by Michael Chacko Daniels (MSJ68)
With illustrations by Krittika Ramanujan & Aaron Bass
Michael Chacko Daniels, in his inimitable way, paints a wild, sensuous, explosive, and yearning picture of the collision between ideals and base motives, whether played out on a human-relational level or in society at large, and what “experience” at the hands of people with base motives can do to innocence—and what the path to love and resolution may be.
Polarity reigns. There are unforgettable characters on both sides of the world, the racial divide.
There’s the brilliantly drawn Annama, who seeks to control her son from India even at a distance of thousands of miles, and who has visions in the latrine.
There’s the aged, dignified, honorable Mr. Scott, the book editor at Asian Transitions, happily married for sixty years until his wife’s death, who befriends Mathew and his ideals.
There is Huckleberry, streetwise and drug-friendly, who talks to Mathew of the Yoga of Laughter at a time when Mathew has abandoned his ideals in despair.
There is Y. K., the editor at Asian Transitions, who, when Mathew is up for review for the soon-available Editor position, unfairly gives Mathew a poor performance review.
And above all, there is Maria, who, with all her edginess, forms a bridge to Mathew’s past and country by writing secret letters to Annama about her love for Mathew, and locking them up, unsent, in a trunk. This is a testing relationship, not a smooth one. Too many opposites come up against each other: not only the “much darker than your father” of Mathew and the “fully white woman” of Maria, but also their acculturated ways, spirits, and attitudes.
And the language, frequently full of poetry and humor, frustration and transcendence, is a Daniels hallmark. Still, it is Mathew who holds the center for us; and in his ultimate salvation is our own.
Ahmad is a Malaysian screenwriter, podcaster and food journalist. She was on the writing team for Emmy-nominated “Saladin,” Malaysia’s first fully-animated series. She has written and produced over 8,000 hours of food content, including a food drama series called “I Eat KL,” which the Asian Wall Street Journal called “a mouth-watering soap opera.” Ahmad’s first film that she co-wrote, “Motif,” featured a female cop on the trail of a small-town murder. She reimagined Walinong Sari into an animation short which has won film fest awards in LA, New York, Mexico, Chile and Japan. She also hosts the “Two Book Nerds Talking” podcast.
Armstrong is an award-winning journalist and professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She has reported from several countries, including Sierra Leone, Kenya and the Philippines, and reported from Haiti from 2010 to 2014, through grants from The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and NYU. She has been featured on NPR and the BBC, discussing rape in the camps in Haiti and HIV/AIDS in the aftermath of the earthquake. Armstrong’s work has been published in The Intercept, the New Yorker and other outlets. She has produced and directed documentaries, including one for CBS News about the role that poor mental health care provided by for-profit companies has played in an increase in suicides in state prisons. She directed a documentary about a young man who was incarcerated in an adult prison when he was 16, which was featured in the Social Impact track at SXSW.
Demillo hosts and reports for CUNY-TV’s Emmy-award winning “Asian American Life.” Her work has received multiple awards, including an Emmy in 2020 for her short documentary on a Philippine-based feeding program. Prior, she spent a decade as a reporter and anchor on the Emmy-award winning FOX-5 morning news show, “Good Day New York.” Demillo was a reporter for the Orange County Newschannel in California and the CBS-affiliate in Sacramento. She is also a tenured journalism professor at Saint Peter’s University and now serves as chair of the Department of Communication and Media Culture. Demillo is the recipient of a grant from the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium in partnership with Slice of Culture to help fill the void of local news in Hudson County, New Jersey. She received her BA in Journalism and International Relations from the University of Southern California and her MSJ from Medill in 1993.
Eng is an award-winning, veteran Chicago reporter. She has worked in Chicago journalism for more than three decades starting at the Chicago Sun-Times and moving to the Chicago Tribune and WBEZ. She has served as an Axios Chicago reporter since the summer of 2021. Eng’s great-grandfather came to Chicago in 1911 and opened Chinese restaurants that served as the inspiration for her first attempt at fiction.
