Host: Dan Kennedy
Dan: [00:00:02] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. So, this week we're bringing you two stories to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Right now, you're hearing sounds that our podcast producer, Timothy Lou Ly, recorded at a grocery store in Parsippany, New Jersey. The store is one of the settings of our first story. And this was told at a StorySLAM here in New York City. And the theme of the night was Altered. Here's Deepa Ambekar.
[cheers and applause]
Deepa: [00:00:34] All right. So, my family is like a group of cockroaches. The sun goes out, and we all scatter into the darkness. We are Indian, therefore, we don't go out in the sun.
So, growing up, my conversations with my mother would go something like, "Mom, please, please can I go down the shore? Jenny's going, Karen's going, Johnny's going." And then, my mom would look at me across the table, totally disgusted and bewildered why I'd want to do such a thing, and she'd be like, "What? You want to go to beach and get sun tan? You want to get black? No." And in one fell swoop, that would end the conversation.
I grew up in an all-white neighborhood in Randolph, New Jersey. And to quote “My 16-year-old self's diary, even the ugliest white girl was prettier than me, because I was brown." Now, it was nothing that was ever expressly said to me. I was never made fun of or told that Indians were ugly. But it was a truth that I knew that I just never questioned. White was beautiful and brown was not.
My parents used to get this publication called the India Abroad. And on the back two pages of the newspaper would be matrimonial ads. And the matrimonial ads would go something like this. "Dr. and Mrs. Bhopindra Singh are seeking a marriage alliance for their daughter. [audience chuckles] 27, but looks 24. [audience chuckles] Pretty, slim." And then, it would say something like fair or wheatish, the color of wheat. [audience chuckles] Or, medium.
Now, it would never say anything darker than that, because that just wasn't a desirable trait. Now, in the dead of winter, with absolutely no sun exposure, I could probably pass for wheatish. I guarded that color of wheat strongly. And to that end, once a month, my mother and I used to go to Patel Brothers, which was our local Indian grocery store. And while my mother was scurrying the aisleways looking for some obscure Indian vegetable that wasn't found in our local Stop & Shop, I would go make a beeline to the cosmetic aisle. And on the right of the cosmetic aisles were all the local magazines. And my favorite one to look at was Stardust. Stardust was the Indian equivalent of US Weekly and Cosmo. It would always have these pictures of these beautiful Bollywood stars that have milky white skin, and some would even have blue and green eyes.
I'd always wish that I could be as beautiful as they were, that even if I had the misfortune of being born Indian, at least I could pass for being white. But instead, I was there to buy Fair & Lovely, which was a skin bleaching cream that was for us, by us. I would buy the largest tub. It was this old school Noxzema tub with this white cream in it. I would take it home and open up all the windows, because it just stunk of peroxide and gross bleach. I would slather it all over my body.
Although it would say to only keep it on for about 20 minutes, I would always push it another 10, hoping I would get a little lighter. I'd always put it on my body, because my face I could fix with makeup. So, I'd go to COVERGIRL, and there were 19 shades of foundation. And my goal was obviously to get as close to alabaster white and as far away from mahogany. I was eight away from alabaster. That's what my skin was. But I would purchase two shades lighter. And so, as a result, all my high school photos were just me in some weird kabuki makeup that was overexposed. [audience chuckles] I thought I looked really great. I don't exactly know when I got over all these skin issues. I don't really know if I ever did. Maybe it was when Madonna started wearing bindis or Trader Joe's started having chana masala in their frozen section [audience chuckles] that I felt comfortable that it was okay for me to be Indian.
So, last summer, I was home at my parents’ place in Randolph, New Jersey. I was flipping through the channels, it was a Sunday night in August, and I happened to come across the Miss America pageant. I came across just in time to see Nina Davuluri being crowned Miss America. I looked at her and I was shocked. I was absolutely overcome with emotion. This was 20 years after I'd last used Fair & Lovely. I was looking at her being crowned, because Nina was the first Indian American to be crowned Miss America. She was not fair. She was not even medium. She was darker than I was. Yet America had found her as the most prettiest woman in the country. And [chuckles] it was in that moment that all of these repressed feelings and things that I thought that I had gotten through all started bubbling up.
