 Aloha. Welcome back to A Nation of Immigrants, a bi-weekly interview program featuring the lives of immigrants, descendants of immigrants, knowledge, diversity, and inclusion created by Sinc-Tank Hawaii and Kingsfield Law Office. We invite renowned immigrants and second- third-generation immigrants to share their life stories, journey to the United States, and the contribution to cultural diversity. Today's guest is Evan Kao. Evan is a Minnesota-born writer, comedian, entrepreneurial, and social media influencer who currently resides in Minneapolis. He earned a bachelor's degree in Japanese studies from the University of Minnesota. He's passionate about martial arts and currently holds the rank of third-degree black belt in Taekwondo and the fourth then in Kundo. He's also a mixed media artist and author of Woodbird, My Life as a Right Shear Driver, Woodbird 2, Wolf in the Jungle, and Wolf at the Gate. We are very pleased to have you here, Evan. Welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here as well. Well, you are short to define. We will say you are a novice to me, a writer. You're also an influencer. Now we have a fancier name called Creator. So you have quarter-million followers on social media. And also you are entrepreneurial. You're owner of St. Louis Park Gold and Silver Store. So you basically are a dealer. But it is my understanding that we cannot label any talented people. So you are talented. You have multiple identities. And there are so many questions I want to ask you. I have your books. I really appreciate the gesture you show to me. And I love the books. I'm eager to read them all. But let's start with your name. Carol, is that a British or a German name? Somewhere in Eastern Europe. To be honest, I have a very convoluted family story. My dad actually is one of the first test tube babies made. He was born in 1952. He did not know his actual biological parents. And he actually found this out through, I think like Ancestry.com pretty recently. So the history of my dad, where the origin of my dad's psychosis was actually still, there's a lot of mystery. We just know somewhere in Eastern Europe. My mom's side are Italian and Polish immigrants. So my family came to this country around the turn of the last century. He's not my biological grandfather, but he was living in Russia, my great-grandfather. And as the story goes, he escaped Russia. He killed two Russian authorities with a lead pipe. And he got his family on a boat, like getting them out of there. And they came to America, like I said, about 1900 and flourished here in St. Paul. Well, that was due to the Empire of Russia. So what he was escaping the Russian czar or escaping the revolutionaries? I would think the czar, just because it predates the revolution by about two decades. But like I said, there's still a lot of mystery with my family. So should we say you are third generation immigrants? I think that would be fair, yes. Yes, because the grandpa would be the first generation, the mom second, the third generation. Well, how does this family history influence your own life and your life paths? Well, I was raised Jewish. My dad's side was Jewish. When my mom met my dad, she was raised Catholic, but she converted. And Judaism, it's not just a religion. It's a cultural identity as well. And although I don't really practice, if I have children, I will raise them Jewish too. It's a lovely tradition. And the Jewish faith is a culture. It shapes your outlook on life. Jews are about loving life, about positivity, about hard work, entrepreneurialism. Jews have been persecuted throughout human history. They're probably the most persecuted ethnic group in human history. They're certainly one of them. I mean, to make it a competition is warped. But the Jewish people have undergone quite a lot throughout the history of humanity. And as a result, we're hardworking people with a positive outlook because we kind of have to be it's a mean world. Well said. Well said, David. Well, you, I think doctors only the Jewish people are hard of working, but they're highly creative. And they use a lot of professional creativity. So you're writing a comedy and a misdemeanor art, what drives you passion for those artistic endeavors? And in our view that the Jewish, they are very good doctors, lawyers, finance people, but you are art artistic people. So what, what make you choose basically create creativity as your career path? Well, ironically, I get my artistic genes from the Goiom side, the non-Jew. It's a Yiddish slang term. It's not offensive. It's a term that the tribe likes to use, shall we say. My mom was a makeup artist. My mom was a very, very successful makeup artist. And she was a multi-talented creative personality as well. I mean, she was in her day, her heyday in the time before social media. I have no doubt that had social media been around back in the 80s when her career was taking off that she would have been an influencer as well. But so I get my artistic