EXO's Kai announces first solo tour "KAION" across Asia in 2025
The announcement came on Thursday, 6 March, through EXO's official social media accounts, revealing that the tour will begin in Seoul at the Olympic Handball Gymnasium on 17-18 May. Malaysian fans will be thrilled to learn that Kuala Lumpur has been selected as the second stop on the tour on 24 May.
The "KAION" tour will continue across Asia with confirmed appearances in Macau, Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei, Manila, Bangkok, Yokohama and Hong Kong.
Here are the details below!
This marks Kai's first major project since completing his military service, and fans are eagerly anticipating what new performances and music he has been developing during his time away.
For fans unable to secure tickets for the Kuala Lumpur show, neighbouring Singapore will also host the K-pop star as part of the tour itinerary.
Further details regarding ticket sales and specific venues for each city are expected to be announced soon. Stay tuned for updates on this exciting tour as Kai prepares to showcase his solo artistry across Asia.
(Photo Source: EXO IG, Kai IG)
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Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
How All Time Low Turned Outside Noise Into New Music
Twenty years into their career as a band, All Time Low hit a crossroads. They had just re-recorded and released a compilation album, revisiting the catalog hits that made them pop-punk pioneers in the mid-aughts. As All Time Low tapped into the nostalgia of past milestones, they were forced to contend with their legacy, and more importantly, what next steps to take. Would they walk away or brave a new chapter? That question also came as the band was embroiled in a major legal drama, which involved a defamation suit All Time Low filed in response to serious accusations of sexual abuse by fans online against founding guitarist Jack Barakat. A storm of controversy ensued as the All Time Low fanbase split into two camps: supporters and detractors of the band, both unequivocal in their stances. It all made the band's next move particularly important. More from Rolling Stone Warped Tour to Head to Washington, D.C., for Second Consecutive Year Warped Tour Pulled Off the Impossible and Took Fans Back in Time Cartel to Celebrate 'Chroma' 20th Anniversary With Re-Recording and Fall Tour Last August, All Time Low played three shows in celebration of their compilation album, which they dubbed the Forever Shows. The Baltimore-bred band performed to 14,000 ecstatic fans at their hometown amphitheater. It was their biggest show to date. Electrified by the crowd of dedicated fans who sang nearly every lyric back to them, All Time Low found the answer to the question hanging over them. 'There's still a story to be told here and there's still another chapter for All Time Low,' lead singer and guitarist Alex Gaskarth says over Zoom. 'It really made us fall in love with the band all over again and made us want to go and make this record,' he adds, reflecting on the pivotal 2024 performances. A few months after those Forever Shows, All Time Low requested to dismiss their defamation suit without prejudice. 'All Time Low has chosen to handle the matter privately and protect the identities of those behind Doe 2, instead of pursuing further litigation at this time… The investigation proved what All Time Low knew all along – the allegations in the posts are completely and utterly false,' the band's lawyer shared in a statement with Rolling Stone at the time. Now, All Time Low is ready to talk about it all. Rolling Stone spoke with Alex Gaskarth about the band's new chapter with aptly titled 10th LP Everyone's Talking!, how controversies influenced the record, and what the band's hope is for the future. You played at the Vans Warped Tour in D.C. for their and performed with the American University cheer squad and D.C.'s Different Drummers marching band. Why was it important to bring them onstage with you guys?There was a lot behind it. The idea came from us looking at the Warped Tour performance as a celebration. We knew that it was the 30th anniversary and we wanted to do something special and new and unique. We'd never really done a show where we had that many moving parts and other performers as an extension of our show. So it started as this fun challenge for us to try and tackle for such an epic day and a celebration of the Warped Tour. Then as we got into piecing it all together, the D.C.'s Different Drummers came to us and said they'd be down to be a part of it. We loved the idea of having a heavy representation on the stage. It was important to have, particularly that weekend when there was so much else going on in D.C. A lot of folks, especially in the LGBTQ+ community, I think are feeling scared and out of place. It was great to be able to use the Warped Tour environment that has always been known as a diverse and welcoming community to lift them up and to extend a warm hug at a time when it feels like everybody freaking needs a warm hug. You told the crowd, 'This is the place to be tonight in D.C., I'll tell you that.' Just a few miles away President Trump hosted his birthday . Was that a pointed remark?I can assure you it was. Soupy [Dan Campbell from The Wonder Years] put it slightly differently, but he said, 'I'm going to say it with my whole chest.' In hindsight, I probably should have said it with my whole chest, but this is me now retroactively clarifying that it was with my whole chest that I very much mean that was the place to be. You just announced your new album . When did you guys decide to get back into the studio?We write a lot with Dan Swank, our fifth Beatle, who is also producing the majority of this record. We wrote together on the road where we have a little studio set up on the bus. There were songs being written over the course of the Tell Me I'm Alive tour and The Forever Sessions tour but we didn't know if they were going to be a body of work. Around the time that we were starting to play those 20 year celebration shows, it just put us in this mindset of 'there's something here that we can keep going.' It set the tone. That's when we started piecing the songs together and made a real intentional effort to get back in the studio and write, write, write. We started putting together the actual album in the middle of last year. It was done in sections. We'd spend a few weeks here writing songs and step away. One of the things we've learned about making albums now is to give the songs some room to breathe and to come back to the ones that we truly love. There's a song on the album called 'Butterflies' that we wrote pretty close to the end of the process; I didn't need to live with that one to know that it was special. It's unlike anything we've done in a while. I fluctuate with my writing — there are songs with concepts that are very easy to follow and then sometimes there are songs where I lean a little more into more off-the-cuff poetry and it's left open for interpretation. 