Welcome to our panel today. These authors all commit the question of justice in different ways. I am frank shyong a columnist with the l. A. Times and i will let everyone introduce themselves so i get it correctly. I am Nicholas David often and i come from new haven, connecticut. I am erica and i live in california. My name is ali winston and i come from new york. I feel like this is setting up a tender profile or something. I live in l. A. I will start with erica. You wrote the book somewhere sisters. I wanted to ask you, as an introduction to the book in case not everyone here has read it, why did you want to write a book and how did the idea come about . My book centers on a pair of identical trends twins born in vietnam separated at birth. About six years ago i became a mother to identical twins. I was studying twin science and epigenetics. I connected with a researcher in california that is a very wellknown twin researcher. She connected me with twins around the world. For a piece i was working on for the atlantic back then interested in twin science. And the story of the twins drew me to it of course. It is inherently one of those stories you might think, what happened to them . I came to find out one of the twins was raised in town in illinois not far from where i was raised. And was adopted by a White American family. The other twin was raised in vietnam. So, that started my process of trying to found out more about the story. While i was researching the science i learned about transnational adoption and the history of that and it became another research throughline through the book. Frank i admire how the book compassionately characterizes different clashing perspectives of the adoption industry. Birth family, adopting families, adoptees themselves. You talk to a pair of sisters with drastically different takes on their circumstances. I think it does the work a lot of journalism seeks to do, put groups in perspective in conversations with each other in ways that do not currently exist in the discourse. What challenges did you face getting access to your subjects and cultivating the necessary level of candor . Erika one of the challenges is of course there are interviews in the book with birth families in vietnam. So there are language challenges there. I worked with an interpreter and traveled and was able to interview the birthmother mother in the family. The family was very open to allowing me to write their story. Through this process i spent about five years getting to know everybody involved and i understood i came to understand more about how adoption narratives are framed historically in the u. S. And how we sort of have this understanding of adoption through popular culture. Of it sort of being a fantasy or fairytale. With a happy ending. That is how it is framed in movies, books, and films also often told from the perspective of adoptive parents. A lot of the literature historically is through the perspective of doctors of adoptive parents, same for studies done on adoptees. It was important for me to center as much as i could experiences of the adopted young woman. Also, the birth families. The approach i took structurally was more complex because while i was including different perspectives, sisters, birthparents, the adoptive mother in particular i was also interweaving the history of adoption, transnational and also transracial adoption in america. And also some of the science reporting. So it became a more complex structure but it was important to have all of that represented in the book. Frank if you read her book, i have never finished a book and exclaimed over how it is structured. But i did this one. It does brilliantly weave different narratives together to illuminate a wider picture of adoption i was not aware of. I am curious, how many here know someone who was adopted . Raise your hand. That is close to 90 of everyone in here. As you will find out in erikas book you make a connection between war and the Global Adoption industry and american racial politics that i found really valuable, exploring these questions of nature versus nurture. You give this revealing history of race science and its applications in adoption and its origins in eugenics. Why was it important for you to connect these histories to the history of adoption and tell these stories together . Erika i teach narrative journalism at uc irvine. I have always been taught since i was at the l. A. Times that narrative is driven by people and their stories and you are following people on their journeys. Getting to know them over years and very indepth sometimes. Sometimes it is emotional and personal even the details you get. At the same time everybody exists within a system. Our lives exist in systems. Science is a system. Adoption is a system. To understand where we are with understanding nature versus nurture and also our conceptions about adoption, it was really important to me to dig into that context and history and some of the structural questions and questions of bias, frankly, that have been part of the science and also the part of the system of adoption. One thing i really enjoyed about the book was these kind of various fables and myths and sayings and sort of vignettes that surface in vietnamese culture and emotional thinking at the beginning of each section and chapter. I thought that was uninteresting way to deepen the Emotional Experience of the text. How did you decide to do that . Erika again, that was in thinking about, again, my training as a journalist, a narrative journalist. We interview so deeply we can write in third person. If you are writing fiction you news them but no somebody so well. It feels on the page like you are writing fiction but you are not. It is all recorded at every detail has eyesores. For experiences of people in this country that i have not lived myself. I am not an adoptee, though i am Asian American and was raised in the midwest and had similar shared experiences, i thought it was important to include oral history in some of this to have the voices speak unfiltered without the voice of the journalist as the narrator. I tried to include