Reclaiming, Story 6: Friends in Liminal Spaces
When Anastasia Sotiropoulos joined the Stanford chapter of the Prison Renaissance Project, she got paired up with a man named Adamu Chan, who had been incarcerated at San Quentin prison for two decades. Their relationship began a few weeks before the pandemic, and the first time they talked San Quentin was the site of one of the largest COVID outbreaks in the nation.
Over the next three years, Anastasia and Adamu exchanged dozens of letters, had weekly phone calls, and dreamed of creating a film together. Neither of them could have imagined where that friendship would lead them: not just to Adamu’s release from San Quentin, but his admission to Stanford as a CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellow. Today Adamu is an award-winning filmmaker and community organizer. Adamu and Anastasia have continued their friendship, and together created the 2024 podcast episode, Friends in Liminal Spaces, through the Stanford Storytelling Project’s Braden Storytelling Grant.
Transcript for Reclaiming, Story 6: Friends in Liminal Spaces
This is State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each episode we take a common human experience like teaching or breathing or joking, and bring you stories that deepen our understanding of that experience. My name is Aru Nyer. Today's episode is a part of a series of episodes about reclaiming what's been lost.
This series will feature stories about reclaiming neighborhoods. Music venues, childhood obsessions, sports teams, languages, and ways of seeing ourselves. It's about holding the tension between what we were and who we've become. It's about returning to our origin. But this time with a more nuanced perspective, and especially in today's episode, it's about finding that perspective in a surprising place with a pen pal in the age of email, text, and social media.
Most of us rarely even think about writing letters, but I've always loved letter writing. There's something so intimate about seeing someone's handwriting, learning how they choose their words, what stationary they use. I remember taking German in middle school and asking my teacher if she knew anyone I could be pen pals with to get better at the language.
She introduced me to Lily, who lives in Dilling in Germany. I. Through handwritten letters, pictures, and eventually emails. We became friends. We exchanged mini blogs featuring our OTs, which for those who weren't pre-teens in the 2014 Tumblr era stands for outfit of the day. We stayed in touch until high school, but somewhere between school and extracurricular activities.
In college applications, we drifted apart. I figured this was just a part of growing up. You lose touch with people, you make new friends. There simply isn't enough time to keep up with everyone you ever knew. So I was surprised when my always busy college roommate, Anas AIA, told me that she had a pen pal.
She still kept in touch with years after their first correspondence. Her pen pal wasn't just a pen pal, he had become one of her closest friends. They had a weekly phone date, not just about what was going on in their lives, but about the things that mattered most to them. And in that process, they changed the course of each other's lives.
Here's Anas Acia. With that story
I had, I think I. Or, or animation or whatever it's gonna be. I kind of wrote out just kind of like some ideas for a screenplay and I was thinking and just tell me what you think about this. Uh,
my name's Anas, I'm 22. The other voice you just heard, that was Amu Amu and I were pen pals of nearly a year.
And here he's about to read an excerpt of his first ever letter to me dated January, 2020. And this is a part that made me laugh.
Oh, okay. So there's a star and it says some other similarities we share. Quick look.
The quick look is like a little parentheses. I, it just, it's like the essence. You have to read it.
You're gonna be there. You're gonna be there.
Okay. The first one is, I'm also an only child. Wow. My name starts with an A, like yours. I also, as a child, fake broadcast, my own news program I use. Uh, grandma's tape recorder to record or to make radio shows.
In my first letter to him, I told Amu about how I'd always been a storyteller.
I have these early memories of finding a cardboard box in my grandparents' garage and dragging it into their living room floor. I plop it there, cut out the middle, kind of pop, pop open the sides, so it'd become a cardboard TV where my head was a tiny reporter. I'd just tell these stories I came up with.
When you're an only child, you have to figure out ways to entertain yourself.
And then the last one, I'm not Greek except when I'm eating Greek food, which is a reference to,
to all the pastries I listed in the first letter. Yeah.
But my father was Ethiopian and they are also Coptic Christians. I remember going to the Greek Orthodox Church in Oakland when I was a kid.