ability and drive from her. I get my sense of comedy from her. My grandmother as well was a very talented drawer and painter. So just that creativity, that artistic side I get from my mom's side and the entrepreneurialism I get from my dad's side because my dad has been, he's had a legendary career. He's engaged in a number of entrepreneurial endeavors. He's been very successful. He's been also very unsuccessful in some things that have happened to him in his life. But just my parents are a fascinating combo. They were frequently written up in the Star Tribune, the local Minnesota paper, as Minnesota socialites, as these personalities that people around town just knew. So I get a lot of who I am and my personality and persona from that. And also in my background, I grew up an only child. I spent growing up as a kid. We had a cabin and we would spend summers up there and just not having siblings. It was, we had no internet. We had a very small TV, we had about yay big with VHS as we'd watch movies on. I figured out how to jailbreak my Nintendo 64 onto it. So I would play that. But otherwise, my summers were about entertaining myself and exploring my mind and my passions and my creativity. And that really fostered a lot of who I became all the time that I spent as myself, all the time I spent by myself as a kid. Finding ways to entertain myself, drawing, coming up with skits, just making jokes to myself. And then, you know, my friend group, I was always in middle and high school. I was always the entertaining one. I was a class clown. But just being an only child, you kind of become accustomed to being a center of attention. And so like when I go to parties, I'm usually not just because I'm famous now, but I'm usually the center of attention because I like to put on a show. I like to entertain people. I like to make people laugh. My least favorite kind of personality to encounter in the wild is somebody with, shall we say like an engineer's brain, where everything is analytical and they can't process a joke or humor because they want to dissect it. Like, well, wait, it's like, just laugh. My God, don't think just laugh. It's meant to be funny. So I'm always kind of like that. I'm always inserting jokes. Even if a situation I'm dealing with is heavy or not funny, I find a way to make it funny because I've also come to discover that making, making humor out of something that is not funny is the best way to own whatever is not funny. Well, thank you so much for cheering people up. And only what we realized is the ultimate absurdity of life. And we could want to really laugh. Yeah. Well, I get to know you because you become a very famous people in the Chinese world. And you discovered a photo album depicting World War Two, Japanese war crimes in China. And that was a huge event because in 1937 to 1945, Chinese fought against Japanese in China. And after the Pearl Harbor became part of the World War Two, the I Life Forces, China, partner with United States. And you discovered this very rare photo album. And then you donated it to China. So could you just walk through how you came across this album and what motivated you to finally decide that this belong to China, not in your store? All right, let me see if I can do this whole story in three minutes or less. That would be pretty good. I've got pretty good at telling it. So I have a program. I entered the business that I'm in. I own St. Louis Park Golden Silver and I entered it very randomly. Basically, I spent my 20s trying to be a writer and I failed. And I had a number of different outlooks that I was trying to succeed at. I first tried to break into Hollywood as a screenwriter and a film producer. And I mean, I didn't say I got pretty close, but it ultimately didn't work out. I pivoted to books. And in the meantime, the jobs that I was working were just low skill, high labor jobs, just to get a paycheck so that I could devote all my time to my artistic endeavors, writing and creativity and such. It still wasn't working. And so I was about to turn 30 and I thought I need a change. And I randomly got a tip that an elderly person who owned a gold business was looking for an apprentice and I begged him for a job. And long story short, after working for him for 18 months and creating a successful social media account that was generating a lot of sales, he wanted me to shut the whole thing down because he was old and he didn't understand it, even though it was making him a lot of money. So I ended up going off of my own, opened up my own store, but you know, opening your own store is hard. I kind of hit the ground running. And I created this program. It started when I was working for this other person. And then I really kind of drove it home. And it's mail me stuff, mail me stuff from anywhere in the United States. I don't buy stuff internationally, but anywhere in the US, mail me your stuff. I'll make a video about going through it. And I'll tell people what it's worth. It's like