PHOTO: California Pacific Medical Center is negotiating with San Francisco to build a new hospital at Van Ness and Geary.

Yesterday (May 11), marked the two-month anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake. The 9.0 quake set off a devastating tsunami, taking the lives of more than 14,000 Japanese citizens – a number that could have been a lot higher if not for the country’s strict building codes.

It’s a tragedy that reminds California legislators, buildings need to be seismically safe before the inevitable “Big One” hits. That includes the state’s hospitals. For hospitals, it’s about more than just being responsible – it’s the law. In 1994 the state legislature mandated all hospitals be seismically safe by 2013.

California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco’s largest hospital operator and second largest private employer, has a plan to comply with seismic regulations. But it has some community members questioning whether their business plan makes sense for the health of all San Franciscans. KALW’s Erica Mu has this story.

Who will be displaced in the new healthcare economy

PHOTO: Karen Anne Light and Edna Barron attempt to put on a mimed performance of Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

Some stories pop up time and time again, in books, movies, and cartoons. Like the one about a little girl who discovered a very colorful world...

KAREN ANNE LIGHT: There’s a very little girl named Alice…
EDNA BARRON: …who lives in England … she is just like you and just like me…

She’s daydreaming one day, when…

LIGHT: …she sees a creature run by…
BARRON: … and starts chasing the rabbit and goes down this hole that she falls down accidentally...

The hole keeps going, and going, and going…

BARRON: … she sees clocks and tea and bells and lights…
LIGHT: … a house … and cookies…

And as she falls…

LIGHT: She says, “I wonder if bats eat cats, and I wonder if cats eat bats. Come to think of it, do cats eat rats?”

What you’re hearing is the story of “Alice in Wonderland” – at least Disney’s version of it. And the voices you heard are from two local performers who have their own take on the Wonderland – one you’ve never heard before.

LIGHT (from “Alice Down the Rwong Wrabbit Whole”): Oh no! Please don’t shoot, I’m just a little girl! Oh no, it’s that f***ing panda again.

Actresses Karen Anne Light and Edna Barron are blurring lines between imagination, reality, and fantasy in their latest show – and they’re taking their audience along for the trip. KALW’s Erica Mu went to the Emerald Tablet theater in San Francisco’s North Beach to find out more.


Making a wrong turn on the way to Wonderland

PHOTO: San Francisco Opera on Tap co-founder Indre Viskontas organizes the opera performances at Café Royale. Photo by Erica Mu.

Long before Beyonce decided to redefine “diva” for pop culture, the term was associated with high culture. Nevertheless, divas of then and now have maintained a reputation, as late comedian Anna Russell explains, “…you would need to be a glorious-voiced, independently wealthy, sexy, politically motivated, backstabbing bitch.”
Russell was actually talking about opera singers, and what it takes to become one. And she has a point: The path to the opera stage can be filled with challenges. But it can also be fun.

For some San Franciscans, it can even include performing in some unexpected venues.


Old school artform meets new school audience with Opera on Tap

PHOTO: Marc Bamuthi Joseph is the performing arts director of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Many creative types in the Bay Area, from writers to radio producers, performers and artists, are managing multiple jobs to feed themselves these days. It's a struggle for many, but for some, wearing different hats isn't a matter of survival – it's actually a way of being. Marc Bamuthi Joseph is one such man: He's a poet, scholar, dancer, educator, director, and performer. He helped found Youth Speaks and the Living Word Festival. He's also the new performing arts director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. KALW's Erica Mu sat down with Joseph on the stage of the Novellus Theater to learn more about the aesthetic future of the San Francisco arts institution.

New YBCA art director strives for creative risks

PHOTO: Artistic director Rene Yung (right) gives instructions to the proxy storytellers during a rehearsal of the theater and oral history project “Chinese Whispers." Photo courtesy of Chinese Whispers

In the mid-1800s, the Gold Rush brought enthusiastic settlers westward, from across the United States. At the same time, another migration was flowing eastward.

Over three decades, the country’s Chinese population grew from 4,000 to over 100,000. The immigrants who landed on California’s shores followed the Transcontinental Railroad across the state, building pockets of community along the way.

A hundred fifty years later, artist Rene Yung is developing a theater production based on the stories passed on from that time. She’s traveling along the Transcontinental Railroad; and at each point along the way, she’s sharing the tales she’s gathered from that region, on stage. She calls the project “Chinese Whispers,” which is actually another name for the game of Telephone – a game in which stories change from teller to teller, often until they’re unrecognizable.

A history built on hearsay - Tales of the early Chinese settlers

PHOTO: Under CC license from Dan Cox. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancox_/2632603962/

It’s a busy Monday morning at the San Francisco Veterans Association Medical Center. Palliative care physicians Alex Smith and Katherine Aragon, along with their intern Sara Murray, gather in the lobby. They’re on their way to see a patient, Bill Jones – a gentleman in his 60s who has a form of slow-growing cancer.

On the way to Jones’ room, the physicians pause by the elevators to discuss Jones’ case, and estimate his prognosis. To do so, they not only look at Jones’ charts – they pull out their iPhones.

Doctors usually rely on their experience when offering a patient their prognosis, especially patients who are suffering from multiple illnesses. But these doctors are using an additional tool called ePrognosis, a website developed by Smith and a team of researchers (they’re currently testing an app of the site). The tool uses existing indices to help physicians with the complicated task of estimating life expectancy.

Can knowing when you’ll die help you live?

PHOTO: Under CC license from Alaina Abplnalp Photography. http://www.flickr.com/photos/lainamarie/6833534625/

It’s difficult to deal with any kind of illness when it hits. But when it affects your emotional and psychological health, it’s often impossible to even describe.

