To capture a parent’s hidden story, practice patience -- and let the tears flow

Transcript

ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:

Before we start, a warning. In this episode, we'll be talking about suicide and abuse.

MARIELLE SEGARRA, BYLINE: You're listening to LIFE KIT from NPR.

LIMBONG: Hey. Andrew Limbong here in for Marielle Segarra. Here's the origin story for today's LIFE KIT. When Aarti Shahani was NPR's technology correspondent, she published her first book, "Here We Are." It's a memoir about her and her family's immigrant experience. Now, Aarti doesn't come from a family of engineers like the people she reported on. Instead, her mom was a seamstress. Her dad, Namdev, was a shopkeeper. He had a side gig, though, of being Aarti's arch-nemesis. You know, the man policing her dating and dancing and skirt lengths. He was the type of dad who worried more about his daughter's marriage prospects than her career ambitions.

Then Namdev got arrested for selling calculators to a drug cartel. He landed in Rikers Island and then was put into deportation proceedings. In a weird way, this legal crisis led to the two becoming friends. Aarti stopped going to school to help fight her dad's case, and when her dad was in jail, Aarti would visit, and they'd spend 30 minutes together one-on-one, which is a lot of time for two people who don't usually talk to each other. And Namdev opened up talking about what his life was like when he was Aarti's age. Years later, shortly before his passing, Aarti recorded a conversation with Namdev.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: So I was sitting at home in San Francisco and thinking that I wanted to start recording talking to you sometimes because I like the way you sound.

NAMDEV SHAHANI: Yeah. It's a regular sound, man. It's not a - kind of it may be a sick person sound, but...

A SHAHANI: Not sick person. I think I mean the accent. Like, you have a...

N SHAHANI: Typical Indian accent.

A SHAHANI: You think it's typical Indian?

N SHAHANI: No, I don't think so.

A SHAHANI: No?

N SHAHANI: No.

A SHAHANI: What do you think it is?

N SHAHANI: Well, it's mixed - Indian, American, British, French kind of pronunciation.

LIMBONG: Turns out Namdev had quite a life. He was born into a civil war during the partition of India and Pakistan when the British left in 1947. Like his daughter, he had to sacrifice for his family. As a teen, he traveled thousands of miles away to become a migrant worker in Beirut and sent money home. He ended up country-hopping, picking up six languages along the way. America was his longest-ever home. Oh, and also, like his daughter, he dated behind his parent's back, though he was in his 20s by then and not his teens. And the reason I'm telling you all of this is because when Aarti went on a book tour for "Here We Are," the questions she mostly got weren't about immigration policy or criminal justice. Instead it was, how can I get to know my mom or dad? Whatever the circumstances that led up to it, the relationship Aarti and her dad eventually developed became enviable. Today, on LIFE KIT, Aarti talks with fellow writers and compiles pro tips on how to talk to your parents about their lives.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

A SHAHANI: If you retain nothing else, please just remember - maybe even repeat after me - takeaway number one, set a clear intention. Your family history is not a pile of dirt. You are not an industrial-strength vacuum. Don't approach mom or dad like you've got to take in everything everywhere all at once.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MIN JIN LEE: There's, like, this I don't know if it's an American idea, but, like, this whole full disclosure, everything's transparent. You know, just tell the truth.

A SHAHANI: This is author Min Jin Lee, who's best known for the dazzling historical fiction "Pachinko."

LEE: There's a part of me that just feels like, yeah, yeah, you know, I want to cosign on that. But with relatives, with people that you love, please proceed with caution. And I'm going to sound corny, but please proceed with love. Let's say someone is listening to us and goes, you know, I really did want to talk to my stepfather about X. I wouldn't pick up the phone right away.

A SHAHANI: (Laughter).

LEE: Have patience.

A SHAHANI: (Laughter).

LEE: Please. I'm begging you. Take a beat. Take a beat. Write down your questions. And then ask, do you think it'd be OK if I came by and asked you some questions about the subject? And the person says yes or no.

A SHAHANI: So you don't believe in the element of surprise?

LEE: No. Please do not surprise anyone, especially people that you love and you have - you know, you have a family bond. That's a very serious thing.

A SHAHANI: So dear listeners, let's say you've set the time and intention to talk. Are you going to dive into the deep end of the pool right away? No. Here is takeaway number two - be gentle. This advice is antithetical to what journalists often do. Our industry values the curveball that catches the powerful off guard. Some call it the gotcha question. But let's be real. It absolutely can shut folks down.

A key way to build trust is to be self-aware. What do I want to know and why? And communicate that before diving in. Min also suggests - ease into the hard stuff. During the pandemic, she decided it was time to sit her parents down to do research for her first nonfiction book.

