Mimi Thi Nguyen (The Gift of Freedom)

Life Harvester Radio

Heavy hitter alert. This month I talked to artist, activist, scholar, illustrious zine maker, and my very old friend Mimi Thi Nguyen about coming to the US as a refugee as a child; getting into punk through Maximum Rocknroll; falling out of love with punk because of a bunch of shitty men involved with MRR; falling back in love with punk through Evolution of a Race Riot, a zine project she made in response; connecting the dots between her refugee experience and the legacies of US imperialism informing her work as a scholar; the statement she wrote about the massacre in Atlanta. Plus I talk a bunch of shit about pop punk and threaten to break a 50 year old's glasses. We didn't talk about the Legend of Billie Jean, and that's my fault, but you should read Mimi's old Punk Planet column about it.