And then I said, I'm sure we'll find other commonalities as we move forward. I'm convinced that you're pretty cool already.
Okay? Yep,
yep. But among all these similarities, DMU and I shared one big difference while I addressed my letters for my freshman door at Stanford. His address included a jumble of six letters and numbers. An ID by his name, he was sending his from San Quentin State Prison
and recorded. To accept this call, say or dial five now. Thank you for using Global Tail Link. Hello.
When Adamu and I started writing these letters, it was just a couple months before the Covid to 19 pandemic.
No. Oh, I don't know. I just, I like, I wasn't expecting to get through to you today. I don't know why, like, I just decided to call the number.
No, I, I, I, I don't know. Like I had, there's a lot that I wanted to tell you, but I don't have your letter right here. Um, so I don't know. I'm a little caught off this call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded. Dude. No, no worries at all. What's that?
I, I said no worries at all. Like I, I didn't expect to hear from you either.
'cause I was like, oh no, I messed up. I haven't like ridden him that I'm in Dallas now 'cause the past two weeks have just been chaotic. Are
you handling everything okay?
Yeah, I've been handling fine. Are you handling everything okay? Are
you healthy?
Yeah, I'm healthy. Everyone in my family is healthy.
College was just shut down so I had to go back to Texas. How have you been doing? How have you been feeling?
All right. I mean, stuff changing like every day. They, they moved me to like a different part of the prison. Yeah. I dunno. Like, I'm a little worried about kind of if some, if there's an outbreak here
shortly after this phone call, San Quentin would face a surge of cases within weeks
news tonight.
The CVID 19 outbreak is San Quentin claiming the lives of
two more years out of San Quentin. Tonight a state appeals court has ordered the prison to immediately cut. Its for several
months. San Quentin was a site of one of the largest covid outbreaks in the nation. By September, 2020, they'd had over 2000 cases and over 20 deaths.
But before all that, let's go back to how I found AMU in the first place. It began a night in October of my freshman year when I walked into a circle of couches at the Women's Community Center. I had just read this email that grabbed my attention, the subject in all caps, prison Renaissance Project, calling, all to collaborate with incarcerated artists.
I remember walking into the room and feeling a bit nervous. It was all upperclassmen. I was a freshman. But there was one who made me feel immediately welcome.
My name's Michelle. I use she her pronouns. I am currently like a grad student at U-C-L-A-I study clinical psychology, but many years back I got to be a part of starting up this really beautiful project called the Prison Renaissance Z.
And yeah, it's been a really beautiful part of the way I navigate the world and understand what my role in it is.
This is Michelle Chang, bad upperclassmen. She helped form Stanford's chapter of the National Nonprofit Prison Renaissance. She did this alongside another student, NEDA Wang, and a graffiti artist and poet incarcerated at San Quentin Mero Coles L Prison Renaissance is a nonprofit formed by a group of incarcerated artists and activists.
Its mission is to connect incarcerated people to the communities who need them. Their goals are to use art and community to create a culture of transformation, to end cycles of incarceration, and to create more proximity between the general public and incarcerated people. They ask the question, what do communities lack when incarcerated voices are absent from them?
The way Stanford's chapter answers this question. It is through a zine collaboration.
There is a long legacy of political prisoners who've written and distributed zines, and been able to kind of use the zine as this medium to circumvent certain barriers of disseminating information that might come with the many layers of surveillance or financial barriers, um, et cetera, that you encounter within Carceral systems.
I guess. One question I have is like, what does radical collaboration mean or mean to you? Because I feel like that's like a term that I read related to prison renaissance that I don't really know too much about.
I think how we started thinking about this idea of radical collaboration was like really creating relationships in unlikely context, being able to kind of.
Paired together, Stanford students with incarcerated folks on the inside, many of whom have very different sets of lived experiences does feel like a radical thing, where we're really trying to kind of interrogate really paternalistic forms of relating to each other in these contexts.