It was one of the first times that I felt that I was proud to be Indian and I was proud to be brown. So, I turned to my mom, who was sitting next to me, and I was like, "Mom, look, this Indian girl [chuckles] just won Miss America." She looks at the TV and then she looks at me and she's like, "Huh, looks like she got too much suntan." I was like, "Thanks, Mom. Great."
[cheers and applause]
Dan: [00:06:22] Deepa Ambekar is an attorney who lives and works in New York City. In her free time, she thinks about going to the gym and teaches a Storytelling for Lawyers class. Deepa now lives with her husband, not her mom, and hasn't avoided the sun in years, but she still continues to ask her mother for advice.
Our next storyteller, Linh Song, got on stage to share this at a recent Moth StorySLAM in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The theme of the night was Refuge. Here's Linh Song.
[applause]
Linh: [00:07:00] Good evening. I will tell you about my morning. So, this morning, I brought my parents out to Café Zola. And for a good two hours, I rotated between laughing and crying. My parents were sharing their stories about being refugees from Vietnam and Laos. And these are stories that I grew up with knowing bits and pieces about. But now that I'm a parent myself, and especially in these times when we're in the context of our doors closing and Syrian refugees having a more difficult time than coming when Southeast Asian refugees were welcomed, I have a more pressing need to understand their histories and try to connect it with what my history is like.
So, we're sitting in Café Zola. I'm laughing and crying, and I'm taking off my glasses. I'm wiping my face and putting them back on, if I just left my glasses on the table. And I asked my parents, "How did you do this?" They were only 20 years old. My father was a medevac pilot for the ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army. And essentially, he worked on the DMZ, rescuing Vietnamese soldiers on the line. He started when he was 18 years old. He was conscripted. But part of him was attracted to this because not only was he fighting in a civil war, but he loved American rock and roll. [audience chuckles]
So, some of his time has been motivated by the need for CCR, [audience chuckles] Santana [laughs] and Cream. [laughs] So, my father has his beginnings as a kind of reckless hippie. In 1973-1975, Vietnam, the day that Saigon fell to the communist forces, my dad ran home and his mother threw a bag of noodles together and said, "Run." So, he ran. He took his helicopter with his co-pilot and landed on a US Naval carrier and then watched as it was pushed overboard. So, literally $2 million pushed overboard in these last hours of a failed war to make room for more refugees coming through and more pilots running for their lives. He found his way to Guam, and then to a refugee camp in Pennsylvania and then was eventually sponsored by a Lutheran church in Gahanna, Ohio, which is this podunk town outside of Columbus.
A year later, my mother escaped from Laos. So, she had a more harrowing journey in that she and her siblings were starting to be rounded up by the Pathet Lao, the communists, because she was educated. So, she had been going to these re-education meetings and finally her older brother said, "We need to run.” So, she leaves. They can't tell their parents they're leaving, because they're afraid that my grandfather's cries would wake the neighbors and they would report on each other. So, they run. They squeeze into a canoe with 19 other people.
So, every time we go to Gallup Park, my mom points through those canoes and says, "You know, I escaped in a canoe about that size with siblings, a niece that was a month old." As they tried to cross the Mekong River, the Thai border guards were shooting at them, because they didn't want refugees coming to their country. So, they make it to the other side and are promptly thrown into a Thai prison camp. They languish there for months in horrific conditions. And I asked my mom, "How did you make it through this as a kid?"
I have an 11-year-old son and I can't imagine-- He can barely clue with himself. [audience chuckles] So, I can't imagine him coming up with an escape plan. [audience laughter] And she says, "We thought it was worth the risk to find a way to live freely than to be killed.” So, she finds her way to a Red Cross refugee camp, and gets sponsored with two other siblings to Gahanna, Ohio, via this podunk little Lutheran church, meets my father. My father greets her at the airport and quickly falls in love with her. He's immediately smitten. My mother, who's quite glamorous, refused to give him the time of day. [audience laughter]
But he was persistent and courted her, brought her to his apartment and time went on. They started a new life, started a family, became true Americans in every sense of the word. All along my parents said that there are people who helped them, who reached out in little ways, finding them a job, bringing them coats, telling them how the system worked, telling my mother how to order Domino's pizzas, [chuckles] and they persevered. At the end of our breakfast this morning, my father said, "There's a Vietnamese saying towards the end of the war when teenagers were being conscripted, it's [speaks Vietnamese] which is 'If you're deaf, you don't know what gunfire sounds like.”
