Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I
Speaker 1: was so excited the first time I saw another Chinese
Speaker 1: person on the street that I opened my mouth to
Speaker 1: exclaim nha. The only thing that stopped me was Mama's
Speaker 1: morning about talking to random people. Don't talk to anyone,
Speaker 1: she said, we can't trust anyone, no one. What about
Speaker 1: police officers, Mama, no one, especially police officers. If you
Speaker 1: see a uniform, turn around and walk the opposite way. Why, Mama,
Speaker 1: it's dangerous. We're not allowed here. Don't trust anyone. Always
Speaker 1: walk the other way when you see the police. Change in.
Speaker 1: Baba's voice guided me wherever I went. If anyone asked
Speaker 1: you for documents, say you don't know, Say that your
Speaker 1: Baba has them, Say that you were born here, that
Speaker 1: you've always lived in America. This was not China, and
Speaker 1: I could no longer get by on the color of
Speaker 1: my skin and my gap tooth smile. I was no
Speaker 1: longer normal. I was never to forget that that's Chian.
Speaker 1: Julie Wong, author, speaker, and litigator, reading passages from her
Speaker 1: debut memoir Beautiful Country. She and Julie's is a story
Speaker 1: of extraordinary triumph. Triumph made all the brighter for having
Speaker 1: been forged from profound hardship, secrecy, and shame. I'm Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 1: and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
Speaker 1: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
Speaker 1: of your childhood before the age of seven. When I
Speaker 1: think about that time, it's all just love and happiness
Speaker 1: and singing and belonging. I never questioned if I was safe,
Speaker 1: if I fit in, if I needed to worry about
Speaker 1: where my next meal was going to come from. It
Speaker 1: was a time I like to think of as true childhood.
Speaker 1: And where were you I was in China. I was
Speaker 1: surrounded by my extended family. UM. I was born in
Speaker 1: North China in a town called Shadrong, just to three
Speaker 1: hours outside of Beijing, and that's where many of my
Speaker 1: mother's family lived, and my dad's family lived not too
Speaker 1: far away. So before age seven, my life was very
Speaker 1: stable and I'm just surrounded by loved once. And how
Speaker 1: old were you when um, your father who you called Baba,
Speaker 1: left China for America. I was five years old at
Speaker 1: the time. I had no idea, and I don't think
Speaker 1: any of us really had a sense that he was
Speaker 1: leaving for very long. At first, he was leaving to
Speaker 1: attend school, and we thought it would just be maybe
Speaker 1: a year nine months, but he ended up being gone
Speaker 1: for two years. Describe both Bamba and your mother, who
Speaker 1: you call Mama before the age of seven back in China,
Speaker 1: they were extremely playful. My earliest memory was of them
Speaker 1: tossing me in a blanket, throwing me up and down
Speaker 1: as I shrieked and laughed, and that was really them.
Speaker 1: They found the creative ways to play with me. My
Speaker 1: mother made absolutely everything a game. I never fussed when
Speaker 1: taking a bath or doing any of the things that
Speaker 1: kids didn't like to do. I never fussed eating vegetables
Speaker 1: because she just told me it was a game. When
Speaker 1: when she cooked, she made the carrot peel dance. It
Speaker 1: was all a play, and life was just full of joy.
Speaker 1: My father, in particular, loved dancing, so he would go
Speaker 1: to the dance hall regularly and I would accompany him,
Speaker 1: and my feet would be on his bigger feet and
Speaker 1: he would move me around the room. We developed such
Speaker 1: a ritual with dance that he came up with my
Speaker 1: very special song that was just for me that he
Speaker 1: made up and the words were all gibberish. But throughout
Speaker 1: the days of my childhood in China, we would dance
Speaker 1: to that at home pretty much every day. And you
Speaker 1: were an only child, yes, due to the Chinese government's
Speaker 1: family planning policy. Unfortunately, I was an only child. I
Speaker 1: really wanted disibling, but that was not in the cards.
Speaker 1: When Jan Julie is seven, she and her mother fly
Speaker 1: to the United States to meet up with her father.
Speaker 1: It's not only a different country, it's a different universe altogether.
Speaker 1: Everything was new and quite bizarre. From the minute we
Speaker 1: went to the airport, we started seeing people with different
Speaker 1: color skin, different color eyes. I was living in a
Speaker 1: part of China where everyone looked the same. We were
Speaker 1: all homogeneous, and I fit in. And all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I'm learning it's possible to have blue eyes and green
Speaker 1: eyes and blonde hair. And my world just felt like
Speaker 1: it was turned upside down. And then when we got
Speaker 1: out of the airport and my father was there, I
Speaker 1: saw how old and wan he looked. It looked like
Speaker 1: he had aged decades in the span of two years.
Speaker 1: Um And all of a sudden, I saw this kind
Speaker 1: of pallor and weariness fall upon both my parents, who
Speaker 1: once were so joyful and full of play and love
Speaker 1: and dance, they didn't really do that anymore. All around
Speaker 1: us were people who looked nothing like me, and they
Speaker 1: would say words to me that I didn't understand and
Speaker 1: I would later know to be ethnic slurs. They would
Speaker 1: pull their eyes back at me on the street and
Speaker 1: mock who we were. We were really we settled in
Speaker 1: then Park Slope general area of Brooklyn and the nineties,
Speaker 1: so it's very different in character than it is now,
Speaker 1: and we were pretty much the only Asians in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: And of course at that point, I had no idea
Speaker 1: what being quote unquote Asian was. I just thought I
Speaker 1: was regular, and I had to learn to reckon with
Speaker 1: race and our new environment. And then of course there
Speaker 1: was this messaging for my parents that I was not
Speaker 1: to tell people that I had immigrated, that I was
Speaker 1: to pretend that I was born here. This is really
Speaker 1: where Changelie's family secret begins. And as family's secrets go,
Speaker 1: it's a particularly unique and potent one because it's the
Speaker 1: family's secret. They all share it, they're all in the know,
Speaker 1: and they're all keeping it. This secret also extends beyond
Speaker 1: Chian and Julie's immediate family and back into the layered
Speaker 1: histories of her parents, particularly her father's childhood and young adulthood.