I've learned all this since joining Prison Renaissance. But honestly, when I walked into that first meeting, I just thought it'd be cool to make art with people I normally wouldn't be able to. I shared that I was interested in filmmaking, got paired with a filmmaker, and so the letters began
February 20th, 2020.
You asked if I like space, I love space. I used to throw a party in San Francisco called Space is the Place. I'll send you a copy of the flyer. Good Times. I think space is beautiful and vast and reminds us how tiny we are. We are stardust, but space also allows me to imagine other worlds with other beings who love each other and love themselves, where every speck of life is precious and deserving of patience.
I want to go there.
Ah, space is the place. I would love to see that poster. The fact that we're stardust so infinite ismal is so comforting. I wanna go to that place too, where everyone is patient with one another. I'm in a class right now called Physics 16, the origin and development of the Cosmos. I'm doing my final project on the possible fates of the universe.
The big freeze rib crunch, bounce. Isn't it wild that one day all the blue stars will have supernova and eventually the red stars will die too? I guess that means the most vibrant our universe will ever be is right now, and it's expanding every second. I feel like my mind is too small to wrap around ideas like that.
We got to know each other through those letters, especially after the world went into lockdown. I found myself looking forward to them. Even though we never met, I had the sense that I was reconnecting with an old friend, someone who understood me during a time when I was cut off from the world. I told him about the places I wished I could visit about the people I missed.
I sent him pictures of the blue rooftops of Santorini places I've never been, even though my family is from there. In one letter, he told me about his own memories of Santorini from 20 years before. It was a place that meant something to him, even though he'd also never been.
Safety is so much tied to memories what is familiar, but predictable and not associated with past life trauma.
There's something very familiar and pleasing about your handwriting and what you write. That reminds me of home and people I haven't seen or talked to in many years. There's a sadness in that, but also an ease.
The way you describe memories and the safety and comfort they bring us is so raw and really resonates with me.
I think about memories a lot. So much. Sometimes I'm afraid of not being present. Memories can really affect my emotions, bringing me bouts of sadness too, because I struggle with wrapping my brain around the fact that the same people won't always be in my life forever. It's a odd concept that I'm sure every adult has to come to terms with, but sometimes I forget.
It's true. I'm so happy my handwriting can remind you of home and memories of people. I wrote my college application essay about how if my voice could be transcribed, it'd be cursive. I love how you write in all caps. All caps. All caps, all caps. Scribbled lightning bolt.
Thank you for deciding to write me and being a part of my life story.
Let's do something amazing together. Have you thought about a project? I was thinking that we could. Write together, but also since we both do videography, we could do a film component, maybe a multimedia conversation. Let me know your thoughts. I hope you're receiving my mail. Can't wait to hear more from you.
Take good care. Anastasia Hugs Adamu.
Beginning with our first call in March of 2020, we went on to record every single phone conversation with the intent to make a film out of them. Thank you for using Global Tail Link, but as the pandemic raged on. San Quentin's Media Centers stayed closed. Hi, how are you?
What emerged? Were hours of tape. Hello? In the form of 34 phone calls. Hi.
Hi. Happy birthday. Hi.
Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello. How are you? Hello. Through those phone calls and letters, Adamu became one of my closest friends. We had a standing phone date, an hour every week or until we got cut off. We talked about everything.
Or almost everything. The thing we didn't talk about was why he was there, not because he wouldn't have told me, but because I made a conscious decision not to ask him.
Oftentimes that question or that sense of curiosity reveals a lot more to ourselves about our own humanity than it does about us demanding an explanation for someone else's humanity.
This is Michelle again from Prison Renaissance, the place that put me in touch with Adamo in the first place.
One thing that we instructed folks on was to not search someone up on the internet without their permission so that they would still sort of have that agency in, in the ways that they wanted to share their lives and invite people into that process rather than having folks on the outside sort of, yeah.
Project themselves onto being able to demand and access information about their collaborators without their consent. Like, I think the question of who is this serving in, in deciding like what to bring up with, you know, a, a collaborator, a friend, a loved one, a question around like. You know, what crime did you do?
