"If you listen closely, every poem on Bao's CD is a love poem: rough-edged, raw, and scalding, or quiet enough to break your heart. Much will be said about his fearless politics and his power, but his words are also threaded with humor, humanity, and beauty - my brother is on a mission to keep us all knit tight, and to remind us how we are quilted together in this cold country. Buy this CD. It will keep you warm at night." -Ishle Park, Def Poetry Jam star and Poet Laureate of Queens, NY If you are reading this, you probably just bought my CD (SUCKER!) or are planning to buy it soon (um, buy it, it's really good…). Here is information and notes regarding the various tracks on Refugeography, and also info on some tracks that didn't make the cut. When I talk about Toby, I mean Toby Folwick who recorded, mixed and engineered my first CD, ,Flares, and who did some work in the early days of this CD. Larry is of course Larry Lucio Jr., who co-produced / engineered / recorded / mixed the vast majority of Refugeography. www.LarryLucio.com, www.amplifiedlife.com. Anyway here are the notes. Read it! So fascinating, so clever, so illuminating, I could read my own writing all day! Which is a good thing 'cuz probably no one else is ever gonna read this shit. Special thanks to webmaster Chris Tsou for working on the website all the way from DC - you so lovely! Thanks also to Sase: The Write Place, the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Loft. Disc One Theresa Vu Says - For those of you who don't know, T-Vu is an amazing young Viet American rapper who, along with another amazing Asian Am rapper, Direct, form a hip hop group called Magnetic North hailing from the Bay Area. I wanted to include a Viet rapper since many young people these days seem to enjoy the "rap music", and since I am hella old I wanted to appear cool and "gangsta" ("gangsta" is a good thing according to the young people these days… oh, these kids and their "rap" music!). T-Vu was generous enough to record me this and send it to me, and I love it, not just because she's bigging me up, but because her rhymes is tight. Did I say that right, kids? Uuuuuuugn. http://www.magnetichiphop.com/ You Bring Out… - This is obviously inspired by Sandra Cisneros' excellent poem, You Bring Out the Mexican In Me. Ms. Cisneros, if you are out there reading this, know that I give you credit for the inspiration and also did so on HBO's Def Poetry but they edited that part out. Figures. Also, I hesitate to compare my poem to hers, even if I say it was inspired by hers, because upon re-reading her poem I am confronted with how awful my poem is compared to hers. I think I am going to go back and re-write this entire poem, cuz if I want to write a rah-rah poem for Vietnamese folks then it better be good goddamnit. Anyway the zither lick that begins the poem is Preserving the Spring by Van Anh, by the way I met her back when I was in Hanoi in 1996 and immediately I turned into her fan-boy. That is probably my absolute favorite instrumental track of all time. The poem is not about her though - it's to any Asian American woman who ever brought out the Vietnamese in me, and can also be interpreted as being about any friend or community that has shown me love. This poem seems to be the favorite when I perform in front of mostly Viet audiences. Hmmm, I wonder why? Viet Pride!!! Hot like pho. Today featuring Emily Chang and Seng Chen - Emily actually recorded her bumbumbumbadada thingie with me and Toby, way back in like, 2000 or 2001 in St. Cloud, onto an analog tape. She was in Minnesota for a show so of course I exploited her voice and asked her to sing or skat something that we may use later. She basically ad-libbed it for a few bars and we left it at that. Maybe three or four years later, me and Larry asked the enormously talented Seng Chen to listen to it and come up with a bass line to go with it, then later still Larry brought it all together and chopped it up and made it into a track when I told him I wanted it to go with Today. It was a very challenging task to bring all three of those disparate elements together and once again Larry came through with flying colors. Damn those three are talented, I kinda wish I was a better poet so I could feel like I deserve to be on there with all of them. Anyway that poem is about how some of the worst atrocities and amazing miracles can all happen in one day. And can you believe Gwen Stefani said those Japanese women are just figments of her imagination? Pleeeease. Reverse Racism - This is one of my most requested poems though I don't perform it much anymore cuz it's so damn long. Yo, blame racism, every day more racist shit happens and I have to comment on it in this poem. So you can blame white supremacy for this 12 minute monstrosity of a poem. Note: for those of you who don't know, Miss Saigon is the play near the end that I work my reversal on, and White Crush is a spoof of Blue Crush. What up with all these damn movies about white people in Hawaii? Can't the indigenous islanders get some love? For Colored Boys In Danger of Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome featuring Juliana Pegues - The title is inspired by Ntozake Shange's excellent, groundbreaking choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide…I wanted to write a piece