Michael Lewis Interviews His Producer

Summary

Podcast Summary: Against the Rules – The Big Short Companion

Episode: Michael Lewis Interviews His Producer

Date: October 18, 2025
Host: Michael Lewis (with Lydia Jean Cott)
Production: Pushkin Industries

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Overview

This special episode spotlights Lydia Jean Cott, Michael Lewis’s producer, and her new investigative podcast, The Chinatown Sting. The episode features a candid conversation in a Brooklyn coffee shop, where Lewis and Cott discuss the origins, challenges, and thematic depths of her series. They explore the intersection of law, personal histories, and community tales tied to an extraordinary 1980s federal criminal case in New York's Chinatown. The episode also includes an extended excerpt from The Chinatown Sting’s first episode, immersing listeners in a suspenseful undercover operation and nuanced social history.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Origin of 'The Chinatown Sting' (03:13)

• Family Connection: Lydia Jean reveals the story springs from a family legend—her partner’s mother, Beryl Howell (a federal judge), prosecuted the case as her first major trial.
• Access and Serendipity: Cott shares the uniqueness of gaining access to a federal judge: "After knowing her for years and years and years, I finally just asked, and she said, sure." (03:44)
• The Hook: The case involved women in 1980s Chinatown, arrested after unknowingly receiving heroin-stuffed packages while playing mahjong.

2. Reporting Challenges & Emotional Stakes (05:36)

• Tracking Down the Past: Lydia Jean describes the difficulty of finding people involved decades later: "Do you realize the chances of me being able to find these people?" (05:46)
• Personal Responsibility: She emphasizes wanting fairness for all, not just legal justice: "I really wanted everyone, you know, they went through the justice system, but I also wanted them to feel like they were treated fairly in the story." (09:05)
• On-the-Ground Reporting: Notably, Cott and her co-reporter knocked on doors in multiple Chinatowns bearing cookies as peace offerings—sometimes with surprising results: "She could be like, get out of here. But instead she was like, how’s Beryl?" (07:54)

3. The Human Perspective on Prosecutorial Power (05:09)

• Michael’s Curiosity about Outcomes: Lewis wonders if prosecutors, after such cases, care about what happens long-term to those they prosecuted.
• Empathy and Distance: The episode contemplates the formative, often traumatic, life-changing effects of prosecution on individuals—and how those enforcing the law reckon with those effects years later.

4. Story Structure and Thematic Core (10:02)

• Finding the Story’s ‘Sentence’: Discussion of how to boil complex narratives down. Lewis notes: "By the time I get excited enough to write something, I assume it's interesting...I’m excited because I’m interested." (09:41)
• Elevator Pitch: Cott frames The Chinatown Sting’s heart: "It’s a story about three women who, you know, who are opposed to each other. And according to the system, only one of them can win. And how do they navigate that?" (10:37)

5. Praise and Lasting Impact (11:03)

• Mentorship and Affection: The segment wraps with Lewis congratulating Cott: "I’m so proud of you. You did great. And you’re gonna be doing this forever." (11:03)
• Cultural Curiosity: Lewis quips about Brooklyn’s “mysterious” nature, providing a lighthearted close to their exchange. (11:17)

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Podcast Excerpt: 'The Chinatown Sting' Episode 1 – "Lucky Bird"

1. Setting the Scene: Federal Agents on the Trail (14:45)

• The Mail Sting: Agents intercept heroin shipments from Hong Kong. Each package, valued at millions, arrives in stuffed animal- and tea-filled boxes.
  • Quote: "Inside each of these packages was about $7 million worth of heroin. In today's money, that's something like $18 million per package." – Lydia Jean Cott (15:15)
• Police Cat-and-Mouse: With decoy packages rigged with transmitters, the agents’ aim is clear: "Our goal was to get someone opening up that box and going through it." – Peter Matesser, DEA (18:48)

2. The Arrest: Mothers, Mahjong, and Betrayal (22:42)

• Reluctant Criminals: The operation surprises many women—mothers, accountants, seemingly ordinary people linked only by Chinatown mahjong parlors.
  • Quote: "Basically, your stay at home moms were picking up these, you know, these large amounts of heroin." – Peter Matesser (24:55)
• Forced Decisions: Women must choose between betraying friends or facing long jail terms and family separation: "If she didn’t cooperate, she might not see her two children grow up." – Lydia Jean Cott (24:11)

