Yellow Chair Collective: The Podcast
Aug 3, 2026 · 31 min · 13 segments
In this Book Club episode, YCC therapist Barbara Hong interviews Dr. Bianca Mabute-Louie (@beyonkz) to chat about her book *Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto For The 21st Century*. If you…
Bianca Mabute-LouieGuest
Barbara HongHost
And I mentioned SGV, and so I'm referencing St. Gabriel Valley, the ethnoburb that I write about outside of Los Angeles.
My Popo relocated from Hong Kong to join us in SGV when she was in her seventies.
When she and her husband prepared to retire and settle down in Hong Kong, he instead decided to start a new family with a woman decades younger, whom he'd had a secret affair with for almost 10 years.
Without any options and overwhelmed by shame, my Popo left her home, her apartment where she raised three children with her ex-husband, and her mahjong group in Hong Kong to live with us in San Gabriel.
She started over at 70 in a foreign place where she couldn't speak the language, didn't have any peers, and couldn't get around.
With barely a kindergarten education, her life ambition was to become a wife and a mother.
In true Cantonese matriarch fashion, she bragged incessantly to her social circles about her husband's and children's accomplishments.
Now with three adult children with families of their own, she was not needed as a mother and no longer a wife.
Her ex-husband's affair decimated all status and belonging she held in their community.
When I was a child, she would insist, your Popo has become a useless nothing.
After living with us for a few years, she moved into her own one-bedroom apartment on Main Street in Alhambra, a city that neighbors San Gabriel at the heart of the Ethnoburb.
She walked to 85 degrees every day, where they rang a cowbell whenever a fresh bao came out of the oven.
And I mentioned SGV, and so I'm referencing St. Gabriel Valley, the ethnoburb that I write about outside of Los Angeles.
My Popo relocated from Hong Kong to join us in SGV when she was in her seventies.
When she and her husband prepared to retire and settle down in Hong Kong, he instead decided to start a new family with a woman decades younger, whom he'd had a secret affair with for almost 10 years.
Without any options and overwhelmed by shame, my Popo left her home, her apartment where she raised three children with her ex-husband, and her mahjong group in Hong Kong to live with us in San Gabriel.
She started over at 70 in a foreign place where she couldn't speak the language, didn't have any peers, and couldn't get around.
With barely a kindergarten education, her life ambition was to become a wife and a mother.
In true Cantonese matriarch fashion, she bragged incessantly to her social circles about her husband's and children's accomplishments.
Now with three adult children with families of their own, she was not needed as a mother and no longer a wife.
Her ex-husband's affair decimated all status and belonging she held in their community.
When I was a child, she would insist, your Popo has become a useless nothing.
After living with us for a few years, she moved into her own one-bedroom apartment on Main Street in Alhambra, a city that neighbors San Gabriel at the heart of the Ethnoburb.
She walked to 85 degrees every day, where they rang a cowbell whenever a fresh bao came out of the oven.
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