Bao Phi

Shanghai seems to be a neon echo of many other major cosmopolitan Asian cities: Foreign investors stake their claim on the skyline with towering, eclectically designed skyscrapers; city life is a mix of old school Asian culture and Westernized ‘modernism’; Sex and the City wanna-be’s rub elbows on the sidewalks with beggars; and Caucasian men […]

How was Mexico? As if the country just sat there waiting for me to experience it, as if it was not a place all its own, with a people and history connected by a language I can’t speak, which will exist and move on with our without my stupid pseudo-tourist ass trying to learn in […]

This border, not a line
but brown skin, jigsawed by chainlink fences
families turned into paper work, long lines
and appointments,
barbed wire rings like falling haloes
biting into blue skies.
In Juarez, in El Paso, there are people
constantly crossing .
The border is not what is in-between,
but what is on the other side –
what language tells the story of your birth,
what […]

Bao, a poet and spoken-word artist from Minneapolis, traveled with The Listening Project to China, France, and Mexico…