snippets of voices and vignettes letting them speak in between chapters to center voices and let voices be there and speak. I also included a lot of voices of scholars and activists and adoptees that are not necessarily part of the narrative of the family. But come part of the larger context. For me it was important to elevate those voices and talk about the history of critical adoption studies. There is a rich history. What i am sick exploring what i am exploring with adoption in the book is nothing new. The scholarship has been around for decades. I was just pointing in the direction of interviewing some of the voices. It was important for me to get the voices of people that have lived experience. Frank one thing i learned from your book was connecting adoption to the aftermath of the vietnam war and the complicated myriad effects it is still having in american society. And, i really admire the way you took the books to carefully argue with history. Carefully and politely. And in some cases it very forcefully argues with history. Because, certain narratives were missed told and needed to be told again. So, we are right now kind of talking about the vietnam war and the unresolved tensions event and so that is a great transition to our next dr. Author dr. Kirk wallace johnson. You wrote the fisherman and the dragon. I will attempt to summarize it. Basically, there is this time of pitched warfare between vietnamese fishermen that are mostly war refugees and a texas fisherman, am i correct . Kirk yes. Frank and while they are fighting under the over the fishing grounds, and unfolding environmental disaster is happening that no one is paying attention to. I thought that made it unique. Did i get it right . Kirk yeah. Frank tell us about your book and why you wanted to write it and how you got the idea. Kirk the book is in one interview somebody described it as the last battle of the vietnam war. Which unexpectedly unfolds along the texas gulf coast. After the fall of saigon we resettled hundreds of thousands of vietnamese and at the Houston Galveston Area became the second largest community. This is in the midtolate 1970s. It was a time of economic despair along the gulf coast there were where there were gas lines and inflation. At first white fishermen were happy to unload crappy old boats on the refugees, playing them for suckers. What the vietnamese did was all you could hope for. They fixed the boats to cut down on cost using family members as deckhands. They would go out fishing. Within a few years they became such an Economic Force that the whites freaked out and ran to the governor and begged for a ban on refugees. And when that failed they brought the ku klux klan in and they started a very public and ghastly campaign to dry try to drive refugees from the coast. Vietnamese boats were firebombed. Their homes were firebombed. The klan conducted boat patrols through Galveston Bay and this is not the 60s or 50s. Its 1981. Where these 20 armed robed klansmen marauding Galveston Bay with an effigy of a vietnamese refugee hanging from one of the outriggers going around in search of vietnamese to harass, basically. I did not know, answering how i found it or why i wanted to write it, i did not know anything about the story. I had never heard of it. I discovered it, strangely, the day my dad died in late 2018 from cancer spurred by his own exposure to agent orange during the war during his deployment. The day he died i was in l. A. And i said to my wife, i did not really feel right sitting around at home like that was a normal day and i felt an overwhelming urge to spend the day fishing because my dad and i fished a lot and he taught me how to fish. I threw my gear in the trunk and i drove to the kern river and along the way i had the radio going but i was not really paying attention to it until this spring sting song came on called Galveston Bay. I am not a big springsteen fan. I should not admit this. But he started singing a song about a young vietnamese refugee that ends up in texas trained to rebuild his life as a fisherman and all of a sudden he has klansmen hunting him down. The whole day on the river i was mourning my dad. But this song kept popping into my head. It was such a bizarre premise. It seemed very overengineered. I do not think it was based on anything. Then weeks later when i finally sat down and googled it and saw that not only had it happened, it happened at a moment of i mean, it was a National News story back then. Cronkite was covering it. There was a huge trove of resources to work from. That kicked off a multiyear investigation to find the people that had carried this out. It meant extracting confessions from klansmen that torched the boats and all of that. I do not know if that answers your question. Frank yes, that was fascinating. Do you want to keep going . Kirk well, one of the things i found really interesting about the story is it starts off with this verdict. With vietnamese fishermen and other fishermen, billy joe. A very texas name. Billy joe and who was the vietnamese fishermen . They are having this disagreement. And it billy joe ins up murdered. It is not clear whether they arrest the right vietnamese person and they deliver the verdict, essentially correct in this circumstance, that this was selfdefense after a year of a year of violent harassment by this manna. But it becomes a spark plug anyway. It is kirk it is an extraordinary story. Because i thought it was unrelated to the events that happened a couple years later. The killing happened in 1979 and there was basically a 17yearold vietnamese kid just starting as a cropper. He is in this small texas town out on the water and he dropped his traps unaware there are unwritten rules of the bay and he dropped his traps too close to a white guys traps. There is no turf. People try to assert it is there water but it is not. The right white clabber billy joe is enraged and he gets the trap up and smashes them. The vietnamese crabbers have been harassed for years. There was a confrontation on the water where knives were brandished on both sides and over the next month each time billy joe would see