'Butterflies' leans a bit that way. It reminds me of the lyricism on Don't Panic, like something from that era kind of spun over into this one. When you look back at all the albums that you've made, it's fun to draw those comparisons and be like, 'Oh yeah, it's got a bit of that to it.' Why did you choose 'Suckerpunch' as the lead single?When we wrote it, there was a feeling in the room that day. We all said, 'This feels like the first thing that people need to hear.' It felt like a good statement like, 'Hi, we're here. We're back, and we're ready to go.' It was an exciting way to announce that we're back in a way that's hard not to pay attention to. It felt like coming out of the gates swinging with that heavy leaning guitar riff. We thought that would translate really well with a live audience too. You have a world tour kicking off in North America in the fall. With 10 albums to choose from now, how are you going to pick the setlist?It's really funny, the biggest argument that we have in the band at this point is about the setlist. Whenever we have to put together a show, it's tough. We always want to make a show that feels well-crafted. I personally always hate the nostalgia band vibe. I love our legacy and our old music, but I see us as a current band making current music. Whenever we put together a set list, I want to show love to the new songs while also fitting in the old. I feel really good about the fact that 'Suckerpunch' and 'The Weather' came out first. Sometimes the songs that end up going off live are deeper cuts on the album, but in this case, those two songs are going to translate really well for the live show. One focus of making this record was 'what's going to pop off at the shows?' We're putting our best foot forward there with these first two tracks. I can see a sea of people just bopping. Is there any particular song that a band member fights for?Oh yeah. If anyone so much as infers that we take 'Lost In Stereo' off a set list, Jack will not be a happy boy. That's his song. I don't know that it's ever left the set list because he fights hard for it. There have been times where we've been like, 'Hey man, what if for this tour we just didn't play that one and popped a different one in there?' He's like, 'No, I'll walk.' What's the significance behind the album title ?I think it's the dichotomy between gossip and celebration. There was this sentiment in the air off the tail of these Forever shows. There was a buzz about All Time Low again. There's the people that have been supportive of us through over 20 years, and then there's people that have found out about our band in more recent times with Wake Up Sunshine and Tell Me I'm Alive. It felt like for the first time in a long time the entire fandom was really buzzing over the story of All Time Low and what we've done over the course of our time as a band. We kept saying 'everyone's talking.' It was a phrase that kept getting thrown around, and then the more we honed in on the album, the more we were like, 'That's such a buzz-worthy title. Let's line it up.' It's definitely intriguing, even compared to some of the band's other album titles. Hell yeah, I'll take that. We were going for it. Over the past few years, the band has been involved in a very public legal battle. How has that impacted the making and release of ?Obviously it's been a dark cloud over our last few years. It was a really difficult thing to navigate and deal with. All of it has been talked about, covered, said, so there's not much more to say there, but it affected the writing process and the creative process in that what more was there to say when there was just this horrible thing that we were going through and navigating? It didn't make it easy to want to write about anything. Coming out the other side of it and getting to share our side of the experience, it feels good. It feels liberating, and it's nice to know that the truth is out there and that we can now proceed without this dark cloud hanging over us. It's a sigh of relief, honestly, and a breath of fresh air. We're so excited for the future. Fans in the All Time Low subreddit have that the lyrics in 'Suckerpunch' seem to reference the public legal battle from the past few years. Was that purposeful? Did you have an audience in mind when you wrote and released 'Suckerpunch'?Oh yeah. There's definitely a hint of that in the song. We live in a world these days where so much can be heavily influenced by faceless voices and opinions on the internet and on social media. The song was in response to some of that in the sense of there are people that resoundingly just seem to want to take you down and seem to get their kicks in the comments section being negative. This song is accepting that and being okay with being the punching bag. It's like, 'I'm going to put myself out there and I'm going to take this risk at living my dream. I know that's going to come with some licks along the way. I'm down to take a couple punches, let's go.' That felt liberating. This song was a way to acknowledge we're here to get past those things and continue to try to thrive. I just hope it feels hopeful. There's a tinge of hope to everything on this record that is exciting. What would you say in response to fans