3. Community, Alienation, and Belonging (27:58)

• The Deeper History of Chinatown: The story provides socio-historic context for Chinatown as a product of exclusion and racism, per expert voices Ellen Wu and Michael Luo.
  • Quote: "The reason Chinatowns exist in the first place is really about a history of racial segregation." – Ellen Wu (27:58)
  • Quote: "I feel like the stranger label remains imprinted on Asian Americans today." – Michael Luo (28:57)
• Journalistic Perspective: Cott and her reporting partner Xuyu Wang discuss their respective outsider and insider views of Chinatown as both home and curiosity.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Emotional Stakes of Justice:

  • Lydia Jean Cott: "I really wanted to do justice to everyone in the story...I also wanted them to feel like they were treated fairly in the story." (09:05)

• On Storytelling Motivation:

  • Michael Lewis: "By the time I get excited enough to write something, I assume it’s interesting…I’m excited because I’m interested." (09:41)

• On the Nature of MahJong and Friendship:

  • "The one thing that is connecting them all is that they were playing mahjong together in Manhattan’s Chinatown." – Lydia Jean Cott (04:19)

• On the Legacy of Exclusion:

  • Ellen Wu: "The reason Chinatowns exist in the first place is really about a history of racial segregation." (27:58)

• On the Long Reach of Prosecutorial Action:

  • Michael Lewis: "The relationship of the prosecutors to the people they're prosecuting is often so... warped and distant, and they've had such an effect on that person's life." (08:28)

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Timestamps to Key Segments

• 03:13 – The origin of The Chinatown Sting
• 05:09 – The emotional complexities for prosecutors and the prosecuted
• 07:34 – Finding and approaching the case’s real-life participants
• 09:05 – Lydia Jean on the challenge of “doing justice” in narrative
• 10:37 – Lydia Jean’s one-sentence summary of the podcast’s theme
• 14:45 – Start of The Chinatown Sting episode excerpt (mail sting operation)
• 24:11 – The impossible choices faced by those ensnared in the sting
• 27:58 – Historical context: Chinatown’s origins and exclusion
• 28:57 – The “stranger” label on Asian American experience

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Conclusion

This episode is a compelling mix of narrative craft discussion, real-world investigation, and a vivid introduction to The Chinatown Sting. Cott’s dogged reporting and sensitivity, alongside Lewis’s mentoring, make for a nuanced exploration of justice, memory, and the invisible legacies of American law enforcement. Listeners are left with a deeper understanding of both the personal and historic contours of a story that remains all too relevant today.

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Where to Listen:
Find The Big Short audiobook and The Chinatown Sting via Audible, Spotify, Apple Books, Pushkin.fm, or wherever you get podcasts.

Transcript

[Lydia Jean Kot]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Kal Penn]

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[Ed Helms]

I'm Ed Helms.

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[Lydia Jean Kot]

Okay. So the story is kind of, I would say, a family legend of sorts. My partner's mom, who I've known ever since I was little. She's a federal Judge in Washington, D.C. beryl Howell.

[Ed Helms]

Beryl Howell, who I have met separately. I spoke to this court, the district court, all the judges, and she's an impressive character. A little scary, actually.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

A little scary, yeah. Yeah. And this is the story of her first case. So it's a case that she talked about a lot because the people in it really made an impression on her. And I always kind of wanted to know more about this case and do a story about it, but I didn't think that would be an option because federal judges don't usually give interviews or talk to the media. But after knowing her for years and years and years, I finally just asked, and she said, sure.

[Ed Helms]

And tell us a little bit about the story, because we have to explain why we're playing mahjong. Right.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

So there's a young federal prosecutor, Beryl Howell, just a few weeks on the job. She has a group of all these women who are in custody. They've all been caught accepting boxes in the mail, boxes that have stuffed animals in them, and tea and also millions of dollars worth of heroin. A lot of them have young kids. And she needs to find out why they. Why they did this and who they're working for. And they're not talking. But the one thing that is connecting them all is that they were playing mahjong together in Manhattan's Chinatown, because this happened in the 1980s. And at the time in Chinatown, there were all these, like, mahjong parlors, which are kind of like speakeasies where you could play the game.

[Ed Helms]

So your boyfriend's mom.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Yes.

[Ed Helms]

So, I mean, it's interesting. These prosecutor has this huge effect on people's lives. Mainly ends badly for the people who are being prosecuted. If it's a federal prosecution. Right. The numbers are just shocking.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Everybody.

