My father’s side of the family spoke Mandarin, but my father did not. So, my sister and I never learned.
We spent a lifetime clumsily sounding out the 谢谢 and 再见 of our heritage language, while relatives smiled sympathetically. I always felt a little less Chinese American for it, always resented my dad a tiny bit for quashing what felt like a cornerstone of our identity.
But when anti-Asian hate crimes rose to an all time high in 2021, I chose to look more deeply at my family history – and realized how misguided my resentment was.
The process of interviewing my own relatives about our family history inspired “Inheriting,” co-created with Anjuli Sastry Krbechek and an entire team at LAist Studios. Set in California, this multi-part, narrative podcast about Asian American and Pacific Islander families explores how one event rippled through the generations that followed.
On “Inheriting,” the past is personal. Families are acknowledged and celebrated as actors in history. Our team wanted to know: What would happen if we talked about the past beyond facts and figures? What if history became a means for bridging intergenerational gaps, tending to our mental health, and processing the world we live in today?
Ultimately, we want “Inheriting” to inspire others to interview their own family members (however you define family), and to use our show and digital resource guide as a model for navigating conversations about the past.
Learning history to connect
The past became personal to me when I stumbled upon a single date, 1943. That was the year the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed, just as my grandmother, Hui Chen, was preparing to immigrate to the U.S. When I stitched these two timelines together – my family history and sociopolitical history – my perspective of my own family shifted.
I imagined the long shadow of that xenophobic law across my grandmother’s 17-year-old face, a Chinese college student fleeing war with Japan and determined to survive in New York City. I got curious about how languages and traditions die within families, and how historical and collective trauma shapes a family for generations.
My first real attempt to answer those questions was in 2021, when I interviewed her son – my father, Christopher Kwong – for almost two hours for the NPR series "Where We Come From." He told me a story I had never heard before: about speaking Mandarin as a kid, his kindergarten teacher’s belief that bilingualism would hold him back academically (a now unproven idea), and his parents’ overnight decision to become an English-only household.
I pictured my five-year-old father in khaki shorts on summer vacation, doing vocabulary drills with my grandmother. He softly told me it was “a decision for (his) own emotional and social survival.” The more I learned about my father’s determination to adopt English, the more my resentment dissipated.
In that two-hour interview, I opened up to him too. I shared how disconnected I’d felt from our culture, our extended family, and why I decided to learn basic Mandarin as an adult. After we wrapped, the distance between us felt shorter. I asked him, “How does it feel to talk about all of this?”
“It’s very therapeutic,” he said. “For people who need to unburden themselves, I think it’s very necessary.”
Learning history to heal
After that conversation with my father, I interviewed my Auntie Linda and Uncle Dick with my microphone and tucked those audio files somewhere safe. I began snapping pictures of sepia-toned family photographs and memorizing the names of those long gone.
Through these conversations, I’ve come to understand how war, racism, and assimilation have shaped our family, and how it runs down the family tree like an inkblot all the way to me.
I was a very depressed and anxious teenager. High-achieving, but unable to get out of bed for stretches of time. No one in my suburban Connecticut hometown had a family history like ours. Therapy and medication have been life-saving, but the real healing has come from talking to other Asian Americans. Other people’s stories have kept me alive. Stories were the proof I needed that life is flexible, and survivable.
A 2019 study from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services (SAMHSA) found that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were the least likely of any racial or ethnic group to seek out mental health services. The barriers for affordable, culturally-competent care are numerous, but there is a generational change afoot.
The list of therapist directories, in-language conversation starters, and recognition of non-Western care practices is growing. Podcasts and new books devoted to intergenerational trauma are flourishing. Our show wants to be a part of that change.
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Take care of yourself and your loved ones as you process this history. Our team’s favorite care resources include the Asian Mental Health Project, Pacific Asian Counseling Services, AAPI Equity Alliance, and Yellow Chair Collective.
Throughout production, our entire team learned so much from Sherry C. Wang, our consulting psychologist on the show, about the intersections between family history, community dialogue, and mental health. “Just talking about it is a big deal,” she’d constantly reassure me. On “Inheriting,” we explore intergenerational trauma most deeply in Episode 5 of the show, with Leah Bash. Both sides of her Japanese American family were incarcerated during World War II.
I want this show to find those that need it, perhaps a teenager in an all-white suburb like I once was, feeling lonely and disconnected from other people. And I want listeners to experience what it's like to bridge that gap, through intentional conversation, deep listening, and moments of real learning and sharing.
Learning history in solidarity
Seven families participated in the first season of “Inheriting,” from Cambodia, Guam, Japan, India, Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. All of them processed a life-changing historical moment, across hours of conversation.
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Interested in interviewing your own relatives? Our team highly recommends the oral history resources from Self Evident and StoryCorps. Also check out the "Inheriting" digital resource guide.
As the reporter facilitating those conversations, I was astonished how little I knew about other communities. In so many ways, this show is the history class I wish I took in college. By deconstructing the AAPI monolith, our team sought to tell a fuller story of these communities.
While making this show, I clung to Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America and Renee Tajima-Peña’s 5-part PBS series Asian Americans. Social media has busted down doors in making learning more accessible. A growing list of states are requiring AAPI studies in their K-12 curriculum.
And yet, a growing number of states have restricted or banned teaching critical race theory. Last year, Florida banned an AP African American studies course, while approving an AAPI history bill for K-12 schools. This move prevents the next generation from understanding how different communities have historically affected one another.
“Inheriting” approaches history education differently, holding our stories alongside other immigrant and BIPOC groups. The first two episodes of the show focus on the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising for that reason, examining how decades of segregation, disinvestment, and police brutality led up to that one week in April. It ends with a call by professor Carol Kwang Park to her students: “What are you going to do to stop it?”
Asian Americans are the fastest-growing group of eligible voters and the fastest growing racial and ethnic group in the United States. When I think about that fact, Carol’s question rings in my ears. What are we going to do with our expanding political power?
This is a show meant to spark conversation within families– a starting point for those who want to engage deeply with the past. That’s why we built a digital resource guide to accompany each episode, alongside lesson plans from the The Asian American Education Project for K-12 instructors and students.
Listen to 'Inheriting'
My father has been one of the biggest supporters of me making “Inheriting.” Every plot beat, every historical deep dive. But he’s nervous.
Over the phone, he said, “I gotta be honest with you Emily, I’m not sure if anyone will want to listen to this.”
I get his concern. The people in “Inheriting” are neither celebrities, nor power brokers. But they are all actors in history, and that is compelling in every sense.
All across the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora are people who took heroic leaps to keep their families together – whose choices made a difference – fleeing war, occupation, and social upheaval. Our families have shaped social movements, as activists and artists, and done good where they could: in gas stations and courtrooms, behind barbed wire and bullhorns, on the farm and on the picket line.
That inheritance is ours for the taking, if we’re willing to go back and reclaim it.
New episodes of “Inheriting” come out every Thursday. Listeners can subscribe on the NPR app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever podcasts are available.