that might be hesitant to listen to the new project in light of the controversies from the past few years?I understand it in a way because it's never easy to see these things in the media and know how to feel about them. The main thing that I'll say is that we stand behind what we said. We established that in the best way we could in a court of law. We established what we set out to say all along, which is that All Time Low has always been a safe space and it's always been a place of cultivating support for people, support for one another, and bringing people together in a celebratory way. As far back as I can remember, that's been the message of our shows. The people that do come to our shows really feel that, and that's what they've told us all along. So much of what you see online is unfortunately not real and can be so easily made up and manipulated. We were living in the shadow of that for a while. That's why those 20 year celebration shows last year felt so good to kind of come out the other side of. It was about 14,000 people coming together under one roof to celebrate and have a great time and support one another in the community that we've been lucky to build around this band. We left the stage of those shows going, 'This is why we do this.' Does this album feel different from other projects after achieving that sense of liberation?Yes, I would say so. We're invigorated, we're inspired. We feel lucky to be able to do this, to be granted the platform and the privilege to take a stage every night. We've always felt that way, but it's much easier to acknowledge it when you've been through something as difficult as that. It really puts you in perspective of going like, 'man, we're lucky to do what we do.' It's nice that people come and support us doing what we love doing. The album is being released under your new label imprint Basement Noise Records. What was the reason to go that route and release the first independent record since your debut album?We were with Fueled by Ramen for the last couple records and it was an amazing label to be a part of. Then, as is the nature of the business, the parent company of Fueled By Ramen went through a massive shakeup. By the time the cards landed, we were mid-record cycle for Tell Me I'm Alive, and the label just wasn't the label that we signed with anymore. We've been around the sun enough times at this point as a band to know there's a tendency for things to change without you realizing and suddenly it's like you're not part of the machine that you signed up to be a part of. We had finished up with the [last] record and we were winding down the cycle and we saw all these people that we loved working with moving on from their jobs. We realized it was probably time for us to move on too. We wanted to take some of the control back and it felt like the right time to do that. It's one thing to be an artist and to make this body of work that you pour your blood, sweat and tears into and love so much and then hand it over to this big company and go, 'please do all the right things with this.' We're fortunate to be in a place where we have more say in the business side of things and the decisions that get made. It's just a really freeing place to be this deep into a career. Some of your peers like Mayday Parade and the Maine have also recently gone back to being independent again after years of being in a band. Has this trend come up in conversation at all?You're seeing it more and more now where artists are starting to approach the business with a little more awareness. We came up at the same time as bands like Mayday Parade and the Maine, and we were all just kids chasing a dream. It sounds corny, but that's what it was. We weren't put together in board meetings. We were kids that played VFW halls and just wanted to make loud music and then dove into the business. We were naive. All Time Low signed a deal that we were fortunate wasn't a terrible deal, but had we been presented with a terrible one, we probably would've signed it. We were just stoked to be at the table and there's a million stories of bands that did sign the bad deals. With all the years of experience that All Time Low has gained, how does it feel like to be guiding new up and coming bands like the Paradox?It's funny. It was actually Benji and Joel [Madden] that told me, 'Look, man, you're in the driver's seat now. You're in that position.' They were a bit older than us and when we were starting to come up, they really took us under their wing and showed us some ropes because we had a Maryland connection. We were lucky to have them as mentors. It hadn't really dawned on me that we were now in that position until they said it. I realized there are some artists out there that look to us for what to do. I would never be so bold as to assume anyone wants to hear what bullshit I have to say to them. At the same time, if anybody comes to us and asks how we handled specific situations or even watches us from the side stage and steals a couple of our jokes, I love it. That's what we did coming up and I think it's amazing to sort of be in those shoes now. What do you think it takes for a band to be 'in it for the long haul' in 2025?It's hard to say because the landscape has changed so much in music. It almost feels like there's no way of knowing exactly where the industry is going to go next. What it comes down to for me is performing. I love being on a stage and I love feeling the connection and the back and forth with an audience. I really respect artists who have maintained that for years. Some people criticize performers who are in their 60s, 70s, or 80s and say they should have thrown in the towel years ago. But these people are getting up on stage and doing the damn thing because they live and breathe their music. I was lucky enough to go to one of Paul McCartney's shows on the last tour. It was right before his 80th birthday, and the dude played for three hours nonstop. That is someone who loves to play music doing the damn thing. I aspire to be that. I want to be in the game for as long as I possibly can making music for people. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