[Ed Helms]

Everybody goes to jail or pleads guilty kind of thing. But. And I've always wondered, partly because I watched this now recently with Sam Bankman Fried, how interested the prosecutors stay in these, in the lives of the people who, you know, are in their rearview mirror. Did you have the impression that Barrel was especially interested in, like, the people Here, or was it just the case was so weird.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

It was the people. I don't think it was that the case was so weird. I think it was the people.

[Ed Helms]

Did you have the impression that she had. She knew something about what had happened to them? Did you find yourself telling her things that she didn't know?

[Lydia Jean Kot]

She had no idea what happened to them. I think it was insane that she thought that I would be able to find them.

[Ed Helms]

Oh, all right.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Like, at times I was mad at her for being like, oh, you should do this. Because I was like, do you realize the chances of me being able to find these people? And then why would they agree to talk to me? Like, she had no idea at all.

[Ed Helms]

So just there are a bunch of characters and there are these very kind of awkward conversations on people's doorsteps that are in your podcast. Just tell us the story of finding one of the characters and what that was like and how that person responded when you just knocked on their door.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Yeah, so, you know, we basically were just looking them up on the white pages, me and my co reporter Xu Yu, who's not here, and all the different Chinatowns, the three Chinatowns in Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn. Each time we brought cookies because we were coming out of nowhere, so we felt like we should not go empty handed. We knocked on the door, we left the cookies in a note, and no one ever responded to our notes. But one time we knocked on the door and the woman inside answered. And I said right away, I'm here because I know Beryl Howell very closely. Could I talk to you for this story? And she invited us in.

[Ed Helms]

You're so disarming. I love one of her roles she plays for me is when I'm scared about chasing someone down. And I don't think they're. I think they're going to be mean to me if I get them on the phone, or they're not going to want to talk to me because they'll suspect evil intent. I send her instead, and she completely defuses the situation. She shows up with their head on a spike kind of thing. And so I'd have thought I was gonna get shot if I ring this doorbell. I mean, it's incredibly brave of you to kind of just hunt these people down. I mean, they'd all been in jail. The story was in the past. I couldn't tell from the podcast just how reluctant they were to talk about it.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

I mean, it's kind of crazy, right, to show up. You've had the worst thing. You were prosecuted for this Crime. Then the basically, like, daughter in law of the person who prosecuted shows up and says, oh, can you tell me your side of the story?

[Ed Helms]

I really want to hear it. And it will do a lot of good now.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

But when I said, you know, because it could go, I could say, oh, I'm, you know, Beryl's my almost mother in law. And she could be like, get out of here. But instead she was like, how's Beryl? I've been watching on TV that she's the judge and she retired. How is she doing? Oh, so that kind of made it easier.

[Ed Helms]

When I was listening to it, I thought you actually might have a runner here in that you could go to any older prosecutor and say, what's the case? That kind of got in your head and you never got out of your head. And you wonder what happened to the people.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Yes.

[Ed Helms]

Because the relationship of the prosecutors to the people they're prosecuting is often so. It's so warped and distant and they've had such an effect on that person's life. You call me. When I called you, I was trying to pester you to help me with something else while you were doing your own show. And you said, you blurted out. I said, how's it going? And you blurted out, it's so hard. And I was a little surprised. It doesn't sound. Listening to it, it doesn't sound like it was hard. It sounds like it came pretty naturally to you. What did you find difficult about actually being responsible for telling the story?

[Lydia Jean Kot]

I think I just really wanted to do justice to everyone in the story. I really wanted everyone, you know, they went through the justice system, but I also wanted them to feel like they were treated fairly in the story.

[Ed Helms]

Right.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Are you not? But, Michael, how do you feel when you do not. If someone asked you in the middle of writing the Big Short, you would never be like, oh, it's so hard.

[Ed Helms]

It was excellent promotional work for Pushkin. We have just dropped. We've just dropped a re release of the Big Short audiobook this week. Very well done. So what were you asking me?

[Lydia Jean Kot]

So, yeah, I was saying, did you never feel like this is so hard?

[Ed Helms]

You know, I'm always a little worried that it's slow, but. No, actually, the truth is that by the time I get excited enough to write something, I assume it's interesting. I'm excited because I'm interested. So I assume everybody's gonna be interested.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Oh, yeah. That part is so fun. The reporting part is so fun. But then, like, finding the. Like you can say, what the big short is about in one sentence.

