(upbeat music) - Pushkin. (phone ringing) - Hi, how are you, baby? - Hi, grandma. - What have you been doing? - I'm gonna be hosting the second episode of the season. - Also, let me know and I'll put it on. - Have you ever had anything that you, I mean, you know the point of the show. Have you ever had anything that you want to apologize for? - Oh, there are probably many things. I'm sure I've been thoughtless in many ways. You know what I say, my daughter's name, I'm a (beep) (laughing) - Grandma. - I don't know if I did a lot of things on purpose. - Right, right, right. - But then again. (laughing) (upbeat music) - From Pushkin Industries, I'm Stevie Lane and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Song. (upbeat music) Right after the break. This is an "I Heart" podcast, Guaranteed Human. - Welcome, Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas, and examine why the US has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get the American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm/audiobooks or at audible, Spotify or wherever audio books are sold. - Hey, Song. - Hi, how are you doing? - This is Song. - All right. There's gonna be a lot of peripheral noises coming from me. But I guess that's part of the story too, so. - Actions have consequences. The world is ruled by cause and effect. So when Song tells the story of how he became the person you're hearing today, it's hard for him not to see it in karmic terms. His fate feels predetermined by something that happened one day in 1983 when he was eight years old. Song was living in Atlanta with his dad. And my father decided that he would send me to a Muslim school. And I just went for a year. - Song's dad was Rastafarian and his mom Catholic. But for this one year, he attended a strict Muslim school. - So, yeah, that day, the day in question, we had mosque and one of the, teachers told us that there were three girls that had written a song praising Allah, praising God. And they wanted to perform it for the school. - The teacher brought the three girls up. And in front of everyone, they sang. - And it was really cute song. I couldn't sing it. - Could you try to sing it? - No, no, don't do that to me. The only part I remember is at the end, it went Allah, Akbar, Allah, Akbar, repeated three times. - Song and two of his friends were sitting up front, close to the girls. - One of my friends noticed that one of the girls had a nervous tick, which was eye blinking and pointed it out. And the three of us started to laugh about it. - Laugh and imitate the girls tick. A teacher caught them doing it. And after the girls were done singing, asked Song and his friends to stand up. Then, to publicly shame them for having mocked the girl. - He made us sing the song in front of the old school and imitate her while we were singing it. - Oh my God. - So, yeah, we sang the song and we imitated her tick and everybody laughed and everybody laughed. - I have to say, it strikes me as a really strange punishment because it feels like it would just be w horrifying for her. - Right, I remember looking at her and she was crying. And she was crying while we were singing it. And I remember she was crying afterwards. - What was going through your head? - That was ashamed. That was ashamed of having laughed at her. And of course, I felt terrible for her. I mean, that also adds to the shame. Just having to watch somebody else in pain because of something that I had done. - Afterwards, Song and his friends were brought to a back room where they were beaten with a large paddle. - Did they call it the Board of Education? It had that written on the board. - Wait, really? - Yeah, it had holes drilled into it so that there would be less wind reduction. - Oh, my God. - Song's memory of the incident though, ends there. - I don't remember any more interaction with her. I wish, you know, like I don't remember her name. I just remember the situation. - Yeah. - And it's hard to say whether or not it would have stayed with me, had not my own condition progressed in the way that it did. (soft music) - Okay, so. You can probably hear it a little bit, but I have Tourette Syndrome. And it varies in severity, but I'm considered to be a pretty severe case. Song says it was right around that same time, the summer after that school year in 1983 that he first started displaying signs of the disorder, signs that were eerily similar to the singing girl. - The ticks that I had in the beginning were mostly facial, you know, and that was like the same ones that we were laughing at that girl for. It was like eye blinking and stuff with my eyes, you know, make faces smiling or opening my mouth wide. (laughing) And other people around me were commenting, like, "Why