When I was in high school, one of my hobbies was DXing (no, nothing sport or vehicle related) which rather involved tuning in on radio broadcasts from distant localities. There was broadcast band DXing (i.e., AM radio) and shortwave broadcasting. On AM radio DXing, this usually entailed looking for radio stations on frequencies between those used by local radio stations, except there was an opportunity to find hidden stations in other time zones after midnight on Sunday night when the local station went off the air for a couple of hours for weekly maintenance. Then there was short wave DXing, which was less exciting because unless you had a powerful antenna (which I didn't have) you could only pick up a few stations with a powerful signal. One of these was BBC and their BBC Calling program.
Little did I know that over 50 years later BBC would be calling me and providing me an unexpected additional 15 minutes of fame, in an episode a bit different from the previous ones. It all started innocuously enough back in May when I received a message from Zhaoyin Feng of BBC's Washington DC bureau that she would like to write a Chinese language article about me. She had seen Clarissa Wei's Goldthread video as well as my Instagram posts, and we had a nice Zoom meeting. It took a month, but the Chinese language article did hit the BBC website, though I wouldn't consider it that impactful. Indeed the only thing noteworthy was that a month later, Zhaoyin did an English language interview on BBC radio's Fifth Floor program where she spoke about the story she had written about me.
I thought that was the end of the BBC episode, but in September, Zhaoyin sent a message saying that her editors had approved an English language version of the article. However I did not hear anything until two weeks ago, when Zhaoyin said she finally would be able to finish the English language article, but first wanted to do a brief update telephone conversation. Then on Monday of last week I received an email with a few follow-up questions, resulting in a string of back and forth messages on Tuesday and Wednesday. Right after I sent my last reply I found a message from one of my followers congratulating me on the BBC article. They had already posted the article without my last response, and also without telling me that the article was up. I guess for some reason they wanted to tie my interview in with Thanksgiving and posted it as is!
For a short while I didn't think anything was extraordinary about this article, but it quickly became clear that this was something different, as large numbers of new Instagram followers appeared in continuous stream. By the time I turned in for the evening I had added 900 new followers, raising my total from 3700 to 4600. And when I woke up at 2am I decided to check for the latest count, finding it had jumped to 5000. When I woke up Thanksgiving morning I saw a message from BBC asking whether I could possibly do a live interview on BBC World News that afternoon, but understanding I might not be available because of the holiday. Fortunately due to conflicts, our Thanksgiving celebration was set on Friday instead, so it was no problem for me.
What I only discovered later was that overnight my interview had become the most popular item on the BBC website, explaining the haste in wanting to schedule a TV interview so quickly on a holiday, to further promote the web article. Meanwhile, I needed to make sure that there wouldn't be any technical problems in doing a live Zoom television interview. It had been so long since I had engaged in a two way Zoom dialog that I wasn't sure if my Zoom account was active, whether the program would run properly, and whether I still had my virtual background picture in working order. That was a time consuming process, so I didn't even have time to worry about the vagaries of live broadcasting, which I haven't had to concern myself about much since most of my video appearances have been pre-recorded. A number of email exchanges with Sara Monetta at BBC in the UK provided a general idea of the line of questioning, as well as useful technical information. She also indicated that I would go on the air around 3:14pm, for a period of three minutes, which would necessitate brief responses on my part. I was told to sign on around 3pm to make sure technical things were in order.
I have to say that I signed on with great trepidation because I've had occasional connectivity issues while watching webcasts and Zoom broadcasts. So I was very pleased that I seemed to connect with what looked like the correct host, though still slightly doubtful since it looked quite a bit different from my last interactive Zoom interview. And I was relieved when the voice of the BBC technician started to come through. Until he said that he could hear me but couldn't see me. However, he quickly figured out that I just needed to press a Start Video button at my end. He also said there was a change in interviewers, but since I didn't know who the first interviewer was, that made no difference. We had to fiddle with the lighting and my sitting position.. The technician told me I would need to stay fairly still because moving my head would cause distracting video effects. He then connected me with an audio feed of the show as it was progressing. However, while waiting for my time slot to arrive I noticed that the setting sun was starting to shine through the window above my computer, throwing my video feed off kilter. I tried fooling with two of my windows, a desk light, and overhead lights before getting back to a semblance of normal lighting.