Speaker 1: So when my father was four years old was when
Speaker 1: China's Cultural Revolution began. During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Now
Speaker 1: called upon the people of China to unify in the
Speaker 1: name of communism, but really also kind of attack and
Speaker 1: penalize in part the educated, the landlords, those who had
Speaker 1: education and had some semblance of power as compared to
Speaker 1: Chairman Now. It led to ten years, a full decade
Speaker 1: of bloodshed. A lot of people were tortured, were publicly beaten,
Speaker 1: were imprisoned, disappeared overnight. Because China has a strong history
Speaker 1: of censorship, there is no real data on how many
Speaker 1: people died, but it could be, you know, five hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: it could be millions. Historians really just can't ascertain. So
Speaker 1: my father was four years old when this began, and
Speaker 1: his first memory was that of two scholars who hung
Speaker 1: from a tree, dead, and at their feet was written
Speaker 1: in blood, the character for wrongly accused because they had
Speaker 1: been publicly persecuted for their scholarly thinking, and probably critical thought,
Speaker 1: and then at age seven, my father then recalls the
Speaker 1: Red Guards who acted at the behested Chairman Mount in
Speaker 1: terms of the cultural revolution, ransacking his home and dragging
Speaker 1: his mother out to be publicly beaten. And this was
Speaker 1: because his brother had written a paper criticizing Chairman Now,
Speaker 1: asking the people of China to think about why, in
Speaker 1: the name of communism we were killing each other and
Speaker 1: reporting on each other and who it really served. My
Speaker 1: uncle loved reading banned books. He hated being told what
Speaker 1: not to read and what not to think, and so
Speaker 1: he presented examples in history of dictatorships and controlling re
Speaker 1: dreams that used the same tactic. He didn't sign his
Speaker 1: name to it, but neighbor saw him post it up.
Speaker 1: And at that time, in that environment, you were encouraged
Speaker 1: to report anyone around you who may be thought of
Speaker 1: as a quote unquote counter revolutionary or traitor to the country.
Speaker 1: So my uncle, who was just eighteen, was imprisoned for decades, tortured,
Speaker 1: star and because of that, my father went through his
Speaker 1: entire schooling with the tarnished being a counter revolutionary, of
Speaker 1: being a traitor. So in China it's the Red perchief
Speaker 1: that you were around your neck. It's like the honor
Speaker 1: role he was just it was impossible for him to
Speaker 1: get ahead in school, and teachers would have him stand
Speaker 1: at the front of the class and have his classmates
Speaker 1: list all of the things that were wrong with him
Speaker 1: and his family and his brother. So it really informed
Speaker 1: the man that he became. And unfortunately, of course, I
Speaker 1: did not have much of this information until later in
Speaker 1: my adulthood, but it definitely informed how he interacted with
Speaker 1: Chinese government, the American government, how he educated me, and
Speaker 1: how he taught me to think about the world's both
Speaker 1: for better and for worse. Chanel. These father's upbringing only
Speaker 1: intensifies his focus on keeping his family safe, which means
Speaker 1: keeping their undocumented status a secret. Their insular lives, compounded
Speaker 1: with the fact that Chian Julie does not yet speak English,
Speaker 1: means that her early education comes from watching television. The
Speaker 1: TV is always on in their house. She's also learning
Speaker 1: self protective behaviors adaptations. She's always counting, whether it's the
Speaker 1: number of steps or number of tiles or whatever, harboring
Speaker 1: a superstition that if she counts exactly the right number,
Speaker 1: she'll be safe. She'll keep everyone safe. Part of keeping
Speaker 1: everyone safe involves arranging her face into a mask to
Speaker 1: keep her true feelings hidden. One place chian Julie wears
Speaker 1: this mask is at the sweatshop, where she works with
Speaker 1: her mother for pennies soon after they arrive in America.
Speaker 1: The sweatshop is full of surprises for young chian Julie,
Speaker 1: not only the harsh conditions and low pay, but also
Speaker 1: the hierarchy among swachshop workers, a hierarchy that has her
Speaker 1: mom and her at the bottom. I remember walking into
Speaker 1: that room. I had never in my short life realized
Speaker 1: that a room like that existed. It was the middle
Speaker 1: of summer, was August. There was no air conditioning. There
Speaker 1: wasn't really even that many fans. There were a few
Speaker 1: ceiling fans. There was no ventilation. It was just rose
Speaker 1: and rows and rows of people slumped over sewing machines.
Speaker 1: And where people sat, I came to learn had meaning.
Speaker 1: So people who sat in the front tended to do
Speaker 1: the more high paying work. Attaching buttons to clothing was
Speaker 1: required more skills, So I believe it was either ten
Speaker 1: cents a button or ten cents per article clothing, probably
Speaker 1: more likely article clothing. And my mother and I being
Speaker 1: brand new, and of course my mother there being a
Speaker 1: math professor, not a seamstress or anything of that kind,
Speaker 1: we were at the right back row, so we made
Speaker 1: the least. My mother made three cents per article of clothing,
Speaker 1: attaching labels to the you know, the back of a
Speaker 1: shirt or dress, and I made one cent per art
Speaker 1: of clothing, snipping thread, loose thread off every piece that
Speaker 1: she finished. And we came to learn also that by
Speaker 1: virtue of the fact that we spoke Mandarin, we were
Speaker 1: viewed as lower ranking because more of the earlier Chinese
Speaker 1: immigrants to America. We're from Guangdong and Southern China and
Speaker 1: spoke Cantonese. So whether or not you could speak Cantonese
Speaker 1: became an emblem of status where we were from. In
Speaker 1: North China. There are similar prejudices against South China. Um
Speaker 1: it's kind of similar to the parallels between North Northern
Speaker 1: States and Southern States. We thought Mandarin was the dialect
Speaker 1: of the intellectual, and anyone who didn't speak it was
Speaker 1: not educated, and so there was a real sense of divide,
Speaker 1: and I remember my mother remarking saying, even here, even
Speaker 1: among our people, we still don't belong. We don't have
Speaker 1: a home anymore, and it was incredibly heartbreaking. So you
Speaker 1: carry that with you when you start grade school and
Speaker 1: you speak Mandarin and the other Chinese children don't and
Speaker 1: put you down for not being able to speak Cantonese,
Speaker 1: and you pretty quickly are singled out. One of the
Speaker 1: things that so striking to me about your story is
Speaker 1: the sort of spectacular teachers that you had and then
Speaker 1: the absolute disaster teachers that you had um And you know,
Speaker 1: you're singled out and put in a special classroom for
Speaker 1: students who don't speak English and students who have special needs. Yes,
Speaker 1: and there's no way that you can communicate to the
Speaker 1: very tired teacher who is in charge of that classroom
Speaker 1: that you do know how to read, and you do
Speaker 1: know how to think, and that you don't belong there.
