’s crashing and blowing up. And it’s meant to do that. It’s like my laboratory, too, where I twist the words around. And I break them. I’ll even invent words. And I’ll use the page with great delight. The page is just a beautiful canvas for me.

Jo Reed:  That is the former Poet Laureate of the United States, two-time NEA fellow and 2024MacArthur Fellow, Juan Felipe Herrera. We decided it was fitting to celebrate Herrera’s most recent honor and bring Hispanic Heritage Month to a resounding close by revisiting my 2015 interview with this extraordinary poet and writer.

Juan Felipe Herrera is a man of great humor, generous spirit and enormous talent. The child of Mexican immigrants, he is the first Latino to be named Poet Laureate of the United States. Herrera grew up in California traveling up and down the coast with his parents who were farm workers. He inherited his love of language and poetry from his mother who was his first and best teacher. His delight in language is evident as is his understanding of language's power to open doors to new worlds. He is a prolific writer, according to the Library of Congress he has published over 30 books— they include collections of poetry, novels in verse, and children's books. His writing can be experimental in form-- Herrera is never afraid to push himself and play with language or with subject matter. Although much of his writing concerns Chicano culture and life in the barrio or in the fields, as his book, Senegal Taxi demonstrates, Herrera is willing to turn his poetic eye on global issues.  

Juan Felipe Herrera: This is a poem from Senegal Taxi and this is one of the children whose name is Abdullah, who is running away from the massacres that have taken place in Darfur and along with his sister, Sahil, and his brother, Abrihin, they’re trying to get to Senegal and hopes of getting further-- wherever that could be-- and this on the way from Darfur to that magical city and that magical place in Senegal. 

Abdullah, the village boy with one eye. All darkness in my eye, even though the sun perches on a limb next to me, webs of light in the stars that I speak to drooling my arms ahead of me. Where? Where? They ask me in starry breath pieces. Why are you running child? They say. Why through this smooth wind under the moon? I tell them that I cannot see, that I can barely breathe, that all is gone, just me now, my sister, gone back, my brother gone forward too soon, too fast, too long. I want to wrap all the trees on my back, tie all the threads of stone and rag and bone, so I will not get lost. Do not hurry the starry ash mouths say. You will live. I do not know, I say. I do not know if I am living or dead or nothing or something, or maybe I’m a giraffe, a giraffe dreaming of walking, dreaming of a giraffe that sings hungry and thirsty, for a name, a name, like Abdullah, who knows hunger and fire. I lift my branch and toss the sun and pull down the moon and bring up the breath under my face with spotted skin, with scars in the shape of cracked crystals. 

Jo Reed: Juan Felipe Hererra, thank you so much for that. That’s from Senegal Taxi. You know, it’s interesting, because on one hand,Senegal Taxi is quite different for you and on the other hand, it’s not different at all. Even though you often write about Chicano culture and Chicano history and California, I think it’s fair to say displaced people is a subject of yours.

Juan Felipe Herrera: It’s a subject of mine, you know, I think we’re all displaced right now, we’re all being displaced right now. No matter how hard we hold on to whatever we want to hold on to-- our house, our family, our neighborhood, our community, ourselves-- we’re being dislodged at every moment with all the pain and shotguns and massacres and firing upon each other, and of course the larger global violence and the poverty and just all the clashes of people against people. So in my writing, I want to address all communities, you know. I’ve spent many years talking about Chicano culture, Chicano history and at the same time, I’ve also been in many communities and presented my work in many communities, in many classrooms, and that’s where my vision is and my delight is and my heart is. I want to for sure, write at a global level and, in this case, about Africa and some of its peoples as best as I can, and it’s a good thing for me, personally, it’s a good thing for my writing as well. But it’s also good, I hope it is, a good model for all of us to cross borders regardless of our, apprehensions about it, “I can’t do that,” or “I don’t know how to write from that space, or from that cultural stance and I’ll be doing harm if I do.” All those doubts that are, in many ways, you know, we’ve talked about those things for a number of decades of appropriating these other groups' culture and making some kind of caricature out of it and doing more harm than good. So it’s a risk that I wanted to take that I encourage in the 21st century. Because we need to be united more than divided and sometimes we have to take those kinds of risks as writers, as long as we stay very close to the experiences at our core.

Jo Reed: Well tell us the experience at your core. Tell us your story and the story of your parents.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Well, you know, it’s a story that’s been unfolding all my life. My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution, and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement. My grandmother and my mom and my aunt Aurelia, my grandmother Juanita, my mom Lucia-- we lived on the outskirts of a barrio in Mexico City called Tepito, and Tepito for many, many decades was the largest barrio in Mexico and perhaps even Latin America. A boiling barrio of suffering and poverty, of course a very creative place because when you’re at the margins, you also see things from a very unique point of view and you create things, language and idioms and art and stories. They got on the train at the tail end of the Revolution. They came up north to Guerrero, Chihuahua at the very edge of the border with the United States and my uncles had already come up north and joined the Army as an effort to perhaps ease the crossing of the border for my mother, my grandmother and my aunt. So that’s how they crossed over. My mother was a washerwoman, or a woman that cleaned houses in Texas... in Plaxo, Texas, who always loved poetry and always loved stories. And as time went on, she was the youngest child and then she inherited all the photographs of my grandmother, who was being sent photographs by all the children, which there were eight children. And my mother liked the camera too, so she kind of was my photographer, mother and storyteller mom and poetry mom and performance mom, because she wanted to be an actress, but she was prevented from being in that world because a woman was not supposed to be in theater or dancing or going around “loosely” throughout the state and little troops where anything could happen, so that was a traditional point of view. So--

Jo Reed: But she passed it along to you.

Juan Felipe Herrera: But she decided to pass it along to me.  

<laughter>

Juan Felipe Herrera: So that’s kind of the beginning of my family stories. 

Jo Reed: Now you grew up going up and down the California coast, didn’t you?

