Inheriting Narratives (July 2024)

Hey, Immigrantly Family, Sadia Khan here. I have some great news. Our new newsletter, Hyphenly, is out. It releases three times a week. It's a no-fluff newsletter with heartaches, heartfelt stories, and all the fields of living in between cultures. Come for the nuance, stay for the vibes. You can subscribe to our newsletter by clicking on the link in our show notes. Don't wait to see all of you there. And now, today's episode. Quick note before we start. For Immigrant Heritage Month, we are revisiting one of those conversations that stays with you. Emily Kwong takes us into the messy, beautiful layers of immigrant identity, family trauma, and healing. And trust me, parts of this hit way too close to home. If you've ever wrestled with who you are, where you come from, or how your family shaped you, this month for you. Come back next week for a brand new Immigrantly episode. Until then, take care and enjoy. Hello and welcome to Immigrantly, the podcast where we delve into the rich tapestry of immigrant experiences and the diverse stories that make up the American mosaic. Today, I am so excited to have Emily Kwong with us, a dedicated journalist and storyteller known for her exceptional work at NPR. Emily has reported on a wide range of topics from climate change and science to human interest stories that illuminate the diverse experiences of immigrant communities. Her insight for reporting and ability to capture the essence of the human experience has earned her recognition and admiration in journalism. I've been listening to her new podcast inheriting about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which basically explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. Like Japanese American incarceration, or the Third World Liberation Front, or World War II in the Pacific Islands. To be honest, I find myself nodding at what Emily is saying or asking her guests. It's like sitting with her in a living room. The connection I feel to these stories is so strong and I am so excited to talk to her about one particular story that she covered of a Muslim family. Her stories show passion for uncovering the nuances of identity, culture and belonging. And I can't wait to dive into her journey, inspirations and the lessons she's learned along the way. So let's get started. [Music] I am so glad that we are having this conversation. I've been binge listening, inheriting and I have so many questions. But before we do that, Emily, and I was thinking about this before we jumped on this call. Where do I start? You know, the podcast is so interesting. But then I was like, you know what, maybe we'll start with your story first. Because I do hear smattering of it during different episodes. So tell me about your upbringing. What was childhood like? First of all, Saadia, thank you so much for having me on the program. I love the work you do and we're like of the same universe. We're trying to elevate immigrant stories, refugee stories and I'm just really happy to be here. And I guess my childhood was full of talking and listening for some really specific and unusual reasons. One, my grandmother owned a daycare center. So I grew up taking care of other people's children and watching parents interact with their children. I was just exposed to so many more kinds of families than most kids. Most kids, maybe they don't encounter other kids until kindergarten or they're in preschool and the parents are somewhere else. Because I worked at my grandma's daycare center, I was interacting with parents a lot and seeing the ways that their personalities showed up in their kids. I think from a very young age, I was very fascinated by families and was always talking to people of different generations, grandparents, aunts, uncles. And then I really loved to listen from a really young age. I was asking personal questions and making direct eye contact at a time that I was also being told like, "Don't talk to strangers and mind your business." But I was just so curious about other people and I loved the feeling of creating safety for someone to open up. And I feel really lucky that I've found a profession where that is a good thing, you know, where I can use that power for good. As you were describing your childhood, I was like, "Okay, that's great. You were listening to other parents. You were listening to other kids. Who was listening to you?" Oh my gosh. My therapist might say that I could have stood to be listened to a little more because I think I was trying. I was such a people-pleasing eldest daughter. I would say that even though I was surrounded by a lot of adults and expectations, my own parents were really good at supporting what I was curious about. They did things like, okay, my dad's an arts buff. He grew up in the New York City area, Chinese American, second-gen, and he would always take me to museums and theater and just walking around the neighborhoods. And that's how I fell in love with New York growing up in the suburbs of Connecticut. I always knew that, like, that's where his family was from. And I would just share with him my opinions about, like, art and stories and whatever we were absorbing from the city. And he would, like, really listen and engage me in conversation. And then my mom, she was really good at listening to, like, feelings. She's, like, a very sensitive emotional person. So I would say, like, my parents were really good at listening to me. Maybe the broader community where I grew up, like, my teachers and other relatives. For some reason, I just felt like I had to, like, meet some expectation of theirs. So I put a lot of academic pressure on myself. I was, like, really, really focused on getting good grades. But that pressure never came from my parents. It came from this, like, systemic feeling that I didn't belong in this, like, all-white town as a mixed Chinese American person. But my parents, they were listening to me. They just worked a lot, so they were kind of busy. But I loved every moment I got with them. What were you curious about? As a kid, I really was