“I think if I were to describe it, it’d be like being in a dream state and not feeling like anything’s real," says Danise Sugita, one of the estimated 57 million Americans who currently suffer from mental illness. "Whether I go through good things or bad things, the feelings of just like this darkness I still have.” 

Sugita is fourth-generation Japanese American, and her experience is emblematic of the many issues Asian Americans face when it comes to mental health.

“I think with my family ... it’s a lot of keeping things within the family," Sugita says. "I think just reputation and not wanting to look bad to other people. When I was trying to get help with a psychologist and being on antidepressants, I remember my mom begin really disappointed with that: ‘Why can’t we just try to fix it on our own, why do we need to bring in other people?’"

Sugita spoke with KALW’s Erica Mu, who was awarded a California Endowment Health Journalism fellowship to take a closer look at mental health from an Asian American perspective. Mu has spent the past six months reporting on this topic. She joined KALW’s Ben Trefny in the studio to introduce her series called “Asian American Mental Health: Inside Out.”

Asian American Mental Health: Inside Out

PHOTO: Danise Sugita shows the diary she kept during one of her suicide attempts. Photo by Erica Mu.

A couple of months ago, KALW began a series on Asian American mental health. We introduced you to the Lieu family, who described their challenges as immigrants finding care for their schizophrenic daughter.

Albert and Anne Lieu run a support group in Oakland to help Chinese families navigate the complex American healthcare system. Their hope is to remove barriers to care, including stigma, and get families to open up to treatment. Asian Americans tend to wait longer before seeking mental health care, and often have more serious problems when they finally see a specialist.

This plays into a surprising statistic among Asian American women. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Asian American women aged 15 to 24 have the highest rates of depressive symptoms of any ethnic or gender group. The CDC reports that young Asian American women have the second highest suicide rate among their age group – the same goes for Asian American women over 65.

In this second installment of KALW’s series, “Asian American Mental Health: Inside Out,” Erica Mu introduces us to two women who have stories that shed light on that statistic.

For Asian American women, depression and suicide go largely unseen

PHOTO: Khmer Rouge survivor Sophany Bay now provides mental health care to Cambodian patients in San Jose. Photo by Erica Mu.

To find the Unify Event Center in San Jose, you have to weave your way through a huge parking lot, swing around the Wal Mart, and follow the music into a large banquet hall. Today just happens to be Khmer or Cambodian New Year. There are about a hundred people in the hall, sitting around large circular tables while the house band warms up for the evening’s party.

It’s a small crowd, but this is a small community. An estimated 12,000 Cambodians live in the Bay Area. Khmer New Year is a positive reminder of their roots and homeland, despite the fact that so many came here under such traumatic circumstances.

In the early 1970s, Cambodia was in the middle of a brutal civil war. Eventually, the communist Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, seized power. And its reign was characterized by horrifying sites of massacre known today as the “killing fields.” Nearly two million people died in the killing fields – a quarter of the country’s population in just four years.

Finding mental health somewhere between east and west

If you had to design music for a performance called Chinese Whispers, you might jump to some pretty familiar sounds – mandolin, bamboo flute, maybe a gong or two. But artist Rene Yung’s Chinese Whispers isn’t that kind of a project. 

Part “investigative journalism” and part “epic poem,” the project includes a performance of Chinese American oral histories gathered along the route of the transcontinental railroad – stories that otherwise would have been forgotten. So when thinking about the soundscape for the project, both Yung and sound designer Jeremiah Moore wanted to break outside of the “Chinese box” and honor the material that they had – voices.

The approach is anything but traditional. Moore is taking recorded interviews with descendants of local Chinese settlers and applying a process called granular synthesis to their spoken words.

“It’s like taking a few milliseconds of sound, a kind of little window of sound – they call it grains – and then playing it back at a pitch,” Moore explains. “Then you can kind of scan through the sound, move the grain through the sound, and that’s where you’re hearing this almost syllabic quality.”

The result is something ethereal, musical, and oddly beautiful.

“We interpret language as language. But language is also sound,” says Moore. Take a word like “radio” and zoom into a few milliseconds of the word. You’ll discover a veritable universe of vowel sounds where the word “radio” disappears and gives way to “sonic, musical textures.” Pick a tiny, tiny slice of that audio, and you can actually manipulate its length and pitch, or loop it to create a new, musical entity.

Technically, these small slices or “grains” are too small to be called sounds, but our perception of their musicality changes depending on their length. For example, at five milliseconds, a grain sounds like a click. And at 10 or 20 milliseconds, you’ll hear a slice, or a blip of sound. Eventually, “it stops being a grain it starts being a sound clip or a sound object,” says Moore.

In the case of Chinese Whispers, Moore is taking phrases like “for some reason, I don’t remember him” – spoken by Frank Kwan, the last living resident of the Bay Area’s historic China Camp – and stretching this string of words into music. “Voices are a key piece of this show,” explains Moore. “And the idea was to build sonic soundscapes … that go into the background and influence the space, but it’s very underscore, at times perhaps so quiet that it’s more felt than heard.”

Chinese Whispers is a project based on memories that were passed on, and stories that might have been lost. It helps us read between the lines of history as it’s written. Through Moore’s sound design, we can also hear between the words.

Audiophiles: The hidden musicality of the human voice

I’m an independent radio producer and freelance reporter based in sunny Los Angeles, CA. I love the quirky, the complex, and the painfully human, and I hold a special place in my heart for community health and arts & culture journalism.

Erica Mu

Popular tracks