this young vietnamese man, he would give death threats. He stabbed the tires of his car. He raised a rifle at him at one point. So, he goes and buys a revolver from walmart. He is concerned about the future. One day he is out on his on the docks. Him and his brothers are checking out a new engine for their boat and billy joe comes and cuts him across the chest with a knife. And he basically for his revolver and shoots him dead. There was an expectation amongst the white residents of texas that there would be texas justice here. That it would be a quick trial and a quick execution. It was shocking to me. In modern terms that trial happened like 60 days after the killing. He was tried in front of an allwhite jury in a very conservative part of the state. There were Vietnam Veterans on the jury. Astonishingly, and it took me years, but i got all of them weeding out potential jurors. But he was acquitted on the grounds of lawful selfdefense, that he had every right to protect himself in that moment. To some audiences, myself as well, its kind of a redeeming moment that goes against what you thought was going to happen to the kid. But everybody knew it was a disaster in terms of tensions rising between these two camps on the coast so tsao and his brother fled texas and because the whites felt wronged by the justice system, they felt the courts did not give them what they wanted so they would get it their own way and bring the clan in. There was this mystery for 40 years. Why was the klan so interested in billy joe . It took 40 years. I was in this tiny town in texas and his widow confessed he was in the plan himself. That nexus, basically, it led to the clan coming in. Then it became every small town along the texas coast. There were whispers that the ku klux klan is coming for the vietnamese. Who wants to join the clan . It gave the media ship publicity and set the cycle in motion that came to a boil in Galveston Bay. It is a really gripping story. I was imagining it as a tv show the whole time i was reading it. Erika it is happening. Frank you have me as a viewer, congratulations. It seems like the last couple years, the last half decade or so i have seen a lot of reexaminations and retellings, or at least, different accounts of the vietnam war. I am talking about the writing of the kevin burns vietnam documentary and countless podcasts, novels, and tv are returning to this formative. This formative time in our nations history and your book seems to take place in a place that is itself unresolved, a product of the vietnam wars unresolved tensions. I am wondering. Erikas book also deals with the vietnam war. I am wondering why is it now that we are undertaking these reexaminations . All of our panelists have written books about things that happened a longer time ago. What does why do these conversations circle back into relevance . What does time due to sort of allow these conversations to flourish . Kirk that is an interesting question. For me at least i had kind of a motivation, a personal motivation. Authors are always supposed to profess they have no biases. I do not try to keep that route is going. Like i stand on the side of i think that our country is made stronger by admitting refugees. I spent years of my life trying to get iraqi refugees out because i served in the war and these were colleagues of mine being hunted. There are no both sides in terms of the story for me. But i cant in 2023, it is very difficult for me to engage in some of the questions beating at the heart of the book and other books from my panelists. Who gets to be an american . Who gets to write the American Dream . These things sound cliche. But they are really crucial. All these fishermen keep saying, im tired of them getting my piece of the pie. You had an issue here, all love to the texas gold coast, but the vietnamese did not dream of moving to small towns on the coastline. They would have given anything to stay at home in their own country. They are thrust here. They were adamant they did not want to go on welfare. They wanted to work their hardest to make a new life. Everything we ask of newcomers to the country. Its difficult for me to get into any constructive debates anymore about what we do at the border or with refugees fleeing current wars without hands going up immediately, was without her devolving into an assessment of trump or maga or all this. Part of the appeal of the book for me was it is engaging the very same issues coursing through the country now, but, because it happened 40 years ago, i am finding a lot of people can take it on its own terms and not feel, is he talking about me because i voted for trump . There is a little bit of the back door. That is an attempt at an answer. Frank i will keep going with questions. Next i want to turn to alis book that he wrote with darla darwin von graham. The riders come out at night is a gripping examination of the brutal tactics of the Oakland Police department over the past couple decades. You talk about how the city of oakland has spent which i learned from your book, has spent more years under Court Ordered oversight than any other Police Department and in the country. You talk about how the city of oakland is the edge case in american Law Enforcement. What do you mean by that . Ali the way our country deals with Police Departments, school systems, prisons, hospitals that are out of control, they have a legalistic method aside from protests and elections and trying to change in the broader political schema. There is a technical term called consent creek. Reforms Consent Decree. Reforms put in place by a judge. They create a Reform Program by which the department or hospital or whatever institution, state prison system, has to change its fundamental practices in order to rectify the problem whether it be prison overcrowding, racial redlining in school districts, be it a Police Department that carries out racist biased policing, Excessive Force muff also rests. Force, false arrests. In the case of the Oakland PoliceDepartment Agency went under a consent degree in 2003 simultaneous and contemporary to the rampart scandal here resulting in