curious about how things worked. So sometimes that was, like, the physical world. I had, like, books with diagrams about beehives and public infrastructure and drill bits and radio parts worked. And I loved those, and I read those voraciously in, like, a magic school bus kind of way. Like, you know how Ms. Frizzle takes people inside the human body in one episode? That was my favorite one. But I also was interested in how, like, relationships worked. So when I was, like, hanging out with friends, I was constantly talking to their parents. Like, as I grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, that's my hometown. Whenever I'd go over to hang out with a friend, I would always end up in the kitchen talking to the parents. And I think to myself, like, okay, what is it about them that, like, was passed on to my friend? And how does my friend relate to their parents, and how does their family function differently than me? So I think I've just always been fascinated by how things work, both human things and non-human things. Emily, it's so interesting you say that. I wonder why this particular relationship was or still is probably so important to you, right? Parent-child dynamic, you talk about how at your grandmother's daycare, you were observing that, listening to, and then even at your friend's house. Why this particular relationship? Why does it stand out to you? Sadia, I have no idea. I actually truly don't know. I'm sure, again, we should probably call it my therapist. Like, why is Emily so obsessed with family relationships? I don't know. I guess everyone's got a thing, and this is mine. And so I just have leaned into it really hard. And maybe the other reason is that it seemed like a lot of life could be understood if you went back a generation. Okay, so flash forward to, like, high school. My friends would be complaining about, like, blah, blah, blah. Like, they're upset with their coach. They're upset with their boyfriend. They're upset with that person. They have a crush on whatever. Somehow, it always, like, drifted into the realm of family, even though we weren't talking about that. And I think psychology and mental health spaces are revealing this more and more that some of those formative years of brain development happened before the age of five. And who is around you when you're less than five? It's your parents. Yeah. Or it's your caretakers, whoever they were. Adverse childhood experiences, aces. That was ones Lingo people didn't know. Now people say, oh, I have a lot of aces or less aces, and that would affect my life. I think there's been this, like, recognition as a society that childhood, but by extension family, has a massive and outsized influence on people's lives in a way that we have not fully appreciated. And I think I intuitively figured that out as a kid. I was like, wait a minute. So as I'm trying to understand the world, if I don't understand how someone was raised, I don't fully understand them. And there's been so many times when I would have like beef with someone or be angry at them or be like, God, they're so, oh, and then I learned something about how they were raised. And I was like, oh, all right, I get what's happening. Yeah, that's an interesting connection because you're almost empathetic towards somebody else because you know their family dynamic in a way. Yes. Oh, interesting. And I think I'm a person who like aims to understand rather than be understood. Whether I'm understood or not, I really don't care. Oh, wow. Because I am a middle child and I'm always -- That's why you're so even killed and calm. No, I'm not calm at all, Emily. In fact -- You're not calm. Oh, my gosh. I am a different person when I'm interviewing people versus when I am with my family. I feel like -- Oh, my gosh, revelation. I am anxious and I feel like I don't fit in. Oh. I have an older sister, a younger brother, and I literally feel sandwiched and I feel like, okay, they have strong personalities in a way, especially the family dynamic that has evolved over the years is so perfect with both of them versus me because I'm still discovering my relationship with my parents because I feel like I was always this one kid who my parents weren't really paying attention to, although they love me daily and I know that they do. But it was always like, you know, okay, she exists in this universe, but the older and the younger were more where their attention lies. And I know if my parents listen to this, they'll be so pissed. They are Asian parents. They won't appreciate this. This is my therapist talking. I love that our therapists have entered the chat. Yes. The thing is, it's interesting how, you know, our families and our relationship with them really influences our relationships with the outside world, outside our familial connections, right? Yeah. That's the way to be, that play out for you. Well, I think that against my will, but because our team and my editor told me to, I explore that on an airing. Like, I am not a memoirist in any way. You know, my background is in public radio journalism, audio. I don't even know what to call it these days. It's changing so much. I'm not a pastor, but, you know, for the past 10 years plus, I've been interviewing other people about them and really decentering myself. And I realized pretty early on that inheriting would only resonate with people if I was open about myself. And so if you listen to the show pretty much from episode one on, I'm weaving in these personal revelations and stories. And I think that I get the most into it in episode five, which is called Leah and Japanese American incarceration. Her words jerked me back to when I was 17. My mom was sitting at the end of my bed as I was trying to explain to her how I truly couldn't get up, how it felt like all the marrow had disappeared from my bones. My mind was stumbling between numbness and suicidal thoughts. So each of our episodes is about a person and an event and we're making the past personal in that that person was shaped by that event irrevocably and is exploring that through the