Speaker 1: So what does she do to feel like she belongs?
Speaker 1: Just as she absorbed the English language and American culture
Speaker 1: from watching television, she now reads every book she can. Clifford,
Speaker 1: the Big Red Dog becomes her guide. Soon she and
Speaker 1: Julie begs her father to get her back into the
Speaker 1: right classroom where she can satiate her hunger for knowledge. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: another hunger persists, actual real hunger. I never knew hunger
Speaker 1: in China. I mean, if you look at my photos
Speaker 1: from China, I'm always holding something that I'm eating, usually
Speaker 1: a popsicle. I was very pledged in China because of
Speaker 1: how educated my my parents were, and when we arrived here,
Speaker 1: I quickly realized that food was going to be a problem.
Speaker 1: One of the early memories I share was my father
Speaker 1: bringing in one slice of pizza for all three of
Speaker 1: us for dinner. And I didn't know what pizza was,
Speaker 1: so I was fine with just having a bike because
Speaker 1: the cheese was brand new to me. But as I
Speaker 1: started observing my parents and how stressed they were shopping
Speaker 1: and how frugal they became, I realized that my hunger
Speaker 1: was a burden on them instead of you know, in China,
Speaker 1: when I said I'm hungry, my mother would immediately get
Speaker 1: me something. She started saying, well, you know, just just
Speaker 1: hang onto that. That's how you know you're becoming stronger.
Speaker 1: When you feel the cold sweat is when you know
Speaker 1: you're you're really getting strong. And I could see the
Speaker 1: pain in her eyes when she said that. So I
Speaker 1: started keeping that secret to myself. If I was hungry.
Speaker 1: There was nothing I knew my parents could do. I
Speaker 1: might as well have kept that to myself and lessen
Speaker 1: their burden. I don't think I was thinking of it
Speaker 1: that consciously as a kid. I just you know, children
Speaker 1: soak up the emotional energy of those around them, and
Speaker 1: especially their parents, and I could feel their stress around
Speaker 1: food and around our weekly budget, which was only twenty dollars.
Speaker 1: So I started going to school hungry every day. I
Speaker 1: told my mother that there was a free public school breakfast,
Speaker 1: which there was, and there was a free public school lunch.
Speaker 1: Of course those are never that nutritional, and I never
Speaker 1: got there early enough for the breakfast because I lived
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn and went to school in Chinatown, Manhattan, and
Speaker 1: we worked late at the sweatshop, and it was this
Speaker 1: constant battle between sleep and hunger. And once I started
Speaker 1: going to school later, I didn't want to then switch
Speaker 1: the times because that my mother would be tipped off
Speaker 1: that something was off. So I for all of my
Speaker 1: elementary school years, I just went to school without breakfast,
Speaker 1: and I remember the entire morning just being me staring
Speaker 1: at the clock, feeling my stomach turning over itself. That
Speaker 1: gnawing sensation, the cold sweat, and telling myself to just
Speaker 1: hang on a little bit longer, you'll make it to lunch,
Speaker 1: and then you'll get that food. But by the time
Speaker 1: I made it to that free lunch, I was shaking everywhere.
Speaker 1: I gulped everything down without really chewing it, and my
Speaker 1: stomach never felt quite satisfied. The rest of the afternoon
Speaker 1: just felt like my stomach was now wrestling with these
Speaker 1: giant pockets of air and these little kits of food
Speaker 1: with no real ability to process at all. So this
Speaker 1: was a bodily trauma that stayed with me for I mean,
Speaker 1: I still have I still have trouble not over buying
Speaker 1: foot I can't throw out any piece of food, And
Speaker 1: when I was able to finally eat four meals, I
Speaker 1: immediately felt like I had to throw up because my
Speaker 1: stomach was not used to being full anymore, and that
Speaker 1: I struggled with throughout high school. It wasn't It was
Speaker 1: a very different kind of eating disorder than the ones
Speaker 1: you typically seen in teenage girls, where I wanted to eat,
Speaker 1: but my stomach was saying, we're not used to this anymore,
Speaker 1: or maybe even don't get used to this. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: so after the sweatshop, there's this very harrowing and brief
Speaker 1: period of time where your mother goes to work in
Speaker 1: a sushi processing factory and and you go with her,
Speaker 1: and it makes the sweatshop look like a day at
Speaker 1: the beach. You're right, that's a that's an interesting analogy
Speaker 1: because I think of the sweatshop as being very hot
Speaker 1: and then the sushi press the same plant as being
Speaker 1: freezing cold, in part because of the seasons in which
Speaker 1: we went there. But yes, my first day going with
Speaker 1: my mother, she had been working there for a while.
Speaker 1: I went into the warehouse door and I saw that
Speaker 1: she was putting on these thick rubber boots and blue
Speaker 1: plastic cape. And the minute the door had opened, I
Speaker 1: felt this giant gust of freezing hair come out. And
Speaker 1: then as we passed through the ante chamber and into
Speaker 1: the main area, I noticed that there's water on the
Speaker 1: floor and it is freezing. My My skin immediately prickles.
Speaker 1: And because my mother had to process salmon and keep
Speaker 1: it in top shape, it had to be processed and
Speaker 1: freezing water with ice cubes around her. The factory was
Speaker 1: not very well equipped or it was kind of old,
Speaker 1: so the basins had leaks in them, and it would
Speaker 1: just be leaking water through the cracks into our boots
Speaker 1: all around us for the twelve or fourteen hours that
Speaker 1: we worked, and it was impossible, impossible to get warm
Speaker 1: in that room. I remember coming home, having an hour
Speaker 1: canoe getting home where it was also cold, but warmer,
Speaker 1: and just the veins all over my arms, all over
Speaker 1: my mother's arms, still so visible. My mother would go
Speaker 1: to the kitchen that we shared with our roommates and
Speaker 1: boil water just to feel her hands again, because again
Speaker 1: she her fingers were in ice water this whole time,
Speaker 1: and um, I mean they had gloves available, but to
Speaker 1: prepare the fish properly, you kind of had to use
Speaker 1: their hands. And if you didn't prepare the fish properly
Speaker 1: and you damage some fish, and your pay was dogged.
