The Bánh Mì Chronicles

I’ve known Travis C. Lau since the beginning of the pandemic, as we follow each other on social media. My interview with him for this episode was the first real conversation I’ve had with him. From the moment I hit record, we hit it off like long-lost siblings discovering new things about each other. In this episode, Travis looks back on his complicated relationship with his parents and his relationship with the queer community during his college days, and how that affected his relationship to his own queer Chinese identity. We chatted about his poetry and how his disability and neurodivergence have impacted his work and a deeper understanding of himself. Travis talked about his friendship with the late Alice Wong, a disabled Asian American disability activist and author, and how he wants to remember her. Also, he treats us to a reading of one of his poems.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, he has been published widely in venues of public scholarship and poetry, including three chapbooks--The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022)--and a full-length collection of poems, What’s Left Is Tender (Harbor Editions, 2025). He is also co-editor of Every Place on the Map Is Disabled, an anthology of disability poetry and poetics, published with Northwestern University Press in 2026. He was the winner of the Christopher Hewitt Award for Poetry (2019), recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council’s Artists Elevated Award in Literature (2024), and the Ohio Arts Council's Artists with Disabilities Access Program Grant (2025). [travisclau.com]

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TW/CW: Discussion of G*nocide, State-Sanctioned V*olence, Racism

Jenny Chan, Executive Director of Pacific Atrocities Education (PAE), joins me as a guest for this week’s episode as we discuss the many parts of Asian American history during the 19th century to pre-World War 2 that have been forgotten in US History, and the racialized harm and v*olence that Asian Americans experienced during that time. Jenny dives into the Asian Pacific Wars that were happening during WW2, specifically imperial Japan’s atrocities, which include the Nanking Massacre, the Bataan Death March, and the Korean and Chinese comfort women. She brings up how necessary it is to share all of this history to gain a deeper understanding of what we are all seeing today in the US and across the globe. Tune in to learn more about this discussion.

Jenny Chan is the director of Pacific Atrocities Education (PAE), a San Francisco-based nonprofit she established in 2014 to raise awareness of World War II atrocities in the Asia-Pacific region, such as the Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731, and the "comfort women" system, through books, videos, and digitized archives that have engaged over 800,000 online visitors annually. Under her leadership, PAE's internship program—offering opportunities in research, community outreach, digital archiving, and oral history—has profoundly shaped participants' careers, with several former interns advancing to become professors and scholars.

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