do you keep doing that?" And, "Oh, wow, you're doing this thing." (laughing) "Hey, you're doing this thing." And, you know, I would try to hide it and stuff. - What does that feel like in your body? - I can suppress it. It's very difficult. Anytime I'm suppressing it, I have to pay for it. You know, like it comes out worse afterwards. You know, it's like if you're in a staring contest with somebody and you're trying not to blink, you can feel when your eyes want to blink. But if you're not thinking about that, you're just gonna blink. It just happens so quickly that you can't really stop it. - Right, yeah. - By the time you're aware that it's coming, it's already happening. - But back then, when song was eight, nine, 10 years old, it was all just new and confusing. - Were you like scared? I don't know, it's funny. I remember like, 'cause, and I'm not equating these things, but like growing up, I had a lot of like, OCD, compulsive behavior. And I remember this one time doing this thing with my hands and my friend saying like, "What are you doing?" And I was like embarrassed, but I had to do it. And I just was like, first I was like, "What?" You know, like when I was trying to deny the thing that was happening right there. And then I was just like, "I don't know." And I like really didn't know. - Oh wow, that's, yeah, that's so similar what you're describing, that compulsion. And you're not wrong in equating every night. OCD and Tourette sort of co-morbid. But yeah, that's what is like, yeah, people would be like, "Well, why are you doing that?" I'd be like, "I don't know, you know?" - Song didn't know, and for a long time, his parents didn't know either. They thought he was just acting out. Song remembers conversations between his dad and grandmother and aunt around the kitchen table, them all talking about him and his tics, as though he weren't sitting right there. - My mother was a little more proactive.
I wanted to put it in a positive way. - Wait, wait, what do you mean? - Well, she, you know, she thought that she could punish it out of me, you know, so like her and like my stepdad, you should be like, this is how much money I'm gonna spend for Christmas and every time you make one of those noises, I'm gonna take five dollars off. - Yeah. - Yeah, I remember like her recording me and playing it back and being like this, which is how I'm like and stuff, like maybe she could embarrass it out of me, I don't know. It was always like the idea that I was doing it on purpose. - It wasn't until song was 14 that he was officially diagnosed, but that didn't offer much help. - They didn't know anything back then. - So, I've been prescribed a lot, a lot of medication. I would say that through most of my adolescence, I was pretty zonked out on anti-psychotics. - Most kids with Tourette syndrome, largely outgrow their tics by adulthood, but song never did. - There's a lot of things. I blinking, abdominal clenching, jumping, I poke myself in the eye sometimes, I grind my teeth to the point that some of them have been broken out of my mouth. - Oh my god. - Yeah, I gave myself two hernias from the age of 17 to 22. A lot of vocalizations, noises, was biting my tongue for a while. A huge scar on my tongue from chewing on it. At some point in everybody's life, their body will rebel against them. And it's just sort of part of the process of living, right? And you never know how it's gonna go, but it's gonna happen. If you're lucky, that's like in very old age. But to be aware of the weight of that in your youth and to have to carry that around with you your whole life, it's just a nightmare. - As song got older, as it became clear that his tics were here to stay, he started asking himself, why? Why me? - I had this sort of nagging suspicion that me having Tourette's was connected to me making fun of that girl. It was some sort of punishment that I was inflicted with, you know, because of what I had done to her. It's easy to imagine some supernatural connection, like there were times where I thought, like, oh, well, maybe because I did this in a house of worship, the day it is punishing me. - It felt like there must be some karmic connection. It was all too uncanny, the timing of his symptoms, the similar facial tics he shared with the girl. Had you ever experienced bullying? - Oh, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, it's like constant. It goes on today, to this day. It happened on the train, on the way here. - What? - Yeah, people making fun of me, you know. It's just, yeah, it's constant. I mean, it was really bad in high school. And that was just, your peers just making fun of you all the time. Teachers as well. - Teachers as well? - Yeah, like mocking me in class. I dropped