Speaker 1: So she just didn't want to risk that. And so
Speaker 1: this day her hands don't look the same. I still
Speaker 1: see her veins, and every time I do, I think of,
Speaker 1: I'm just sent back to that environment where she, I
Speaker 1: don't know, risk her bodily health for a meal on
Speaker 1: a table. We'll be right back. She and Julie's childhood
Speaker 1: in America is proving to be beyond challenging and without
Speaker 1: any of the childlike magic she'd once known back in China.
Speaker 1: But then something happens Christmas. This is the first time
Speaker 1: she feels like she understands how this country, America, could
Speaker 1: be a beautiful country. The first time I saw Fifth
Speaker 1: Avenue during the holidays, I thought, Oh, here's the America
Speaker 1: that I heard about back then in China. There were
Speaker 1: really two depictions of America. One was of homeless people
Speaker 1: on the street, hungry and begging and fighting over food,
Speaker 1: and the other was of roads paved with gold, where
Speaker 1: no one was hungry and everyone had everything they absolutely wanted.
Speaker 1: And it was unclear to all of us through what
Speaker 1: the government censored to us which one was the truth.
Speaker 1: And our reality unfortunately fell closer to the former. But
Speaker 1: when I saw Fifth Avenue, I thought, here's the one
Speaker 1: that I had been promised that my uncle was excited
Speaker 1: for me to experience. It does, in fact exists, I'm
Speaker 1: just not privy to it all the time. When I
Speaker 1: was standing outside of it must have been Sacks or
Speaker 1: one of those department stores with the lights dancing and
Speaker 1: the figurines in the window display, I realized how easily
Speaker 1: people could fall in love with this country, that magic
Speaker 1: for change. Julie is also soon found in the library,
Speaker 1: where she spends as much time as she possibly can.
Speaker 1: She lives and breathes books. They are her friends, her
Speaker 1: windows into possibility. She also makes positive connections outside her
Speaker 1: family for the first time, with her third grade teacher,
Speaker 1: Ms Pong, and with Elaine, her new best friend. Finally,
Speaker 1: she has a sleepover at Elaine's house, which should be
Speaker 1: a highlight, but instead, Changuli is plagued by a terrible homesickness.
Speaker 1: This fear of separation made so much sense because you
Speaker 1: had drilled in you, um from the time that you
Speaker 1: arrived in America, this feeling of don't trust anyone. You know,
Speaker 1: we're only safe with our own kind. Tell them you
Speaker 1: were born here and that you've always lived here, and
Speaker 1: the idea that it could all vanish at any moment.
Speaker 1: And you get through the night, but you've called, and
Speaker 1: you've said to your parents, please come get me or
Speaker 1: let me come home, and and the next morning they
Speaker 1: do meet you and take you home. Yep, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think one important bit that jumped up at me
Speaker 1: looking back was that my father had boarded a plane
Speaker 1: and then just disappeared for two years. So their presence
Speaker 1: felt very conditional to me. From that point on, I
Speaker 1: remember being very clingy and having a lot of separation
Speaker 1: anxiety towards my mother, even when we were in China
Speaker 1: after my father left. Whenever she try to get a
Speaker 1: visa to the US, and she had to try many
Speaker 1: times and get rejected. Many times. She had to go
Speaker 1: to Beijing, which might I had to stay home with
Speaker 1: my grandpa parents, and I would cry thinking that I
Speaker 1: would never see her again. So this whole idea of
Speaker 1: people can just disappear and your whole life as you
Speaker 1: know it can change in a second, was very much
Speaker 1: drilled into me by the immigrant experience, you know. Then
Speaker 1: we boarded that planet. I never saw my grandparents and
Speaker 1: my uncles or my aunt again. And then there was
Speaker 1: the elements, as you mentioned earlier, of superstition. I thought
Speaker 1: that if I did everything right, then I could minimize
Speaker 1: the harm that my parents were exposed to. And I
Speaker 1: thought that if I stayed with them and watched them,
Speaker 1: that that would ensure that they stayed safe. And there's
Speaker 1: really no rhyme or reason to thinking that. It was
Speaker 1: just when you're a child, and you have zero control
Speaker 1: or power over what's happening. You grasp onto what little
Speaker 1: you can, like getting to that street signed before the
Speaker 1: light changes, are watching your parents like a hawk. So
Speaker 1: all of these superstitions just became embedded in me, and
Speaker 1: they became this kind of talisman that I held onto
Speaker 1: to feel like I was doing what I could to
Speaker 1: keep us safe while having very little power at all.
Speaker 1: I was so struck by that, the feeling as a
Speaker 1: child of somehow intuiting that your parents are vulnerable. It's
Speaker 1: a very particular feeling one I know as well that
Speaker 1: most children don't experience. Most children experience their parents as
Speaker 1: invulnerable in a long and innocent childhood. But you had
Speaker 1: the experience of almost feeling like you could navigate the
Speaker 1: world for them, especially with regards to my mother, because
Speaker 1: I spoke. I learned English much faster than she did,
Speaker 1: because she was in her thirties and it just takes
Speaker 1: you longer. And so I was able to navigate American
Speaker 1: society much easier and trying inslate to her and explained
Speaker 1: to her how social morays worked. And I feel incredibly
Speaker 1: feel and felt incredibly protective toward her. I think as
Speaker 1: you say, Danny, once you see your parents as vulnerable,
Speaker 1: it's very hard to reverse that. And the earlier it happens,
Speaker 1: the more steeped in that child it is that it
Speaker 1: is their job and their responsibility to keep that parents safe,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the other way around. And I want
Speaker 1: to say too that I believe. And I looking back,
Speaker 1: I see my mother trying to hide that from me.
Speaker 1: When we first went to the sweatshop. She tried to
Speaker 1: pretend it was a game, that she was fine. She
Speaker 1: tried to not cry in front of me. But there
Speaker 1: was only so much she could do. I mean, we
Speaker 1: had no resources, we had no friends or family around.