LEE: It was sunny. It was outdoors because of COVID, and I had my legal pad. I never record or do video - never. And I was very gentle. Like, I asked them very simple questions, very factual questions like, where did you study? How did you feel? What do you remember about your parents? What are their actual names? How do you spell it?

Like, I wanted to know, literally, because very often, if you ask immigrant families, like, what is the name of your great-grandfather? People won't know. They're like, well, I call them great-grandfather (laughter).

A SHAHANI: Right, right, right.

LEE: But - and it's not that they're ignorant. It's just - and they don't even have the records, or sometimes they don't have the ability to look up in their own language.

A SHAHANI: Right. So you asked these gentle, basic, factual questions.

LEE: Very basic, very factual questions.

A SHAHANI: I am endlessly fascinated by how little we migrants know about our families. Like, why did we really come to America? I told Min about the time I finally asked my mom. I was 38 and, frankly, approached her with some resentment. Why would you and dad decide to cross the ocean with three small children, overstay visas and live undocumented and poor in a new country? It was risky. I considered it reckless behavior. And we suffered growing up.

And mom explained for the first time - I had not known this - that she was physically abused by her mother-in-law and her brother-in-law. When I was born and she attempted to bring me back home from the hospital, my grandmother wouldn't let us into the house because I was a girl. And so we had to go sleep somewhere else. And that night or that week is when my parents decided, hey, this America thing we've been talking about, let's go ahead and do it. Mom didn't have fun telling me about it. It hurt. And so, you know...

LEE: It was tragic. I mean - and also to repeat your victimization to your child, to retell the victimization to your child - all that transference of negativity and abuse, right? And then you have this flight to another country, which is a hostile environment. I've been interviewing so many Korean undocumented people. It's such a difficult life. And also, there's hostility within our own communities and shame. So I imagine her telling you was such an act of courage, but it is also a moment of healing.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

A SHAHANI: Maybe you've felt this for yourself. It's healing, but it doesn't feel good. Mom and I were both bedridden with nausea. That story brought us back to the doorstep where my own grandmother rejected me. Though, it also put another memory into sharp relief.

Back in sixth grade, my teacher told me I would not be class valedictorian. Even though I had the highest grades, he said I had an attitude problem. I had successfully petitioned to allow girls to play in the student faculty softball game against his wishes. I guess lifelong feminism was written into my fate. Memories that make your parents feel ashamed - deep, dark secrets they've held for decades - those can end up being a source of empowerment for you. Min Jin has had that sort of experience.

LEE: In my conversations with my family members and knowing their history and their struggle, I remember that I'm somebody and that you're somebody. And that's a very powerful thing because when people are underestimating you or undervaluing you, they are profoundly gaslighting you. And that is very painful.

A SHAHANI: Min says it was her father's idea to leave Korea, where he was a marketing executive, and try out New York City. He suffered a huge setback professionally. He ended up putting on a suit every single morning to work at a newspaper stand.

LEE: When I think about people throwing money at my dad - like a nickel or a dime - to buy our daily news, while he's wearing a coat and tie (laughter) behind the newspaper stand, I think, oh, that's who my father is. He can withstand that level of humiliation. 'Cause I've been in situations where people do equivalent things to me metaphorically, and I think, you know, go ahead. Make my day (laughter) because I can take it.

A SHAHANI: Right.

LEE: So it's not for what I write. It's not. It's actually to know who I am when the world says I'm nobody.

KAO KALIA YANG: I think, for me, one of the hardest things in any conversation with an elder is when they're really sad or when they're really broken, and your instinct is to say, it's OK. I'm here.

A SHAHANI: Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong refugee and memoirist born in Thailand, now living in Minnesota.

YANG: But you weren't there. You were not there, you know? You don't know what the future holds. You don't know the magnitude of this memory in comparison to everything else that will come your way or their way. And so just to let it flow, that is the hardest thing - you know, whatever feelings there are, just to be brave in the face of it, to honor its place.

A SHAHANI: Sometimes bravery means sitting quietly as someone sobs violently. This is part of the gentle approach - no gotcha questions, no smothering a teary face with tissues. When Kalia began probing the past with her mom, Chue, the intention was to help her. It was an act of service. Chue had been drowning in grief for decades. Her parents were uprooted from their villages during the Vietnam War. They fled into a jungle and crossed paths there. They felt a spark. Dad asked mom for her hand. She said yes.

YANG: I think there are a lot of missing pieces of my mother in that jungle. A lot of missing pieces of my mother in that war. She wakes up all the time from this dream in this nightmare in the jungle. She's young, and my father is holding her hand and tugging her away, and she watches her mother standing there looking, and she runs with my father, and she never sees her mother again, which is, of course, the story of her life.