2 hours ago
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Paramore's ‘All We Know Is Falling' Was a Revolutionary Emo Moment. 20 Years Later, It Still Is
It started at Warped Tour 2005. Five teens from Franklin, Tennessee thrashing around a scrappy, makeshift stage on a flatbed truck with unabashed confidence and emotion-packed songs. At the center was a beacon, sporting a graphic t-shirt and auburn hair, with a voice that pierced through all the noise. This was Paramore's first Warped Tour appearance, and that voice belonged to lead singer Hayley Williams, a fire-cracker of a performer amidst the festival's black-clad parade of dejected boys. In retrospect, it's crazy to think that Paramore, one of the biggest bands to come out of the pop-punk and emo scene, was once relegated to the female-only Warped Tour stage known as the Shiragirl stage, far from main stage acts like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, who would soon be their peers in the pop-rock mainstream. 'As a 16-year-old who had dreams of playing with the big boys, it felt like we were being slighted,' Williams told Vulture in 2020. For Paramore, that just meant they had to rock harder. 'I would spit farther, yell louder, and thrash my neck wilder than anyone,' Williams added in the same interview. More from Rolling Stone Hear Hayley Williams Debut New Song 'Mirtazapine' on Nashville Radio How All Time Low Turned Outside Noise Into New Music Zac Farro Is One of One on Latest Solo Single '1' And that she did. The way Williams commanded the tiny, pink-bannered stage was a turning point for the emo genre, and would prove to have a ripple effect beyond the confines of that scene. Here was this teen girl showing she could rock amongst the best of the scene with powerhouse vocals and great songs to match. It shouldn't have been a phenomenon, but at that time of peak misogyny, it was. While most people heard of Paramore because of their breakout 2007 LP Riot!, it was All We Know Is Falling that served as their introduction to a generation of fans on that vital first Warped Tour run. This summer marks the 20th anniversary of Paramore's sharp debut, which laid the foundation for everything the band would become. (To celebrate, Paramore has just released a deluxe version of the album, which includes the first-ever digital release of their 2006 B-sides EPThe Summer Tic.) All We Know Is Falling is simple, introspective, and filled with hardcore influences from bands like Deftones and Underoath, filtered through a pop-punk sensibility. Explosive, dark-tinged tracks like 'Emergency' and 'Pressure' showed Paramore's penchant for bangers — and have since become notable additions to the emo canon. From the album's instrumentation to its lyrics, All We Know Is Falling displays Paramore's strengths as they bellowed about their shared dreams and experimented with screamo singing on songs like 'My Heart.' Though Williams admitted to being careful to not use any defining pronouns in the lyrics for All We Know Is Falling and some of the band's subsequent records, she still didn't shy away from writing about her personal experiences as a young woman. 'Conspiracy' is the first Paramore song ever written and is about the controversy behind Williams' name being the only one on the band's record contract because she was the key interest of Atlantic Records. 'Explain to me this conspiracy against me and tell me how I've lost my power,' Williams wails. 'We wrote those songs over the course of probably a year,' Williams told Time in 2023. In the same interview, drummer Zac Farro shared how the actual album was recorded and created within three weeks. 'That it made us not second guess ourselves… That's something we still attribute to this day in helping us make quick decisions.' Looking back 20 years after the fact, it's a feat that a pack of teenagers had such strong instincts from the jump. At the time, Paramore was both accessible and preternatural; they were everyday teens that proved to young kids anyone could make a band, but with talent well beyond their years. But the mere fact of Williams' presence made them otherworldly and spoke directly to young women; Paramore proved that their voice mattered, too. 20 years later, it's a fact that's inescapable and cannot be overstated. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has the lacy white dress from Paramore's theatrical 'Emergency' music video on display as part of the Warped Tour exhibit. In the museum description, Williams is specifically heralded for inspiring future generations of bold musicians like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. Those Gen Z icons may not front rock bands, but Paramore, with Williams at the helm, showed them how to navigate their own thriving alternative avenue. In a 2005 interview, a week after the release of All We Know Is Falling, Williams was asked what advice she'd give to girls who want to be in the music industry. 'Do it for yourself. Don't do it because it seems cool or anything,' she said 'It's hard because you either have people who like you because they say you're hot or you have people who hate you because you're a girl. And a lot of people don't give you a chance. But you're doing it because you love it and it's what you love to do, then it's not hard.' Nearly two decades later, in 2022, Paramore played the inaugural year of the emo nostalgia festival When We Were Young. This time, they served as co-headliners alongside My Chemical Romance, cementing their status as scene titans. During their set, Williams delivered a brutally honest emo history lesson before launching into a post-hardcore take on 'Here We Go Again' from All We Know Is Falling. 'When Paramore came onto the scene in roughly 2005, the scene was not always a safe place to be if you were different,' she said. 'I can think of nothing more anti-establishment than young women, people of color, and the queer community… If you are one of those people, there is space for you now.' It's a message they've been sharing since the early days. Now, 20 years after Paramore's debut, it's a goal they've met. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