out in 11th grade. I was pretty depressed. I just couldn't, I just couldn't be there anymore, you know. - Of course, song is a reasonable person. And the most rational part of him understands that his Tourette wasn't caused by his making fun of the girl. And yet. - It still hasn't stopped me from thinking about it. - Yeah. - For most of the time, I've really just felt like I wanted to apologize, you know. You know, I'm regretful. I know how it feels. The other thing is like, when you deal with something like that that's socially stigmatizing or like isolating any like effort that you make to make yourself visible is a victory. Like I feel like every any time I leave the house, any time I go out in public and socialize, like I'm proud of myself. And so, you know, to do that at that age. - To stand up in front of a school you mean? - Yeah, yeah. That she got up there and did that is, you know, that's a courageous person. I also want to know that she's doing okay. - Yeah, when you think about her, like, do you imagine that she has Tourette's too or no? - I mean, that's the thing is, you know, I'm like, I just hope that I hope that it was just a tick and it went away when she was a kid, you know. Nobody should have to go through this. That's why I was saying, I hope that she's doing okay. - Yeah. - I don't know, I'm just sorry, you know, I'm sorry. - It's been 40 years since the incident. 40 years since song has seen the singing girl. He has no idea how to find her. He doesn't even know her name, which is why he reached out to me. - I mean, I don't, I just don't know where I would start. - Song isn't in touch with anyone from the school anymore. He was only there the one year. He can't offer much besides the name of the school. - Sister Clara Muhammad. - Though song admits to me, his lack of leads isn't the only reason he reached out. - 'Cause when, what would I do? When I just like show up at somebody's door, if I were able to find them and knock on the door and be like, "Hey, remember me from that time?" Hey, I've been tracking you. - I've been looking for you for 40 years. - Right. (laughs) That's like super scary. - And so, I go searching for the singing girl after the break. (upbeat music) - Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, "The American Way of Killing" investigates America's gun violence crisis. Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas, and examine why the US has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get the American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm/audiobooks or at audible, Spotify, or wherever audio books are sold. - I think about the task ahead of me. Finding a girl from a random school assembly 40 years ago, without so much as a first name, or even a school photo. It's not a lot to go on. But though song doesn't remember the singing girl, all I need is to find one person who does. One person who remembers the incident and can say, "Oh yeah, that was so-and-so." And so, I begin with the information I do have, the name of the school. - Good afternoon, I have a great day. I'm on the school, this is where she and I help you. I'm hoping the school might have class lists or yearbooks where I can find the names of songs-old classmates. But I learn they don't keep records that far back. - I couldn't help you. You said 1983. - As for the teachers who worked back then, most all of them have since retired. But I get the names of a few. - Jeanette Newman, Shafika Duan, D-A-W. - And I give them each a call to see if they have any memory of song. - I don't remember people in the one with the left land little. - She was in fourth grade? - No. - None of them do. And it turns out songs fourth grade teacher died some years back. - Why is he telling the phone this time? - Yeah, well, let me, can I actually tell you the story? Because. - One teacher does give me something useful. The name of one of song-sold classmates, a woman who, she says, has an amazing memory. Her name is Crystal. - She would have noticed and she probably would have remembered. So she may be the best person to go to. - Hello. - What with all the scam callers these days? I tried to sound relaxed and casual. - Hi, I'm calling for Crystal. Is Crystal available? - Do you know Crystal? Nailed it. Do you know Crystal? - She's my mom. - Oh. - This is not a spam call, right? - No, no, no, sorry. I'm a journalist. I'm a radio producer and I'm working with an old, it's not spam, I promise. - Okay, sounds good. - She was different in so far and she was not Muslim when he joined our school. - As promised, Crystal's memory is sharp. She remembers song immediately. - I think he might have been maybe the first non-Muslim. student that I knew, and if I remember correctly.