about my memories of growing up in Phillips, being a young man of color, how sometimes it felt like being a young man of color meant either being a demon or not being missed when you passed on. How sometimes we as young men of color growing up in poverty hid so much of our pain and experiences because we were trying to survive. I also wanted to explore Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome in a poem, and Juliana Pegues agreed to sing a Chinese lullaby to accompany it. One time, during the crunch period of this CD production where me and Larry routinely stayed up all night, every night to get this CD done, we listened to Juliana's voice sing from the speakers, angelic and impossibly beautiful, as birds began to chirp outside the window. Larry remarked that her singing was the most beautiful thing he had heard, and I agreed. WWOK - If you haven't picked up any of DJ Neil Armstrong's CDs, you should do so now, they're dope. Anyway when I was thinking about this poem and how to start it, I thought about how Neil mixed Taste of Honey's Sukiyaki with Slick Rick singing a section of that song in La Di Da Di, and I also wanted to include the song that Sukiyaki was based on, Ue o Muite Aruko by Kyu Sakamoto, the only Japanese song to hit #1 on the Billboard charts in the U.S. I met Neal Armstrong when he and I were part of the same show on the East Coast a while back, and I asked him if it was cool and he said yes - I seem to recall he was surprised that I found a copy of Ue o Muite Aruko. I also had all these crazy ideas for different songs to be playing in the background (since my character is supposed to be a radio DJ) and Larry somehow pulled it all off: it was a tremendously difficult, technical process and he somehow did it (BTW that last song is Kugatsu no Omio by Bird which has been my favorite song for a long, long time). I also make reference to Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in protest against the oppression of Buddhists in Viet Nam. Crossroads of Convenience Stores featuring Doug Kearney - ah, one of my favorite poems of all time, written and performed along with the incomparable Doug Kearney. This is me at my most shameless, riding off the talent of Mr. Kearney and coasting on talent by osmosis. Anyway we wrote this together waaaaaaaay back when we used to send rhymes to each other back and forth through email, and we wanted to collaborate on a poem. Doug is one of those cats that push you to the top of your game, because you simply cannot do something half-assed with him or you will end up looking hella foolish. We recorded this studio version in LA with Doug's very talented and generous cousin, Paul. We also recorded my hip hop debut with Doug, which we were gonna include as a hidden track but ran out of room. Look for more hippity hop from me and Doug soon. We have formed a hip hop group called "-OOK" (try putting an "sp" before those letters, then try putting a "g" before those letters - you get it now?). Hopefully soon. I'm already too old to rap. Brother featuring Dennis Kim - Waaaay back, Dennis happened to be in town for a show and we had been talking about collaborating for some time. He showed me a piece he had been working on and asked if I wanted to be a part of it. Of course it was such a beautiful, gorgeous and important piece, but I didn't know if I could add anything - but we sat down and I wrote my half then we re-wrote it/scripted it. e.g. bailey of MN Spoken Word Association wanted to record something by Dennis, so we went to KFAI and recorded this track. Me and Dennis also beatboxed together and recorded that as a separate track, and I think e.g. brought the two tracks together later on. Check out Dennis http://www.galapagos4.com/artists/denizen.htm, he is one of the most talented artists I have ever had the privilege to work with, and e.g. is one of the most important community workers in the Minnesota spoken word scene, http://www.mnswa.org Missed Sigh Gone - Years ago, when Larry asked me what kind of music and vibe I wanted for this CD, I plunked down a bunch of Asian traditional and pop music CDs in front of him and said, here ya go. He listened to a bunch of the CDs and picked out this amazing sample, which he looped - he came up with it all his own, I don't even remember the song that he chose it from. I thought it would go well with my short version of Missed Sigh Gone - City Pages asked me to be a part of the Twin Cities Poet Laureate article and asked for a poem no longer than 15 minutes about a famous person, so I came up with this modified, edited version of one of my old poems where I have a fictional conversation with the fictional Miss Saigon character from the racist Broadway musical. Love story, my ass. Asian Men: On a Roll! - Newsweek ran an article entitled Asian Men on a Roll! It was about how Asian men were suddenly getting noticed by white women as desirable. This was problematic in a lot of different ways which I won't get into - but at its heart, one of my questions was, how about an article about why Asian Americans (queer or straight) don't date each other? Can we talk about internalized racism instead of celebrating how other races make a fetish out of us? And I know, we straight Asian dudes are completely de-sexed by everybody, but am I really supposed to