voices

In my travels - particularly the legs of my journeys that have taken me through New Haven, New York, and Beijing - I've met men and women who feel, material possessions stripped away, as though the only thing they have left is their story.

I've also met many people, regardless of economic status, who feel that their stories are unimportant and unheeded. Some of these people remember their stories, but think that they're only useful as a means to an end. Hoping to monetize their background, they leverage their characteristics and very selves into concrete value. They don't think who they are matters so much as what they can accomplish.

How many people have been told, over and over again, that their stories don't matter?

How can these men and women find a voice - and how can we tell them that there is Someone out there to whom their lives matter, on an intimate level?

hours in a day

Beginning Friday, August 6:

9:30 AM - Woke up. Dressed.
10 AM - Brunch in Dongzhimen with my buddy Israel.
12 PM - lunch at Xizhimen (across town) with my buddy Billy.
2 PM - Head to Dongsi. Hang with Chacey and her roommate in Dongsi, at the underground shopping market. Go to Bustout store, help the girls shop. Hang with Slim Paul.
6:30 PM - back at home. Kelley and Sylvia are waiting! Sorry, girls.
7 PM - go out to eat. 24 hour Xinjiang restaurant. Israel, Kelley, Sylvia, Chacey, Dui Dui, and I are all hanging.
8:30 PM - Chacey and Dui Dui had to bounce. Maggie, Jenna, Jenna's friend, and Ben join us. We ask the server to reheat our food.
11 PM - Maggie, Jenna, and her friend headed home; Ben, Israel, Kelley, Sylvia, and I are back home. Figuring out what to do.
1 AM - All hands in: pledging that we will make it to the sunrise flag-raising at Tiananmen Square.
1:30 AM - I remember that I have the Internet, and can stay awake forever with it, guaranteeing that I will be up to wake others up. The others go to sleep.
2 AM - I'm on the internet checking email, reading blogs, and talking to Jessii. Everyone else is napping. Jenna comes by and promptly falls asleep on my floor. There are 12 people in my house: 6 in beds, 4 on couches, 1 on the floor, and me on the internet.
4:30 AM - Everybody up! Out the door, hailing the few cabs we can find, headed to Tiananmen East.
5:15 AM - sunrise at Tiananmen Square, followed by Israel guiding us over to the national opera house ("The Egg"), lots of photos, and a subway back home.
7 AM - Back home. Time to sleep.
11 AM - Up and at 'em: lunch with Steve!

And so another day dawns...

a day in the life

8 AM - wake up. dress.
8:10 AM - hop on the bus to work
8:35 AM - arrive at my internship
8:40 AM - 5:30 PM - work. sit in on meetings, do some reading, send emails, write letters.
5:45 PM - 7:15 PM - prepare for large group.
7:20 PM - 9:10 PM - large group meeting.
9:30 PM - 11:00 PM - late-night after large group with friends from church.
11:00 PM - 11:15 PM - hop a taxi home from the restaurant.
11:15 PM - 12:00 AM - catch up on emails at home. change clothes.
12:00 AM - 1 AM - head to the nearby bar/restaurant/shopping district. hang out with rap friends - the top emcee and radio DJ in the city. The #1 DJ in the country. Meet the top house music DJ in Taiwan and his new assistant.
1 AM - 3 AM - Wes and Marcus know a guy having his birthday party at another club. hit the club.
3:15 AM - back home. brush teeth, check emails. mess around online.
4:30 AM - sleep. prepare to wake up at 7 AM to pick someone up from the airport. tomorrow, I meet up with friends, go shopping, head to a recording studio, go out to a work dinner with my best friend, and maybe go to see Chozie DJ at a club.

12 hours in

Hi, everyone!

How yall feelin tonight? (this was the second half of one of 108 Tongues' songs, Don't Start Somethin'. The chorus went:

How many tongues in the house? [108, 108]
How yall feelin tonight? [feelin good, feelin great])

Well, it's 1:30 PM in Beijing - a sunny, muggy, hazy day. I just ran around my block...

hold up, let me rewind.

"Yesterday" - that is to say, in that span of time before I last fell asleep and after I last woke - my parents, sister, and I left Delaware around 11 AM, bound for JFK international airport. I arrived in a fantastically, even excessively, prompt fashion: 1:30 PM for a 4:30 PM flight, that later wound up getting delayed until 5:15.

Boarding the plane, I was greeted with the horrific sight of no in-headrest entertainment. That's right: you buy budget, you fly budget.

Well thankfully, this revelation was immediately followed by another, more positive one: that in place of the now-commonplace headrest-mounted touchscreen lay a standard 3-prong electrical outlet. So, ten minutes into the 15-hour flight, I happily pulled out my laptop and spent the rest of the flight alternating between watching movies (The Squid and the Whale, The Departed, Pulling John - all dope flicks) and powering through over a season and a half of 30 Rock, abetted by the empty seats on my either side - at points, I was alternately nearly fully supine and prone.

After a full day of this, I was greeted by the lights of Shanghai Pudong Airport



where I passed a quick layover, including a short 15-minute panic after a delay was announced "due to communications equipment issues" (the worst phrase to hear when travelling: "your flight has been delayed. a new departure time will be announced shortly").



Post-boarding, I settled into my seat and finally succumbed to the dull but growing urge to sleep. Slipping on my headphones, I leaned back like Fat Joe and woke to the even hazier yellow glow of Beijing.

Gathering my two 50-pound suitcases (guh), I motivated myself, plus wheeled encumbrances, into a waiting cab and sped through the night towards dongcheng





Making my way to the address my new roommate Steve gave me, my cab driver and i only got a little (read: a lot) lost. I caught up briefly with Steve before he hit the hay, got online through my VPN and caught up with emails and various work, then fell asleep just as the blue of morning began to tint the east.

Waking up, I began my unpacking, ran various errands (got keys copied, bought a new SIM card) and had a quick run around my new neighborhood.

Tonight, I'm going to swing by an older couple's house to talk to the husband, meet some friends for dinner, and then tomorrow I have a lunch and dinner with friends - and hoping to meet up with some of the Light Fellowship students in the afternoon to hang around in wudaokou. Saturday, practically all day, is my buddy Billy's wedding! and we'll take it from there...

Time to roll!


this machine is super fly. The bit closer to the camera slides into the groove of the key, and moves synchronized with the drill in the background, which carves out an identical copy in the blank.

first morning

this is home now

Still winning

The homeboy Derek representing SBTG/Royalefam just friended me on facebook. I assumed that he friended me through my facebook connection to Mark "SBTG" Ong and thought, cool, good to network with a fellow Asian streetwear/lifestyle head - and maybe we can build, at some point after I move to China, connecting the bustout movement + Royalefam.



But it turns out that he had more of an immediate concern - in the last royalefam online mailer, they announced a simple enough giveaway: a silkscreened SBTG hoodie to a randomly selected respondent who could identify one of their AJ5 customs.

And so, a few minutes after Derek friended me, I'm tagged in this image:


(Bustout X SOS New Haven, representing in the studio! I miss those guys, thorough hip-hop heads and emcees to the fullest!)

"Derek says: Royalefam would like to thank all our die-hard fans for taking part in our hoodie giveaway contest! Out of the 300+ entries we have received, we have randomly picked Jason G.L. Chu as the winner! Congrats! Thank you all for participating, look out for our next giveaway contest!"


Internets - stay winning

The collection

New photos of every shoe in my current collection, here