He was like light skin, with curly hair. Crystal doesn't recall the incident and mosque though. But she does provide me with the names of other students at the school. The team arms, Jamila, who else was with them? Rukia. And those students provide the names of more students. Nassim, Sakina, Malik, Rashida, Tafiya, Turemon, Tamiqa. Lisa, Rukia, Daisy, Aisha. And those students have theories. If anybody was going to get up and sing, it would have been Zenovia. That may have been Jamila. Rashida may have had like a little kick. But none of them bear out. You know, I've never performed in a performance like that in my life. I don't know who he's talking about. Yeah, now my students didn't have a kick. After a few months, I start running out of people to call. As I'm told over and over, Clare Mohammed was a tiny school, only about 10 kids per grade, sometimes fewer. It was the sort of school where everyone knew everyone and where everyone is still in touch. Many of songs old schoolmates now attend the same mosque. And whenever I can't find a name or number, it's always someone's cousin or close friend. I can get his number, too. I was married to a sister for a minute. No, really? Yes, so I can definitely get that number. I get numbers, and I reach out to all of them. Group texts are texted, Facebook groups alerted. Alumni chats queried. I even contact the Imam of the school mosque back then. Everyone is friendly and seems to genuinely want to help. But over and over, I hear the same thing. I don't remember that incident at all. And I'm sure I was there. No, I don't remember any of that. And I've never heard it since. I don't remember it happening. None of us remember the incident. I don't recall that at all. Not at all. No, none of us remember. Unfortunately, I don't. And I don't remember who this person is. I don't remember any children having texts. I just don't know if he's going to find the person who he's looking for. I don't know. I search for over two years. No one remembers the incident. No one remembers the singing girl. [MUSIC PLAYING] Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. I feel like by now, if it were possible to find the singing girl, I would have. So there are a few possibilities. There were two girls I learned who've died in the years since 1983. Maybe the singing girl was one of them. Or maybe she's one of the very few students I somehow haven't been able to reach. Or maybe there's something song is misremembering. I speak with a psychologist who studies memory, and she tells me that we often distort memories in ways that help us make sense of the world. It's possible that while some parts of the memory are true, there are other parts song invented to help explain his Tourette's. I will say the number of people from your school that I've talked to, like the sheer list of names, is so long. And I mean, I check in with song to run through all the names I've called. Whoa, that's a lot. Whoa, and nobody remembers. Nobody remembers. Well, that's crazy. Yeah. For years, song has been holding this apology that he needs to express. And now it seems he has no one to express it too. But maybe there's still another way forward. Recently, on a long flight, I watched the movie "Rental Family." It's about this industry in Japan where actors are paid to play family members or friends in real people's lives. Standards, they're called. For instance, a lonely client might hire a fake friend to go to the movies with, or a widower might hire someone to play the role of his late wife so he can say to her the things he wishes he still could. It sounds like science fiction, but apparently it works. Clients know the actors aren't their real daughters or fathers, but they can still solve real issues by proxy. As wild as it sounds, I wonder if something similar might help song. Not a professional stand-in, but an unofficial one. Maybe there's a conversation song can have, not with the singing girl, but with a stand-in of sorts that will allow him to move on. So I start looking around. I want someone who will get song, appreciate his candor and dark sense of humor. My contact Tourette's advocacy groups put out calls on social media. I speak with a number of kids with Tourette's, who are all great, but not quite right. I search for nearly as long as I searched for the singing girl herself. Over a year goes by. And then I meet Chloe. Chloe is 13 years old and lives in Ireland. The first time we speak, she tells me about her newest tick. Blurting out the sentence, I love cocaine. She says, "It's a real problem at the airport." And in that moment, I know my search is over. When I bring the whole idea up to song, he's skeptical. Of course he is. But I tell him more about Chloe. She's from a small village where she doesn't know anyone else like her. She's only ever met one other girl with Tourette's, who lives far away. So she