What harm did you cause? Oftentimes that's serving folks on the outside their own sense of like voyeuristic, cur curiosity about someone and not necessarily actually serving the goals of the project.
Our conversations were one thing that really grounded me during this wild time. And as we got deeper into the pandemic, I realized that they may have served the same role for him too.
I remember like being on the phone and, you know, just closing my eyes and talking to you, or talking to like other folks that, um, I cared about. You know, there's like, you can escape for a little bit, right? It's like you're not there. You're just like in this kind of whatever. Liminal space where you're just like in between worlds.
I think they had, there were milk crates that were on the ground, so you would just be like very low to the ground. Um, and the phones were just payphones, like on the wall. They weren't inside of a phone booth, but they were just like very low. Um, I. Yeah, so like sometimes you would be like sitting like right next to someone and like, you know, sometimes people are like being loud or whatever.
Um, so it's not like the most ideal place or space. A couple of quick things before I gotta get off the phone. So I had an idea too for like the name.
Oh, yay. Yay.
I remember like something that I like really remembered from your first letter was like when you, or it wasn't even your first, I think it was like your second or third letter, but when you're talking about Aris ity
Yeah.
AP City. Yeah.
Ity. Right. And like I think like what it translates to in Latin is like the.
Kind of, you know, something warm during this, like really kind of like dark and cold time.
It was like really loud in the dorm and like I just like straining and like having my hand over my other ear and just like listening to like what you're saying. And I think for me it wasn't like so much that I wanted to kind of like share about what was going on inside, like on a day-to-day basis, but just more just.
Being able to like escape for a little bit and kind of like share connection was like a way to kind of, it was therapeutic.
I feel like that time, like once a week, whatever hour that we spoke to talk about our lives was just cool because it's like, I don't know how to describe it, like disconnected, but in a good way.
Not like, oh, he's removed. So like I get to like talk bad about the people in my life, Don. Like that kind of way. But just like, it was cool that like you kinda get to like the essence of what like a person's going through or whatever without all the like. Extra fluff
when I don't know where you are or what's happening.
Like I, like, I don't know what text, I don't know what Dallas looks like. I don't know what like your, like your world or your family looks like. Like you have to describe those things to me and like you have to like, describe it in, in, and an, in an amount of detail that like allows me to like be able to see it in my mind.
Right. And a lot of times that. Means that you're like describing like how you feel and certain contexts that like maybe you wouldn't feel like you would need to like tell a person, like in a normal situation or um, or just like wouldn't come up.
Do you feel like the person has to want to, to, for it to happen?
Like. Like, do you think that the breakthrough happened because you wanted it to happen? I think, I
think that everybody, I think that everybody wants it to happen, right? I think everybody wants to be more free. And I think, yeah, I mean, I just, I just think that like, I don't know anybody in here that's like a bad person, you know?
Like I know that people have been through like vary degrees of.
You know, maybe they didn't, they never got justice for what the things that happened to them. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know.
I just think that like, people can get stuck in kind of the things that have happened to them or whatever. Right. But yeah, I mean, I, I genuinely, I genuinely think that like, people are trying to figure out what's going on with them and what, you know, like who they.
The moments that we have in here are important, like the memorable. Look at them like that, right? Like when we graduate from whatever, or we do, right? Like when we produce a video or something like that. Like that needs to be honored. That needs to be like celebrated. Like we're in our lives, like we're living
Yeah.
Right now.
And I think I just, I feel like that's really important, but I think, I think that anywhere it's not just in prison. Like I think people can be in those kind of prisons within their own lives, right? And.
And they come in here and they like interact with us, and they, and they tell us the same thing that like, like their lives are like devoid of like human connection and like whatever. Right? And so, yeah, I mean prison, prison is just a metaphor, right? I still want get out. Yeah. Obviously I still would like to be out.
Um, yeah.
What does it mean to form a friendship across space? What does it mean to form a friendship across experience? Obviously, some of our varying experience is the fact that Adam's been incarcerated. I wanna take a minute to talk about what I haven't talked about Adamu and I never spoke about his crime until the making of this podcast and the process of even.
