The Brief

Comedians need a space to workshop their jokes — that’s universal.

So on a recent Saturday afternoon at the Tang Dynasty restaurant in San Gabriel, a handful of stand up performers were slinging their stuff at an open mic.

In Mandarin Chinese.

Liting Chen was third in the lineup, a self-proclaimed neophyte with a firm grasp of comedic timing.

"It's actually my third time doing Chinese stand up," Chen began. She then turned to a laowai — or foreigner — in the audience.

"Your Chinese is better than mine," she continued, and asked him where he learned it.

Online, from a teacher who lives in Southern China, he replied.

Chen interrupted him with a small apologetic laugh. "I don't understand," she said.

Liting Chen performs at a Chinese open mic event in San Gabriel.

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Iris Ouyang

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How to slay in Chinese

Welcome to Re-educated Comedy, a series of Chinese stand up shows and open mics in Los Angeles, where roasts, heckling, jokes that land and those that don't are all part of the experience. Just like they would be in English.

Re-educated is the brainchild of Lewis Liu, who works with Chinese-speaking entertainers, including film and TV professionals and social media influencers. In late 2023, Liu said a couple of his clients had wanted to do comedy in Chinese, but were bemoaning the lack of opportunities in L.A.

So like any good producer, Liu put an event together about a month later — a mixer and a stand-up show with a handful of performers in downtown. It packed the house.

"Because we had food, people showed up for that," Liu said. "Some people probably showed up for the comedians."

The audience is there

In March 2024, Re-educated had its first ticketed stand-up only show at a 140-seat comedy club. The first half of the sold-out performance was in English. The second, Chinese. It was bilingual, Liu said, because there weren't enough Chinese comics around.

There was another challenge.

"After our first show, our comedians were telling me, 'Lewis, it's great that we have a show, but we're running out of material,'" Liu said.

So they asked him to add free open mics to the programming.

"Having a small live audience really helps them test out the material," Liu said.

And all jokes are welcome at Re-educated Comedy. If the brand sounds like a political jab, Liu said to think of it more as a double entendre.

"When you come to a new country, you learn about the new things in the new world," said Liu, who came to the U.S. from central China more than a decade ago. "You essentially get reeducated."

As to any additional meaning, Liu said, "we let the audience interpret how they see it."

This year, the series is expanding from quarterly to monthly, with a mix of open mics and ticketed shows. As word about Re-educated gets out, more comedians are joining, from total newbies to bilingual comics who first cut their teeth in English stand-up.

Liting Chen, who roasted the guy in the audience at Tang Dynasty, started performing stand-up in English about a year-and-a-half ago and considers herself firmly in the bilingual camp. She learned about Re-educated from a fellow Chinese comic, went to her first show at the end of last year, and took the plunge shortly after.

" I was shocked to see there are so many Chinese-speaking [people in the] audience. Like, they're real people; they're not comics," Chen said.

In comparison, the audience of most English open mics she's been part of are other comics, waiting for their turn to go up.

Chen, who immigrated to the U.S. from northern China about a decade ago, said it's been interesting trying to figure out what makes the two different crowds tick.

"I don't think it translates," she said, bringing up a conversation she recently had with another bilingual comedian. "We feel like when we speak different languages, like Chinese and English, we switch our personality, we become another person."

Sliding between cultures

Jesse Appell, known in the Chinese-speaking stand up world as Ai Jiexi, performs at the open mic in San Gabriel.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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In between sets at Tang Dynasty, a comic with a close-cropped head of curls jumps on stage to work the crowd of about 30 people. His name is Jesse Appell, but he goes by another name in the Chinese stand-up scene.

"My name is Ai Jiexi," Appell said to the audience. "When you look at my face, you probably don't know where I am from. Well, I am a Dongbei ren."

Dongbei ren means someone who's from northeastern China.

"America's Northeast," Appell delivered the punchline. "I'm from Boston."

About 15 years ago, the Bostonian went to Beijing to study Chinese. He was already dabbling in improv in the U.S., and decided to check out the comedy scene in China. He discovered an old-school style of comedy known as xiangsheng — or crosstalk — that goes back some two centuries. A couple of years later, he returned to China on the Fulbright fellowship to research Chinese comedy, with the ulterior motive to study with the only crosstalk master in the country that would take on foreign disciples.

From there, Appell started to make a career for himself in China as a stand-up comic, performing some 300 shows in one year, including on Royal Caribbean cruises, a popular Chinese internet knock-off of SNL, and at his own comedy club in Beijing.

"Then I came home to the States for what I thought would be a nine-day vacation, and COVID hit in midair," Appell said. "I found myself locked back in America after having not lived here for basically my whole adult life."

