A new podcast from LAist Studios and NPR Network explores how events from decades ago shaped today’s AAPI families.
Host Scott Detrow:
The stories that generations of us tell ourselves over the years help define our families and our identities. Perhaps just as important are the stories we don’t tell ourselves but still feel them hovering in the air around us. A new podcast from LAist Studios and the NPR network helps families tell these stories to each other and help better understand their family history and cultural heritage. This can be difficult.
The podcast “The Inheritance” focuses on Asian American and Pacific Islander families, exploring how events that happened decades ago in Cambodia, Vietnam, Guam and elsewhere are felt in families today. I interviewed Emily Kwong, the host of Succession. Emily, welcome to the show.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Scott, great to be here. Thank you very much for having me.
DETROW: I’m really glad to have you. I want to start with this. I think a lot of listeners know you through shortwave. They know you as a science reporter and presenter. It’s really different. What prompted you to choose inheritance? What were you thinking when you started this project?
KWONG: I would say this is a show that I’ve been preparing for my whole life, and I admit that’s a big statement.
DETROW: The stakes are high.
Kwong: Do you know? I spent some sleepless nights staring at the ceiling. The reason is because I am a Chinese American who grew up in southern Connecticut. This is indeed a special way of education. This means there are very few families like mine. But I’m not here to really talk about representation. What I’m here to talk about is loneliness and isolation and feeling disconnected from your own history because maybe your family doesn’t talk about it that much.
I think that’s true for immigrants and refugees and people all over the country, the things they left behind before they came here are maybe traumatic, maybe things they can’t safely talk about. It has seven families from Cambodia, Guam, Japan, India, Korea, Pakistan, Philippines and Vietnam. So, we learned about the AAPI diaspora.
These are eight narrative episodes. Each episode tells the story of how a historical event shaped a family. So it was kind of a crash course in Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. But it also does try to bring people together to discuss what happened in the past.
DETROW: So you went ahead and made this podcast. Tell us some stories about what you discovered.
KWONG: So we put out a solicitation form. Basically, it’s like a Google Form, a really good Google Form. But we’re asking anyone to send us a story idea. The question is, you know, do you have any unanswered curiosity about your family history, and would you be willing to talk about it on an NPR podcast? And more than a hundred people submitted it. We visited about 40 families in advance and after refining and refining, we finally identified 7 families.
One of the people who wrote to us was Bao Truong, who was basically affected by the Vietnam War. His father fought with the South Vietnamese Air Force and came to this country after the fall of Saigon. He knew that if that war had not happened, he would never have been born because his parents met in the United States. So he always wanted to know, yeah, how do I connect to Vietnamese culture when I was born here?
He started watching films by Asian directors like Wong Kar-Wai and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. So at this point in the story, I’m talking about watching these movies and realizing how much Vietnamese tradition he has abandoned.
BAO TRUONG: What did I leave behind? I think it was in this moment of clarity, young adult reflection, that I started to really miss this part of myself that I had left behind, this culture that I had been away from for so long. I look back on my life and feel so embarrassed because it took me so long to accept who I was.
Kuang: Baobao finally had a name for the feeling of homelessness he felt as a child.
Bao: I have an inherited sense of nostalgia for a place you’ve never known, a place you’ve never had a home for.
DETROW: That’s a very powerful idea, inherited nostalgia.
KWONG: Yeah, it’s a very compelling idea and one that I think a lot of people with connections to other places share. When we talk about war, when we talk about racism, when we talk about the American experience of assimilation, I think this show is basically trying to reconnect those feelings with historical events, especially when a lot of this history isn’t taught time at school.
You know, the Vietnam War was taught a certain way, depending on what school district you lived in. So in a way, this class is the Asian American Pacific Islander studies class that I always wanted to take, but it also incorporates a lot of family, a lot of family feelings.
DETROW: I want to talk about one of the biggest choices you’ve made here, and one of the most interesting choices you’ve made here, is that you’re the host of the podcast and you’re telling us a lot of the backstory here, but You’re not actually conducting the interview. You are promoting family members to talk to each other. Why is this so important to you?
KWANG: Yes, actually, in the process of learning Mandarin, I chose to interview my own father and shared the story on NPR. Just like people’s reactions, it’s like, oh, yeah, my family lost our language too, and that’s why – and, wow, it’s so cool to hear a daughter and her father talk about the past. I was like, ah, this is a show. That’s what keeps me going in the direction of making shows, I help people have conversations and facilitate conversations.
So the next clip we’re going to play for you is from Victoria Uce. She is a young woman living in Long Beach, California. She is interviewing her father, Beau, who lost his parents at a young age but still remembers his mother. One of the stories Beau told Victoria was about how his mother struggled to find food for them in the labor camp.
DETROW: Let’s hear it.
Kuang: Bo’s clearest memory at that time was his mother calling him to a hole in the rice field. There is a snake inside.
BO: She knows I’m not afraid of lily snakes. And she was a devout Buddhist, but because she was hungry, she told me that there was a frog in the hole in the rice field.
KWONG: So Bo reached into the hole to get it. Instead, he caught the snake.
BO: The snake resisted. Then suddenly, I pulled and threw the snake into the air. And then when it fell to the ground, my mom just closed her eyes and beat the hell out of that snake, just to feed her kids, you know. I love my mom, you know. They took her away in 1977 and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to my mother.
Kuang: Bo believes he was 7 years old when the regime took away his mother and sister. With no adults around to explain their absence, Beau and his three other siblings were left alone.
BO: We don’t know where our parents are. We were like – we were so excited. Like, hopefully one day they’ll come, you know. They never came.
DETROW: I mean, Emily, families here are talking about historical events, but also deeply personal, often traumatic memories. I mean, you can hear an understandable emotion when he recalls that and how he said goodbye to his mom or didn’t say goodbye to his mom.
KWONG: Yes. I think one thing that’s really well thought out about our show is taking care of the people who are involved in the project. So we had a counselor throughout the entire production. We also did a lot of checking with sources, like, after these interviews, you know, just saying, how did this conversation shape you? How has it shaped your relationship with each other? I think people responded really well to it. They feel cared for. Or at least I really want Beau and Victoria to feel cared for when they talk about it.
DETROW: Like you said at the beginning, this is a project that you’ve been thinking about for a long time. This is a very personal project for you. I feel like you probably have a lot of thoughts on the outcome. I wonder what was the biggest surprise for you when you put these episodes together.
KWONG: I think what surprised me the most was that people actually did want to talk about this issue, given permission. People are really looking for context to understand the world we live in today. They are also looking for some emotional footing to know they can get through the toughest things.
When you listen to the accounts of people who have been through the toughest things and how they continue to be a family, you start to look around and realize that you are not as alone as you thought. Sometimes when I’m struggling as a person, I do think about what my grandmother went through, what my great-grandmother went through, and when I don’t know how to move forward, I seek that out.
DETROW: That’s Emily Kwong, host and co-founder of Inheriting, a new podcast from LAist Studios and the NPR network. Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about this.
KWONG: Scott, thank you so much for having me. Nice to talk to you.
DETROW: Any time. The first five episodes of Succession are now available. You can watch the show on NPR One or wherever you get podcasts. Special thanks to Succession senior producer and co-creator Anjuli Sastry Krbechek and executive producer Catherine Mailhouse.
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