Behind the Scenes Minis: Cannery Row & Tumanbay

Holly and Tracy talk about the evolution of Monterey's Cannery Row and the history behind the fictional podcast Tumanbay. Their discussion then turns to current events, the death of George Floyd and the protests around the nation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to our casual
Friday chat. I'm Holly Frying. I'm Tray p V. Wilson.
So the first thing we talked about this week was
Canary Row in the Monterey area and how the thing

(00:25):
it is today references the thing it used to be,
but the fishing and canning industry there is is not
what's driving it anymore. Yeah. Something that this reminded me
of from the very beginning, UM, was how it wasn't
called Canary Row when the book Canary Row was written, correct,
And it reminded me of the House of the Seven

(00:45):
Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, UM, which which you and I
have been to and recorded some videos out a while back,
which was not known as the House of the Seven
Gables and did not have seven gables when that book
was written, but as part of a settlement houses fundraising efforts, UM,

(01:07):
like the the house came to reflect what had been
depicted in fiction. Yeah, it's interesting, Um, it's to me,
it's I'm very fascinated by this idea that um Cannery
Row is a historic district, but like it's not as
though those canaries still exist, although the buildings still do.
It's a little bit different than like, this is a

(01:29):
historic home. We have preserved it and it's well restored
it to the way it once was, which is both
a departure from what I would normally expect from something,
uh that is so steeped in history. But also there's
the part of me that admires that what could have
become kind of like a dead space of you know,

(01:51):
abandoned businesses became a thriving thing that still references it's past.
Just it evolved in a in a way that it
could sustain itself. Yeah. Yeah, so many places I've had
to go through that kind of a trajectory for for
so many reasons. Um, Like when I grew up, the
nearest city to us was Winston Salem, UM, which of

(02:13):
course had a lot of cigarette and tobacco uh facilities,
many of which have been converted into various other things.
Um now that cigarettes and tobacco are a much smaller
industry than they were, uh, just even a couple of
decades ago. Yeah, it's super interesting. Have you ever been
out to Monterey? I have not. Um, it's it is

(02:35):
a really interesting mix because it's smaller than I expected.
For some reason, when I think of places with like
warehouses and like village settlements that have been moved to
various places, like I think a few miles of stretch,
but it's not. It's way more compacted than that. Um
I mentioned in the episode that like from the place

(02:58):
at Point Alone is where the Chinese fishing village was,
which sounds like it was like a really impressive interesting
place on its own because they built their homes like
right up to the water and sometimes overhanging the water.
To the place it got moved down the beach is
just not a far walk at all. Um. So the

(03:21):
idea of it being considered a move even almost seems
strange where you like but you just walked up the
beach because they're very close together. But uh, that was
another thing that we I didn't really get into. There
was sort of a mini tourism industry that started before
even um Hotel del Monty was built, which is that

(03:42):
because these Chinese fishing villages were so unique architecturally and
some of it was shanty town and some of it,
but some of it stood for a really long time
and they were in these strange what seemed very strange
to UM, you know, European descendant locals, these structures that
were built out over the water and people could literally

(04:02):
just like pull their boats up and get in and
out of the boat from their house. There were sometimes
people that would come in, like from San Francisco and
just take their carriage on a ride down through the
very you know, narrow streets of this Chinese village because
it was like this mini tourism thing where they would
just be curious, looky loose about how other people lived,

(04:27):
which is a whole interesting thing, especially when you consider
that almost no evidence of those people in those villages remains. Yeah.
I think we mentioned this in the episode about the
San Francisco fire UM, but there is an episode of
the podcast Invisible Um about the Chinese community's rebuilding of

(04:49):
Chinatown that touches on some of those same themes about
how UM tourists are just kind of coming to gawk
at the Chinese neighborhood and what that meant for the
people who live there in the rebuilding process. Yeah, it's
very very interesting. It's it's also interesting looking even at
different reference materials. There are some that kind of painted

(05:10):
almost like the Chinese and Chinese American inhabitants of the
Monterey area had an easier time in terms of dealing
with racism than the Chinese community in the city, for example,
in San Francisco, but ultimately they still had to deal
with racist attitudes, people complaining about them, undoubtedly professional jealousy