Which pretty much sums up one major theme across his jokes.  "A lot of my comedy in Mandarin and even in English comes down to being this person that lives between the two worlds," Appell said.

A global phenomenon

Despite the vast Chinese-speaking diaspora in Southern California, the local Chinese comedy scene isn’t as developed as other cities. Re-educated's Liu said stand-up comedy started blowing up in China and Taiwan in the late 2010s, with variety and late night-type shows devoted to the artform.

" I actually was not surprised there's an audience out there for Chinese-language comedy," Liu said, referring to Los Angeles. "Because of the popularity of these shows, there are many other Chinese language comedy clubs that started to pop out around the world."

New York, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, the Silicon Valley, according to Liu, all have their own spots.

But what Los Angeles has is the San Gabriel Valley.

" The SGV is different," said Appell, who has performed in a number of Chinese-speaking communities, including in Paris, London and Seattle. He calls it a kind of cultural confidence that he hasn't seen elsewhere, like the fact that the signage of an entire mall could be in Chinese, the fact that zero thoughts are given to whether you know the language.

"I feel like [in] the SGV, people are living their life and they're thriving and they're doing what they want," Appell said.

Details for the next show

Re-educated Comedy
Date: Saturday, Feb. 22
Time: English stand-up: 7 – 9 p.m. Chinese stand-up: 9 - 11 p.m.
Venue: Happy Humble Hub, 117 East Main Street #Unit A & B, Alhambra
Tickets: Starting at $28.52

Recent court filings paint two contradictory pictures about what is happening behind closed doors at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, the privately run immigration detention center 90 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

On the one hand, federal officials argue conditions at Adelanto already meet the standards set by U.S. District Court Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes. Sykes ordered the government to make immediate improvements at the detention facility on July 16.

And, in any case, they’ve asked the judge to hold off on enforcing her order while they appeal.

Lawyers representing the plaintiffs — people detained at the facility — instead describe routine violations of the court order still taking place today. They argue delaying enforcement will prolong violations of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees due process and fair treatment before the law.

How we got here

The case was filed in January by lawyers representing people detained at Adelanto after two people died at the facility — two more people have died since then.

Here are some key allegations in the lawsuit:

• Problems with access to medical care and disability accommodations
• Contaminated water
• Water unavailable 24/7
• Food that doesn't meet dietary requirements

Sykes found enough evidence to support these claims to require immediate action. That’s where the preliminary injunction comes in.

And that did two things: It ordered some changes to be made right away, like 24-hour access to clean water and healthy food. Then it asked the government to prepare a plan for long term improvements. That’s the plan filed by federal officials late Thursday, July 30, which was short on details and also claimed many of the alleged complaints were invalid.

A July 31 filing by plaintiffs’ attorneys fundamentally disagreed, saying “conditions at Adelanto are not a matter of dispute; they are documented by extensive expert testimony, declarations from detained individuals, and the Government’s own admissions.”

The filing calls the government’s request for a stay a delaying tactic, one that would keep in place “conditions this Court found likely unconstitutional, and in which four people have died.”

Sophia Wrench, an attorney for the plaintiffs with Public Counsel, said the government’s request is full of contradictions.

“This request to hold off on enforcing this injunction represents a pattern of behavior on the part of the government to continually delay implementing court orders,” Wrench said. “They are simultaneously arguing that they’re already doing everything that the court order is asking them to do, but also saying that it would irreparably injure them to continue to implement the order. So meanwhile, the 1,800 plus people at Adelanto still don’t have clean water consistently, still don’t have clean facilities, and still experience mold that has not been remediated.”

Asked for comment about the plaintiff’s most recent filing, The GEO Group Inc., the private company contracted to run Adelanto under a $400 million annual contract through 2029, referred LAist to ICE.

The Department of Homeland Security has not yet responded to a request to comment for this story, but in a previous, unsigned statement, the agency said reports of substandard conditions at Adelanto are false.

Alleged worms in the water

One central area of dispute is over water, both access and quality.

Federal officials say both are adequate. In a declaration filed to the court on July 30, Ryan Smith, an ICE assistant field office director, said conditions outlined in the July 16 court injunction are being met.

Smith’s declaration said the facility already provides clean drinking water 24 hours a day, with access to drinking fountains supplied by the same municipal water company that supplies the town of Adelanto.

Shortly after Smith’s declaration was filed, L.A. Taco reported a man held at Adelanto, Carlitos Ricardo Parias, said he discovered black worms in the drinking water there. An attorney representing Parias said Parias got the water from coolers provided by the facility, and shared the video showing the worms with LAist.

Other people detained at Adelanto complained about the water in new court filings. A declaration filed by Wrench, of Public Counsel, includes reports from four men held inside the facility who all report “significant delays” accessing clean drinking water since the court order.