Speaker 1: There was no one for her to talk to except me. Really,
Speaker 1: and she's only human. And I say this because I
Speaker 1: know she regret doing that. She still to the state,
Speaker 1: regrets that. She says she wishes she could give me
Speaker 1: my childhood back. But she did the absolute best she could.
Speaker 1: I do not falter for one bit how much she
Speaker 1: shared with me. You become her lifeline in many ways,
Speaker 1: and she does share a lot with you. And at
Speaker 1: around this time, she decides that she's going to go
Speaker 1: to City College to study computer science, and she's going
Speaker 1: to find a way to get a foothold in this
Speaker 1: country the way that she had had in China. That
Speaker 1: you know that she was going to become a professional. Yep.
Speaker 1: While Angel's mom is trying to find her professional foothold,
Speaker 1: she and Julie continues to voraciously read and watch television,
Speaker 1: and her own future professional goals begin to form. The
Speaker 1: kids around her want to be astronauts, pilots, movie stars
Speaker 1: when they grow up. But she and Julie she's decided
Speaker 1: she's going to be a lawyer. She reads the biographies
Speaker 1: of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and their good Marshall. She's inspired,
Speaker 1: and she forms a plan, a plan towards safety, a
Speaker 1: plan toward never being hungry, a plan toward helping herself
Speaker 1: and her family move forward in the direction of truth
Speaker 1: and away from secrecy. I watched a lot of TV,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, and I've read a lot of books,
Speaker 1: and everywhere I looked, lawyers were very well off. They
Speaker 1: knew what was going on. They were usually in charge
Speaker 1: and incredibly bossy, which was what I was in China.
Speaker 1: Very much wanted to get to that position. Um, And
Speaker 1: once you've known poverty and hunger, your primary goal before
Speaker 1: you can think of anyone else, and I think anyone
Speaker 1: else and anything else. And I think this is probably
Speaker 1: universally true, is that you need to sure that you
Speaker 1: will never be there again. And with the way that
Speaker 1: lawyers were portrayed, I was like, Oh, this is a
Speaker 1: guaranteed way to be safe, to have money to it,
Speaker 1: so my parents are never hungry. I'm never hungry in
Speaker 1: my future children are never hungry. And then on top
Speaker 1: of that, reading books about RBG and their good Marshal,
Speaker 1: I realized lawyers know what's going on. They know the law.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the opposite of being undocumented. They know
Speaker 1: exactly how to navigate the system, and they can make
Speaker 1: it easier to do so for themselves, their family and
Speaker 1: people who are like them who they want to help.
Speaker 1: And so it just made perfect sense to me. And
Speaker 1: I had already loved reading and writing so much. While
Speaker 1: it would have been cool and probably lucrative to be
Speaker 1: an astronaut, I didn't have any of the skills, and
Speaker 1: I don't know how to do that. Reading and writing
Speaker 1: I could do, and so I just single mindedly excited
Speaker 1: on that. And I think it was very similar to
Speaker 1: what my mother did. She said, I'm I know math.
Speaker 1: She had been on the cutting edge of computer science
Speaker 1: in China back in the late eighties and early nineties.
Speaker 1: One of my earliest memories of her is her sitting
Speaker 1: in front of a giant computer that took up the
Speaker 1: entire room, typing code into a black screen. I must
Speaker 1: have been in a stroller or something, but I was
Speaker 1: kind of from afar watching her. It was her dream
Speaker 1: and it was what she knew to do, and it
Speaker 1: was also lucrative she could provide for her family. So
Speaker 1: I think we were very similar in that respect of
Speaker 1: being extremely practical and knowing what we were good at.
Speaker 1: When fourth grade rolls around, she and Julie has a
Speaker 1: number of powerful experiences in quick succession. First, she gets
Speaker 1: a cat named Marilyn, who has an imperfect face. As
Speaker 1: an only child, she A Julie loves this cat, who
Speaker 1: is her companion, her sibling, her true best friend, all
Speaker 1: rolled into one furry, flawed creature. But her parents don't
Speaker 1: exactly share this love from Maryland. They believe the cat's
Speaker 1: imperfections will bring bad luck. During this time, she and
Speaker 1: Julie's mother becomes increasingly unwell. She and Julie is also
Speaker 1: experiencing some bad luck at school, where her new teacher, Mr. Kane,
Speaker 1: is strict and unkind. When she and Julie turns in
Speaker 1: near perfect papers, he doesn't believe she's written them and
Speaker 1: accuses her of plagiarizing. She isn't, of course, so she
Speaker 1: starts to make errors on purpose, just so he'll leave
Speaker 1: her alone. These self protective lies lead to other kinds
Speaker 1: of lies. She and Julie becomes what she calls a
Speaker 1: habitual liar. She starts telling her friends tall tales, contradictory
Speaker 1: stories about where she comes from and who she is.
Speaker 1: I think the message of having to lie about the
Speaker 1: fact that I immigrated, the fact that English was my
Speaker 1: second language, the fact that I was undocumented, embedded in
Speaker 1: me a deep shame that went to the core of
Speaker 1: who I was. If I couldn't tell people I was
Speaker 1: born in China, which was at that point very central
Speaker 1: to my identity and my life, it must have been
Speaker 1: to my childhood mind that pretty much everything about me
Speaker 1: was worth being ashamed about, and everything about me should
Speaker 1: be kept secret. And what if I just created a
Speaker 1: different identity kind of as an escape, just as I
Speaker 1: escaped into fiction. Most of the time, I could create
Speaker 1: this whole new life for myself and that would be
Speaker 1: worthy of esteem, and that would get my friends attention,
Speaker 1: and that I wouldn't have to be ashamed about. So
Speaker 1: there was a lot of me that just longed for
Speaker 1: that regular American childhood, whatever that means, right. I think
Speaker 1: that was the reason that I was so obsessed with
Speaker 1: the Babysitters Club and Sweet Belly High, because those people
Speaker 1: represented to me regular Americans who were acceptable and didn't
Speaker 1: need to have all of these secrets and hide all
Speaker 1: of these things about themselves, and I so badly wanted that.
