Adult Swim: Celeb-Nerdy with Das Racist's Dapwell

Das Racist is a lot of things -- like a group of three rappers -- but no one would exactly describe them as nerds. But guess what: They are. Of the three (Himanshu "Heems" Suri, Victor "Kool A.D." Vazquez and Ashok "Dapwell" Kondabolu), hype man Dapwell wins the prize for the most peculiar obsession: Chinatowns. (And lucky for him, since the prize is an orange slice and a fortune cookie.) We gave Dapwell a call while his band was on tour behind the recent LP Relax, Das Racist's first commercially-released album. P.S. Your lucky numbers are 8, 6, 7, 5309.

Dapwell's Web Series, Chillin' Island

What is it about Chinatowns that you love so much?

I like, about the New York Chinatown specifically… I mean, there are some tourist things about it, but when I've been to other Chinatowns and they have entire restaurants that no actual Chinese people go to, and that are obviously watered down in terms of the food and how they present the culture. But the New York Chinatown? The population density is very high, and it's fairly big. There's a couple of Chinatowns there, but I'm talking about the one in Manhattan. There will be a lot of places where you walk in and people clearly don't want you there, if you know what I mean.

Because you're a gringo?

Right. [Laughs.] They'll just look at you and wonder what you're doing there and what you want.

Basically there will be huge amounts of fungi and root vegetables that I've never seen before in my entire life that will be sitting in cardboard boxes out on the streets. And then there will be Chinese people deciding which ones to buy. I'm like, "How do you tell what a good one of these funguses is?"

I like taro buns. They're my favorite dessert ever. There's this place called Fay-Da Bakery that has this weird, like, ball. It's like a puffball that's filled with taro mush. It's my favorite dessert ever that I've never seen anywhere else in Chinatown.

“Basically there will be huge amounts of fungi and root vegetables that I've never seen before in my entire life that will be sitting in cardboard boxes out on the
streets. ”

What are some of your earliest memories of falling in love with Chinatowns?

I grew up in Queens, in Jackson Heights, but my father worked at Flushing Hospital. And Flushing had maybe even a bigger Chinatown than Manhattan, but if it isn't Manhattan, nobody cares. It's like incredibly huge. So my dad was an echocardiogram technician, so a lot of people who would do that at the time was either Russian, Indian, or Chinese immigrants typically. So a lot of his students would be Chinese men, and mostly Chinese women. So, he eventually was doing teaching and giving this test, and once they passed this test, they'd want to thank him. So most of the time we'd go into these really crazy buffets, but they were only Chinese people and only Chinese spoken. At least twice there was these two women in two consecutive years that brought us to the same buffet that was very popular at the time. It closed down. It had a picture of President Clinton on the wall. There'd be these small women who couldn't possibly have weighed over 100 pounds eating mounds of lobster and crab, which I didn't even know how to eat when I was that age. I was putting down seven plates worth of food and my parents barely even knew what it was we were eating.

I spent a lot of time in the Flushing Chinatown, which is very heavily Taiwanese, but went to high school in Stuyvesant. At that time it was at least 49 to 50 percent East Asian kids. It was in downtown Manhattan not too far from Chinatown at all, really. So a lot of the time a couple of us would go over to the Chinatown arcade that just closed down very recently. Kids would play, like, Dance Dance Revolution with their girlfriends and stuff. I don't really play videogames but it was a fun place to hang out just because it was very grimy and dingy and weird. In the middle of Chinatown. Yeah. It was very cinematic.

“I was putting down seven plates worth of food and my parents barely even knew what it was we were eating.”

Chinatown Fair, Circa 2007

Probably when I was 15, that's when I started really going to Chinatown. I was always obsessed with Americanized Chinese food. Not obsessed, I constantly ate it and liked eating it all the time. I used to go to Chinatown and eat actual Chinese food, or at least Chinatown Chinese food, it was kinda insane.

When you're able, how often do you go to Chinatown?

When I'm in New York I'll probably go to Chinatown at least once a week. At one point I was going three or four times a week for many hours at a time. I recently moved and me and my girlfriend were gonna move to Chinatown, but the apartments, because there's so much tenement housing, that the apartments are incredibly small. She refused to live in this small, closet-like apartment. I didn't really care, but it was a problem for her so I couldn't do it. But if I lived in Chinatown, it woulda been insane.

“When I'm in New York I'll probably go to Chinatown at least once a week. ”

It would've saved you a lot of time going back and forth.

There's a lot of illicit activity going on and I wanted to see if I just spent a ton of time there to try and crack it. We're touring with this guy named Despot and he was reading that there's this rat poison -- they just did a raid on this or something [in Chinatown] and they pulled away all this rat poison. Hang on, let me pull this up: "12 Held In Sale Of Pest Poisons, One 60 Times As Potent As The Legal Limit." And then, here you go, one of the packages on it says: "The cat be unemployed." It's a cat kind of smiling and resting on a stylized mountain. [Laughs.] It means that the cat doesn't have to kill rats because the poison's so good.

When you were going there three or four times a week, did you have a routine? What would you usually do?

I would sometimes go to Vanessa's Dumpling House, on Eldridge. It has dollar dumplings, and I'm a vegetarian, so I only eat certain things, but they have, like, sesame-pancake sandwiches and all this stuff. It's probably the cheapest place in New York. But when I got sick of that I used to go to this place called House Of Vegetarian on Baxter. They have all these fake meat products, but they don't make them out of soy. Some of them are made out of wheat gluten, which is pretty standard but also pretty good. But they make fake meat out of yam, like white yam, so I go to that place.

Vanessa's Dumpling House

My routine is just ambling along, buying weird stuff that they just get. They get a lot of stuff wholesale from Chinese factories, so I like to see what you can get because they have certain stores that look like the touristy streets on Canal but aren't really on Canal. Then they get shipments of really weird bandanas, tablecloths, or hats that say really ridiculous versions of American things, or stuff that isn't even imitations of something. Just weird things that I can't understand the motivation. Or who designed this product that they probably printed like 30,000 hats of. Who designed the hat that said, "Best Friend" or "Buddy Boy" or something on it. What does that even mean?

“Who designed the hat that said, "Best Friend" or "Buddy Boy" or something on it. What does that even mean? ”

What's the last thing that you bought like that?

I have this completely ridiculous hat. I can't remember what it says because I lost it three months ago.

Do you have any ideas of how you'd like to branch out with your Chinatown routine?

What I'm gonna try to get into now is going to those herbalist stores. They used to have these stores in Flushing or wherever, where you could go into the medicine stores and there's a guy with a lab coat. You'd go in there with a certain ailment and they'd crush up herbs and fungi and sometimes cockroaches and they'd all be ground up into a potion. They used to have those when I was a kid. I don't know if they have those anymore, but I don't know why they wouldn't. They don't have that in the Manhattan Chinatown probably because it's too heavily trafficked.

I want to get into going in with an ailment or some made-up health problem and drinking whatever they have and see how I feel.

What sort of made-up health problems are you expecting to need help with?

I'll pretend I have terrible back pain or that I'm having problems sleeping. They'll probably give me some mildly narcotic thing that I drink and I'll probably just walk around Chinatown all f***-up and s***.

Oh! The hat! I remember what the hat said: "Smart guy." [Laughs.]