storytelling. And I'm helping them. I'm like facilitating conversations. But in Leah's episode in particular, I talk a lot about my mental health, my mom's mental health, how me and my mom's mental health has echoed each other, how it drove us apart, how it brought us back together. And I think that like my capacity for hard conversations comes from this like lifelong need to understand like where my depression and anxiety comes from, where certain instincts I have. Like when life gets hard, I want to go to sleep. Where the hell did that come from? I felt like such a freak. You know, when I was like younger, I was like, why do I just have this intense urge to go to sleep? And it's more than puberty. It's more than being a teenager. It's like there's something profoundly in me that's like the only safe place is to do nothing and to sleep. And it wasn't until I really started to see some of these behaviors in my own mom who has panic disorder who lives with depression that I was like, oh, all right. And as me working through that in our relationship, it shows up as like, okay, I have to sleep sometimes, but I don't get so mad at myself about that. I'm like, oh, that's just me. I got to work with it. Like that's my flow. Sometimes I just quit and fall asleep. And how can I stop beating myself up when that happens and get back up again and say to myself like, that was just what your executive functioning needed. You needed to have a little depressive episode for a weekend to two weeks. That's just your flow. And it's what gives you the power to hold space for like some of the hardest things. Like those things cannot be separated. These gifts your mother gave you, this curse your mother gave you, they are one and the same. They're two sides of the same coin. I like the way you frame it. And you're right. I've listened to a few episodes of inheriting almost all I believe. I have seen that evolution. Initially, you sounded more cautious in how much you shared about yourself and the conversation was really centered around conversations that were happening between different folks. And then in this particular episode that you mentioned, you do talk more about yourself. And I wonder why this particular episode, why did you choose that? Excellent question. Wow. First of all, thank you for listening because I do think this podcast is kind of an emotional marathon. And I was so worried about putting this out there in the world when like life's hard enough. But I'm also like sometimes diving in deeper is what makes it easier. But the reason is really simple. This episode, Leah and Japanese American incarceration, it deals the most directly with mental health conditions and epigenetics. So Leah, her father as a two-month-old was shipped away to Manzanar Relocation Center in the middle of the desert with his whole family. His father was arrested and put in a prison camp, was not a spy for Japan, but the whole family along with 125,000 other Japanese Americans was incarcerated during World War II. Her father is no longer alive, but she believes that the trauma that her dad, all his siblings, his parents, and then the trauma her mom's side of the family, also Japanese American experienced in this three and a half years of incarceration shaped her mental health. And we now know from research that people who were incarcerated under Executive Order 9066 experienced much higher levels of avoidance and detachment later in life. Those are symptoms of PTSD. Whether they were diagnosed or not, the markers were there. And we know from the new science, newer-ish science of epigenetics that trauma in one generation can affect the generation below it that didn't experience directly the traumatic event at all. And that's because chronic stress and violence can leave actual marks on your genes that influences how they are read. Our environment can change our genes. We didn't know this. And so I was like, wow, if there ever were a place to talk about mental health explicitly, it's this episode. And the other reason I talk about myself so much in that episode is that Leah Bash and I just clicked on this topic. She was the one I talked to about the most with my mom. Actually, can I read you a text message from her? Absolutely. Oh my gosh, your story is about your mom. You were so vulnerable. I'm so glad you felt comfortable sharing them in the episode. And I said, Leah, I could not have done it without you and your courage, too. And she wrote, you're so welcome. I'm so glad we had the courage to do it together. I feel like we both helped each other talk about our parents and our mental health. Leah has bipolar disorder. I have anxiety and depression. We both were able to talk about that really openly on the show together. I love that as I was listening through all these episodes, I kept thinking, you know, you facilitate these conversations about heritage and identity with different generations. How do you make sure that you're intentional about how revisiting trauma may impact them because it is a lot of agony and anguish that they probably go through once they narrate that story to you, right? This is kind of at the heart of inheriting's process. I kind of say to people, it's not really a podcast, it's more of like a process. So we put out an open call for anyone who wanted to delve into one historical moment and how it influenced their family to write to us. So right off the bat, we knew we were going to hear from people who were kind of ready to at least consider publicly talking about history and maybe trauma. Trauma was kind of like a bedfellow of this whole podcast. Pretty quickly, we hired a consulting psychologist to advise our team. Her name is Sherry C. Wang. She's incredible. We also had a training with the Dart Center. They are kind of one of the leading voices in trauma-informed journalism. And from those two places, we kind of built a process that was designed to be trauma-informed. So what did that look like? Instead of me leading the interviews, I'm facilitating the interviews for all of our guests. I call them our families. In the