[Ed Helms]

I can.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Yeah. And it's really easy for you.

[Ed Helms]

Takes a while to get there, though.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

That part for me is really hard.

[Ed Helms]

So that I've just been doing this with the new book. I'm about to start writing it and. And I just figured out last week what it was. And it was just like, ah, that's it. That's it. That's the.

[Peter Matesser]

It's.

[Ed Helms]

And you might never say it to the reader or the listener, but it's got to be. That structure's got to be the point of it's got to be there. So what's the one sentence about the podcast? God, Michael, you came up with this. I'm curious, what's the sentence? It's not about mahjong.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

I mean, there's a lot of mahjong.

[Ed Helms]

There's a lot of mahjong in it. But do you remember what your one sentence was you told yourself?

[Lydia Jean Kot]

I mean, I think it's a story about three women who, you know, who are opposed to each other. And according to the system, only one of them can win. And how do they navigate that?

[Ed Helms]

Oh, very well done. Yeah. Your mother was about to collapse and then she realized she's your mother and that she shouldn't lead a standing ovation.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Feel free to rise.

[Ed Helms]

That's very good. Thank you. And I just gotta say I'm proud of you. I'm so proud of you. You did great. And you're gonna be doing this forever.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

And I so appreciate you coming to Brooklyn.

[Ed Helms]

It's a mysterious land. I've never been. The people are different. We seem to be able to communicate.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

I hope you think they.

[Ed Helms]

Sure, they understand me, but I think I understand them. But I'm going back to Manhattan as fast as possible. And now don't go anywhere. Coming up, we have an excerpt from the first episode of LJ's show, the Chinatown Sting.

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[Lydia Jean Kot]

Every now and then I rinse it.

[Ed Helms]

Out and I need tummy rinse tonight.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

And I need it more.

[Ed Helms]

My kid wet the bed and the smell never leaves.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

I don't know what to do. I'm always in the dark. The sweat and dead short smells like.

[Ed Helms]

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[Lydia Jean Kot]

On February 9, 1988, David Sheehan was working his usual shift. He was a U.S. customs agent at JFK Airport. His phone rang.

[David Sheehan]

I was talking to a customs agent in California who says, hey, we just got three shipments of heroin and three different bail parcels. Do you guys want the case? So I said, absolutely, I'll take it.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

The parcels were on their way from Hong Kong to New York. Customs agents were looking inside packages more often. Ever since President Reagan and Congress had ramped up the war on drugs. David Sheehan was part of the special task force to Combat narcotic smuggling. So they got calls about drugs coming into New York City all the time. This call was special, though, because inside each of these packages was about $7 million worth of heroin. In today's money, that's something like $18 million per package. Peter Matesser was an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He really wanted to know who was waiting for those boxes.

[Peter Matesser]

I knew it was going to be a big case because there was a lot of heroin. And the focus was on China white heroin at the time, because was coming into New York, a lot of heroin was coming in from China to Hong Kong, then into New York. And it sounded like a good opportunity to work a big case.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

On February 17, the boxes arrived at the airport. Peter and David knew they were at the beginning of something big, but they didn't know how big. My name is Lydia Jean Kot. As a journalist, I often report on law and power. I've written an audiobook about the Supreme Court, covered the federal trial of a crypto billionaire, and investigated the fallout of the legalization of sports betting. I'm interested in how throughout American history we've used the law as a tool to make our country both more and less. Just a few years ago, I came into possession of a suitcase. It was full of thousands of pages of court documents. They were all about a case a prosecutor spent years trying to build against a criminal who refused to be caught. There was mention of a criminal syndicate powerful enough to take on the Italian Mafia. An attempted assassination, a global manhunt, Congressional hearings, international press coverage, a standing room only trial. And none of it would have happened without a group of ordinary people, people who in time, would have to make a decision about who to protect and who to betray. But that afternoon in 1988, one of these people was just waiting for a box. This is the Chinatown Stang Episode one Lucky Bird. Court documents would later describe the exact contents of each box that landed in New York. 20 small bricks made up of white compressed powder wrapped up in either brown tape or duct tape. In one of the packages, the heroin was hidden inside these red and white tea boxes that had Chinese characters on them. In the other two, the heroin was hidden among stuffed animals. Now Peter McTesser and the DEA could get to work. Step one, take out the heroin and replace it with decoy heroin. It was made out of wooden blocks cut and taped together.