Speaker 1: So that was kind of my way of making it
Speaker 1: up for myself. And I think it also normalized the
Speaker 1: secret keeping around being undocumented, because if I was lying
Speaker 1: about whether my dad was a cop or not, then
Speaker 1: maybe lying about being documented is not so bad. Of course, again,
Speaker 1: none of this was happening consciously. I think as a kid,
Speaker 1: I was just feeling a lot and going through a lot,
Speaker 1: and that's how I tried to escape at all. But
Speaker 1: looking through an adult lens, it just makes sense why
Speaker 1: I was doing that. Yeah, it really does. And it
Speaker 1: also occurs to me that you were very good at it.
Speaker 1: The lying and you know, like when you would get
Speaker 1: caught in one lie. You know, my father is a cop,
Speaker 1: and then later my father is white, um, and and
Speaker 1: it's a CEO of a company, and I'm half white,
Speaker 1: and your friends would be like, wait a minute, I thought,
Speaker 1: and you played this game with them like gotcha. I
Speaker 1: just wanted to see if you're paying attention, which would
Speaker 1: have made you actually probably a little more confident about
Speaker 1: being able to lie about being undocumented and feel a
Speaker 1: little safer. That's true. That's true because any time that
Speaker 1: they called me out on some discrepancy in terms of
Speaker 1: my immigration status, I could be like, gotcha was a
Speaker 1: test and you passed right. Um. It was a way
Speaker 1: of reclaiming power in the way that superstitions did for
Speaker 1: me in that little world where I felt like I
Speaker 1: had so little to hold onto. Well, Chian Julie is
Speaker 1: escaping into these fictions. The hard facts of our family's
Speaker 1: life intrude. Her mother is getting sicker and sicker, often
Speaker 1: retreating in pain. One day, she's rushed to the e er.
Speaker 1: The doctors need to do surgery to determine the root
Speaker 1: cause of her pain, but it takes quite some time
Speaker 1: before this can happen while other patients with more resources
Speaker 1: are prioritized on the queue. As the family waits terrified
Speaker 1: for the results of Mamma's surgery, she a Julie is
Speaker 1: feeling destabilized. Literally around that time, I started bumping into everything.
Speaker 1: And it may have been that I was growing and
Speaker 1: I was not fling my arms in the right position,
Speaker 1: or you know, as you're going through spurts of if
Speaker 1: that happens. But I think more likely it was that
Speaker 1: I was so stressed out that I just was not
Speaker 1: fully in control for my body, and to the same extent,
Speaker 1: because I was so distracted, so I started hitting things.
Speaker 1: And then when I was alone on the playground, as
Speaker 1: I say, I tripped on nothing. There was nothing in
Speaker 1: my way. I just tripped and fell and twisted my
Speaker 1: right hand, which was my dominant hand, so I could
Speaker 1: not really hold a pencil. I couldn't squeeze toothpaste. There
Speaker 1: were a million and one things in the day that
Speaker 1: I could not do. But I also saw how incredibly
Speaker 1: stressed out my dad was. He was racing from work
Speaker 1: to the hospital and making sure I was taken care of,
Speaker 1: and she just did not have enough hours in the day.
Speaker 1: Much less any sort of financial resources to get me
Speaker 1: to also see a doctor, because he was also saying,
Speaker 1: we don't know how we're going to pay for your
Speaker 1: mother's care. She has now been the hospital for how
Speaker 1: many days? That's very expensive. It was a number that
Speaker 1: I couldn't have even fathoms. It just seemed so fancy
Speaker 1: to have my mother boarding in a clean hospital bed
Speaker 1: when we were living in this dingy little room. So
Speaker 1: the last thing I wanted to do was add to
Speaker 1: my father's fears and his worries about bills and money
Speaker 1: and the government coming after us. So I did what
Speaker 1: I knew to do by that point, which was high
Speaker 1: banks and lie about things and not make any trouble.
Speaker 1: The surgery finally happens, and while the news is good,
Speaker 1: the fear, of course, had been that chi Angelie's mom
Speaker 1: had cancer. Still it's determined that her gallbladder and a
Speaker 1: large part of her liver need to be removed. The
Speaker 1: surgeon takes a very small amount of money for the
Speaker 1: otherwise expensive surgery, but to the family it's not a
Speaker 1: small amount. It's their entire life savings. She A Julie's
Speaker 1: father pays the surgeon in cash at the time. As
Speaker 1: a child, I really saw him as a saint, an angel,
Speaker 1: someone who just descended upon us, helped us when we
Speaker 1: needed it most, and took what little we had to
Speaker 1: give him. But looking back, also thinking about how deeply
Speaker 1: appreciate Shave my father was, how much he thanked him,
Speaker 1: and the doctor acting kind of cold. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: he was aware of the family that he was helping out.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure he even took the time to understand
Speaker 1: what was going on there. He was just doing his
Speaker 1: job and doing it well at that, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: really thinking about the humanity behind the surgery. I can't
Speaker 1: fully trust my memory as a child's because everyone was
Speaker 1: so much bigger than me and has so much more power.
Speaker 1: But seeing kind of that hurt in my father's eyes
Speaker 1: when he handed over our life savings and the doctor
Speaker 1: just grabbed it with one hand and walked away, that
Speaker 1: introduces an element of an adult lens that I think
Speaker 1: there was something else bigger going on. After Angele's mother
Speaker 1: finally comes home from the hospital, the fault lines in
Speaker 1: the family deepen, her parents vulnerability intensifies. Her father gets
Speaker 1: rid of Marilyn the cat without telling Changjuli. This is
Speaker 1: an enormous loss for her, but she stays quiet about it.
Speaker 1: She feels like a burden on her stressed Baba and
Speaker 1: on her Mama, who is still recovering. She and Julie
Speaker 1: is carrying the weight of everything her parents are handling.
Speaker 1: So when she learns about a school in Manhattan for
Speaker 1: gifted kids, the New York City LAB School for Collaborative Studies,
Speaker 1: she really wants to apply, but she doesn't tell her parents.
Speaker 1: They have too much on their plate, she thinks, and
Speaker 1: so without any support from her parents or her teacher,
Speaker 1: she applies in secret and she's accepted. I think that
Speaker 1: to balance my approach of not making any trouble, was
Speaker 1: this inherent rebellious streak, maybe a drop of dissident blood
Speaker 1: in me, where I believe I made the decid vision
Speaker 1: in my head to go forward with applying to LAB
Speaker 1: because Mr Kane at one point said that school is
Speaker 1: not for you. You can't get in, and if you,
Speaker 1: even if you did, you're not going to fit in.