Juan Felipe Herrera: Yes I did. Yes I did. I’ve always been on the move. My father was always on the move. We were always on the move in my father’s Army pickup. Since they were farm workers, my mother and father, and indeed from ranch to ranch, from field to field as a child, by the time I was around seven years old, it was time to hit first grade and we had kind of done the routes of the Central Valley of California and the small towns, Vista, California and even Escondido and for some reason, my father was like a donkey houte so he said, “Wow, we’re going to Ramona.” “Why are we going to Ramona?” “Well don’t you know at Ramona, they’ve got the best water?” So then we would go to Ramona. And then, after like maybe three months, he said, “We’re going to San Diego.” And then my mom said, “Well, why are we going to San Diego?” “They have the best climate in San Diego.” So we kept on moving. 

Jo Reed: English wasn’t your first language?

Juan Felipe Herrera: No. It wasn’t my first language. It was Spanish. That’s a whole other story. I only spoke Spanish. And my mother taught me Spanish from an old beat-up primer that she found in a thrift store in Spanish on how to read and pronounce letters. So she used that book. A natural teacher, she used that book. So that’s how I learned it as we were walking down the street too. Even on the sidewalk, she’d be making sure I knew my alphabet, and at home, reading and showing me the images of the letters which were accompanied by drawings, so I could read in Spanish before I went to school. But once I was in school, it was not allowed. I was not allowed to speak in Spanish and if I did, if I was late, which I was the first day, and I spoke in Spanish, the first day, because I didn’t know what was going on, my father just pointed me to this big cement building. He said, “There’s the school. There it is. Andale. Vamanos." Because he had, as a 14 year old, he had jumped on a train from that little village in Chihuahua and he made it all the way to Denver and in Denver, he stepped out of that train and he did the same thing. He had to look at buildings and find out where to go, and how to get things happening. Now that I think about it, that’s what happened to me. It was harsh, let me tell you. I was spanked. I was hit with a ruler, told to speak English, so I had to deal with that. I had to deal with that until Mrs. Sampson in third grade. And I wrote a children’s book about her. 

Jo Reed: Explain to the listeners who Mrs. Sampson was in your life.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Well, Mrs. Sampson was my third grade teacher. I wasn’t really speaking anymore because it was a kind of difficult world, you know, you’re going to face some consequences, especially in Spanish. So in third grade, she goes, “John, come on up and stand in front of the class, okay? I want you to sing a song.” I said to myself, “Sing a song? I can’t even speak in class and all of a sudden I’m asked to be singing a song?” And she was very encouraging and her tone... it was an invitation. So I got up in front of the class and I sang "Three Blind Mice." And after I finished singing "Three Blind Mice," she said, “You have a beautiful voice. You have a beautiful voice.” I didn’t say anything. I knew what she said. And I knew those words. It was like a sign I had never seen, it was actually a map for the rest of my life that I was going to need to discover my voice and I was going to need to discover the beauty of my voice and in turn, encourage others to acknowledge their voices and to acknowledge the beauty of their voices. So that’s why I’m here.

Jo Reed: When did you discover poetry? Or creative writing? When did you begin writing? 

Juan Felipe Herrera: Well, you know, like the formal stuff, like cracking sentences and moving words around, I kind of started with my mother’s talent, my mother wanting to play word games with me and a billion stories that she told me day after day and real, real stories, I mean, you know, woman’s stories that her life as a young woman and what she had to deal with in life as a woman, like those stories about joining the theater now. So she started me going with language games and verbal art.

Jo Reed: Now, you went to UCLA, as you mentioned earlier. And it was during the civil rights movement and the Chicano movement was starting at that time. And that had a great influence on you. Talk about the influence that it had on you and on your work and how you proceeded.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Geez, you know that’s a very big question. That’s like a year. We have to spend a year talking about it. Going from a little apartment in San Diego, a fifty dollar a month apartment, sleeping on the sofa, my little mother and myself. My father had passed away a few years earlier. So, imagine leaving that little apartment and the kind of world I had lived in, even though I was in high school. And I joined every organization you could ever join because I lived downtown. And what am I going to do downtown other than walk around and look at things, which I did, and window shop, which I did. I’m an expert window shopper. I’ve got medals in window shopping <laughs>. So, I got in a car with my buddies who also got an EOP scholarship, Equal Opportunity Program scholarship, to UCLA. And I left my mom. I said, “Bye, Mama, adios.” And that’s the last time we were together as a little unit, mother and son. And for me, as a wild teenager, it was no problem. But now that I think back, it was a big move. It was a big old move. But yeah. So, I got in that crazy car, and landed in UCLA. So, because I felt I was kind of cloistered up in my world as an only child living with my mom and living in little apartments, always moving, never really having a neighborhood because I was going from neighborhood to neighborhood. So, when I got to UCLA at thirty-five thousand students and the big old campus, I thought this was Lego Land. I could build anything I wanted and go anywhere I wanted. So, I got a little lost in that in a sense. I got lost. And the medium that got me together was becoming part of the, of the Chicano student organization on campus. So, I became part of that organization and part of the campus. It was music and jazz and cultural, political, social, social change oriented way of seeing things. It kind of created a constellation for me that included my family, my upbringing, my language, and my way of seeing things as a farm worker child and young man. And at that time, Cesar Chavez had just began in ’64 the United Farm Workers Movement. So, as I stepped into campus in ’67, the farm worker movement had also stepped in, and Martin Luther King, and the women’s movement, and the gay movement, and the student movement, global student movement. So, I was right at the heart of that. And that was the cauldron where I shaped and catapulted and cooked and spiced up this thing called my voice that turned into poetry.