antiques roadshow. And then I'll try and sell it for profit. So about a year and a half into owning my business, somebody reached out to me and they said I have a photo album from World War Two and the photos are disturbing. And yeah, I get all kinds of stuff advertised to me. The whole war was disturbing. So I thought nothing of it. And I said send it to me and I get this photo album and I flip it open. And the first thing that struck me was the quality of the album, not just this is beautifully leather bound or dain like these two dragons looking up. And the photos in it were incredible. They were like national geographic quality. It's a soldier stationed in Southeast Asia in 1937 is when he arrives. And so I'm going through this book. But a few pages in it just turns to slaughter. And I see the word Nanking written a bunch. And having majored in Japanese studies, I knew all about the horrors of what happened in Nanking. And I thought, holy crap, this might be photos from the Nanking massacre. And these photos were if these are real, these are really, really expensive. And I turned this over my head because I wasn't sure what to do. One of my rules is I don't buy stuff affiliated with war crimes. It's got to go to a museum. It's just too historically important. It does not belong in a private collection. It's an ethical concern. And frankly, I just think it's a slant to it's it's not good for history to have things like that in private collections. They need to be studied and preserved and shared with everyone. So I turned this over my head a couple days, what to do. And the guy reaches out to me and he's like, you know, hey, I know you got my book like he, you know, pay me your what. And I find myself in this dilemma. And meanwhile, might be photos of Nanking in my head over a few days turns into I think these are. And so I made this tip talk, because I this guy wanted an answer. And I thought, well, I just got a scream so loud that people hear me because I have had items that belong in museums advertised to me in the past. And every time I reached out to a museum, I never even got the time of day. And I had a quarter million followers at this point. So I thought, I just need to make a video that gets attention, because that way I can get a museum to take this. And what I accidentally did was created a perfect storm of words with a tech talk. And the video went immediately mega mega mega viral, it got like, like 10s of millions of years that was shared internationally within 24 hours. And I suddenly found myself the ire of the internet, because I made a mistake. A lot of the photos were known as souvenir photos. These are photos that were taken and sold for profit. And there were copies. And sailors would trade these photos. I don't know why they would do this. It's really gross, but they would trade these and fill these books that they would have with these photos. Not all of them are real only or not all of them were fake, only maybe about 20% of them were souvenirs. And they're like the best quality souvenirs out there. Obviously, nobody looked at this book. So what had happened was the original soldier took the photos back after the war. And he died in 1964. His name was Leslie G. Allen Jr. And his wife contracted the person that I ended up acquiring the photos from. His father did a contracting job and the lady didn't have enough to pay him. So the story goes. And so she gave him this book in lieu of payment. He died. He never looked at it. Son's going through stuff finds the book and that's how it ends up in my hands. Now I became this global sensation like overnight. And I had people accusing me of using a war crime to get famous. Like I was getting threats. I was getting look, I don't want to get into it, but it got really scary really fast. So I got a lawyer and you know lawyer said what do you want to do with this? I had Chinese people showing up at my store hugging me, giving me flowers, crying writing me letters. It was so it just got so insane. It was so much to handle so fast. And I thought, well, I need to donate this book and I need to donate it to China because it's Chinese history and this book has become a symbol of what happened. So ultimately I used my lawyer to contact the consulate because I thought, you know, I shouldn't just try to privately call a museum. I should just give it to them and let them figure out where it goes. And I met the Chinese ambassador or one of them. He flipped to Minneapolis with his assistant. We signed a contract. I donated them the album and they presented me with a letter of thanks and a porcelain tea jar as a diplomatic gift, which I later found out is like an incredible honor to be bestowed. So that's why the book ended up in China. I made a mistake. I corrected the mistake, but the book, this is this is my favorite irony. My name is Pawn Man on the internet. I don't own a pawn shop. It's just a catchy name. One of my followers started calling me Pawn Man when I first started