Water is available from a sink inside the cells and in Igloo jugs, according to the declaration, which also notes those detained said it’s only been since the lawsuit was filed in January that GEO guards instructed them to drink from the sink.

The declaration says that even the water in the jugs “appears to be stale and dirty, with visible black sediment in the water.”

Guards occasionally take the water dispensers away, one plaintiff reported, leading the men in his unit to chant “Agua! Agua! Agua!”

One plaintiff said the men in his unit do not have clean drinking water for four hours at a time nearly every day. He said on July 22, nearly a week after the order, around 25 people in the unit filed a collective grievance and were told by a guard that they could drink water from the sink instead.

While it’s true that the Adelanto Water Department provides water to the facility, Wrench said that doesn’t explain away issues with water cleanliness.

“The city of Adelanto serves water to the entire city of Adelanto. So they are responsible to that point, but once the water is in the detention center, Adelanto is responsible for the storage of the water, the quality of the pipes, the overlay with the sewer system,” Wrench said. “We’re getting things like people saying the water smells, alternatively, like bleach or smells like water, we’re seeing that the water is dark colored. That’s what we’re hearing from folks inside. That doesn’t align with what GEO Group and ICE are telling us.”

Alleged defiance of the order and ongoing staffing issues

The plaintiffs also report in the court declarations that ICE has failed to improve access to healthy food, medical care or exercise in the yard.

According to the declaration, people detained at Adelanto report The GEO Group employees telling them they either have not heard of the order, or that ICE has told them not to make any changes until the appeal is finalized.

One example in the declaration: A detained man who raised the court order with a GEO officer, a captain, reported she told him that she had not seen the order and said that the facility was short-staffed. The next day, the man said that the captain called him into her office to explain that, since the order was being appealed, it would not be enforced.

“She explained that once ICE told them to enforce the [preliminary injunction], they would do so immediately, but that ICE had not told them to enforce it,” according to the declaration.

In their application to delay implementing the July 16 order, lawyers for the federal government explain that there are approximately 52 ICE employees on-site, along with 350 security and operations staff and 100 medical staff employed by GEO Group. There are currently about 1,800 people being held at Adelanto.

Wrench told LAist that staffing appears to be a major issue at Adelanto.

“We are hearing that guards have to work 16, 18 hour shifts, and so they’re burning out quickly, either getting fired or leaving, quitting their jobs,” Wrench said. “Almost every time I go to Adelanto, I’m hearing new people being trained on the job when I’m speaking to different staff. That means they don’t have enough guards to clean, they don’t have enough guards to supervise people in their outdoor time, and so that means they have to cut corners.”

Who is responsible for Adelanto?

In court filings, the federal government has argued that the government cannot address the issues in the court order, because the Adelanto facility is run by GEO, its contractor.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs dispute this reasoning, what the recent court filings call the “defendant’s central gambit.” They claim Sykes was briefed on this argument and rejected it in issuing the order for relief. According to plaintiffs’ filings, ICE has the contractual authority to require GEO’s compliance with any conditions the court orders. “ICE need not physically operate the mop to ensure the floors are clean, it need only exercise the contract provisions that already require GEO to do so,” a filing from July 31 states.

“It’s quite frankly ridiculous that they continue to argue that because GEO is not a direct party to the case, that they don’t have levers of control over GEO to be implementing this order,” Wrench told LAist. “They have a contract with GEO Group to be doing the day-to-day operations for this facility. There is a constitutional duty that the government has whenever they are detaining someone.”

In the latest earnings call, GEO’s CEO and founder George Zoley, who immigrated to the U.S. from Greece in 1953, said the federal government was looking to take direct ownership of immigration detention centers.

“As some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership of the facilities,” Zoley said. “They are federal facilities to begin with, in my opinion.”

Ice-Age discoveries are still happening at the La Brea Tar Pits while the museum is closed for renovations.

And for the first time in Los Angeles, researchers have found a new species of extinct amphibian, according to a study released Wednesday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The little amphibian is a type of spadefoot toad — which technically aren’t toads but have the word in the common name. The researchers have affectionately named it Spea labreae (spay-ah lah-bray-eye) — a nod to the location where it was discovered.

How they found the amphibian

Spea labreae is now one of only two amphibians found from this era in North America. The other is a tree frog in Florida.

The study’s lead author, José Alberto Cruz, discovered the spadefoot while reviewing a collection of bones that had been barely touched since they were excavated from Rancho La Brea in 1929.

This incomplete sacro-urostyle bone (base of the spine that connects to the hips) is the holotype specimen used to describe the new species, Spea labreae.

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Courtesy La Brea Tar Pits

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At first, he said, he thought the sample came from a sick or injured amphibian in the already known spadefoot family. But as he compared the bones, he realized that couldn’t explain the differences in what he saw.