As 3:14pm was approaching it was clear that I wasn't going to be interviewed as scheduled. My interview ended up being seven or eight minutes late. I had no idea who was doing the interviewing, as there was only a one way Zoom screen, i.e., I could only see myself. The interview ran four minutes, and the questions were essential what they told me in advance, the first time that I can recall that ever happening. Meanwhile I was curious if I would get to see the program. I don't get BBC World News in my cable package, but I did discover that KCET does carry two nightly 30 minute telecasts of BBC World News, the US-Canada edition and a world edition. However while they carried some of the same content that I had listened to while waiting to be interviewed, there was a clear difference in some of the stories, and neither KCET version had my interview. I also tried to figure out who was interviewing me, but couldn't come up with any likely names.
Fortunately a few hours later the interviewer, Mariko Oi, posted the interview on her Twitter account.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1464073116280229890
It was neat to see a split screen showing the interview as if we were looking at each other. Of course, Twitter is not a video hosting site, so theoretically there's no way to download a video that is posted to Twitter. However third party sites, like Twitter Video Downloader, let you enter the URL of the video and spits out a video file, so I got a copy that way.
By the end of the day on Thanksgiving the follower count had jumped to 7,000, aided not only by the BBC article, but also a cover article by the Daily Mail, which also included a direct Instagram link. The follower total was 8,000 by Friday, and 9,000 by Sunday, at which point in time the Instagram follower flurry appeared to finally subside. Getting so many new followers so quickly was actually annoying at one point, because Instagram only permits a few dozen combined likes, new followers and comment notifications to be displayed at any time. If the amount exceeds the limit, then the oldest notification drops off. While I tried to check for notifications as often as possible, there were time periods (e.g., overnight sleeping) where I missed many notifications and therefore could not reply to people making comments and who expected a response.
But wait, there's more. On Tuesday afternoon the Instagram follower count started to surge again. By the end of the day the count was almost 13,000, which means there was a new follower every 10 seconds during that time period, a rate even faster right after the BBC article hit. An internet search traced the surge to the Asian American news website Nextshark. In a way it was puzzling though, since some internet searches didn't even pull up the Nextshark article, and the article was very brief. However that was clarified the next day when I discovered that most of the traffic was generated from the Nextshark Instagram page, and what they had posted was a six frame article. Nextshark has 500,000 followers and the posting pulled 20,000 likes, so one could see the size of their audience.
By the next afternoon the Nextshark surge had tapered off. But late in the evening there was another surge, at about the same rate as the Nextshark surge. An internet search showed no cause for the increased activity. By the end of the evening the count was 15,000. I was truly puzzled by this renewed activity, so much so when I woke up at 1am, I decided to message a couple of new followers to see how they found me. The only response to those inquiries were the previous BBC and Nextshark articles. The count continued to rise this morning so I messaged more new followers, and one provided the answer. The Asian American apparel purveyor Asians Never Dies has an Instagram account with 500,000 followers in which they link stories related to Asian culture, and they linked the Nextshark story, which got them 10,000 likes. So now the Instagram follower count is 16,500.
In a way I'm not totally surprised about having gone viral again almost 10 years after Clarissa Wei's LA Weekly article got picked up around the world back in 2012. True I received a lot of attention from that and other articles, and yes, Clarissa Wei's 2019 Goldthread video has received over a million views. But still, only a small fraction of the public happened to be exposed to the media in which I have been featured, and if my story was so captivating back then, one would think it could happen again if exposed to an entirely different audience. So this is what has happened again.
It's also interesting to see the differences in how the exposure now and back then have played out. I think Clarissa's original story, and then Frank Shyong's subsequent Los Angeles Times story was more widely disseminated by various media outlets around the world. But where the difference lies is in today's social media. I'm not sure if Instagram existed back then, and I certainly didn't have an Instagram account. I did have a Twitter account, and did pick up several hundred followers. However, the current articles have embedded links to my Instagram account and I would imagine most of the followers came via smartphone rather than computer, such that it made it easy for me to add 13,000 new followers in scarcely more than a week.
