Ep 11 – Carmen Sandiego and Front Desk

If you’ve grown up playing Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, Lin wants you to know that you can relive its delights with Netflix’s Carmen Sandiego. It brings entertaining geography lessons alongside fun and dynamic adventures which prove Carmen to be a thief with a heart of gold.

Kelly Yang’s middle-grade novel Front Desk features the so-called “sandwich generation” of Chinese immigrants who came to North America in the 1980s-90s. Through the eyes of ten-year old Mia Tang, we grasp the multi-faceted experiences of struggling immigrants, while holding out hope for the better.

Question of the episode: What’s your experience with learning about the world—history or geography, for example—from fiction?

Join the conversation on Twitter at @World_ofStories or email us at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com. 

Transcript

Margrit 0:00
Welcome to World of Stories. I’m Margrit and my pronoun is they.

Lin 0:04
I’m Lin and my pronoun is she and we’re here to talk about diversity in storytelling.

Margrit 0:09
Yes, that’s it. And how’s your week been, Lin?

Lin 0:12
Well, I’ve been really busy this week because I’ve been getting my new release ready for publishing. It’s called Fly With Me. And Margrit was kind enough to beta read it for me.

Margrit 0:24
And it’s amazing. I’m here to vouch for it.

Lin 0:28
Thank you. It’s a–it’s an M/F novella. So that means a cis man and a cis woman, and they are both flight attendants and they fly back and forth between Toronto and Rome and Paris and London and along the way, they fall in love. So the hero is bisexual and the heroine is straight. They’re both Chinese Canadians. So that sort of my thing, I like writing about Asians, especially Asian immigrants, because that’s my own experience. And there’s lots of food in the book.

Margrit 1:10
You will be so hungry.

Lin 1:12
I know. I was so hungry when I was writing it. And it comes out February 28. And we’ll have some pre-order links in the show notes. So if you like romance novels, go check it out.

Margrit 1:29
And if you like feeling comforted and taken care of by your stories, this is the story for you.

Lin 1:36
Thanks.

Margrit 1:37
So what have you been watching or reading this week?

Lin 1:41
Well, when I found the time, I’ve really been enjoying Carmen San Diego on Netflix. It’s so good.

Margrit 1:49
I’m laughing because this was the first ever game that I’ve played on the computer.

Lin 1:54
It was the same for me!

Margrit 1:56
That’s ridiculous.

Lin 1:59
So a friend of mine had it–had the game on his computer. So I remember going over to his house when I was a kid. And he also had this set of encyclopedias. And we would sit there with encyclopedias open on our laps, and then every time the game would like ask us a question that we didn’t know, we’d be like, flipping through an encyclopedia, looking at like random flags of different countries trying to figure out the answers.

Margrit 2:23
That is so cool.

Lin 2:22
It’s so great. There was also a game show. Did you ever watch that?

Margrit 2:27
No, it wasn’t in Romania, it wasn’t like broadcast in Romania. So, I did not even know it, that there was a thing.

Lin 2:35
Yeah, so it was game show for kids. And it was like, same thing–trivia about random, not random, different countries in the world. And I loved that show so much. I watched it every single week. And I really wanted to be a contestant on the show, but I never figured out how to do that.

Margrit 2:53
Now. I want to watch it.

Lin 2:56
I don’t know. Maybe there are some old episodes lingering on Youtube or somewhere.

Margrit 3:01
Yeah? I’m gonna look it up.

Lin 3:03
So Netflix has remade this story into a TV show. The first season is nine episodes and 30 minutes each. And so–it’s very short, very fast. I flew through them in a couple of sittings because it’s just so good and really easy to watch. I do have to say though they’re a little didactic, which I know Margrit, you’re not necessarily a fan of.

Margrit 3:30
No, but it’s fine.

Lin 3:32
So there–it’s like half story, half, the story, right, of this character and her hijinks, and then half of it is a geography lesson. So they’ll actually be like, now we’re going to Indonesia and did you know that Indonesia’s population is however many millions and there are however many islands in Indonesia.

Margrit 3:51
That is cool, though, because it is a show for kids.

Lin 3:55
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, but it’s just a little–it’s not what you expect, right? So…

Margrit 4:01
Yeah,

Lin 4:01
It’s a hundred percent an educational show.

Margrit 4:06
Okay. I was gonna say that it’s got a, an unusual narrative structure. They’re breaking the fourth wall, which is okay.

Lin 4:14
Yeah, definitely. So it’s like half story, half geography lesson. But it’s good because it’s like that, as you say it’s an education for kids about different parts of the world.

So for people who do not know the story of Carmen San Diego, she is this super thief who’s very stylish. She wears this red trench coat and wide brim red hat. And she goes around the world, you know, traveling in style, and she steals expensive artifacts and jewels and art. And she’s very difficult–to be she’s very difficult to track. And the authorities are always trying to catch her but they never can. But there’s always this question of is she really a bad guy? Or is she a good guy? Or is she kind of like in between?