Jo Reed: Your poetry is... it’s experimental in form. And you move from one form to another with such ease. But you’re such a storyteller. And your poetry, a lot of your early poetry particularly, it’s very autobiographical. And you’re telling the story of the campesinos. You’re telling the story of what it means to be Chicano, what it means to try and cross borders.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Yes, you’re right. You know, it's... I tell the story because it’s my experience. I also tell the story because it’s the experience of many Latinos and Latinas whether they’re in the United States or just coming in first generation, or in Latin America, or throughout the Caribbean, and many peoples that have experienced the immigrant experience and migrant experience. So, I wrote it right from my heart coming out to our communities. And I also wrote it as creating a panorama that I thought wasn’t available and that, as students at that time and still today, we feel it’s not available and not present in the media, or in the bookstores, or in the libraries, that we tell our stories in this manner, perhaps in new forms because we just need to be heard like everybody needs to be heard. And we want all voices. And it’s also beautiful to write, you know? It’s beautiful to write. It’s beautiful to use indigenous words.

Jo Reed: I was going to say because some of the poems, some are in English. Some are in Spanish.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Some are in both.

Juan Felipe Herrera: It’s like Stevie Wonder. You’re playing like four keyboards at the same time. I encourage that. And you’re right. And different mediums, different registers, different styles, different genres, it’s a very beautiful experience. And of course, this is the experience of the 21st century.

Jo Reed: I think this poem really kind of speaks to this, "Ricardo Slick Ric Salinas." I think that gives a good sense. I was looking for it, sorry. I should have marked it better.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Ricardo Slick Ric Salinas is a really great friend of mine. He’s part of a performance group called Culture Clash. And this poem is kind of... being involved in this cultural fair on 24th Street in the Mission District in San Francisco. And it used to take place every year. It may have changed. Ricardo Slick Ric Salinas was a rapper. He was a rapper and a performer and also a DJ, rapping at the 24th Street Fair, San Francisco. And the year must have been 1982.

You look so slick in your hot lemon parachute pants and your cutoff tank, dude. The Achaias and Dominique doing a spin on the staging. I remember when you were writing love letters to her. That’s what I’m saying. And I had Margie’s photo on the wall back in that sugar shack on the hill. When we were doing teatro for Reese Veldez. I mean the wall looked like some kind of 1969 North Beach poster shop. But they closed them down. And the teatro season is over, except for Herb. He just got a gig with Teatro Esperanza, right? It’s not movement anymore, Carnel, not really a street fair either. It’s something else. You know what, Slick? I got a feeling your rap got through the cut on the great wall where despair set in long ago. Good times. We had good times. We were--

Jo Reed: Good poem.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Thank you so much. Yeah, we were in Teatro Campesino for a season.

Jo Reed: But what you do with your poetry is it’s so accessible. And often with experimental poetry, one feels that the poet is writing for him or herself. And this is me speaking just for me. What you do is you include us. You’re like putting your arm around us and saying, “Here, you might not have looked at this before, but look at this with me.”

Juan Felipe Herrera: That’s true. I believe in that. I believe in that. I believe in when you’re reading, I believe in communication. I read in front of audiences. And sometimes, I’m reading something really deep and really heavy, you know. And you’ve got to look up at the audience on occasion. And I look up. And the audience’s faces are like sad. And they’re like sallow and sometimes crying. I go, “Yeah this is a good poem I think. But you know what? I don’t think I want to be part of making an audience look like that. Geez, it looks like they’re suffering out there.” <laughs>. So, I get involved, but not everyone’s like that, responds like I do. I remember touring with Amiri Baraka and he read like he was on fire everywhere he was. It didn’t matter if he had two people or it was standing room only with a line going out the café or reading. He was just booming and bursting. And I wasn’t because if there’s four people, I’m going to read to those four people. I’m going to be mellower. You know, this whole thing is, it’s like you're always examining your life in your poems and what you’re saying and how you say it and with the audience. The audience is you in many ways, too. You look at the audience. You go, “Oh, this is what I’m writing. This is how they’re feeling. This is how I’m feeling. This is what’s in this poem. Okay. All right.” And sometimes, I improvise on the place where I’m at. I used to do that a lot. And I don’t really recommend it because I’d go around town and listening and taking in people’s conversations. And I’d ask them a couple of questions because I was interested. And then I would do a little improv about what I had heard, but just a light-handed, nice, almost funny and sometimes funny, little improv intro before I read the poems. It does not work all the time. Your audience teaches you a lot of things and reflects who you are. So, geez, you know, it’s one thing is the writing getting your work out and finding new ways of writing. And then there’s finding ways of what the stage is all about, the performance is all about, the reading is all about, and who’s there is all about. And of course, you want to address your audience. In certain places, I just know I can go all out, all bilingualed out. I can just let my bilingual ’57 Chevy roll out and have a great time. Or I can talk about particular experiences that I know I have in common with the audience. Then again, I also read poems that it’s just language that’s crashing and blowing up. And it’s meant to do that. It’s like my laboratory, too, where I twist the words around. And I break them. I’ll even invent words. And I’ll use the page with great delight. The page is just a beautiful canvas for me. And I’ll do that with a poem.

Jo Reed: You received two NEA grants.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Yes, I did.

Jo Reed: Where were you as a poet when you got-- do you remember?

Juan Felipe Herrera: I remember, I was in San Francisco, 1979. I got my first NEA grant when I was at Stanford. But I moved into San Francisco into the Mission District. I was writing this very intense collection called Akrilica, acrylic in Spanish and translated into English through my friends. I told them, “I don’t want to translate this. I have burned my whole body up with this book.” So, that’s where I was. I was into-- I had left my kind of Chicano literary, cultural voices. And I moved into Vayehi Neruda, Garcia Márquez approaches with my writing in Spanish and translated into English. So, I got into a very delightful beautiful palette. The book is called Acrylic, which the book functions like a gallery of paintings. So, I enjoyed creating poems that were murals, poems that were watercolors, poems that were experimental plays. I just loved writing that book. Anyway, that’s where I was, before I get into the book too much. So I wrote the proposal and I got the grant. It made me feel like I was on my way to being a poet. You know how we think of becoming poets. So that made me feel like I was becoming a poet even though I had been a poet for a decade. You know, it helped me a lot. It gave me a sense of place to be. And of course, it helped me financially to do everything I needed to do and find time to write. 1985, I got the second grant. And I was in dire straits. It was even worse straits than I had been in 1979. And I was in between worlds. I finished up at Stanford, had two degrees. I was writing, a lot of writing experiments in my mind. I wanted to write something called Bato Gula. And it was a collection of scribbles. I was thinking at that time that process was more important than product. I was thinking at that level at that time. That was where my experimental writing life was at. I was looking at covers or books and writing cover poems. And I was into, very deeply into writing about process. So, when that grant came in, it helped me pay these immense bills hanging over my immense head at that time <laughs>. And I could really, really get into the books that I was developing in the mid ‘80s.