A SHAHANI: Do you know the biggest decision your mom or dad ever made? And to take it a step further, do you know how they really felt about it? I ask Kalia.

Growing up, did you know that the decision to marry your dad was basically the biggest regret of your mother's life?

YANG: Not in Thailand. In America, I did. I was 6 1/2 when we came. And in America, away from all of the eyes and the ears of the other parts of the family because in Thailand we all live together, you know? In America, my mom would say out loud in her moments of despair, she'd say, why did I do it? Why did I marry you? And he never had anything to say, Aarti. And that's the beautiful thing about my dad. He's never questioned it. He's always believed that she was the best possible option for him in this whole wide world.

A SHAHANI: She was the best for him, and he was the worst for her.

YANG: Yes. Yes. And he said to me once, he said - because I think I got frustrated, and I said, Dad, why does Mom always say that? You feel bad when she says that, right? And he said, I imagine a thousand varieties of a life for her beyond me, and each would be happier than the one she shares with me.

A SHAHANI: Your family has some honest conversations. My God.

YANG: That's what he said.

A SHAHANI: Kalia has written three family memoirs. In the first, she recounts her grandmother's life as a shaman. The next, her dad, the poet. And this year, a gorgeous new memoir called "Where Rivers Part." It's in the voice of her mom, like it's Chue telling her life story, the moment she left her mother, not realizing they would never meet again, how she had seven miscarriages and seven babies. Kalia says she always knew she wanted to write her mother's story.

YANG: But I understood that I wasn't ready in the beginning. I knew that I needed to know what love was and perhaps marriage and perhaps motherhood because these are such important realities of my mother's life. And so I was holding back. I was waiting and waiting, and then the pandemic hit. And I felt the ticking clock.

A SHAHANI: We've all felt it. Takeaway number three - wait for the right time. Do you yourself feel ready in your bones? Is there a shared experience or rite of passage that helps you to empathize with your parent? It could be having a child, building a business, losing a job, having your first love dump you. While patience is not Kalia's strong suit, she says she played the long game because she had a deep knowing that she had to. When she finally did it...

YANG: My style, Aarti, and this is only - this is my style because I think I have a gentle touch. I want to put my hand right there on the wound. The pain that we feel is only one side of the pain that lives there. If a deeper understanding is what you're looking for, then there are no shortcuts.

A SHAHANI: Emily Kwong could not wait any longer. She needed a deeper understanding of why her mother tried to take her own life. It felt urgent. Emily decided to ask her mom directly about a decade ago. And Emily recorded that conversation for StoryCorps.

EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Oh, my God, my heart's just like - my heart is, like, beating in my chest as I'm talking about it. Like, it's that - you know, these are not conversations people have. But I was having a hard time looking my mom in the eye after that because she almost took herself away from us, and I didn't understand why. And I also struggled with depression and was so afraid that I would become overwhelmed by it at some point, too.

A SHAHANI: Did you feel going into it that your own heightened emotions would get in your way?

KWONG: I didn't think - here's what I'll say. My heightened emotions were actually getting in the way of us having a relationship. And so it kind of felt like in having a really intentional conversation, a lot of relationships aren't all that intentional. We just say things to each other. And my resentment, my anger, my fear, my hurt, my betrayal, all of that was just muddying up my relationship with my mom. For, like, 45 minutes, I had to really put my (vocalizing) on the back burner so that she could, like, be. And I could, like, hang with her in her recollection of the worst day of her life. So it actually - it was the opposite. I actually felt like this is one place where my emotions, like, won't take over because that's not the point here.

A SHAHANI: I have to say...

KWONG: Yeah.

A SHAHANI: ...I love your sound effects. We're talking about something so brutal, and you managed to bring in, like, cartoon humor (laughter).

KWONG: I'm kind of a cartoon character of a person.

A SHAHANI: I'm getting that.

KWONG: Like...

A SHAHANI: I'm getting that.

Emily is the host of NPR's science podcast Short Wave, and she hosted another podcast I'd strongly recommend - Inheriting. In it, she helps Asian American and Pacific Islander families talk with each other about their past. Her intention when she approached her own mom was to glean understanding about her mom and also about herself.

KWONG: She told the story about how when she was in the hospital after the suicide attempt, there were lullabies playing because in the wing next door was the obstetrics unit where babies were being born. And so she heard these lullabies and was so comforted by them. You know, having survived this terrible thing, she was reminded of, like, life happening right next door. And that kind of experience would have done the same for me, too. Like, I am as earnest as they come. I'm, like, looking for a metaphor. I'm looking for signs from the universe. I'm looking for reminders that I'm not alone. So, like, my mom's a sap. I'm a sap. And, like, even on the worst day of her life, she's a sap. So, like, that - I was like, yeah, I am your daughter.