Margrit 5:06
Is she like a Robin Hood figure?

Lin 5:08
So in this iteration, she is. Where she’s stealing from this evil corporation and donating it to various charities.

Margrit 5:21
Wow, so, Robin Hood for the 21st century.

Lin 5:24
Yeah, exactly.

And, yeah, it’s great. And it’s a very diverse show. All the characters are very purposefully diverse. And you can tell they’ve put a lot of effort into making sure they’ve got representation from all around the globe, all around the globe. And she travels to a lot of lesser known places, such as Indonesia, or you know, some random island in Indonesia that very few people know about.

Margrit 5:57
Not only Bali.

Lin 5:59
Yeah, no, not Bali. So you can tell they’ve put in a lot of care to try to make sure there’s good representation in the show. And something I’ve started doing with the TV shows and movies that I watch is to watch the credits. Because there’s this idea that we’ve talked about on the podcast before about having representation on the screen, but also representation behind the screen. So behind the camera and who is actually putting together the show effects what ends up in the show, so I like watching the credits and just looking at the names in the credits. And I know it’s not a foolproof method to tell somebody’s ethnicity just by their name, but sometimes you can get a sense. If there’s a lot of like Asian names or Latino names or things like that. You can kind of get a sense of the makeup of the crew working on it. So for this, for Carmen San Diego, I did notice a lot of Asian and Latinx names in the credits, so…

Margrit 7:01
That’s great.

Lin 7:02
Yeah. Bonus points in my book.

Margrit 7:05
So not just the content, but the actual producers or makers of the show.

Lin 7:10
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Mm hmm. Yeah. So it’s good.

Margrit 7:16
That’s awesome.

Lin 7:16
What about you, Margrit, what have you been enjoying this week?

Margrit 7:19
Well, I’ve just finished reading Kelly Yang’s novel Front Desk. It’s a middle grade novel about a family of immigrants from China, told from the point of view of their 10-year-old daughter. And so the story is that after struggling for a long time to make ends meet Mia’s family the Tangs are offered the opportunity to run a motel in Southern California. And the motel is owned by Mr. Yao, who offers them $5 per occupied room on top of free rent. So Mia’s family finally see and end to their financial woes in the new country that they’ve immigrated to, and but it’s soon turns out there are many caveats to the deal. And all of them come out of Mia’s family’s pockets so that they’re still worked to the bone and barely staying afloat.

Lin 8:10
So what do you mean by caveats?

Margrit 8:13
So it turns out that there’s a group of people who are weeklies, so who actually live at the motel and pay a weekly, a weekly rate, I guess. And those people don’t count toward the $5 per occupied room.

Lin 8:32
Oh, I see.

Margrit 8:32
It also turns out that when the laundry machine, so the washer breaks, it comes out of the Tang’s pockets, because Mr. Yao says that you broke it, you have to fix it.

Lin 8:45
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Margrit 8:46
And so all of these other things, so anything that needs to be paid for, there’s a reason why it has to come out of their pockets rather than the owners pockets, right? So they’re still not making enough money to–they’re they’re barely subsisting, basically.

Lin 9:04
Mm hmm.

Margrit 9:05
But what happens is that one of their friends from China somehow finds out that they work at this motel and comes and visits them. And they offer him, they let him stay overnight because he’s also been exploited by his employer. And so this becomes a sort of a habit and they’re–so by accident almost the motel that they work for, the Cal Vista, becomes a well-known place of refuge. And the mother, she, you know, feeds them, shares the meager dinner that they have with these immigrants in need of refuge. And so there’s a rich representation of the struggles of immigrants and low income people.

And there, these stories are told with the very upbeat voice of Mia. And she experiences like, shocking otherings, and shocking, like racism, and she doesn’t back down either from witnessing it or for fighting the injustice when she sees it.

Lin 10:13
Mm hmm.

Margrit 10:14
And so Yang does a great job of illustrating the exploitation and aggressions that immigrants are subjected to in this series of vignettes. So every little, every little story of the immigrants who come to take refuge at the Cal Vista with the Tangs is sort of told, and Mia finds a way to help them. So she writes letters for this man who was hired for a restaurant whose owner said that he needs to take their papers. And so she writes a letter that says, you know, I’m a lawyer, and what you’re doing is illegal. And so basically, the whole–most of the things that she–most of the solutions that she finds to solve her problems are through writing. She’s always writing letters, she’s always solving the problems this way.

And there’s, so there’s a really rich representation of various types of experiences and they all have to deal with like low income immigrants that are so, you know, such ripe for exploitation by people who are, who know how to work the ropes. And it’s a very sort of, current story, basically.

Lin 11:34
Yeah.