celebrate because white women have a fetish for Asian guys? What are the racial implications of that? The end is me being sarcastic: my character doesn't care about all of these issues since now white women apparently love us Asian guys so what else do we need? Race - Back in the 80's, if you were Asian and owned a Japanese car, you could be racially harassed (like I was) by people who said you should "buy American". The fact that US car companies were screwing over Americans out of their jobs by outsourcing was lost on the vast majority of people - they blamed the Japanese auto industry, and of course this meant they blamed Asians. Vincent Chin was killed by two disgruntled white autoworkers in Detroit who claimed that "Japs" were responsible for their unemployment and whom never spent a day in jail for his murder, even though Vincent Chin was Chinese American and had no connection whatsoever to the auto industry. Now that young Asian Americans have turned import tuner car culture into something hip, the mainstream co-opted that scene and there are rarely any Asian faces represented when you see import/tuner culture (from movies to TV shows to video games). This poem is my attempt at combining the ideas of an actual car race with racial dynamics. I wanted to get a ride in a Celica GTS and record the noise on my minidisk but no one I know has one, so me and Larry hooked up my Xbox to the sound system and I played Need for Speed Underground, a videogame that records and replicates the actual sound of the different cars that are on the screen, so at the video game menu I chose the Celica and drove it around in time with the poetry track, which Larry fed me through headphones. This is an example of a nerd ingenuity triumphing over a low budget. Special thanks to Brooke Choo for the feedback and technical assist on this poem. Everyday People - This is one of my newer pieces, trying to get into the heads of two different characters who have internalized racism towards each other. The basic idea behind it is, all of us have stories behind the front that we put up when we meet each other. Sometimes all we need to do is really hear each other and give one another a chance. White supremacy has fucked us all up and sometimes Asian people will see another Asian face and automatically write that person off because he or she is not radical enough, not rich enough, not educated enough, not progressive enough, etc. And yet the same Asian people will not make the same assumptions about other races. Usually I don't say there are absolutes when it comes to interpretations - but if you are one of the folk who have heard this poem and told me that you like it but that you take the poem as an indicator that all people regardless of race make false assumptions about one another - you're wrong. This is specifically about Asian people and our internalized racism towards each other, because that shit rarely gets addressed. Please do not turn my poem into some bullshit Benetton ad. Where You At? featuring Emily Chang - The poem explores Asian American identity from two very different perspectives and we come together in the end with the hope that, though Asian Ams may come from very different worlds, we have a lot to talk about and listen to when it comes to our stories. I placed it directly after Everyday People as a contrast: Everyday People is about Asian Americans NOT talking to each other, and Where You At IS Asian American people talking to each other. Me and Emily wrote and recorded this with Toby so long ago that when we needed to fix it up this past year, we couldn't remember who wrote what. Thankfully Emily is more organized than I am and she found her copy of the script under her bed in a box filled with her Atari 2600 games and old porno magazines. When we originally taped, it was really low budget, the levels were off and we only had a specific amount of analog tape left on the reel so we had to re-record this until we got it right, we had to record over previous takes so there was no having multiple versions. I really dig the energy of this poem, but I think my dumb-ass voice was recorded too loud on the original track and Emily's amazing voice was recorded too low, and there were some errors in the transfer from tape to digital that caused a few irreparable skips of me and Emily's verses, and since we had it as one track it was impossible for Larry to save it. But I really liked the piece and so we asked Seng to compose and play a bassline for it (which was amazing, damn that dude is hella talented) and Emily graciously recorded some verses over in a NY studio and mailed it to us, even though her lovely voice has deepened over the years - then Larry worked his magic on all these disparate elements into a cohesive whole. This patchwork track is one of among many testimonies to Larry's hard work and genius. Yellowbrown Babies for the Revolution featuring Dennis Kim and Seng Chen - when I had first written this poem, me and Dennis had shared the stage in a couple of different cities and several times Dennis played the guitar while I read the poem. I really liked the guitar melody that Dennis came up with, so on one of my trips out to the Bay I brought along my trusty lil' minidisk recorder and late at night, sitting on the floor of Dennis and Golda's apartment on