doesn't have many people to talk to. That's something song understands. So song says he's open to talking. He hopes it might be helpful for Chloe. And I hope it might be helpful for him. Both of our hopes come true, but not in the way either of us expect. - Hey, Chloe. - Hi. - How are you? - Good, thanks, how are you? - Pretty good. - On what is morning for song and evening for Chloe, we all meet up on a video call. Chloe and Song make polite small talk at first, chatting about their hobbies. - Make you swear you won. - Yeah, I like to bake as well. - Yeah. - It's difficult. - Yeah, everything that I bake turns out scones. (laughs) - Does that mean they're hard? - Yeah, they can hard. (laughs) But it's not long before they're talking about their texts. - One thing I don't like is I blow kisses at people and I have gotten quite a lot. - If I was doing that, it could be a problem. (laughs) - Look at her, I'm a child, so it's not like as weird. - Like Song, Chloe's texts have changed over time. She says she's constantly picking up new ones. - Like my meowing one, I got that one 'cause I was like messing around with my cat. And then, yeah, and then it just got stuck. - Yeah, it's annoying whenever I pick up new ones. I'm like, "Ah, why am I doing that now?" (laughs) - Yeah, I'm like, "I can't tell you, it has to be that one." - Yeah, like I don't know, I have one that's like running my fingers through my hair. - I've always thought like, "Well, if I go to France or something and then I pick up a French chick." - A French chick? - So I kind of want to have a French chick now. (laughs) (gentle music) - Song has been living for 40 years with something relatively new to Chloe. She has questions for him about what life might be like when she's an adult. - Well, to like, like, work with your texts. - Well, I mostly work from home. But I worked in comic stores for about 14 years. - Did you get like any weird customers or anything like about your texts? - Sometimes, yeah. - Huh. - Song tells Chloe a story from when he was living in London working the counter at a comic store there. A blind man walked in with his guide. - It was a really weird image that the blind guy was maybe like a 70 year old white guy gray hair, dark glasses. And his guide was like this tall, really muscular black guy. - Song says they looked like they had just walked off the pages of a comic book themselves. The blind man approached Song, started talking to him. - He was talking about blindness and then he goes, but, you know, we all have our thing. You know, I'm blind and you've got a neurological disorder. I'm like, how do you know that? And he's like, oh, it's a different smell.
People with neurological disorders have a different smell and I was like, what do we smell like? And he said, he said like ozone, like electricity. It made sense to song in a weird way. He says there's this feeling of electricity in his spine a tingling or buzzing. It's like always there, right? Yeah. So you feel that as well. Yeah, pretty much constantly, to be honest. Yeah. And that just kind of tripped me out. I was like standing there dumbfounded because like, yeah. How did that make you feel? I mean, at the time, I don't really deal with this as much anymore. I've gotten to a point where I just don't really give a shit about what anybody thinks, you know? But I think when when I was younger, I used to really feel like I was repulsive to people. At the time when the guy said it, the way that I thought about it was like, well, even to blind people, I can be repulsive. Like, even somebody who can't see what I'm doing has a response to me, you know? Oh, definitely. I do just get that feeling a lot because I feel like a lot of people don't like me. And I'll show if it's like my texts are a lot, like especially at school. Chloe tells us about something that happened at an after school club. She was sitting with some friends when a boy came up. And he started feeling like bah, bah, bah, and just mocking me a bunch. And he told me that it sounds like a dying pig to put it in crying just hysterical. I was like, I have to rest. It's in a relative condition. I can't help it. And he was like, I don't give a shit and just kept doing it. I remember going home later. And then I was like crying. I was saying, I just want to be normal. I just want to be normal. I felt that for the longest time. I'm just not normal. And then I just would love to be normal. I'd be my one wish if I got one. Yeah. Song pauses. Talking to him after, did you ever feel like there was any sense of, I don't know, like accountability for him having done that or regret for having done that? No, like, once he did give me half an Oreo. So that was great. Did he ever apologize to you? No. I don't think anyone has ever apologized to me for making fun of my tears. Well, so I used to go to a Muslim school for one year when I was about, when