making videos and I thought, that's a great name. And so now I trademarked it and branded it. But Pawn Man that doesn't do Pawn has a book of photos about the Nanking Massacre that contains actually no photos about Nanking, but it ended up educating the whole world about this genocide because it's not properly taught in the West like it is in the East. And I don't have a good answer for why that is. But because this book educated in this tech talk that I made, educated so many people about this massacre that was buried by the Japanese armed, it's still such a painful part of Chinese history. It wouldn't say thanks. So now I'm a Chinese celebrity. You are, thank you very much. It's not three minutes, but it's very, very good. I saw a Chinese lawyer. I want to say first, I want to say thank you. And second, I don't think it was a mistake. And even you can call it honest mistake. But however, first, that when you see Nanking wrote on the photo, and only a handful of Chinese can understand that that would be a road in Shanghai City, not in Nanking City. Second, even if it was not about the Nanking Massacre, the Rebellion of Nanking or say, but it is about the Sino-Japanese War. It was about the time, it's about the Shanghai, the war around Shanghai. And even it was not original copy, treated as a souvenir, but it's not art. Historically, it's still very valuable. And even we can even use that as a window to study why these kinds of stuff were treated by Japanese as a souvenir. Was that particularly me? So I really appreciate you donated to the authority so they can probably engage some historians and art historians and and World War II historians to study it. So, but as you said, you were under tremendous stress because all kinds of unwelcomed, solid-thated comments and accusation. And how do these, all of these, what happened during this storm? You wrote an article through the storm in the fantastic article. I've read all of them. And how do these make you to look at the power of social media? And how does this impact you thinking of social media? Well, as far as what it did to me, I mean, I wrote about it in the essay. If you visit my website, pwnmanstore.com, I think where it was for a sec. I posted all the photos on my website, as well as this essay that I wrote detailing all the crazy that I went through because it is a new facet of our culture. This video that gets shared across the internet all over the world and gets picked apart a million ways from some Sunday and everybody has an opinion. And to have your actions and words taken out of context and have it lead the run away from you in a way that you can't control. And potentially, you know, I'm sitting here looking at this thinking like, God, did I ruin my life? Did I ruin my reputation forever? I may never be able to fix this. I might be the World War II folks guy. What a horrible thing. They're accusing me of using a war crime to get famous. That's the, even I want to punch me, you know, hearing that. So to have that on your conscience have, you know, everybody sees you, everybody knows you for, you know, it's faded now. But definitely I was getting recognized everywhere I went and not like, not in a good way. And it was really scary. And it just speaks to the power of how fast things spread on the internet, how right now somebody could create another perfect storm of words with the right tone, the right words, the right setting, the right backdrop. Anybody can make something like this. And I did it on accident. And, you know, Mr. Beast is a good example, not for the same reasons, but that's a guy that is able to make a viral product, no matter what he even said in interviews, there's ways to do it. And when you make something like that, it's a bullhorn heard around the world, never in a million years that I think this thing was in a spread so fast. Like I said, as far as what it did to me, it absolutely melted my brain. I had a couple weeks of like just mental duress, the likes of which I've never felt in my life. I developed some substance abuse problems. I lost 20 pounds, I wasn't eating, I was puking, I was having panic attacks. And I'm still in therapy, I see a therapist now because of this, the damage that this caused me is ongoing, it's getting better, but it's a lot to deal with. And it's a very exclusive club to be the subject of this viral video that's picked apart. And I wouldn't tell you guys, anybody watching, you don't want to be in this club is not fun. So it's, you know, I came to fill in the shoes of something that's new in our culture with technology and sharing information. And them is heavy shoes that make you sink in water, I'll tell you that much. Well, thank you for sharing that. But I'm sorry, Evan, what happened, the sci-fi boarding is a real thing now. And it's just so absurd and etiological and it just very quite hard to understand. The start to interrupt, but the internet is not a nice place. And we went in, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say