Margrit 11:35
And Yang does a really good job of showing how racial prejudice feeds into the structural or institutional racism against Black people. For example, there is one of the weeklies, who becomes Mia’s immediate friend, Hank, is profiled by the police when a car is stolen overnight from the motel. The police come in and immediately blame Hank who is African American. And they, not only do they like arrest him with absolutely zero cause, but they go and inquire at his workplace and start asking questions. And so he gets fired because his employer says I don’t want to have trouble with the police. And so through the eyes of this girl, the author manages to show how institutional racism works. Right? By showing how, you know, the system is just rigged against, you know, people of color.

Lin 12:37
Yeah, I think, I think it’s interesting because there are a number of stories where the subject matter of the story can be quite difficult but if you tell it through the eyes of a child, it kind of simplifies it. You know? Down to like the core of the message. At the same time makes it a little bit more palpable for people like, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it just, it makes it less harsh, because you know, sometimes as adults, we’re just like, oh, well, this guy was an adult, and he should have known better than to do this or that thing that ended up getting him into trouble, right? But when it’s a child who’s telling the story, you have a little bit more sympathy and a little bit more openness to what they want to say.

Margrit 13:30
Absolutely. Yeah. And I think it also has to do a lot with craft, like the craft of the writer. And I think Yang does a really good job of not turning this into sort of a, I don’t know, a dogmatic sort of presentation of the issues of immigrants, but really a fictionalized and in a narrative way in which it feels natural and organic. And we actually see the sense of wonder that this 10-year-old girl experiences. And sometimes the sense of wonder is like super positive, oh, look at this wonderful thing that nature has created. But sometimes it’s negative, look at look at how problematic the behavior of these people who are in positions of power is towards people who are marginalized. Right? And so I think Yang does a really terrific job of keeping the, the sort of the show not tell part of craft, which is really difficult, like you say to do.

Lin 14:26
Yeah, right.

Margrit 14:28
And it was it was a funny thing that I laughed out loud. Because, remember, when we had the interview with Jackie Lau, we had that conversation about people who like fight to pay the bill at a restaurant.

Lin 14:40
Yeah.

Margrit 14:40
So there’s this. There’s this little anecdote that Mia talks about where she says that she went to a restaurant in China and watched people get into fistfights over who gets to pay the bill.

Lin 14:54
That’s great.

Margrit 14:54
It’s a really, really well done novel and as you say, it could very well have been, have turned into, you know, this manifesto. But instead, it’s a very clear story of a 10-year-old who starts to understand the injustices of the world. And there’s an author’s note at the end. And it talks about the sandwich generation of Chinese immigrants from the 80s and 90s, who were highly educated in contrast with the laborers who built the railways, for example. And they left China with very little and struggled in poverty in North America, while also seeing their relatives and friends who stayed back in China become more and more affluent as China became more affluent. So, yeah, there’s a, there’s a very clear backdrop of, of history against which this book is set.

Lin 15:45
Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s interesting, because that applies somewhat to my family as well. My family’s from Taiwan originally and we left in the second half of the 80s. Back then, my understanding was, that if anybody had a way to come to North America, that was preferable. So any way to get to North America was the opportunity everyone was looking for. And so that’s what my family did. But then right after that, we saw Taiwan and China and, in fact, several countries across Asia become really prosperous. That was the time where–they called it the Asian tigers. It’s like a group of like four or five countries including Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, all became really, really prosperous. And I think my dad did mention to me once that he, a part of him regretted leaving when he did because, you know, if we had stayed in Taiwan, he probably would have had a lot more job opportunities and higher paying opportunities then what he ended up doing here. But you know, at the time, no one could have predicted that, right?

Margrit 17:06
No, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And it’s absolutely a very well done. Like Kelly Yang’s Front Desk. The novel that I’m talking about is a very well done illustration of that. Mia’s parents are both engineers by training, so they’re highly educated, and then they end up, you know, having to work to the bone in order to just survive in North America while watching their relatives get rich and talk about saving their money to buy apartments in Beijing.

Lin 17:36
Mm hmm. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Margrit 17:38
So yeah, I really recommend this book. If you’re into understanding, you know, the immigrant experience and a particular moment in history. It’s a very well done example of that.

Lin 17:49
Great. So what is our question of the episode?

Margrit 17:53
Since you’re talking about geography, and I’m talking about history, dear listeners, if you wanted to answer our questions. Our question is what’s your experience with learning about the world, history or geography, for example, from fiction? So are there books? Or are there shows, video games or game shows you have learned that have sort of mediated, helped you understand more about the world in terms of history, geography or anything else.

Lin 18:22
Great. And as always, you can comment on this or previous episodes on Twitter at @World_ofStories. Or you can email us at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear what you think.

Margrit 18:36
So be sure to subscribe to our podcasts to get new episodes as they drop. If you like our show, please leave us a review on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you’re listening to us and I hope you have a great two weeks.

Lin 18:47
Thank you. Bye!