Showing results by narrator "Paul Yen" in All Categories

Kenichi Zenimura–known as “Zeni”–loved baseball. As a young man in the 1920s he developed a Nisei baseball league in Fresno, California, and later organized barnstorming tours that brought the likes of Babe Ruth to the West Coast and Japan. And despite being sent to a Japanese-American internment camp in Arizona during World War II, he knew that somehow, baseball would be the key to improving the lives of his fellow detainees.

Saigon has fallen, and two Vietnamese refugees meet in an Arkansas relocation camp before setting out on a rip-roaring road trip across America. Qui Nguyen tells the hilarious and only slightly not-true version of how his parents met and built a life for themselves in a new land. Recorded before a live audience at the UCLA James Bridges Theater in February 2020.

Ken Narasaki's adaptation of the novel by Japanese American author John Okada is set during the aftermath of the US government's incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II and the resettlement of Japanese Americans to the West Coast. In the play, Ichiro returns to Seattle, where he struggles to transition into post-war life.

A team of lawyers uses a little-known legal writ to fight and overturn the conviction of Fred Korematsu, unjustly sentenced for resisting the WWII mass incarceration of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. The play draws much inspiration from Enduring Conviction: Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice by Lorraine K. Bannai (University of Washington Press 2015) and Justice Delayed by Peter Irons (Wesleyan University Press 1989).