(05:37):
over how well they were able to manage their fishing business. Um,
so it is I'm like, is this a rose colored
glasses situation or was it to some degree a little
bit better there? And I don't honestly know, I have
not I don't feel like I have a wide enough
data set to feel like I can confidently say one

(06:00):
way or the other. But it is something, especially if
any of our listeners go looking for more information, to
take into account that those accounts, all of them, are written,
for the most part um through the lens of the
white person's experience and not the experience of the people
living in that fishing village, who probably had a much

(06:21):
different point of view, in a much different perception of
of how things were and how they were treated. But
so prosperous. I wish we still had more evidence of that.
We've talked about that to the archaeology of San Francisco
and how it's only getting harder and harder and harder
to find historical evidence, particularly of the Asian immigrants who

(06:46):
came and really made that part of the California coast
what it is today. So our second episode this week
was my interview with John Dryden, who makes Too Mumbay,
which is a really interesting podcast and if you're into
historical fiction, I think you would probably really enjoy it.
It is extremely compelling, as I mentioned in the course
of that interview, when I first started listening to it,

(07:09):
um because in in full disclosure, it was a project
that when it came over to my heart, I kind
of helped ussure it into being republished on our side,
so I got to hear it all kind of before
it got wide release, and I remember just being sort
of wowed by how um, how rich an experience it

(07:29):
is in audio format, and I think people would really
be into it. What's interesting is that it is full
of of intrigues and uh there's a lot of talk
as as John and I mentioned, of uprising and uh,
you know, kind of power shifts going on within that world,
which is again obviously fictional, and and sort of fantastical. Um,

(07:52):
but as as Tracy and I have been talking about
it and are programming for this week, it feels very
weird to talk about something like that and not talk
a little bit more about current events because they're everyone's mind.
It honestly feels weird and a little like odd and
and wrong to talk about anything else and to sit

(08:15):
here and do our jobs, even though are our jobs
and they they have meaning in their own way. Um. Yeah,
it's a strange time where everything feels sort of inconsequential
unless we're dealing with the multitude of problems facing us
at the moment, right right, well, and you were out
last week. Um, Normally we try to be in a

(08:39):
place where when we record something it is like the
following week's episodes at the earliest. Because you were out
last week. When Monday rolled around with the Canary Row
episode that had already been recorded two weeks ago, basically
we had already recorded the behind the scenes for it
two weeks ago, right after we were recorded it. Um.

(09:01):
I got to work on Monday morning to do the
q A on that episode, and I that it was
the biggest disparity between the tone of the episode that
was coming out and what was happening in the world
that I think I have ever experienced in my time
working on the show. Um, and you and I had
this conversation of like, should we acknowledged it would like

(09:24):
add on some kind of announcement like we couldn't. We
had a kind of the head scratching conversation about how
to handle it because it just really felt like, uh,
incongruous between what the show was going to say on
Monday and what the United States was doing on Monday
and what the response worldwide has been to what was

(09:44):
happening in the United States on Monday. Uh did not
have good answers anything. Yeah, I mean it's interesting. And
I kind of was like, I don't think anyone is
going to think like that we are evil for having
made a show before this happened right like on a
Monday morning, when like I'm just coming back from literally

(10:07):
a week of completely like not having any access to
work stuff. Um, and then like, are amazing editor Casey
is is busy with his own workload, Like it was
a going to be a huge weird thing to try
to add on something that may or may not have
added value to the episode, and then we also have

(10:29):
to consider okay, but somebody that discovers this episode in
two years, will that then be a whole other kind
of discordant if we have it. So please know that
if you didn't like how that played out, it's not
something that we're mindlessly doing. We're making choices and they
may or may not be the right ones ever, but

(10:49):
decisions kind of have to get made and sometimes on
the fly. Um. I had a similar moment completely unrelated
to our podcast, where I was uh watching television and
there was an ad for the launch of a new
game show that clearly was recorded like before the pandemic started,
before any of this, and it was just so strange

(11:11):
because it's like news, news, news, what's going on in
the world right now, Hey, look at all these people
having a wacky time on a game show. And I
was like, whoa, this is really weird. But again, it's
the same thing where they made that show and are
on a whole other schedule, and sometimes those are harder
to shift than you might think. Um, it's just it's

(11:34):
there's I don't think there's any way to get through
times like this as a human, but also as someone
who works in media. And and makes things and publishes
them to know the right path. Yeah, what we ultimately
decided to do with the Canary Row episode, UM was
just not to put it on our social media because