Jo Reed: Now, did you have an inkling that you were going to be named U.S. Poet Laureate?

Juan Felipe Herrera: No, no, no. There were no-- there was no ink and no inkling <laughs>. There was neither one taking place regarding U.S. Poet Laureate. The dream did pass through my mind, maybe two, three years earlier. But it passed very quickly. But I said, “No, that’s not going to happen. Let me get back to reality here and do what I do and teach and finish teaching, retire, and then just write, just write. I’ve got a lot of ideas for projects.” And that’s where I was when I got the call.

Jo Reed: But you had been Poet Laureate of California.

Juan Felipe Herrera: That, too. See, that was another lightning bolt. It’s like all the other lightning bolts. And I had been nominated to be the California Poet Laureate. And I was very happy to be nominated. And I was thankful to the California Arts Council for nominating me. But I said, “Come on, California Poet Laureate.” 

Jo Reed: The projects that you did as Poet Laureate of California, such as “The Most Incredible and Biggest and Most Amazing Poem on Unity in the World”… And how do you not love that title, never mind the concept behind it?

Juan Felipe Herrera: That’s right.

Jo Reed: Which is a poem that's written by California residents.

Juan Felipe Herrera: That’s right.

Jo Reed: Can we look at your projects as Poet Laureate of California as an indication of what you might do as U.S. Poet Laureate?

Juan Felipe Herrera: Yes, yes you can because it’s all about including people. And it’s all about honoring people’s languages and voices. It’s all about honoring everyone in the United States, their vision, and what moves them, and their reflections, and their inspirations. Some of the deepest things we have in our lives, in our fast, rushing, working hour, day to day obligations is those set of reflections and that soft, soul-like heart that beats and dreams and feels. That’s where the poetry is. And that’s who I am calling. I’m calling everybody’s heart to speak out. So, in a way, that’s going to be very similar. The banner is Casa de Colores, house of colors. This includes everybody, not just two or three colors, all colors, all languages, and all voices. 

Jo Reed: I feel like we’ll be in very good hands Juan Felipe. And I want you to read one more poem... One of the letters to Victor?

Juan Felipe Herrera: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, you know Victor Martinez was a beautiful, extremely brilliant-- he was a guy I would go to and ask about what on Earth is Heidegger talking about? He could churn it out. He could crunch it. And he was a really good-hearted man. He passed away in 2011, lung cancer. And I felt it. And I miss him. But he knew about these poems <laughs>. “Undelivered Letters to Victor, Number Nine,”

I want to rock in Teddy Matthews’ America, in his hula palace. Remember Teddy Matthews? Teddy out gay talking about Nicaragua, doing the reading series at Modern Times? Teddy working hard through AIDS, through pain? And in the end, with god face, febrile fingers, and starry eyes? Teddy’s drawn face calls and calls. And his clear eyes peer through me. Battles, missions, random intersections, chaos, time, and culture boosters, explosions. I want writing to contain all this because we contain all this. Is this closer to what you mean by saying, “We are Americanos”? Is this your mission? You know, Victor, I’m going to say it. No more movements. Nothing about lines or metaphors or even about quality and craft. You know what I mean?

Jo Reed: Juan Felipe, thank you so much.

Juan Felipe Herrera: Thank you. It’s an honor. Thank you so much.

Jo Reed: Thank you. We just heard my 2015 interview with former Poet Laureate of the United States, two-time NEA fellow and 2024 MacArthur Fellow, Juan Felipe Herrera.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and if you like us, leave us a rating. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Juan Felipe Herrera: I tell the story because it’s my experience. I also tell the story because it’s the experience of many Latinos and Latinas whether they’re in the United States or just coming in first generation, or in Latin America, or throughout the Caribbean, and many peoples that have experienced the immigrant experience and migrant experience. So, I wrote it right from my heart coming out to our communities. And I also wrote it as creating a panorama that I thought wasn’t available and that, as students at that time and still today, we feel it’s not available and not present in the media, or in the bookstores, or in the libraries, that we tell our stories in this manner, perhaps in new forms because we just need to be heard like everybody needs to be heard. And we want all voices. And it’s also beautiful to write, you know? It’s beautiful to write. It’s beautiful to use indigenous words.

Music Credits: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed.  Today I’m happy to welcome Soo Hugh, the showrunner and writer of the Pachinko, a compelling series from Apple Plus that spans four generations of a Korean family living through war, occupation, and displacement. Based on Min Jin Lee’s novel,  Pachinko follows the journey of Sunja, a young Korean woman whose life is changed in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation of Korea. She becomes pregnant by Hansu, a wealthy and (as she finds out later) married man. She faces a choice that will reverberate through her family for decades to come: She can stay in Korea, where Hansu will always make sure she is taken care of financially  or accept an offer of marriage from a minister  Isak and immigrate to Japan, where she will almost certainly struggle to make ends meet but will be able to give her child a family.  Knowing she might never return to her homeland, she moves to Japan  where she and her family confront the widespread bigotry against Koreans, struggling to survive and thrive in a society that views them as second-class citizens.

The series weaves between two timelines: one that follows Sunja from her youth under Japanese rule through World War II and its aftermath, and another timeline in 1989, where her grandson Solomon faces his own challenges as a Korean raised in Japan attempting to make it big in the world of finance. With its exquisite production and brilliant acting across the board, Pachinko is epic in scope but intimate in focus, highlighting themes of survival, belonging, and legacy across generations. With the Season 2 finale airing this week,  Soo Hugh joins me to talk about the emotional heart of the story, the challenges of filming with an international cast, across three countries in multiple languages, and how Pachinko captures the universality of this family's specific experience.