episode three, Victoria and the Cambodian Genocide, all of the questions that Victoria asked her father or we asked her father about his experience as a child under the Khmer Rouge were all reviewed by Victoria. She wrote some of them. She asked some of them. If she didn't feel comfortable asking them, I jumped in. And I think the thing we made clear to Bo and to any person who was asked by their own relatives, like can I talk to you about this for this podcast, was expressing to that individual why we wanted to talk to them. Bo knew when he sat down with Victoria that the reason she wanted to talk to him was to understand how he became the parent he is today. And we pre-interviewed with everyone too. So like off mic, we had a conversation with Bo where we really asked him, do you want to dig into these memories? Do you want to go there? Are you sure? Because when I got Victoria's pitch, I was like, there's no way her dad is going to want to talk about this. This is so unbelievably. And we were wrong. He did want to talk about it for his daughter's sake because of what she wanted to know. But also, as is revealed in the episode, if you listen to it, Bo says, thank you so much for listening. It's really important for me that your generation and humanity itself understands things like this, the most unspeakable, difficult things. And in every one of our episodes, there's an epilogue to let you know how people are doing ever since the conversations, the facilitated conversations. And that was important to me too, as far as helping the listener know that these people's lives are going on. They shared these stories for your benefit. And also for their own, Bo has started to realize things about himself that he didn't, how PTSD shows up in his life. He says, I didn't know you can still carry that kind of pain in your body. It's been decades. I was just a kid, but it still affects me to this day. Like around the recent years, has he recently accepted, okay, maybe this is PTSD, and maybe this isn't just my moment of weakness. This is just something that's been ingrained in me when I was younger, and this is something I still carry with me. And that's like an open conversation now between him and his daughter in a way that I believe is really good. I don't think it's healthy for all of us to walk around suppressing our struggles. I think there was a previous generation that thought that was true, and it made that generation really sick. Emily, in terms of choosing these particular stories, what was the process? We kind of narrowed in on what we identified as like, I would say a dozen historical moments that really shaped US history and world history. We put those moments into an open call-out form, and then sent it to like 300 nonprofits, professors, individuals. We had this massive outreach campaign last summer, and just hope for the best, and found the people who were most willing to talk, who could commit to the time, and really tried to also represent like a diversity of Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences. So on our show, we have families from Korea, Cambodia, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Japan, Guam, and the Philippines. That's a pretty representative group. I wish we had far more Pacific Islander stories, and that's really a goal of mine for season two is to have more native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander stories. The team is all Asian American. We don't have a Pacific Islander person who works at LA Studios at this time, who we could bring in. I hope that will change. I really hope this podcast actually encourages us as an industry to tell more Pacific Islander stories, but really to create space for Pacific Islander journalists and young storytellers to come up and add that voice to API spaces where so often like Pacific Islander voices get really, really minimized. So when I was listening to Saira and Shaquille's story, I assume it's classified as Pakistani story in a way, right? Because you said there is an Indian and a Pakistani story, but Shaquille is originally from India. Shaquille's from India, Saira's from Pakistan, and that story was actually not found through the call-out. Because there were some historical moments where like we just didn't get enough pitches. And I was like, okay, we can't have everyone come to us, like we have to go to them. So we just started calling all of these South Asian organizations and started meeting activists, and that's what led us to Shaquille Sayed. And then in the story I say, Shaquille was like, you don't want to tell my story, you should talk to my wife, and that's how we met Saira. I will come back to this story because it's so important and it hit home first. But talking about different historical events, I am curious to know if you had Partition of India on the list. Oh my gosh, it wasn't in the call-out, but in my dream version. I wanted to talk about multiple historical events in a single episode. And in that episode, Shaquille and Saira 9/11's impact, we talk about partition briefly. We talk about the Bosnian war and genocide briefly. We talk about 9/11, and we talk about Israel and Gaza and Palestine. We talk about so many things that have touched the Muslim-American community. And I think that's because Shaquille and Saira, you know, they're older, they're going to be like, Emily's calling us old on this podcast, but like, Shaquille's been doing activism for so long, and it's such, through his life, through Saira's life, it's such an opportunity for our generation, a younger generation, to really learn, like, all the forces that have driven people here over time that have affected them even so in the US. It wasn't on the list. It was like a hope for thing. And it's something that people do not think about because it's not just Muslim diaspora, right? Right. Like it's Hindu diaspora, Sikh diaspora. Yes. These stories are so interconnected, and the narrative, at least the predominant narrative in the US is that there was Gandhi, and everything happened peacefully, and not recognizing