“[I thought,] 'Oh my god, this is a new species that is [being kept] in a drawer,'” he said. “And now it’s in the light to the world.”

This was Cruz's first discovery of an extinct species. He said he measured the bones to determine the size. According to his research, it was a bit larger than today's spadefoots. (Reporter’s note: Sorry to anyone who was hoping for it to be huge, like I was.)

As for the name, Spea labreae may seem self-explanatory, but there’s another reason.

“ The team [is] amazing,” he said. “All the people inside, the curators, the collection managers, the excavation lab — all the people are great.”

Why the discovery matters for climate change

Amphibians are incredibly sensitive to climate changes and need water. Because of that, researchers can learn more about what conditions were like during the Ice Age, such as precipitation and temperature, just from a frog's presence.

“ The birds, they can fly. If the conditions are very bad, they move,” he said. “But in the case of toads, frogs … they can’t move a lot.”

Co-author Emily Lindsey, a  vertebrate paleontologist at the La Brea Tar Pits, said the new discovery could offer insights about a much colder, wetter L.A. region.

Reconstructions of the dark Spea labreae at the center and right in the La Brea Tar Pits, compared with Spea hammondii (light spadefoot, left), which is the species in L.A. today. The Mexican burrowing toad is at the bottom.

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Artwork by Arturo Dávalos

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Courtesy La Brea Tar Pits

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“ If we’re trying to understand what Los Angeles looked like during the Ice Age, these are some of our best clues that can give us information about that,” she said.

For Spea labreae, L.A. is its only known home so far. But researchers also found the first record of the Mexican burrowing toad here, which today is only found in southern Mexico.

Lindsey said something big may have happened that made the toad move, such as climate changes during the late Ice Age or the arrival of humans.

Although the new discoveries won’t be in a dedicated exhibit when the museum reopens, they will be incorporated into the format.

“ Toads are definitely going to be represented in the new museum,” Lindsey said, “along with insects, songbirds, pack rats and all of the other plants and animals that make up an ecosystem.”

The second ticket drop for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles launches Monday, and fans will learn this week if they have a slot.

Just like last time, anyone who wants to buy tickets to the Games had to pre-register. That automatically entered them into a lottery for a window to buy tickets.

Those who won a spot will receive an email Thursday or Friday.

Ticket sales for Drop 2 will launch Aug. 10 and run through Aug. 20. Fans are limited to 12 tickets each, with an additional 12 allowed for the Olympic soccer tournament.

Purchases are limited to four tickets maximum for both the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. Those who purchased fewer than that in the first round of ticket sales — or didn't get a spot — will be automatically re-entered into Drop 2.

Tickets start at $28 a piece, and some will be available at that price in this next round of sales.

In the first drop, cheap tickets went fast, and many were left only with options in the hundreds and thousands of dollars. Ticket prices include a 24% service fee, which raised eyebrows for some people when they reached check-out.

LA28 is counting on ticket and hospitality sales to bring in $2.5 billion to cover the costs of putting on the Games. If they don't hit that mark, public funds could be on the line.

Organizers will launch an official ticket re-sale market next year. Tickets to the Paralympic Games will also go on sale in 2027.

A federal judge on Tuesday held the Department of Homeland Security in contempt for allegedly slow-rolling an order to create digital copies of communications from personal and government cell phones used by immigration agents during operations in the Los Angeles area last year.

U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in the Central District of California previously ordered the federal government in January to expedite imaging the personal cell phones of more than 800 agents involved in controversial immigration raids in Los Angeles in 2025.

Judge Frimpong imposed a fine of $500 per day on the federal government until it complies with the order to turn over phones as part of discovery and reimburse plaintiffs’ attorneys for the legal costs of getting the records.

Attorneys for DHS admitted in court in June that the agency had not provided the records. They told the judge they were processing the government devices at a rate of three phones every two weeks, which plaintiffs noted would take nearly four years to complete.

Attorneys representing immigrants caught up in Operation At Large — the name given to the Trump administration’s Los Angeles immigration crackdown last year — argue the phones may contain evidence of a pattern of racial profiling by federal agents.

Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in May that the Department of Homeland Security “simply proceeded to thwart” Frompong’s order “by dragging their feet on imaging government-issued cell phones and by openly defying the order as to personal phones.”

Last month, ACLU attorneys asked Frimpong to issue another order that would prohibit agents from detaining people based on their race. They cited text messages and body camera footage in which agents used racial slurs, including “wet and “tonks,” to identify working-class Latinos to stop, according to court records.

“Not only are federal agents violating the Constitution on the streets, the government is violating court orders by intentionally withholding critical evidence about its immigration enforcement operations.” said Mayra Joachin with the ACLU of Southern California.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.