Soo Hugh, welcome! Thank you for joining me.

Soo Hugh: Oh, thank you.

Jo Reed: Soo, I can't think of another show, another television show that I've been so emotionally engaged with as "Pachinko."

Soo Hugh: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you.

Jo Reed: Some of those characters are more real to me than my neighbors. And so, there's so much I want to talk about here and I want to begin with-- season one is subtitled “ home” and season two is subtitled  “family” and in some ways, I really think that does set up season two. So, why don't you talk about why it's unfolding under the umbrella of family?

Soo Hugh: I love that you were able to just really root that out. I mean, if season one is not just home, but the loss of home, right? It's season two feels like a chance for our characters to find out how they can create a new home and I think for us, we always keyed in this idea that at the end of the day, whether you're in a country that doesn't want you, no matter what the times or circumstances, that a family built a home together and that's one of the reasons why we changed that opening title sequence for season two, because we have so many more characters and this idea that they've really brought this family together to create this second home.

Jo Reed: I'm curious how the tone of season two changes as we move into an historical period more of us perhaps are familiar with. That is World War II, the occupation and after the occupation. That's a lot to grapple with.

Soo Hugh: What's interesting-- one of the things that I discovered when I was starting this project was I thought I knew World War II fairly well. You get really confident about certain things in history because you've been so exposed to them and especially in movies. But then you realize "Wait, we don't know this story at all from the other perspective," right? Having grown up in the States and taking history classes here, it's really humbling to know just "Ah, my experience of some big historical event is very, very limited." So, all of a sudden, we had to reconfigure our knowledge of World War II from the Japanese point of view, specifically our characters, who were on the home front and just really shocking to all of a sudden just learn everything all over again.

Jo Reed:  Well, the series moves through two parallel timelines—it’s not told chronologically. The story of the older Sunja and her grandson Solomon takes place over one year 1989, whereas the historical part of the story moves through 40 years.  I wonder how this adds to the dynamic of the show.

Soo Hugh: So, I always loved this idea of the present day feeling almost like-- each season of the present day in 1989 is one season in a year-- so, spring, summer, fall, winter-- and especially because in Asian art, seasons are so important and so, I wanted to pay homage to that tradition. But then in our past storyline, I very much wanted to feel like this rocket ship that you're traveling in time. It's so fast and this idea is eventually at the end of our show, the two timelines will collide into one another, the past and present.

Jo Reed: Here's the thing, though, because even though things are going so rapidly in the historical part of the series, I love the way you give the characters time to breathe. The care that's taken with making rice, for example. You just give them that moment that's so important.

Soo Hugh: We always called it the breathing space in the edit room. There are times when you really just want the audience to feel immersed in a scene and you only get that if you control the editing. So, you don't cut away. As someone who just sometimes feels like modern day storytelling, modern day cinema just feels so fast and I think there's definitely a time and place for that style. But for this show, we looked at a lot of paintings as references, interestingly enough, as opposed to some movies and with a painting, you give the viewer the power to linger on an image and we really wanted to capture that experience in the show.

Jo Reed: Well, you've made this over a number of languages, three languages, three continents. So many of the actors had to be multilingual and move from Korean to Japanese and back again, often in a single sentence. How did that complicate casting for you?

Soo Hugh: Oh, it was a headache. But at some point, we threw it away. At first, we were trying to find our unicorn. "Who's that unicorn that's going to be able to speak one or two or three languages?" and then you realize at the end of the day, the performance needed to trump everything else. So, we asked actors just to audition in the language they felt most comfortable, whatever their native language in and then we just really trusted the process with all of our language coaches or dialect coaches. We had this army of just language historians and so, when you look at someone for like Eunseong, who plays little Mozasu, eight-year-old Mozasu in season two, Eunseong, who just stole the show so many times, in real life, he speaks only Korean. But so much of his dialogue is that back-and-forth ping pong between Korean and Japanese and I was really worried whether or not this nine-year-old child was going to be able to do this and he nailed it. He was so professional. It was amazing to see him on set just effortlessly go through all of it.  You know what's really funny? When you think about it, it in some ways works with our show's themes, right? The adults, we complicate things. We create war. We create these battle lines and these boundary lines between countries and there's something about our child actors that make it feel just language so effortless. So, you feel like if you followed their lead-- boundaries, languages, all of it would just be so easy.

Jo Reed: There are real differences in the way films and television are made in the US, Korea, and Japan. So, how did you navigate all these cultural differences?

Soo Hugh: Oh, I mean, I always wish there was a documentary crew following us around, especially in the first season, because it would be a comedy, which would be funny because it would be so much of us learning from our mistakes and that cultural difference that you talk about. Again, it's that transcendence of the human experience, where you start set and you're hearing all these languages and everything takes so long. I know a scene normally would take two hours to shoot takes four hours to shoot because of all the interpreters on set and everyone's pulling their hair out wondering "Is this person understanding what I'm saying?" and then within a few weeks, you just see how everything settles and it's this natural rhythm that happens where all of a sudden, people are finishing each other's sentences in a language they don't even speak and someone could just point at something already like "I get it." I thought it was really inspiring. I was moved so many times on set just seeing all these differences, all the wrinkles work out, if that makes sense. The western crew learned so much from our Japanese crew or Korean crew and likewise, I think they learned a lot from us. So, by the end, it was this melting pot of just experiences and practices. It just worked.

Jo Reed: The acting is truly amazing—academy award winner Youn Yuh-Jung, am I saying her name correctly?

Soo Hugh: Yeah, YJ. I call her YJ 

Jo Reed: I'll do that too. YJ as the older Sunja and Lee Minho as Hansu, the father of Sunja’s older son. They are both stars and give extraordinary performances. But then there's this glorious unknown actress Minha Kim who plays Sunja throughout the historical part and ages from teenager to middle-aged woman and she's one of those actresses who just draws you in immediately. How did you find her?

