Ramtin Arablouei
speaker
199 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 29 Mar
Ramtin Arablouei’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's like a city within a city. And you can feel its history in the sights, sounds, smells, and flavors in every alley, on every corner.
This place has a lot of stories to tell.
Sandra Wong, our editor, Julie, one of the many Julies you'll hear in this episode, is there to meet Sandra and a local historian of sorts named Julie Su.
Julie Su is an attorney who grew up in San Francisco. She met Sandra Wong years ago. They were brought together by the story of one of Chinatown's most legendary residents, Wong Kim Ark.
751 Sacramento Street. Back then, in the late 1800s, when Wong Kim Ark was born, it was a storefront with an apartment above the shop. Today, it's a school in the middle of a quiet side street, just downhill from the main tourist drag.
The school is a beautiful red, green, and white building. It's designed in a classic Chinese style. Raised pavilions, ornate paneling covering the windows, curved shingles on the roof. This should probably be a site where tourists flock because of its connection to Wong Kim Ark. He was the defendant in a court case that would forever alter U.S. immigration laws.
This is Sandra Wong.
He fought for his birthright citizenship, the idea that, with some small exceptions, if you're born in the United States, then you're automatically a citizen. A concept that isn't foreign for many of us. I immigrated to the US from Iran as a child, but my son, who was born in Maryland, is the first person in my entire family to be a US citizen because he was born here.
Many of the staff on ThruLine are either first, second, or third generation immigrants who have some experience with the complexities of this legal principle. It's easy to think that it's always been this way. But the question of who is an American has always been up for debate.
And the answer to that question is always a product of the political, social, and economic realities of when it's being asked. It's an issue that's still contested today.
In this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're gonna experience Wong Kim Ark's story and learn how his legal battle changed the debate about who gets to be an American.
This is Amanda Frost. Amanda is a law professor at the University of Virginia and has practiced immigration law for years.
And this is Carol Nakanoff.
Carol co-wrote a book all about Wong Kim Ark.
Wong Kim Ark's parents, Wee Lee and Wong C. Ping, came to the United States, like many Chinese immigrants, looking for work. Most of these immigrants were men coming to build the railroads or to work as agricultural field hands or to search for gold in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Wong Kim Ark's parents did something different.
They opened what was basically a grocery store in San Francisco.
And at some point in the early 1870s, the records aren't totally clear. They welcomed a new baby into the world, Wong Kim Ark.
This is probably because Chinese people were not welcome in many other parts of San Francisco. And this pattern followed in other cities with growing Chinese populations. In response, Chinatowns popped up in cities all over the U.S. It was a way for Chinese immigrants to band together, form communities, and try to keep themselves safe in an increasingly hostile country.
But sometimes these enclaves became a target.
Where did all this anger towards Chinese immigrants come from? Most people in the U.S. probably would have never encountered a Chinese immigrant. Yet in the last half of the 19th century, anti-Chinese sentiment was everywhere.
Showing 81–100 of 199 · page 5 of 10
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