Thinking about needing to include. It was something I really had to wrestle with. I am in my room right now and I'm overwhelmed. Honestly, making this episode has been hard. Um, I want to do justice to our story. I wanna. I want Domi to listen to this. Hi. If you're listening and enjoy it. I don't wanna make him uncomfortable by talking about the crime that I'm sure a general audience may be waiting for me to get to.
Um, and like by not talking about it like that is intentional. It just feels weird having to, because of the circumstances that we met under, it feels, it feels like people ask, what did he do? Um, I. As if it's something I have to forgive him for something that happened when I was an infant. Um,
I don't know. It's hard to talk about, I
think to enter. Uh, relationship as sacred, as collaborative art making and, and building something together. There needs to be a foundation of trust and mutual respect and consent and agency. And I trust going into a collaborative relationship that, you know, you as my collaborator have taken accountability for whatever harm that you.
Feel you've caused in the same way that you are also trying to heal from the harm that has been inflicted upon you by the state and by other systems and structures, and that you will bring something up or share something if it feels relevant or feels meaningful and feels safe. And if it doesn't, that you won't have to bring those things up.
Ultimately, I decided not to share that conversation. What I will share is how Adamu became who he is today. Getting to know him during such a transitional time for the world, for myself, for him has felt pretty extraordinary. Especially three years later, I stay transitional for the world as it felt like our very social fabric disintegrated for myself as I had just left my home for the first time to begin my adult life, only to end up in my childhood bedroom months later, coming to terms with what that looked like, who I was becoming.
And as for dmu, because, well, we began discussing transitions a lot.
So shit crazy. So like a couple days ago I told you that we were having a meeting with the district attorney, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Basically like she reviewed everything and she was like, there's no need for a meeting. Like I'm, I'm gonna recommend to be re so that he can go home now.
Wait to go home now.
Well, not now, like, not right like right now, but like soon, like as soon as like, as soon as the court can see my case and then like resentence me.
Wow. Wait, that's crazy. Okay, so like resentence to like a shorter time or like for your sentence to be over over.
I am recording this for my dorm room. It's almost 2024 from where I am. I can see the space is a place poster, which he did end up mailing me, held by a magnet on my mini fridge. Free every Wednesday. It reads soul, future funk, sci-Fi, slap, and interplanetary rhythms with Northern California's finest selectors.
And then the bottom line hosted by all caps amu in October, 2020, after over 12 years in California state prisons, Adamu came home. He's gone on to win the San Francisco International Film Festival for his documentary. What These Walls Won't Hold. And weirdly enough ended up at Stanford
as a kid, like growing up in the Bay Area, I never had really had like a connection to Stanford.
I didn't know much about this school. It seemed like a place that like seemed inaccessible to me. I think I might have gone to the church one time with my dad, then all of a sudden, like I'm like in this fellowship at Stanford. Just funny, like the way that the world works in certain ways, right? Like I said, like.
Like you're basically my only connection to it. It's not, and it's also not because I knew you that like I got this fellowship. It's like, so I don't know. All of that seems very strange to me. It just seems kind of bizarre.
I'm happy that we still have a friendship outside of the silly little context that we met in.
Yeah, it's pretty sweet. Yeah, it's pretty sweet. I wonder like how, um. You know, like if Covid wouldn't have happened, like how things would've turned out, obviously it would've been like probably completely different. Maybe we would've done a project, a film project. I probably maybe wouldn't have gotten out.
I might still be in prison.
Do you really think that?
Yeah, I think so. Maybe possibly. Who knows? I think that's just like an interesting thing to think about when people talk about
all your success that's coming out in terms of your film and touring it. I don't know, just how do you feel about, like, how people describe your life since, since that moment or how you view it?
I don't
know. I think most days I just feel tired. Um, I think it's pretty bizarre. Like the world is like a pretty strange place where you can like be like, you can change positions so quickly, you know, where you can be like a forgotten. You know, like cursed person on a larger scale, right? Like society had deemed me like persona non grata.