Soo Hugh: I mean, it took us a while. For Sunja especially, she was one of the later roles cast and I have to say I was panicking at some point in season one when we hadn't found her. We auditioned so many really, really strong actors, but none of them felt like they were Sunja yet, especially when you have someone like YJ. It had to be someone who's going to be able to hold up that character in the past storyline and then our casting director, Su Kim, in Korea, texted me one day and said "I'm going to send you a tape. Watch it now. I think we found her," and I was very skeptical when I got that text, by the way, because I was starting to become a little bit despondent about whether we had to settle on another actress and then I saw the tape, Min-Ha's tape, and she was reading the scene where Hansu tells her he's married and this unknown, she's sobbing on tape and she has just her face. There's nothing performative about it. She was really in it. We brought her back quite a few times and we really put her through the paces because she's never done anything on this scale before. I don't think she'd ever done a TV show before in Korea and there's something about taking the responsibility of being number one on the call sheet that I think is really important that actors understand and so, having seen her multiple times, we were really pretty convinced she was the right Sunja for us.

Jo Reed: Absolutely!  The scene I’m about to discuss has already aired, I think it’s the second episode, so no spoilers if you’re caught up. But the scene in which we see Isak, Sunja’s husband, return from prison and he's a dying man. He’s come home to die. First, that episode is just heartbreaking.  But I also really appreciated the camera work.  I think, in some ways, the shot echoes season one, the first time Sunja and Isak make love. Only this time he's dying. It's just a beautiful, emotional scene and they're both wonderful in it. Can you talk about filming that?

Soo Hugh: I'm so glad that you picked that up. That was directed by Leanne Welham and shot by Ante Cheng and Ante was with us on season one as well and shot that episode that you're talking about, where Sunja and Isak for the first time make love once they get to Japan and we talked about how this feeling of life and death, this cycle, we wanted to really bring some poetry to the similarities in some ways. So, the camera work is exactly the same, just like you picked up on. So, that's amazing. Thank you. Especially with Steve who plays Isak, I remember when we shot the lovemaking scene in season one, just in season one in general, Steven, he was so nervous. He hadn't done that many roles yet either. He was fairly new, as an actor to the film scene and how nervous he was in season one and then watching him in season two, I mean, just how much more of a confident actor he was in that scene. He knew he had such a huge task of wanting to be authentic and they were like crying on set. It was a really emotional scene to film.

Jo Reed: I'm sure it was. It’s a very emotional series.  In season one, when Sunja is leaving for Japan and saying goodbye to her mother who she may never see again, that clearly just tore at the heart. But what was unexpectedly moving for me where I was full out sobbing was the scene in Osaka shortly after Sunja had arrived and her sister-in-law had washed her clothes and Sunja starts weeping because the smell of Korea in her clothes is gone. Oh my, that was so vivid. Anyone who has ever been homesick will understand that immediately.

Soo Hugh: I mean, so, it's interesting that you say that because I remember worrying about that scene, whether it would be too intellectual of an idea, right? I get it on an intellectual idea, but will the audience get it on an emotional level that this woman is crying over something as silly as laundry and when Min-ha did that scene, I remember her that how close she put that piece of whatever clothing was up to her nose. She couldn't even separate it from her body and so, I had a feeling "Ah, I think it's going to work." So, I'm so glad to hear that it was emotional for you.

Jo Reed: Oh, very, very. We mentioned World War II.  Sunja's brother-in-law is in Nagasaki and so, we clearly know we're going to engage with the dropping of the bomb at some point. Talk about the way you approach that.

Soo Hugh: There were a lot of conversations about Nagasaki. I mean, I had not seen "Oppenheimer" yet and I'm curious if they had the same conversations on "Oppenheimer." There was something about Nagasaki that gave me pause as to whether or not this is one of the failures of cinema, right? The failures of the visual representation mode is “can the camera possibly pick up or create the same horror that it really is or does it feel like it's entertainment for the sake of entertainment?” There's something just false and dirty about that. So, we had lots of talks about " Do we put archival footage in, historical footage in instead?" and at the end of the day, we decided just to stay on Isak’s brother and sort of have the camera just go to this bright light and do it as simply as possible because I think there's just no way. I think there's no way the camera's going to be able to pick up the true experience of what it was to live in that moment. So, I just didn't want to try.

Jo Reed: And you were also filming in black and white.

Soo Hugh: No, we didn't film in black and white. We filmed in color and it wasn't until we edited in color, all of it was in color and it wasn't until very, very late in the process, what we call the color grading process. So, once the whole episode's been edited, we go into the grading suite with our grader, Joe Gawler and that's when you fine tune the look of it, the color of the episode and Joe had just done a black and white film that looked gorgeous and then it was like "Let's look at it. Let's just try it." So, it's almost like, really, at a push of a button, you take all the color away and it just all of a sudden it was really transformative.

Jo Reed: Well, Sunja and her family are fortunate enough to be evacuated to the country and so, spared the horrific bombing. I was really so cognizant of "Oh, we're in the country for the first time when we're in Japan," because we're always in a city in Japan and it made me think of Korea and those beautiful countryside scenes in Korea. I love those farm scenes. Can you talk about those when she and her family are evacuated?

Soo Hugh: Yeah. I'll tell you, it's a funny thing. So, we always said when we're looking for the rice fields-- because we knew that we had to take over a rice field to shoot. So, when we found that rice field, we had to plant all of our rice, our crew did. But we saw this one rice field early on when we were location scouting because it's such an important location in season two and this one rice field that we saw was just gorgeous. It was one of those terraced rice fields that had the sunset that went forever and ever and it just felt like that picture postcard perfect view and everyone was like "This must be it. This must be the right rice field," and yet, I really thought "This is not it," and they're like "Why? Look how beautiful this is. You can't get anything more beautiful." I was like "That's the problem. It's too beautiful." Because I think the reason why the rice field is so important in our show in the second season is not only does it represent escape and survival for Sunja, but we had to show that it wasn't supposed to be paradise, right? Because the war was still happening in the background. So, the rice field was too idyllic, was too just beautiful. Then somehow you felt like we're in a fairy tale of a story. I always called it "Let's not do Disney World for our rice farm." So, when we got to the rice farm to shoot, it was hard. There was bugs and mosquitoes and it was just a very, very hard set in some ways. But I think you see, even though it is a beautiful locale, you also see the hard work that goes into it, which I think is really important in the show.