the internet was created for good or it was thought of as being this good gateway that was going to change the world and make it more fair and just and instead all it's done is embellish all the evil and terrible and people. It's created this culture of never say sorry, of bullying, of attacking, of stupidity. You know, it's ironic that the sharing of information is actually large and it is dumber. Oh, totally agree, totally agree. Well, I will now to leave the show without talk about Japan. You studied Japanese studies at URM and by its pure serendipity, I just received in my office a very beautiful greeting card from Tokyo and my Japanese friend sent me an English language Japanese cookbook. And you might surprise that as a Chinese and the Chinese American, I'm pretty fond of Japanese culture and tell us about why you chose Japanese studies as your major in college. Oh, it's okay. It's a convoluted answer. Let me see if I can break this one. I grew up watching Japanese cartoons like I can tell you any episode of anything that happens in Dragon Ball Z. I've seen the whole series. I don't know how many times. I love Japanese cartoons and I continue to watch them to this day at age 34. So my love of that, when I was trying to break into Hollywood as a screenwriter, a wait, there's no, there's no good way to do it. It's one of the hardest things that you can break into. It's a 99.999% failure rate. Anybody trying to do it, you got to have a good plan. And I thought to myself, well, I want to do this. I want to try and break into Hollywood. What's a good plan? And I had the ability to predict box office numbers. I'm not as good at it anymore because I don't keep up with the trends like I used to. But like, I used to make spreadsheets on box offices and movies coming out and what I thought they were going to gross. And I was almost always right. I was really close almost every week. So I thought, you know what the next big trend is going to be? We are in this Marvel trend right now. I started doing this around 2009. Marvel's a big thing. I think that big, big budget Hollywood studios are going to turn their Japanese cartoons and try to adapt them. And I want to put myself in a position to be the go to guy for, hey, who are we going to hire? Let's hire Evan Kayle because he speaks Japanese. He knows all about Japanese culture. He grew up on the stuff. He knows, he knows Hollywood films. He knows how to write and he can adapt these for an American audience. So that was honestly, that was why I picked Japanese studies was I wanted to have that armed with me going into the screenwriting endeavor. Like I said, it didn't work. But my love of Japanese culture and particularly my love of samurai culture, they study Kumdo, which is Korean sword fighting, but the martial arts and the weapon used the curved sword, the one bladed sword of one place got one side on it. That weapon, it's a little bit of chicken and egg as to who actually invented that the Japanese or the Koreans, I'll tell you, in my opinion, the Japanese perfected it. But the Koreans were very big on that. I couldn't find anybody to teach me Bushido or Kendo or anything. So that's why I took Kumdo because that was available to me. But my love of samurai culture also was a huge driver and my love of martial arts as well as to why I majored in Japanese studies. Now, to be honest, my Japanese is terrible now. I can barely speak it. But the cultural aspect remains, my knowledge of the history remains. And, you know, I kind of joked because I could not, one of the reasons why I was an Uber driver and I did all these high skill low labor jobs, not just because I wanted to devote all my spare time to creativity. I couldn't get a job to save my life with a degree in Japanese studies from the University of Minnesota. I couldn't even get a warehouse job. And I kept for years thinking to myself, what, this was a stupid degree. This did nothing for me in life. And all it did was leave me with that. But ultimately, an army with the knowledge that kind of accidentally put me right here now talking to you. So no, actually, indeed, I did turn out to do something productive with it. Well, thank you very much. It's a good degree. And really, I can tell that a walking youth store, I saw the Japanese painting. And I really, you know, understand that the youth was of Japan. And personally, I love Japanese culture. I'm not big fan of samurai culture, but Japanese painting, calligraphy and poetry is fantastic. Well, the samurai culture was ultimately kind of dragged through the mud on World War 2, because that was the methodology, shall we say, of soldiers and the war crimes that they committed. But let's not get into that. Well, we normally end our show with two questions to our distinguished guests. The first question is, you're still young, you're much younger than me, but what advice you could offer to a younger self? And if you were in your 20s, you've time travel permits, you