We were just talking about what that word, that fancy phrase meant
Latin.
But you,
but you felt like per persona, non grata. Like,
I mean that's, I mean that's essentially like what prison is, right? Right. Prison is like the physical manifestation of like. Yeah, just being like a dispo, like a disposable and unwanted like person, right?
Like you can't even be in society. Like you have to be like caged and contained. Um, and so I think it's just like, it's bizarre to me to like be that person and then all of a sudden, like being the same person, but like being a very celebrated person. Um, I think it's a lot of it points to kind of the fickleness of like the ways that we like, think about people, um, that these things are kind of in some ways, um, I don't know, like arbitrary, you know, like I'm not so much of a different person than I was like three years ago.
So it's just, it's like a very strange thing. It's like really strange. It's really weird. Yeah.
Okay. You keep using the word bizarre too much. No, no, I like it. No, no. Like I get what you mean though.
Yeah.
In one of our first conversations when we thought the media center at San Quentin would reopen again when we thought the pandemic was just a long spring break, AMU shared the vision he had for the film we were gonna make for this project we were gonna produce through our collaboration.
And what he said, it is kind of interesting.
My idea was like the first scene would be a split screen animation, right? Like me in animation form, like standing in front of San Quentin.
Mm-Hmm. And
you standing in front of Stanford and like a split screen, right?
Yeah.
From that fade in, like fade into the first letter and then go through a sequence where like we're kind of like jumping through.
The letters and, and, and jumping to certain passages in both of our letters. Like read By Us, we start walking. Right. And the backgrounds are changing, right? Maybe the, the first background is like the ocean and like we're walking through the Golden Gate Bridge and out past the California coast, and then that fade into something else.
Somewhere like that, a conversation would take you or somewhere that you would want go. I know. So I. Paris, the great pyramid maybe, and then like, like our conversation is going like disolve into other. Finally, like I feel like, like we've had this conversation about outer space and like our, like that is like the final place that we go to, right?
Like we are walking through like the solar,
you have 60 seconds remaining.
We're walking through the solar system and having this conversation. And then at the end, like we end the conversation and we, you know, hug and then it goes back to like we turn and simultaneously, like I walk back into. He walked back into the distance into Stanford.
Whoa. And that's the end of it. Whoa. That's my idea. Whoa. That's so cool. Wait, is it gonna cut off or can you call back for two minutes?
I can't call back. I'm sorry.
No, it's okay. It's okay. They just
told us we gotta go.
You're good, you're good. Oh my God, I have so many thoughts. Okay. I'm so excited. I think that's an incredible idea.
I have, oh my God, that's so cool. I can run with that. I can try to like brainstorm even more. What makes our friendship interesting isn't that Adamu was incarcerated. I've learned from Adamu that creativity doesn't have limits. So much of his incredible film work is stuff that he shot while inside. He's also taught me that friendship doesn't have to have limits either.
We never did make that movie together. But we made something better, A friendship, the kind that crossed a space and time and experience and a podcast, but mostly a friendship. I don't know if I've really told him this, but I. He's a role model to me. He's been a formative person in my life, partly because I want to be a successful filmmaker like him, but mostly because I hope I can become as intentional as him in art and life and friendship.
This episode is produced by naia, so Delos as part of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Music for this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. Thank you to Amu Chan, Michelle Chang, the breeding grant, and Laura Joyce Davis for all their support. Take care.
Yeah, you. Bye bye.
You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. This episode was produced by Anastasia Soo and me, ARU Nyer, with support from Laura Joyce Davis. Dawn Frazier. Megan Kafe, Melissa Dal and Jonah gans for their generous financial support. We'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the program in Writing and rhetoric, the Office of the Vice President for the Arts and Bruce Braden.
You'll hear more stories of reclaiming what's been lost in upcoming episodes. You can learn about the Stanford Storytelling Project and our podcasts, workshops, live events, and courses@storytelling.stanford.edu. You can find this. And every episode of State of the Human on our website or anywhere you listen to podcasts for State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Aru Nyer.