Speaker 1: And I at this point was so sick of this
Speaker 1: man telling me what I couldn't do. It was my
Speaker 1: small act of rebellion to apply nevertheless, and when I
Speaker 1: got in, and even in the when I first broached
Speaker 1: the application the idea, my father was staunchly resistant. He
Speaker 1: did not want anyone taking a very close look at
Speaker 1: our family, and any sort of application would of course
Speaker 1: invite that. He knew that there was going to be
Speaker 1: an interview. He just did not want to risk it.
Speaker 1: He said, why not just go to your school in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: It's just as good, and now you actually speak English,
Speaker 1: so you have nothing to worry about. But I got
Speaker 1: it into my head because Mr Kane said I couldn't
Speaker 1: go there, that if I went there, things will be
Speaker 1: different and I would be able to change my life
Speaker 1: and turn our whole families the situation around. In fact,
Speaker 1: Mr Kane said that you know those those are for
Speaker 1: wealthy kids or some rich kids there, and my dad's
Speaker 1: at the same It was when Mr Kane said that
Speaker 1: it was the white, wealthy kids who went to schools
Speaker 1: like Lab that I made up my mind to attend
Speaker 1: there because I believe that going to that school would
Speaker 1: somehow turn my life all around and turn around the
Speaker 1: situation for my entire family. You're right, this is a
Speaker 1: quote from your book. Maybe I could create everything I
Speaker 1: wanted for myself, for the three of us, and this
Speaker 1: was the first step. Yeah, we'll be back in a
Speaker 1: moment with more family secrets. Before chi and Julie can
Speaker 1: actually take this first step, her mother is rushed back
Speaker 1: to the hospital in the weeks before chi Angelie's graduation
Speaker 1: from fifth grade. She's not recovering smoothly from her surgery,
Speaker 1: and the doctors diagnose her with pancreatitis. She's released just
Speaker 1: in time to attend her daughter's graduation. At the ceremony,
Speaker 1: ch Angelie searches for her parents in the sea of
Speaker 1: faces as she and her classmates sing the graduation songs.
Speaker 1: One is Bette Midler's wind Beneath My Wings. Midway through
Speaker 1: the song, a certain lyric pierces Chiang Julie that lyric
Speaker 1: is a beautiful smile to hide the pain. I felt
Speaker 1: like everything was hanging by string. I thought that my
Speaker 1: mother was going to die, that she had given all
Speaker 1: of herself, of her body to me to keep me
Speaker 1: on or shelter under a roof with a bed. I
Speaker 1: felt like I owed her absolutely everything, and I felt
Speaker 1: that all three of us were trapped in the situation.
Speaker 1: Graduation as supposed to be an exciting time of new beginnings.
Speaker 1: And yes, I was going to lab and I was
Speaker 1: hopeful that that would change things, But it also felt
Speaker 1: so dangerous and treacherous. It felt like any wrong step
Speaker 1: for any of us would be the last of me.
Speaker 1: As my father said to me every now and then,
Speaker 1: as I repeated to myself and the armor that I
Speaker 1: had put on, the lies and pretending to be impervious
Speaker 1: and bossing my friends around and being mean, that was
Speaker 1: the beautiful style and iteration of that um to hide
Speaker 1: so much of the pain. And when those lyrics came on,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I just felt like something in me
Speaker 1: cracked open, and everything I was trying to hide all
Speaker 1: those years, so much, so much emotion. I just could
Speaker 1: not contain it anymore. And most of all, you know,
Speaker 1: the wind beneath my wings, which is my mother, my
Speaker 1: best friend, and the closest person to me in the
Speaker 1: entire Western hemisphere. I didn't know if she was going
Speaker 1: to be healthy, if she was going to live, if
Speaker 1: what was going to be happening to our little family,
Speaker 1: So everything just felt so precarious. Finally, at the lab school,
Speaker 1: Chang Julie is where she belongs. Both academically and socially,
Speaker 1: but things at home are increasingly complicated. Things are very
Speaker 1: tense between her parents. Her mom does recover physically and
Speaker 1: graduates from City College with a degree in computer science,
Speaker 1: and her dad, her dad buys a car, which is
Speaker 1: sort of like saying her dad buys a private jet.
Speaker 1: It's insane, astounding, and he doesn't discuss it with chian
Speaker 1: Julie's mother. He just goes and does it. During a
Speaker 1: fight at the dinner table, he reaches across and slaps
Speaker 1: his wife and something shifts. Shortly after that terrible moment,
Speaker 1: chian Julie's mother shows up at the lab school one
Speaker 1: day and simply says, we're going to Canada and her
Speaker 1: father isn't coming. He didn't want to go. He was
Speaker 1: afraid to go. Um, he didn't believe in the plan
Speaker 1: to go. He didn't think it was safe. She said,
Speaker 1: she figured out a way, and you're going. And you know,
Speaker 1: you describe so beautifully the way that that is both
Speaker 1: this very exciting and hopeful thing and also a huge loss.
Speaker 1: You're leaving again, you're leaving everything that you know again,
Speaker 1: and you're leaving your father and in an entire world
Speaker 1: leaving to Canada was terrifying to me because the last
Speaker 1: time I had left a country it had not worked
Speaker 1: out so well, and I had no idea what would
Speaker 1: be happening in Canada. My biggest fear was that it
Speaker 1: was going to be worse. But my mother was so
Speaker 1: incredibly hopeful and excited, and she had, for the first
Speaker 1: time and a long time, done something without even telling
Speaker 1: me about it. She planned on it for months without
Speaker 1: really talking to me, and that suggested to me like
Speaker 1: she was a little bit more of her old self
Speaker 1: in China, where she had hope and agency and was
Speaker 1: the mother that I leaned on for safety. So it
Speaker 1: gave me a sense that things might be better, but
Speaker 1: it also felt like we were leaving in defeat. And
Speaker 1: it's really quite a coincidence that happened to be reading
Speaker 1: from the Mix of Files at the time, because there's
Speaker 1: a famous line from that book that says, it's one
Speaker 1: thing to be running towards something, and another thing entirely
Speaker 1: to be running away from something. And I felt very
Speaker 1: much like we were not running toward Canada, but running
Speaker 1: away from America, whereas when we left China we were
Speaker 1: very much running toward America for my father and for
Speaker 1: that dream of the United States that he had from
Speaker 1: reading American literature. Eventually, Chan Julie's father does follow them,
Speaker 1: and together in Canada, they all become citizens. When it's
Speaker 1: time for college, a Julie returns to America, she goes
Speaker 1: to Swarthmore, a school that Mr Kane would definitely have
Speaker 1: told her was beyond her reach. This becomes a pattern.