[Peter Matesser]

Except you leave a sample of the heroin in there. We put the Stuffed animals back in. Our goal was to get someone opening up that box and going through it. That was our goal.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

So when someone on the receiving end looked inside the boxes, they should notice nothing weird. Step two, the feds hid thin wires in a transmitter inside each box. Whoever was looking through the box would break the wires, and that would trigger a silent electric signal that would be picked up by these special machines in the hands of law enforcement. And this receiver had only two signals.

[Peter Matesser]

It was a slow beep. You're listening in to, like a computer almost, and you hear the beep, beep, beep. And then when a rapid beep goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, that means it's been open.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

The DEA agents set up their trap as fast as they could. They didn't want the people who were waiting for the packages to get suspicious.

[Peter Matesser]

They know how long it takes from point A to point B. So as soon as you get a day or two late, the investigation could be compromised.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Step three, each of these boxes had to be dropped off at exactly the same time. They were to be delivered by postal inspectors who were working undercover. Vans full of agents were waiting nearby, listening in on their little computers and ready to spring into action.

[Peter Matesser]

You have to cover all the different parts of the locations, because if someone takes the box and runs out the door, then we have heroin on the street.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

On February 23, the mail packages, the vans full of agents, and the undercover postal workers, they were all ready to go. Two of the packages were addressed to Manhattan's Chinatown, and one was going to Brooklyn. Peter and the customs agent, David Sheehan, followed the two packages that were going to Chinatown.

[Peter Matesser]

The thrill of the chase really becomes. It just. It sort of takes you over.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

That day, like on any other day, Chinatown was bustling. The sidewalks were crowded with vendors selling cucumbers, eggplants, bok choy, dried mushrooms. People were walking shoulder to shoulder on the main streets. There are neon signs everywhere saying, go this way or go that way. And there was always a truck somewhere squeezing its way down these narrow streets full of fresh wares. That's all to say Chinatown wasn't an easy place to find parking, especially not for a van full of non Asian undercover federal agents.

[David Sheehan]

We were underneath the highway in Manhattan, the East River Drive. And that's where we had 30 agents all lined up, ready to go with shotguns and rifles, and you name it.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

There were two wired up packages addressed to two apartment buildings right next door to each other. So the undercover postal inspector buzzed at one address and then he buzzed at the other. No answer. He left behind mail slips. Peter and David waited to see what would happen next and waited some more.

[David Sheehan]

One of the guys from DEA took a leak in the east river, and believe it or not, two sanitation police guys came up to him and said, hey, you can't pee in the river.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

David Sheehan could feel his hopes of catching anyone in Chinatown pissing away, too. Nobody was coming to collect the packages, even though their street value was supposed to be huge. Maybe someone had tipped them off. The whole operation now hinged on the third boxthe one that was going to Brooklyn.

[Peter Matesser]

We heard the beep go off.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Peter Mattesser rushed over to the Brooklyn address to meet the agents there.

[Peter Matesser]

We knocked on the door or broke down the door. There's the package open. The stuffed animals were out.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

Peter found himself face to face with a 38 year old woman, a mother of two, an accountant at a bank. Peter explained she was under arrest.

[Peter Matesser]

Read her rights. You know, in Cantonese and Mandarin. I forgot exactly which one it was. She was very upset, crying. And your goal is to try to calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

By move up the ladder, Peter means this woman might have information that would help the feds figure out who's in charge of importing the heroin. The first rung of the ladder was right here in this house. Peter needed to know the box's next destination. And to find that out, he needed this woman to act totally normal. She needed to call whoever she was going to call after the box's arrival. They needed her to go from being an accomplice to being a cooperating witness quickly.

[Peter Matesser]

I tell her the amount of heroin here you're facing 10 years to life because it's so much heroin. This is your time to help out yourself. We can't guarantee you how much jail time you do, but it'll be brought to the attention of the judges. We'll know how much you've helped out in this case, and it's a courageous decision to make. We try to tell them we think it's the right one to make to help us. Then we help you.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

But the person this woman was going to call was her friend. If she cooperated, that would mean betraying her friend. But if she didn't cooperate, she might not see her two children grow up. She had to make an impossible decision. As the agents hovered over her, the clock was ticking. This woman agreed to cooperate. Her name is in the court documents. But she never responded to a request for an interview. Anyway, her name's not that important to the story. What's important is the chain of events she set off by giving the federal agents the name of her contact. Over the next few days, agents were arresting moms like her all over New York City.