(11:56):
especially social media, felt like that would come off as
thoughtless and death that there was no possible way we
could frame it in a social media post where it
would seem like it meant something. UM. And we had had,
like we schedule social media stuff ahead of time, and
we had like a post sandules it for over the

(12:18):
weekend that was about I think Walt Whitman's birthday or
something like that. UM. And there were folks on our
Facebook page who I think I thought that we had
gotten up on Saturday or Sunday morning and like talk
about Walt Whitman, And it was really the opposite, Like
we had scheduled the Walt women thing ahead of time,

(12:39):
and then I spent the whole weekend not looking at
work social media almost at all. I didn't even open
the app on Sunday because I was like focused on
what was happening in the world and whether my friends
were safe and whether the people I knew were okay.
Like I was not even thinking about what's on the
stuff you missed in history class based page. Yeah, And

(13:01):
I mean, here's the thing, right, I completely understand or
at least like can appreciate people being angry about things
that seem very frivolous popping up in their timeline. Um,
Like I don't. I don't begrudge anybody for being like,
what the heck are you talking about? Right? Um, but

(13:22):
it is just when it's like I said, it's it's
one of the perils of our line of work, Like
there will always be moments like that where it's like, um,
well that happened. It was planned because we don't have
um precognitive abilities when it comes to that's going to
happen in the world. Now. We have been for the

(13:43):
last several weeks, most of our episodes have been in
some way influenced by the pandemic, and definitely neither of
us foresaw suddenly that not seeming relevant anymore, Like I
was not not at all, and like I don't know,
I I we we said this, uh in the in

(14:05):
the intro of the interview episode about Tom Bay. We
have talked about the historical context for what is happening
right now. So much on this show we have talked
so many times about especially black people, but also indigenous people,
also other people of color, either making advancements in their

(14:27):
lives and then having the white community say no, like
we're going to pass laws to make it illegal for
you to make that money, or or a white mob
literally burning down a black neighborhood, like it has been
part of the show so many times. I do not
understand how people can have listened to our show for
a long time and not understand that. And I'm so

(14:49):
angry about what's happening right now, Like I don't even
know what I'm going to research next. I don't either.
I'm in the same boat where I'm like, well, where
do we go from here? Yeah? Yeah, I mean it's
one of the things I said on like my personal
Twitter was that, like, I know, there are a lot
of folks who feel like this moment in history is
unprecedented and it's not. And we've been talking about it

(15:11):
for so long, and it feels like we're having the
same conversations over and over and over again. Um, I
don't know what else I have to add to that, because,
in addition to everything else, you and I are too
white women with a lot of privilege. Oh yeah, and
we're not. We're not the voices that needs to be
really heard. Right now, simultaneously asking for like our our

(15:36):
black friends or asking for a black historian to come
on our show and do work like for us does
not feel like the time for that either. Right, this
is Tuesday morning, June two. We'll see what happens because
I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's that's you've
hit on exactly. Like the problem is that I I

(15:56):
I mean, we both want to make sure that we're
aplifying black voices, that we are supporting black voices, but also,
like you, that doesn't mean that we need to ask
them to come and educate people. That is problematic in
its own right. Uh. So you know, we're kind of
feeling our way in the dark, trying to figure out

(16:18):
the best things to do. I'm I'm sure I will
make all kinds of errors and I don't want to,
but yeah, I recognize that that is a likelihood. And
the stuff that's coming up on the show for the
next week is also stuff that is already written and
in some cases recorded, And it's like we either have

(16:38):
those episodes or no episodes. That's the choice. Yeah, yeah, Um,
it's a weird time. I hope everyone you know will
bear with us. As we said at the beginning of
that two ubay episode, like if this is not the
time and you just don't want to hear people talk
about things that don't seem relevant or right right now,

(17:01):
like we bear you no ill will if you want
to just hold onto those episodes and listen later, or
if you want to skip that, Like we understand all
of that. Everybody is trying to figure this out in
the ways that make the best sense for hopefully them
to maintain their mental health as best you can in
a situation like this, and people going through experiences we

(17:22):
cannot possibly understand. I would never presume how they would
interact with such material. So um, that's where we're at. Yep,
I I don't have anything else to add. I don't either.

(17:43):
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