I was eight years old. I hope she knows that like, you child and like, that you are very sorry about it. For a moment, Chloe considers the boy who made her cry at after school. I'd be very grateful if he, like, apologized to me, but be like, thank you for apologizing. Like, it would mean something to me, like, for him to apologize. He's still me. He's still me. Sometimes it takes people a while to, to figure out what it is that they've done and what effect it's had on other people. Like, I know I can say for myself, like, the idea of apologizing, I don't think really hit me until I was in my, in my twenties. You know, so it could happen sometimes, sometimes people surprise you. But until then, song offers this, not to the singing girl, but to this one. Well, I mean, in the place of a boy, I say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that I hurt your feelings. I'm sorry that I made fun of you. It wasn't right. I didn't understand what it was to not have control over my own body and how frustrating that could be. I know that it's not your fault, and I know that it's hard for you, and I shouldn't have made things worse for you. You know, I've been around for a while now, and if I was going to put a bit of, you know, 50-year-old into this boy's apology, I would actually say, I had things about myself that I felt insecure about, and it has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with how I feel about myself, and I would say that you are very brave and very strong to be you and to live your life and your skin. And it's not your fault, and I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It felt like it's really good to hear that, just to imagine like the kid that was making fun of me being so nice. That was just really amazing. I thought Chloe could act as a stand-in for the girl-in-song story, but it's song who acts the part of the boy in Chloe's. I really hope that he does now to remorse for him, and is like song in the way that he feels bad for him and how he's so nice. Yeah. What I needed to do is, and the next time I see him, just around my village or something, I need to get his number, then when this podcast comes out, I'll send it to him. Oh well. I'd be like, you better do this for me, and you will apologise, I'm forcing you to. Give me the other half of that Oreo while you're at it. That's amazing. In the end, song got to apologise, not for karma, but for Chloe. After the call, I check in with song. He's really happy to have apologised to Chloe, and he hopes it made her feel better. But it hasn't entirely made him feel better. There's still some small part of him that hopes the singing girl is out there, that hopes that maybe one day he'll find her and finally get to say sorry. There's an undeniable instinct to explain the randomness of our lives. Maybe that's all karma is really, a collection of consequences to which we assign causes. It's just the way it is, is a lot scarier than things happen for a reason. And so we can't help but search for order, for answers, for solutions, even when we know there are none. I used to think maybe I would be cured if I was struck by lightning, song once wrote me. This thought first occurred to me while riding my bike across the Williamsburg bridge in the rain. So it's kind of like a fantasy, that I'll get hit by lightning and be fixed. And honestly, who knows, song said, it just might work. Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is skiing with the damaged deposit, take this moment to decide if we meant it if we tried.
This episode of Heavyweight was produced by me, Stevie Lane, along with Jonathan Goldstein and Lisa Wang. Our senior producer is Kaleela Holt, a tutorial guidance from Emily Condon. Special thanks to Phoebe Flanagan, Daphne Chen, Ben Nett of Half-Free, Neil Drumming, and Dr. Jillian Murphy, who is extremely helpful on the subject of memory. Emma Munger mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Samson, Bobby Lorde, and she herself, Emma Munger. Additional scoring by Chris Sibersky and Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thens, courtesy of Epitaph Records. Song is an artist, animator, and illustrator. And if you'd like to check out his work, and you should, you can find it at SongRiddle.com, spelled S-O-N-G-E-Riddle.com. Follow us on Instagram @heavyweightpodcast or email us at
[email protected]. We also have a free newsletter at patreon.com/heavyweight. Jonathan will be back next week with a brand new episode. Welcome, Glau Boe here. Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas, and examine why the US has never quite understood its own problem, and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get The American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm/audiobooks or at audible, Spotify, or wherever audio books are sold.
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