[Peter Matesser]

It was like, the first time we've ever seen anything like that, really. Basically, your stay at home moms were picking up these, you know, these large amounts of heroin. And I'm sure they knew it was drugs.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

It turned out that all of these women, women who received packages of heroin sent to their homes, all knew each other from playing mahjong. Mahjong is a game of luck and skill. You play with domino, like tiles instead of with cards. They have different designs on them. Stones, bamboos, dragons. And the goal is to end up with four pairs of three tiles and one pair of two tiles. That's called the eyes. Different hands are with different amounts of points. There were mahjong parlors all over Chinatown. These were places where people could play for a bit of money or a lot of money. The parlors were a place to catch up with old friends and make new ones. But now many of these friends were under arrest, and they were being forced to turn on one another. Customs agent David Sheehan was doing a lot of that forcing.

[David Sheehan]

We're gonna seize all your assets. We're gonna take all your kids away from you, and you're gonna go to jail, and they're gonna go to foster care and things of that nature.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

You know, you're doing that because you really need their help to get to the person at the top, I guess.

[David Sheehan]

Absolutely. Yeah. You need somebody, you know, you need more than one person to cooperate, because.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

You need it to be corroborated.

[David Sheehan]

Yes.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

After I got that suitcase full of court documents on the Chinatown drug trials, I realized I need help from someone who spoke Cantonese. That's the language that's spoken by many of the people in the documents.

[Xuyu Wang]

My name is Xuyu Wang. I'm a practicing attorney in the city in New York.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

I met Xuyu through a friend of a friend. We met up at a bar, and I told her all about the Chinatown case.

[Xuyu Wang]

It was a very interesting story to me personally. I came from the Cantonese area in China, which is, like, super close to Hong Kong, where a lot of those people in the story were originally from. My major in college was actually journalism. So that sort of, like, opened up a part of my brain.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

So Shiyu joined me in reporting out this story. We went over court documents together, and we visited Chinatown together. For months and months, for most of the time that I've lived in New York, Chinatown's been a place where I'd get dinner or drinks with friends. For Shuyu, it was a neighborhood where she got groceries.

[Xuyu Wang]

There's certain ingredients that's a rare find in a non Chinese grocery store, like chicken feet. There are like, certain things that I can only get here at a good price.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

But we've been learning that Chinatown's a place with 150 years of history. So Chinatowns today we think of as these kind of tourist destinations. And, you know, they're fun places to go to get, you know, tchotchkes or dim sum and have kind of a colorful urban experience or, you know, a fun meal or something. But the reason Chinatowns exist in the first place is really about a history of racial segregation. That's Ellen Wu. She teaches history at Indiana University, Bloomington. And she talked to us about how Chinatowns arose in American cities in the face of anti Asian laws and violence. US Immigration laws also helped create Chinatowns, especially a law called the Chinese Exclusion act, which passed in 1882. Another historian we spoke to is Michael Luo. He's an editor at the New Yorker and, and he wrote a book on Chinese immigration called Strangers in the Land.

[Peter Matesser]

It was the justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Field, who wrote the opinion, referred to the Chinese as strangers in the land, talking about how they could never assimilate with our people. And I feel like the stranger label remains imprinted on Asian Americans today.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

She says she's felt what Michael Luo is describing, especially when she first moved to the US for law school.

[Xuyu Wang]

So it was kind of like surprised at how friendly people were surrounding me, but also to that. And I'm sensing like, there are people out there just kind of like, oh, you're different. And you can tell by their gestures, by their, like, facial expressions, things like that.

[Lydia Jean Kot]

As a white person, I've never experienced that, but I do know how bad it feels to be viewed as a stranger. My family moved to the US from Poland when I was eight. My English was kind of weird, but I wanted to fit in so badly. When I look at pictures of myself, it's embarrassing. I was like a parody of what I thought an American kid was supposed to look like. And the more Shuyu and I looked into this Chinatown case, the more we came to see that it's also about someone who was trying to, in their own way, to feel like they belonged.

[Ed Helms]

You can listen to the rest of this episode of the Chinatown Sting. And the full series wherever you listen to podcasts.

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[Lydia Jean Kot]

This is an iHeart podcast.