can travel back to the early 20s and what advice you want to give to yourself. Second question is, is there any specific book, movie, or cartoon you would recommend to our audience? Oh, sure. Absolutely. Okay, first off, what advice should I give myself? Well, I actually am a big fan of, shall we say, quantum physics and all kinds of, you know, convoluted physics. So, you know, if there's only one timeline, you know, it's not multiple universes, then by going back and changing things, I would change everything and make my life worse, because who knows where I'd end up and I wouldn't do anything different because I'm pleased with where I am. That said, I went through quite a lot of suffering in my 20s. My family grew up very wealthy and my family lost everything. When I was 18, they hit it from me. They started going broke when I was 16. I didn't know. And they, like right as I was packing up going to college, Evan, by the way, not only can we not pay for your college, we can't give you anything. You're going to have to figure it out. And so, I was, I lived in squalor for my entire 20s. I was so poor. I didn't have money to buy food sometimes. It was really, really hard on me. So, the perseverance that I instilled in myself and, you know, my tough attitude, it got me through it, but I would just go back and tell myself, it is going to be okay. You just got to keep fighting and keep pushing that boulder up the mountain. I would also give myself the advice of taking advantage of social media a lot earlier. I really wish I had gotten on YouTube what I originally wanted to in 2008, 2009. That was, I mean, I might be way more famous now, way more successful. But, you know, again, I'm not, I'm not discrediting or discounting where I am now. I had some reservations about putting myself out there on the internet. I thought, well, what are people going to think of me? And so, that prevented me from making videos. I just start making content until 2014 or 15 and my like first YouTube videos are kind of unwatchable. They're really bad. This Pawn Man persona ended up being, well, I failed and how do I make a niche where I can break out because what you need now is, you can't just be beautiful. You can't just be queer. You can't just have one thing that you're going to talk about. You got to have something really niche and be really good at it. And when I started making content for Pawn Man, I looked out on the landscape of social media and I said, my God, there's nobody in the space or at least nobody like me with a personality. And that was immediately an advantage to me. So I would have got myself on social media a lot earlier. Second question, what would I recommend for Japanese, for cartoons? So my all-time favorite movie, I have two live action all-time favorite movies, Pulp Fiction. But my other all-time favorite movie is Princess Mononoke. I've seen it probably 50 times. I am a huge fan of Hayao Miyazaki. He's, I'm not going to swear, he's a master of what he does. The newest movie that just came out by, I absolutely loved it, The Boy and the Heron. He's such a genius with everything he does. So any Miyazaki movie I'd recommend. My all-time favorite anime, I have two, Cowboy Bebop. A lot of people say that that is the, you know, kind of the go-to everyone's favorite anime. It's an excellent cartoon, massively impactful on my life. The story is excellent, the music's great, the art is great, everything about it just sings. There's a live-action adaptation on Netflix that I actually thought they did a good job. One of the hardest things with adapting Japanese cartoons, it is really tough to make a live-action, to make it engaging and interesting and to have a story that relates especially to American audiences. And Netflix's product I thought was fabulous, and they canceled after one season because it wasn't getting good ratings, reviews, or people weren't watching it. So that's it. But I'd recommend you guys check out the first season of it. It really was great. My other favorite, I'm a massive fan of Mobile Suit Gundam. It's kind of the Star Wars of Japan. And I've seen all of it. My favorite is Gundam 0083. It's a 12 episode miniseries, Shinichiro Watanabe, who I think he was the main artist on Cowboy Bebop. He did that one too. He's got a very specific style. He's very, very good at what he does. Gundam 0083, you don't need to watch any other Gundam stuff to get into that one. That's my other favorite. Well, thank you so much for the recommendations. Well, thank you, Evan, for the time fascinating life story, fascinating comments on social media. And again, thank you so much for sharing the story of the World War II album. And thank you for donating it to Chinese. And finally, thank you for all the recommendations. I learned a lot from you today. Really appreciate your time. Evan Call, I'll go for an oil influencer, content creator, comedian, and author. Thank you. And check out my books, everyone. We will. We will. I'm all hot.