Fruitvale in Oakland, he played the riff while I held the lil' mic up to the guitar. If you listen really, really close you can hear a car or bus passing in the background. We asked Seng to come up with a bassline and once again, he was amazing - listen to how his bass drops into a low note when I talk about gravity (get it, gravity, and the bass note climbs low, fucking genius). Then Larry brought all these elements together and you have one of my favorite tracks. I actually asked Larry to make me an instrumental-only version so I wouldn't have to listen to my voice, I could just hear the bass and guitar. They sound impossibly warm, the music on this track, to me, sounds like a jar of perfect honey sitting on a cloud in heaven warmed by a beam of sunlight. The poem is jokingly named Yellowbrown Babies for the Revolution because a lot of people have mistaken or misrepresented my decision to only date Asian women: people have said (mostly behind my back) that I date Asian women because I'm trying to turn Asian women into revolutionary objects, that I want to create some yellowbrown army of children to fight against whitey, etc., etc. No, it's about love. Why is it that so many people, Asian or otherwise, are so threatened and vehemently hateful when I tell them that it's important to me to be with an Asian partner? Why is there always some convenient excuse for why we aren't with one another? Is it so hard to believe that Asian American people, queer or straight, can love one another, madly, deeply, truly? And dare I add, that we can love one another much more strongly because of who we are and what we have to go through? Disc Two The Map Part One - Originally, the idea for this track was: wouldn't it be cool to have a bunch of Asian Americans from all over the country say their name, state, crew, and ethnicity/nationality, so that I could put all these voices into a track of voices and names and places and it would be like a map of Asian America. Of course it is a map, not the map, to Asian America since it would be hella hard to represent e'erbody. Many of the recordings were done at the APIA Summit in Seattle in 2001, with me running around with my minidisk recorder. Then some people said they would only do it if they could grab the mic/recorder for a minute and do it alone. Though I suspect some of y'all were trying to rob me, some people came back and unexpectedly said really nice, sweet things about me and I must say that it became addictive. So it became a combination "map" track and a "shout out to Bao Phi" track. Forgive my shamelessness. And of course the incomparable Jenny Assef took all these voices from all these minidisks and put it all together during one long marathon night of editing, even though she had not been getting any sleep and was utterly exhausted. I must say it is hella good to hear all these voices on the CD though to balance my own voice of which I cannot stand the sound of. Oh by the way, if you recorded a shout-out to me and you're not in here, it's not because I didn't want you included, but because there were a bunch of technical problems (I lost a bunch of minidisks, and I accidentally recorded over others, etc). Reverse Racism recorded live at We Will Not Be Moved at the University of California, Berkeley - This was a big benefit show at Berkeley to raise funds to stop the deportation of Cambodians from the U.S. I think one of the pictures of the audience inside the CD sleeve is from that show. Anyway see my notes on Reverse Racism above for notes on the poem. What I will say about this event is, a few months prior Dennis Kim decided to read my Reverse Racism poem at a huge Asian American show at Berkeley. So the poem had already become kinda infamous by the time I read it at Berkeley myself. The funny thing is, Dennis made me famous by reading my poem but I think hella people were disappointed when I read it myself cuz, you know, the first time they heard it, this hella good looking Asian dude was reading it, and then when the actual author reads it he looks like…me. One sister came up and said, "Yeah, Dennis Kim read your poem here a while back, I was so into it! And now I heard you read it and it was… different." You could hear the disappointment in her voice. Crossroads of Convenience Stores feat. Doug Kearney and Truth Maze recorded live at Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis - See the liner notes under CD One (the studio recording of this track) for more details on the poem. We did this live and Truth Maze beat-boxed for us - nope, we did not go back and modify the track, that is 100% live and off the top of the dome beat-boxing by Truth Maze. Some folks still can't believe that we didn't go up and add another layer to his beat-boxing, cuz his multilayered beat sounds so damn good. But it was on the real live and there was about 100 people there in the audience who can verify that. Asian Lit/Mass Transit recorded live at Recollection, Asian American Writers Workshop, New York City - This was way back in the day when I was the featured performer at the amazing Recollection series at AAWW located in Koreatown in NYC. It was emcee'd by Julie and Steve, and it was such a great crowd - Omar had just gone on and did a poem about how we should declare war against white people and Europeans, it