Jaime is the youngest daughter in a tight-knit family, as Mexicans from Guanajuato, of Otomi and Purépecha heritage, who share a legacy of post-colonialism and migration. She is a graduate of Medill whose work has been published by Teen Vogue, The Los Angeles Times, Vice, i-D and more. Most recently, she served as the first-ever Head of Creator Content for The Los Angeles Times. Through culture-shifting journalism, Jaime strives to create digital and physical spaces that are more civically engaged, accessible and reflective of the real world. Her work explores how communities at the margins survive and thrive in the Western world; and the ways cultural phenomena, art and technology can affect populations in disparate ways. Occasionally, she writes personal essays.
Midgette was the classical music critic of The Washington Post, where she established herself as one of the leading voices in her field. She also wrote on the visual arts and did significant work on #MeToo. Before the Post, she became the first woman to write classical music reviews on a regular basis for The New York Times where she contributed reviews and features on music and theater. A graduate of Yale University, Midgette started her career as a journalist during the 11 years she lived in Germany. She is co-author of “The King and I,” a candid book about Luciano Pavarotti written with his manager, Herbert Breslin, and “My Nine Lives,” written with the pianist Leon Fleisher, who lost the use of his right hand and then regained it three decades later. She is working on a historical novel about the woman who built pianos for Beethoven.
Lekas Miller is a journalist who began her work in Palestine, covering daily life under Israel’s occupation for The Daily Beast, before moving to Lebanon—and then Turkey and Iraq—to cover the Syrian civil war, the refugee exodus to Europe and the rise and fall of the Islamic State for Vanity Fair, Deutsche Welle and other publications. Her favorite stories center around love and romance, particularly the ones that show the way that love can flourish in even the darkest places. Her first book, “Love Across Borders,” is a collection of real-life love stories of people who have been displaced by conflict and separated by borders, fighting for their happily ever after in a world that is divided by passports and papers. She plans to write a novel that follows the emotional journey of a young Palestinian journalist navigating life in London while still being tied to the Middle East.
Mumford is a writer and podcast producer, currently bouncing between Minnesota and places closer to an ocean. She started in public radio and now produces a morning news show with The New York Times audio team. Her work in various mediums has won a Peabody Award — and fourth place at the Minnesota State Fair quilt competition (category 205). During the pandemic, Mumford sculpted eight wire-and-mortar tentacles bursting out of her front yard; they’re still standing. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.
Pierre’s work centers the voices and lived experience of people and communities that have been historically marginalized. A former reporter and editor at The Washington Post, he was the initial impetus behind the 2006 groundbreaking series and later book, “Being A Black Man: At the Corner of Progress and Peril.” He was on the Metro reporting team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting massacre in 2007. Pierre is the co-author of “A Day Late and A Dollar Short: High Hopes and Deferred Dreams in Obama’s ‘Post-Racial’ America.” He owns Bald Cypress Media and has provided media solutions to clients including UNCF, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Pierre has taught at Dillard University, Georgetown University and Howard University. Pierre graduated from Louisiana State University.
Rezendes is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist with the global investigations team at The Associated Press. His recent work includes an examination of child sex abuse in the Mormon Church and financial corruption in the Catholic Church. Rezendes is also a television writer, a screenwriter and a biographer. He is currently at work on a biography of the late Jimmy Breslin, the legendary New York reporter who gave voice to the powerless and helped create the New Journalism. Previously, he worked for The Boston Globe Spotlight Team where he shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for revealing the cover-up of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, and one for covering the bombing of the Boston Marathon. Rezendes was running the marathon when the bombs exploded and worked into the night covering the tragedy. In 2015, Rezendes was played by Mark Ruffalo in the Academy Award-winning movie, “Spotlight.”
Smith is Reuters’ bureau chief in Seoul, where he oversees a team of more than 20 journalists covering both South and North Korea. He joined Reuters in 2016 in Afghanistan, then moved to Seoul amid the “fire and fury” of 2017. Smith went on to cover the Trump-Kim summits, lead a rare reporting trip to Pyongyang, and reveal the scale of North Korea’s pandemic border walls. First arriving in Kabul for the military affairs newspaper Stars and Stripes in 2013, Smith spent nearly five years chronicling the West’s attempts to extricate itself from the conflict and the increasing toll on the Afghan population. He has also reported on security affairs from Russia, Europe, Central Asia and Iraq, where he accompanied Shi’ite militias to the frontlines of the battle against Islamic State militants, and in 2019 he reported on the Hong Kong protests, including from inside the occupied Polytechnic University.