Jo Reed: Well, you had an impressive lineup of directors for both seasons. So, how do you ensure continuity and vision and tone across the various directors while maintaining the core, the vision of the story?

Soo Hugh: I'm so grateful to our directors. We had two in the season one and three in season two. They spend months with us, right? It's not just fly in and do an episode and fly out. They're with us for prep and production through multiple countries and it really does become this collaborative family. What I love about this show is that when you look at all of our directors, they're very different. They're very different artistically, stylistically, temperamentally, even, and I think that really brings a lot to our show that we have such diversity. But I think the thing that really connects them all together that's crucial for "Pachinko" is that I feel all of our directors are true humanists, meaning they privilege the human experience, the human emotions over anything and I think you really see that in the work.

Jo Reed: Did you film all eight episodes at once in each season?

Soo Hugh: So, yeah, we shoot almost like a movie. So, we cross-board the entire episodes. So, all eight are shot together, meaning in one day of shooting, you can be shooting an episode from episode two and then the next scene that you shoot is from episode eight and it's because we just had to take advantage of the locations to shoot at the locations. So, it's really nutty, I have to say. For the actors, it's a huge challenge and again, it's a testament to them of how good they are, that they're able to really just flex that way. So, they're able to be Sunja in one year in one scene and then quickly change, quickly change and then rush to the other set and all of a sudden play 10 years later. It's amazing.

Jo Reed: I'm curious about the kind of adjustments or creative changes you and the team made from season one to season two, especially because now the cast and the crew are so much more familiar with the project and with the cast, especially the characters. You mentioned Steve playing Isak..

Soo Hugh: Yeah. There's always so many changes. I mean, season one, we shot in Vancouver-- for some of them, Vancouver, we moved to Toronto. This is interesting. I think it's something that most people won't pick up on. But season one was shot on a much wider aspect ratio. So, if you look at season one, the framing is much wider and in season two, we went to a little bit of a not as wide frame and I think that's because when I was in post, it's gorgeous. But so much of our show works on the closeups and I always said our closeups have to feel as epic as the widest landscape possible. One of the concerns I have from season one was that our closeups could have been more powerful, I think, just because of all that negative space around the face. So, in season two, that was a decision to go closer in and I really think you do feel it. I feel like it feels more intimate in season two with our actors and our characters. I'm not sure you can tell me if you felt that way, but it feels more intimate to me.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I think it does, too and I think when they're in their home or in the Korean ghetto, if you will, in Osaka, the narrowness of everything. You feel very close to it.  Min Jin Lee's book is more than 400 pages long, but it also spans more than 60 years. So, it really can only accommodate but so much attention to any given period. How did you fill in that space? How did you go about doing that, especially in season two?

Soo Hugh: I mean, this is why I think television is an extraordinary medium. In some ways, it's a really lovely cousin to the novel. I can't imagine "Pachinko" as a feature film two hours, it just, I don't think it's possible. And there's something about the translation to jump from the book to television, where in television, you can live with these characters from week to week, but also from years to years in future seasons that gives you -- we talked about breathing space earlier, but we don't have to rush so much. You talked about that rice scene and have the camera have time to linger in that bowl of rice. It was amazing to be able to think of scenes that aren't in the book that really help you get into our character's psyche. The Hansu earthquake episode in season one is an example of that. If we didn't have the luxury of television time, we wouldn't have been able to get into Hansu's backstory. But it feels so crucial to jump in there for us.

Jo Reed: Hansu is such a complicated character. He is the father of Sunja’s eldest child. He’s a gangster. He can be kind, but he is so deeply vicious and he lives in Japan among people who despise him because he is Korean and we see shades of that duality in the 1989 story--with Solomon, Sunja’s grandson as well.

Soo Hugh: I think, I mean, what you're pointing out, that rhyming, what we always call it on set is "How are we rhyming with one another? How is this character rhyming with this character?" Or "How is this timeline rhyming with this timeline?" We talk a lot about Hansu and Solomon rhyming with one another, in some ways. It's interesting that Solomon has no blood line similarities to Hansu and yet, he does feel like he's genetically-- he's somehow spiritually the heir to Hansu. I mean, for us, the question of Solomon is which path is he going to follow? He's caught between Hansu's worldview and his grandmother Sunja's worldview and that's always been his dilemma.

Jo Reed: The show explores themes of identity, belonging, family, loss over multiple generations and I wonder how you and the writers brought your own family experiences into the writer's room and how that influenced the story that you're telling.

Soo Hugh: I think I'm so lucky to have had, in both seasons, writer's rooms where it was filled with not just great writers, but people who came from such varied backgrounds. It was very important to me that we didn't just have Korean and Korean American writers, that we didn't have that very narrow point of view. We had a Nigerian playwright. We had a poet who had never even written a screenplay before. We had novelists. We had Chang-rae Lee and David Mitchell, who don't come even from the film and television backgrounds, just so many different writers from different modes and different experiences of different ages and different immigration backgrounds and yet, the thing that I think is so interesting was how similar so many of our stories were to one another, right? Everyone can remember that moment when they're watching over a parent and not knowing what to do because the parent's getting older and it really speaks to the universality of so many of our human emotions and I hope "Pachinko" speaks to that, that even though it's a story of this one specific family who lived in one specific time period, that there's also this feeling that "Ah, I know this family because this family resembles mine as well."

Jo Reed: Yeah, for sure. Can we just take a step back and tell me what inspired you to write for television and when and how did that begin for you?