He explained it as being, like, “Sometimes when you're facing these challenges, you just have to look past these obstacles and survive.” I'm here to tell you that their story has become my story, and I hope when you think of refugees, you think of my family, that they become your story too. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Dan: [00:13:13] Linh Song is a social worker and community organizer living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her husband and two children. She wrote in to tell us that she almost always ties in her community work with her roots through Vietnamese cuisine. But it was the conversation she had with her parents outside of food or work or children that helped them all finally connect. Linh's parents felt like they could be candid in those conversations, and Linh felt like she was finally ready to hear them.
So, our producer, Timothy Lou Ly, when he heard this story in this week's episode, he realized he had a striking amount of similarities in his family. I'm seeing now why you made this phone call.
Timothy: [00:13:55] Yeah. Absolutely. Well, my mom is Chinese, but she's from Vietnam and my dad is from Laos.
Dan: [00:14:04] That's crazy.
Timothy: [00:14:05] Yeah. Everything in Linh's story really mirrors my parents' experience as well. So, of course, I had to call home, I had to reach out to my mom and get her take.
Timothy’s Mother: [00:14:15] [speaks in foreign language]
Timothy: [00:14:22] When Saigon fell, everything just went with it. There was nothing. No businesses, no schools and no safety either. At a certain point, my mom started to hear gunfire. She'd heard about there being bodies in the streets, but she never dared to go see them. It was clearly time for them to go. And so, they gathered what little they could, and in the night, they fled down the countryside to escape on a boat.
Timothy’s Mother: [00:14:48] [continues to speak in foreign language]
Timothy: [00:14:52] They were taken to Malaysia and quartered on an island. And even then, their living conditions were pretty squalid. Food was miniscule, water was rationed and only accessible at certain times. All they had were literally the clothes that they were wearing. And so, my grandmother begged.
Timothy’s Mother: [00:15:10] [speaks in foreign language]
Timothy: [00:15:19] She asked for old clothes for her family.
Timothy’s Mother: [00:15:22] [continues to speak in foreign language]
Timothy: [00:15:29] My mom scrapped this kind of life together for a long time. She'd even scrounge around for containers to store and to carry water with, because it was so limited and inaccessible where they lived. They found these tall cans with these flat plastic lids on top, and ended up using those to drink from and to cook with whenever they could. But that actually wouldn't be the last time that she would see them either, because eventually, after making her way here to the United States, she'd see them again. But this time, she'd understand what they really were. They were cans of Pringles potato chips. When she saw this, she took a single potato chip out and then bit into it. I asked her how it tasted. Now, of course, with any potato chip, it's going to be crispy and salty, but she told me it tasted like this.
Timothy’s Mother: [00:16:18] [continues to speak in foreign language]
Timothy: [00:16:26] So, in Chinese, we say sour, sweet, bitter, spicy. Those are some of the main flavor components of Chinese cuisine. But together, they're also a metaphor for the ups and downs of life. When she tasted that potato chip, she was instantly transported back to Malaysia, the boat, Vietnam. She felt all of it. But when I asked her about the United States, she explained it as a different kind of feeling.
Timothy’s Mother: [00:16:54] [continues to speak in foreign language]
Timothy: [00:16:59] "When I was young, your grandfather would always talk about China. And so, I grew up always hoping that someday I could go back to the place where my ancestors come from. And for that, I'll always love China. With Vietnam, I'll always care for it and it'll always have a special place in my heart, because that's where I was born and that's where I was raised. But when it comes to America, I'm so thankful. I'm so thankful that America helped us and took us refugees in.
It's why my children have a better life now and why each of them have gone to college and graduated. Do you understand? Do you think you can put this up? I want Americans to know that we refugees are extremely grateful. You helped us, and that's why we'll always try to do some good. We're good people. Not every one of us is bad. We will always remember that you helped. Put that in."
Dan: [00:18:20] Wow That is it for The Moth Podcast this week. Man, all of you listening, I hope you have a story-worthy week. I also hope you realize that you work with somebody or see somebody on a daily basis that has a story in them more epic than you could imagine. Special thanks this week to Moth Podcast Producer Timothy Lou Ly.
Timothy: [00:18:52] Thank you.
Mooj: [00:18:55] Dan Kennedy is the author of the books, Loser Goes First, Rock On and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer with The Moth.
Dan: [00:19:05] Podcast production by Timothy Lou Ly. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.