A SHAHANI: When your parent shares, is it over-sharing? When you were listening like an adult, is that parentification, your parents playing the child and leaning on you to be the strong one well before your time? Here's what Emily thinks.

KWONG: Some people listening might be like, well, she's the kid. But that doesn't really work once you get older. You know, I feel like once you get older, you kind of do need some answers 'cause you start living life as an adult and maybe struggling with some of the things your parents do. And I was struggling with depression terribly at the time. And I needed some help, and that kind of looked like hearing how my mom got through the worst day of her life.

It frustrates me that some people are kept in the dark about their family's history and their mental health history. I think it's as wrong as not knowing your physical health history.

A SHAHANI: It's a fair and cogent point, though it also opens up a topic we have not discussed explicitly yet - abuse. A lot of people have been harmed by our parents physically or emotionally. Asian Americans are dubbed the model minority in the U.S. But in reality, many of our parents lived through war, migration, poverty and were left broken inside. I don't have a single Asian American close friend who wasn't parentified in childhood.

Sahaj Kaur Kohli is a practicing therapist and founder of Brown Girl Therapy on Instagram. She's gotten this kind of question.

SAHAJ KAUR KOHLI: My relationship with my parent is so abusive, like, should I actually be having these conversations right now? My answer is probably not - right? - because it's not going to feel good to you, because the dynamic is not in a place where it would even be healing or you would access some of that information that you want.

A SHAHANI: This is takeaway number four - our final takeaway - protect yourself. Even if you're an adult, you may still be at risk of your parent harming you in ways that just aren't worth it. For Sahaj to talk with her family, she needed emotional and physical distance first.

KOHLI: It was in my 20s that I said, I need to get out of here because it wasn't healthy for me. My relationship with my dad wasn't great. My mom understood it and was like, go, if you need to go. And I moved, and I became financially independent. I was able to access therapy. I had done years of that. I solo traveled. I made new friends. I did all of these things that, like, felt really healing to me and allowed me to just understand myself and live my own life. And it was through that that I was able to then revisit a relationship with my parents.

A SHAHANI: And to repeat a point that every one of our writers has made, you don't have to go there with a parent who's harmed you. Kao Kalia Yang points out that many successful people have not bothered. Min Jin Lee goes back to the point about intention.

LEE: I think about this quite a lot because people have hurt me. And I'm 55, and I've been hurt. I've been betrayed. I've - and I think, well, am I ready to talk to that person? Is that person ready to talk to me? Like, what is the point of the conversation? Do I want reconciliation? Do I want forgiveness? Do I want to give forgiveness? And sometimes, I don't. Do you want justice? Like - and what would justice look like to you? So if you don't know what you want, if you just want to vent, that's not wise.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

A SHAHANI: Here's a quick recap. One, know your intention. Do you want to excavate the path to help your parents find peace, to remind yourself what you're made of, to understand your hidden DNA? Maybe it's another reason entirely. Make your intention clear to you and to them before diving in.

Two, be gentle with your parent and yourself. These conversations can be intensely physical - leave you nauseous, even bedridden. Check in with everyone involved. Take space - like, no marathon work assignment right after having one of these hard conversations.

Three, don't rush to have the talk or to resolve difficult feelings that come up in the talk.

Four, protect yourself. A sense of independence and security in one's life makes it much more possible to listen to another person.

Now, as for this issue of devices, you may have caught Min Jin Lee saying don't record. And it's true - as soon as you hit record, people change, get stiff, invisible walls go up. That said, I know I needed to record my dad at least one time.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

A SHAHANI: Are you comfortable?

N SHAHANI: Yes, I am. I'm very comfortable.

A SHAHANI: Why are you smiling?

N SHAHANI: I'm finding when I look at your face, I love it.

A SHAHANI: My family does not have heirlooms. I wanted a piece of dad's voice to give to my son, who never got to meet dad but has the same single dimple on his cheek. Sometimes, intentions conflict, I suppose.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

A SHAHANI: If you or someone you know may be in crisis or considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

For more LIFE KIT, check out our other episodes. We've got one on how to tell your own story and another on how to build an adult relationship with your parents. You can find those at npr.org/lifekit. And if you love LIFE KIT and want more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org/lifekitnewsletter. Also, we'd love to hear from you. If you have episode ideas or feedback you want to share, email us at lifekit@npr.org.

This episode of LIFE KIT was produced by Margaret Cirino. It was edited by our supervising editor, Meghan Keane. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan. Our digital editor is Malaka Gharib. Beth Donovan is the executive producer. Our production team also includes Andee Tagle, Clare Marie Schneider and Sylvie Douglis. Engineering support comes from Robert Rodriguez. I'm Aarti Shahani. Thanks for listening.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.