Soo Hugh: So, it's this funny story. I always say I wish it was one of those things I could say "Oh, television and I were made for one another from day one." I was actually a terrible snob and I thought I wanted to be a movie writer and I wrote movies that never got made and I really disdain television, which is just ridiculous when you think about all this great television that was around me at that time and someone said "You should write for television." I said "No, I'm a movie writer. I'm not a television writer," and then my agent sent me the script for "The Killing." This is the US remake of the Scandinavian show and the pilot, I read it and I just got chills. I was like "Wow, this doesn't feel like a TV show." Again, my ignorance and I was really fortunate enough to have been hired on that show and what's amazing about television is you're in this writer's room with other writers and you don't do that with feature films and all of a sudden, you're in this community and it's really sacred being able to talk to other writers and go over a story and then a few weeks later, you're on set seeing actors actually say lines that you wrote. It's incredibly satisfying.

Jo Reed: The opening credits of "Pachinko" became iconic in season one and you introduced a new song for the opening credits in season two. But let's talk about the process of creating such a memorable sequence and how you wanted it to set the tone for the show because it's one of the first things we see every week.

Soo Hugh: So, what's interesting, when I was first thinking about the title sequence and I was talking to the producers about it, they were at first like "Wait, we don't get it. For such a serious show, does this feel tonally out of whack?" and I think that was exactly the point, which is life shouldn't feel one noted emotionally and that title sequence for me was really important because it really shows the full language of life, that joy is equally important as mourning or solace or any of the heavier emotions we sometimes deal with. Just also on a practical level, it's probably the happiest day of our shoot, both seasons. I remember both days really, really well when we shoot our title sequences and it's the first time our entire cast gets to come together. Our past and present actors never see one another, except for the day of the title sequence shoot and it really is just extraordinary.

Jo Reed: You launched the incubator program ‘Thousand Miles’ to support emerging Asian and Asian American writers. Tell me more about that program and sort of how it aligns with your vision of fostering new voices.

Soo Hugh: It was something that I was able to do through Universal and UCP when I had my deal there. We went through one cycle. I regret I'm no longer there, but I really have to give them a lot of credit because it wasn't a cheap program and they really put their money where their mouth was and we were able to foster over 35 writers. The goal of this program was to help people give them their first step forward because I know how hard it is to take that first step and I remember the people who helped give me mine and all we did was just give them, in some ways, a room of their own. Three of the writers were paid to write a script and I can't tell you how important that first paycheck is. The first time I got actually paid to write was the first time I legitimately felt like a writer. I think that paycheck, whether it's $10 or $100 or $1 million, it doesn't matter because it validates being a writer and that was really important to the program.

Jo Reed: And you also formed your own production company, Moonslinger.

Soo Hugh: We started Moonslinger about two years ago, my producing partner, Margo and I, and again, with this idea that we want to create film and TV that feels like it's made forever. What that means is that I grew up on movies that somehow endured and that felt like they were going to last beyond one season or one cycle. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to create hits. But I think there's a way, if you can, to create hits that also feel like they're going to speak to the future as well and not just for the time.

Jo Reed: And what do you hope "Pachinko" will mean to viewers years from now, to your children and grandchildren?

Soo Hugh: I think to my children, that's a really important thing. They don't watch "Pachinko" yet. They're a little too young to understand "Pachinko," but one day they will watch "Pachinko," I hope. They're mixed-race children and they have one step, not just in America, one foot not just in Korea, but also generationally, they're in this second, third generation. So, they're really out of this strange Venn diagram of not knowing what part of them belongs where. I hope "Pachinko" gives them a little bit of shading. I just hope "Pachinko" gives them a little bit of a richer sense of where they've come from, that helps them figure out who they are. I think it helped me. "Pachinko," without a doubt, helped fill in so many things for me as a person, beyond just a writer of who I am and where I came from. I hope it does the same for my daughters.

Jo Reed: We have two seasons to go. Am I right in assuming you have them all mapped out?

Soo Hugh: We're lucky enough to have future seasons. We definitely have more story to tell and we feel like they're urgent stories to tell.

Jo Reed: Well, with two seasons done, what have been your biggest takeaways as a showrunner and as a writer?

Soo Hugh: I think the biggest takeaway is these shows are possible. When I started almost five, six years ago, this idea of doing a multi-language, multi-national show, it felt like we were set up for failure. But now, again, through the universal language of cinema and filmmaking, it's not easy, but it's totally doable and it's worth it because I can't tell you just what it feels like to step on set, whether you're in Japan or Korea or Toronto, and seeing people from all over the world come together to tell a story and our crew really cared and that was also something that was really meaningful to me is it didn't feel they showed up on set for something that they weren't proud of being part of. They cared about being part of "Pachinko" and Pachinko couldn't be as good as it is without them caring. So, I think that's given me a lot of confidence as well.

Jo Reed: Okay. I think that's a good place to leave it, Soo. Thank you so much. Thank you for "Pachinko," truly.

Soo Hugh: No, thank you for your support and thank you for watching. It means a lot. It's important. Thank you.

Jo Reed: That was showrunner and writer Soo Hugh talking about the series Pachinko. The season two finale is airing this week on Apple Plus. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and if you like us leave us a rating! For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. 

Soo Hugh: I'm so lucky to have had, in both seasons, writer's rooms where it was filled with not just great writers, but people who came from such varied backgrounds. It was very important to me that we didn't just have Korean and Korean American writers, that we didn't have that very narrow point of view. We had a Nigerian playwright. We had a poet who had never even written a screenplay before. We had novelists. We had Chang-rae Lee and David Mitchell, who don't come even from the film and television backgrounds, just so many different writers from different modes and different experiences of different ages and different immigration backgrounds. Yet, the thing that I think is so interesting was how similar so many of our stories were to one another. Everyone can remember that moment when they're watching over a parent and not knowing what to do because the parent's getting older. And it really speaks to the universality of so many of our human emotions and I hope "Pachinko" speaks to that, that even though it's a story of this one specific family who lived in one specific time period, that there's also this feeling that "Ah, I know this family because this family resembles mine as well."