was awesome. I think this was the first night that I met Steven Bor and Janet Kim, too - Hang introduced me to them. Me and Emily did Yellowbrown together later that night and I was going to include that on this CD but I ran out of space and time. More on Mass Transit below. The short poem is pretty self-explanatory. Hip Hop Haiku feat. Doug Kearney, recorded live at Sai-I-Gu Remembered, Locus Arts, J-Town San Francisco - Some of the best shows that I've done in my life have happened at Locus, at the old location in Japantown in San Francisco. This show, commemorating the 10th anniversary of the L.A. riots, was definitely one of the best of the best - me, Doug and Dennis were the co-features and so of course all of us brought our A-game to the show. More details on the poem below. For Us, recorded live at MadBar, Chicago - This was recorded waaaay back when Madbar was still around, and I did this poem right before I Was Born With Two Tongues hit the stage for their big reunion show - Emily had moved to NYC but was back in Chicago for this one. It was one of the first public readings I did of this piece, and the response was far stronger than I expected - I remember that being a high point of my performance career, because the best is when you think folks are either not going to feel you or not really be into you, then you hit the stage and people feel you and give you all this unexpected love and energy, it's like the best surprise imaginable. Transmigratory Worker feat. Truth Maze and Sister Mimi, recorded live at Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis - Those Intermedia shows were a joy for me, though when I re-listen to the minidisks of the show, I think I went on too long. This was when I was young and my sense of time/endurance was very different. Anyway I wrote this poem for Vijit Ramchandani, who had passed away around the time of this show. He was a great man, a great poet and a great friend. One of my favorite poems by him was called Transmigratory, and a lot of the poem's content makes references to his work. Truth Maze and Sister Mimi were gracious enough to back me up with their improvisational beat-boxing/singing skills. This was completely unrehearsed. You Bring Out the Vietnamese in Me, recorded live at the Vietnamese American Student Conference, University of Texas, Austin - This is by far the most recent live recording that made the CD. All the other live recordings are at least 2 or 3 years old, but this one was just a few months old. To tell you the truth, the sound quality is horrible (I recorded it myself by placing my minidisk recorder and mic in a chair in the audience), but that show was truly amazing, in terms of the audience and the fellow artists who hit the stage, you could not believe the energy and love in that room. So many raucous Asians, most of them Vietnamese, full of spirit and pride and laughter and love - it was one of those nights that made everything seem perfect. The Map Part II - When me and Jenny sat in the studio editing the first map track, we realized it was way too long and that it needed to be split into two. So this map track has the same ideas, but it's much longer and less edited than the first map track, the folks here take longer to say lovely things about me. Stuff like this makes me hella self-conscious, so I think it helps that the beginning starts with a short series of people messing up as they try to record their shout-outs. Some surprises on here are Li-Young Lee, who graciously recorded the shout-out for me while he was in Minneapolis doing a show, and of course, Yuri Kochiyama, an inspiration for us all. Anmol, Yuri and a bunch of folks were putting together a benefit show at Locus in SF for Viet Ngo and Eddie Zheng, two Asian American inmates in the California penal system who were fighting for Asian American studies in prison and accused the prison system of being segregationist and racist. They asked me to perform and of course I was honored to even be a part of something of this magnitude. Anmol asked me if I wanted to meet Yuri, and when I met her in Oakland… I don't even know how to describe it. She has done so much for this world, fought for so long and so hard yet remains so humble and down-to-earth and personable, I was completely at a loss for words. She asked me to read a couple of poems for her so I did. Then she graciously recorded a couple of shout-out tracks for me, and I chose this one because the humor ofit brings us back to the beginning of the track. Fire Sings feat. Emily Chang - This is my friendship poem to Emily, the original version was long and awful but I came back to it after two years and rewrote it and cut out about a page of it, and this version I think is much more concise and strong. Emily is so cool - you know, she's one of those people that makes the world a better place because you have her cell number saved onto your cellphone. Any time I think the world sucks and is full of assholes, I scroll through all the numbers of white women I have on my celli and see Emily's number and I'm like, damn, at least I got Emily's phone number. Though I wrote it to Emily after being inspired by her work (Hyphenation from Broken Speak was in constant rotation for a long time), I also (emotionally) wanted this poem to be dedicated to the amazing Asian