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A professor's hunt for the rarest Chinese typewriter
It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices he'd hunted down. But there was one typewriter that Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Only one -- the prototype -- was ever made. Advertisement 'It was the one machine,' he said recently, 'which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.' Mullaney's mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything. Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language -- around 100,000, by some estimates -- there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost. Advertisement Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole. It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter? Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor's take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable -- a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology. Mullaney was fascinated. That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise. He cold-called strangers and left voicemail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, 'Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?' Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Mullaney took it off their hands. Advertisement The MingKwai is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters. It was invented by Lin Yutang, a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically -- perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers. Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine. Lin's solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened. Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Lin called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Mullaney said, Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet. He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to 'clear and fast.' Lin, who was then living with his wife and children on Manhattan's Upper East Side, hired a New York machinist firm to make a prototype, at enormous cost to himself. He presented that prototype in a demonstration to executives from Remington, the typewriter manufacturer. Advertisement It was a failure. The machine malfunctioned at a crucial moment. Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a printing company in Brooklyn. And that, as far as Mullaney had been able to find out, was the machine's last known location. When Mergenthaler Linotype moved offices sometime in the 1950s, the machine disappeared. In his 2017 book, 'The Chinese Typewriter,' Mullaney wrote that he believed the MingKwai had most likely ended up on a scrap heap. This past January, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were in their home in Massapequa, N.Y., going through boxes that had been in storage since Felix's father died in Arizona five years before. They were looking at a wooden crate sitting among the cardboard boxes. 'What's this?' Jennifer Felix asked her husband. He'd had a peek in the crate back in Arizona. Oh, he said, it's that typewriter. She opened it, and realized it was not a typical typewriter. The symbols on the keys looked like Chinese. Nelson Felix, who often sold and bought items on Facebook, quickly found a group called 'What's My Typewriter Worth?' and posted some photos. Then they set it aside and moved on to other things. An hour later, Nelson Felix checked on his post. There were hundreds of comments, many written in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom. The couple looked at each other. 'Who's Tom?' Mullaney was in Chicago to give a talk when his phone started going off -- ping, ping, ping. The small community of people he'd encountered in his long quest were sending up digital flares, urgently trying to get his attention. As soon as he saw the post, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the MingKwai. Advertisement But he didn't rejoice. He didn't sigh with relief. He was gripped with fear. What if they didn't know what they had and sold it before he could get to it? Someone could buy it with a click on eBay. They could make it into a coffee table. Take it apart and make steampunk earrings. It would be gone, just like that. He posted a comment on Facebook, asking the poster to contact him right away. After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone. He told them the MingKwai's story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon. Jennifer Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement. But Mullaney had made an impression. 'It was lost for half a century,' she said. 'We didn't want it to get lost again.' 'To me it's just a typewriter,' she continued. 'But to other people it's history; it's a story, a life, a treasure.' Instructions and a box of tools were used to cast more Chinese character bars for the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Mullaney figured out that Jennifer Felix's grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It's likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home. Then it was passed down to Felix's father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him. 'That's what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,' Felix said. Advertisement Keys on the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn't know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds. In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor. This spring, the MingKwai made its way back across the country. When it was lifted out of the crate onto the floor at a Stanford warehouse, Mullaney lay down to look at it. The history professor could see that it was full of intricate machinery, far more delicate than any other typewriter he'd seen, and he began to imagine how engineers might help him understand it -- perhaps revealing what was going on in Lin's mind in 1947 when he invented a machine he thought could rescue China. Perhaps they could even build a new one. Lying on his stomach, Mullaney began to wonder. The MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT This article originally appeared in