Speaker 1: At Swathmore, a professor discourages her from applying to Yale Law,
Speaker 1: telling her it will never happen. But as she did
Speaker 1: with Mr. Kane, she Angulie proves this professor wrong as well.
Speaker 1: She is accepted at Yale Law. She's on track to
Speaker 1: achieving the goal set for herself back in the third grade.
Speaker 1: You know, through all of this accomplishment and all of
Speaker 1: this achievement, you carry with you the feeling that you
Speaker 1: need to keep this history of yours secret quiet, that
Speaker 1: you're going to transcend it. But you're going to transcend
Speaker 1: it not by sharing it, but by hiding it. And
Speaker 1: then you're in your second clerkship and you're opening the
Speaker 1: file on yet another immigration appeal because this is the
Speaker 1: area of law that you're doing, and it's like the
Speaker 1: damn bursts. Absolutely, I kept everything a secret for so
Speaker 1: long because I knew that if I didn't, if I
Speaker 1: turned around and confronted it, it would be ugly for
Speaker 1: a long time before it got better. It's like sweeping
Speaker 1: things under the rug for decades. When you finally lift
Speaker 1: up that rug, it's going to be pretty gross under there.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to keep it barricaded and hidden and
Speaker 1: out of sight. And like you say, I happened to
Speaker 1: clerk on a great court that handled a lot of
Speaker 1: immigration federal appeals during the Obama administration, when there were
Speaker 1: a lot of deportations, including of Dreamers. And when I
Speaker 1: came upon yet another I believe it was like twenty
Speaker 1: something or fortieth case on the same back pattern that
Speaker 1: somewhat mirrored my life, I felt like such a complete fraud.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, who am I to advise the judge
Speaker 1: on the fate of this person when I myself cannot
Speaker 1: confront my own truths which are reflected in this record.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking, if the judge knew, maybe she
Speaker 1: wouldn't even want me to work on it, because I
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe I'm conflicted out. I was then still
Speaker 1: very young lawyer and didn't understand quite how that worked.
Speaker 1: So at that juncture of my personal and professional lives crossing,
Speaker 1: and me realizing that I had made it to that
Speaker 1: point that little chan thought would get her to safety.
Speaker 1: She was a lawyer, she was making money, She should
Speaker 1: be safe, she should know what to do, and realizing
Speaker 1: I still didn't know what to do and I was
Speaker 1: still very much that little kid who lied about everything,
Speaker 1: I just had it. So I walked into my judges office.
Speaker 1: She's an incredible mentor to me, and I'm sure she
Speaker 1: had no idea what I was about to say. I
Speaker 1: sat down, apropos of nothing and just started talking. But
Speaker 1: she listened. She, like ms palm, held space for me.
Speaker 1: She listened intently. She didn't speak when I paused, because
Speaker 1: she knew there was more. She just kept listening. I
Speaker 1: had never told anyone this whole history, much less someone
Speaker 1: in such a position of power, someone who could arguably
Speaker 1: support me if my case came up that way. And
Speaker 1: when I stopped talking, she didn't have judgment in her eyes,
Speaker 1: she didn't have blames, she didn't have to discussed none
Speaker 1: of the things that I expected to be confronted with
Speaker 1: when I finally aired the truth. She instead had this
Speaker 1: look of great understanding and empathy, and she said, secrets
Speaker 1: hold so much power over us, don't they? And she
Speaker 1: said it in such a way that suggested that she
Speaker 1: had lived my life. But of course she didn't. I
Speaker 1: knew that much. And it would take probably a year
Speaker 1: of me thinking about that sentence and chewing on it
Speaker 1: and trying to figure out what she was saying for
Speaker 1: me to realize, Oh, what she's really saying is that
Speaker 1: all of us have these monumental secrets that to us
Speaker 1: feel incredibly shameful and burdensome, but are actually, once aired,
Speaker 1: the key to our liberate sition. It took me a
Speaker 1: long time to understand that. Of course, she's had other words,
Speaker 1: reassuring words and kind words for me to not worry
Speaker 1: and to stand in my truth. That it was great
Speaker 1: to hear and hard for me to accept at the time.
Speaker 1: But without her guidance, without her holding space for me
Speaker 1: in that position of supreme power, I think I would
Speaker 1: have kept online for many more years. Here's tan Julie
Speaker 1: reading from the ending of her extraordinary story. I repeat
Speaker 1: the judge's words. It has become a daily morning practice
Speaker 1: But this time, after almost a year, I feel the
Speaker 1: lie slip away through the weave of my mantra. My
Speaker 1: muscles lose a tightness I did not know they have
Speaker 1: been carrying, And against the backdrop of my truths, I me,
Speaker 1: at long last, free to admit I am hired. I'm
Speaker 1: so very tired of running and hiding. But I have
Speaker 1: been doing it for so long. I don't know how
Speaker 1: to stop. I don't know how to do anything else.
Speaker 1: It is all I am defining myself against illegality while
Speaker 1: stitching it into my veins. The Judge's words are my blanketness,
Speaker 1: and in its snug embrace, I rediscover safety I knew once,
Speaker 1: long long ago. I turned back to the window and
Speaker 1: see for the first time the little girl cast a
Speaker 1: glow against the light of the waking sun. And then
Speaker 1: I try something new. I look that wise little girl
Speaker 1: in the eyes and reach my hand out for hers.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Mollys A.
Speaker 1: Core is the story editor and Dylan fa Again is
Speaker 1: the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
Speaker 1: like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your
Speaker 1: story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
Speaker 1: one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
Speaker 1: can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer, and
Speaker 1: you can find us on Facebook at facebook dot com
Speaker 1: slash Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at FAMI Secrets Pod.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to know more about the story that
Speaker 1: inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.