American women artists and friends who have inspired me and shared their stories with me over the years. Emily's bambambadabadabam was again recorded onto that analog reel by Toby (damn, we got a lot of mileage out of that tape), just so we could see if we could do something with it later, it was originally supposed to support the Poetry Never Leads to Love poem but I thought it would do better here, since the poem is about singing and it seems to fit the tone (or at least help hide my boring ass voice). BTW, if you don't have I Was Born With Two Tongue's Broken Speak album yet, go get it. It gets my vote as the best spoken word album of all time, and it should be like Thriller for Asian folks: every household should have at least one copy. I myself have two copies just in case a tornado rips my house apart and whisks away all my worldly belongings. By the way I was just kidding about the white women thing. Our Kung Fu - These days there is a lot of co-option of Asian action cinema by Hollywood and white hipsters, and there is no real dialogue or discussion about it. I know, every one has the right to be inspired, but there is a difference between being inspired/paying homage and straight-up ripping people off. Especially considering the politics of racial representations of Asians in the U.S. pop culture and the money that makes it work. I was thinking about how important Asian kung fu and action flicks were to me throughout my life and all the different reasons for it - and it made me think of all the cultures, subcultures, etc. that people of color and the indigenous in this country create and/or depend on to survive, and how that usually gets co-opted and exploited by white people. No Offense - A few years ago, a frat down in Florida threw a Mekong Delta party, where all the men who attended dressed up like American GI's and any woman who wanted to come had to dress like a Vietnamese prostitute. Well, America, if all you teach your kids about the Vietnam War is Miss Saigon and Oliver Stone movies, this is what you get. Anyway community members and veterans were upset, so of course the frat boys said they didn't mean to be offensive. Hence the title of this poem, No Offense. Then they said that, now that they knew, they wouldn't do it again. But they did. So I wrote this poem as a reversal: how would the rest of America like it if we brought war into their neighborhoods and turned that horrific tragedy into a frat party? Obviously that would not be okay. So then why is it okay for this Mekong Delta party to happen? What kind of level of entitlement do you have when you assume that you can through a party like this? Hip Hop Haiku (17 Skillables) - This is the studio version of HHH, recorded in L.A. This is one of my favorite pieces - me and Doug trading rhymes that are exactly 17 syllables a-piece. Sometimes DK and me are so damn clever and talented that it creeps me out. It must creep other people out too cuz no one else thinks we're as talented and clever as we think ourselves to be. Which leads me to announce the title of my next CD: FUCK ALL Y'ALL MOTHERFUCKERS. Anyway we did this off the cuff through emails (yes boss, of course I'm working!), just trading haiku back and forth through the miracle of email till we had a collaborative poem. Yeah you know it's dope and you wish you thought of it before we did. Mass Transit - Ah, love. The bane of poets everywhere. This poem at its most basic level is about long distance relationships, but also exploring the idea of love as it effects Asian Americans and how in many ways we're seen/treated as transient, always a foreigner and on the way to somewhere else, always from somewhere else. This is how Asian Americans in love with one another can finally feel at home together. Way back when I was writing this, I sent out a request to the APIA spoken word list serv and asked people to hit me up with the names of mass transit modes in their cities (i.e. the Muni in SF, the L in Chicago, the 21A in Minneapolis, etc.). Then I recorded a bunch of ambient noises so we could mix it all together into the background - the noises of planes landing/taking off in Minneapolis and San Francisco, taxi cabs and the subway trains in NY, the Muni and trolley in SF, and I rode the 21A one day recording the door opening and the bus roar as it trucked up and down Lake Street. We just ran out of time. Poetry Never Leads to Love - Nothing like a troubled relationship poem, eh? Here's another short poem about a troubled relationship, I call it Riot: " Their love was like a brick through glass/first there was a riot/then fire/then nothing." Ooooooooooooo. I'm hella deep, huh? Doug is of the opinion that an alarming number of my very best poems are love poems. Which is his tender way of saying that all my other poems are bootywack. Oh shit, I just realized that just now. Yo, thanks for all the backhanded "compliments", you magnificent bastard! I'm gonna hide a diss of you in my next rhyme! Anyway, Poetry Never Leads to Love is pretty self-explanatory, but since most of y'all are some ignorant motherfuckers I'll explain it by saying that there is a progression in the poem, for when everything is going right til when things start to go wrong, when you don't have to write me a poem goes to where is my poem. You know, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Transmigratory Worker (for Vijit Ramchandani) feat. Emily Chang - This is the studio version of the poem for Vijit, read my other notes for it above. Toby recorded this as well, and Emily improvised her singing for it, building the melody and then running with it, turning one of my verses (our languages break like waves on these strange shores) into a hook. She was sick and exhausted and still she sounds amazing. Vijit, if you're out there somewhere man, I hope you're in a better place. And we miss you like crazy. For Us - This is the studio version of this poem. I wanted to write something positive about Asian America, a celebratory poem, something along the lines of Margaret Walker's amazing For My People poem. Larry came up with this beat from a bunch of samples he culled from a stack of taiko drum CDs I left with him, and when I first heard it, I was like, this energy needs to lift up For Us and take that poem to the next level. Larry really did something amazing by piecing all these different sounds together, making a beat is no joke! The tracks that didn't make it/ideas that didn't happen Dear Senator McCain - this track was so old that I didn't know what I did with it - I recorded it for a MN Poetry Slam CD and couldn't find where I put my copy. Damn, I really need to be more organized. Anyway, I guess it may seem odd that this poem is not on Refugeography, since it really was the poem that catapulted me (unexpectedly) into the National Slam Finals back in 2000 and got me a fair share of death threats. Oh well, let's hope there's another CD and I can put it on there, or maybe it'll be on the "Bao Phi: a Retrospective" best of/box set which will come out in 40 years after I've completely sold out and am a contestant on a spoken word reality TV show on VH-1. Geography featuring Ed Bok Lee and Annelize Machado - this one was a heartbreaker to not include on the CD. It's a really great poem that me and Ed wrote together and we wanted to get Annelize's amazing voice on there with us. I also wanted to get more of my fellow Minnesotan Asian American homies with me on this CD. But we couldn't work it out from a technical standpoint (recording three voices in the studio with one mic is no joke!) and though Larry had the great idea of recording it live, we just didn't have the time/money. Hopefully if there is another CD or if Ed gets his own CD out (if any rich people are reading this, produce his CD!) we can work on it further. Ode to William Hung - This one was a bit too new and needed work, and I wrote it after I promised myself (and Larry) that there would be NO MORE NEW POEMS on this CD project. Bread and Glass/Knick Knacks - These are the poems about my mother and my father, respectively. These are amongst the most popular poems I do when I perform around the country. But I'm still weirded out about poems that are that personal involving my family. When you're performing live in the heat of the moment, things can be okay, but - anyway, I don't want to get into it too much, let's just say that I'm not ready for these poems to be out there. Notes on the Liner Notes Didn't Doug do a great job? He designed the whole shebang. And of course Chamindika's amazing art work graces the front cover of the CD. It was her first official commissioned piece and I am honored that it's my CD - when she first showed it to me years back, I wanted the CD to come out right away so that people could see the art. Of course, neither of us knew the CD wouldn't be coming out for like another 4 years. Damn! www.chamindika.com Then there is a bunch of pics that go with the dedication and thank you's, those are some of the pics taken by me during different performances from the stage, of audiences around the country. I wanted to include the pics to show that the Asian American community and Asian Am audiences are as important to this art as the artist is. Then there's the big beautiful black and white picture of a bunch of us Asians in Minneapolis, taken by the enormously talented Wing Young Huie, who donated his time and talent to the project. www.wingyounghuie.com When I considered an 'author photo' of myself for this CD, different ideas popped into my head: me with my chin in my hands gazing out into the distance while wearing a shimmering gold suit; me asleep in a chair as my poems surround me like so much broken glass; me with no shirt on, with a bunch of dollar bills stuck into my pants. Then I thought to myself, self, how about a picture that somehow communicates the idea, I am just one Asian American voice in a community of many? So I sent out a call with his idea in mind and a bunch of my friends came to the shoot, along with some people who hated my guts but thought the idea was pretty cool. I also like it because it makes me look a lot more popular than I am. It's also open to interpretation, like, these are the fools that Bao owes money to, or as Thuyet suggested, it looks like I'm about to challenge someone to a street race and this is my crew. The picture of me on the CD tray was taken by the magnificent David Huang, whom you can check out at www.poeticdream.com You can search for hella sexy pictures of me on his site, including pics he took of me and my good friend Carolyn when we went to get tattoo'd in San Jose. close