that two million people died. It was bloody, and it was brutal, something that I am very, very passionate about, right? Because when people say, oh, why can't we be like Gandhi, and I'm like, what the actual fuck? Do you even know the history? I don't think they do. And that's why at the depth of the ignorance is there's so many reasons I wanted to make this show. The other was my ignorance. I didn't know about partition for a long time, until I was an adult. And gosh, we really want to make a season two that focuses on food and recipe reclamation and food pathways, but also use it as an excuse to talk about the other six histories we didn't get into. And the 36 after that, this is an open call for anyone, honestly, if we get funding for a season two, we could do a whole episode just about partition itself. And my dream is that we can make a show that really spends time with all these events in a really deliberate way. How do you ensure that your personal bias does not influence stories that you report? How do you confront and overcome bias in how you're telling these stories? So I'm a science reporter for NPR's shortwave podcast, which is where all my epigenetics knowledge first came from. I know from my other job that everyone has cognitive bias. It's like a shortcut pathway for our brain to keep us safe. And some of those biases, many of them are totally unfounded. We see a person who's black or brown and we assume something versus someone who is white or light-skinned. How to disrupt those pathways is by being really deliberate, really being honest about your bias. And I think that one of the best ways to do that is to really be honest with yourself about what you don't know. So because I mentioned earlier that there wasn't anyone of Pacific Islander heritage on the team, and so that was Leilani and the Occupation of Guam, which is an episode that talks about a lot of history that I didn't know for one, two, from a vantage point that like just I don't have any family members or friends who share that vantage point. That looks like really being honest about what we didn't know, reading a lot of books and talking to a lot of journalists, having sensitivity listeners listen to the episode to catch our gaps in knowledge, to ask, are we characterizing this in a culturally sensitive way? And I actually went to extra ends with that episode because we didn't have the working knowledge as a team. And that's why I really think the best way to overcome this is to actually hire in a more diverse way, which I don't have control over, but if I did, if I did, if I did, that's what I would do. I think that you actually cannot overcome your biases. I think you can change them, you can be aware of them, but the best thing you can possibly do is to work with people who are not like you and ask their opinion. That makes sense. Be prepared for what they say. But then on like a personal interview level, I was a local reporter in Alaska for five years and I think that pounding the pavement like day to day, reporting on like everything from house fires to parades to vigils to the best of times, the worst of times in people's lives was really humbling. And I think that training as a journalist helps you develop the muscle to be aware of your own preconceptions and internal stereotypes, because I was challenged constantly all the time to like really just try to understand where someone else is coming from. It's cognitive training. I swear to God, nothing will teach you how to like put aside your own opinions and try to understand someone then practice. Yeah. Like practice, practice, practice, practice. And then when you mess up, think to yourself like, how could I avoid messing up next time? It's a lot of work though. It's a lot of work. I had someone say to me once they're like, Emily, why are you doing so much emotional labor? And I honestly am like, I think we all should be doing more. Why? I think in our like soundbite fueled echo chamber society, we're all really focused on like, am I being heard? Am I being understood? And how does this thing coming from outside make me feel? People are like, oh my God, that's not for me. That is for me. And they make like knee jerk reactions to stuff, like and don't like lists. Ugh. I don't know. There's something about that that is so self centered and it's kind of another kind of emotional labor, but it's so focused on yourself. When I say emotional labor, what I mean is like just trying to understand other people. You don't have to like it. You don't have to agree with it. But I think trying to understand setting the record straight, right? Yeah. Sometimes not understanding means we let our brains and our minds wander and create these ideas or caricatures of who those people are. Yes. That are so problematic. And sometimes that happens with your parents, right? You think this thing of your parent, but you don't try to understand them and you can spend your whole life like that. And then one day you're like, oh, wait, I didn't understand that fundamental thing about my parent. Huh. And it may not change your opinion, but it might just soften the edges and that changes everything. I grew up in Pakistan. So the default setting was to always understand your parents in a way where you almost reveal them and they are sacrosanct. So you don't question them as much. And that's where the dichotomy lies for me because when I look at my daughters and they question me on every single thing, I'm like, what the hell is happening here? And I feel like being a kid of South Asian parents and being a parent of American kids, I think it's the worst thing that can happen to you because nobody gets you. Nobody gets you. Yeah. It's just an interesting juxtaposition of emotions and ideas of familial dynamics and this kid-parent relationship. It's so different. My relationship with my parents versus my relationship with my kids, it's so different. Do you think your kids, because I think there's a difference between revere and understand, there's like, oh, the suffering of my dad and mom, they're making it abundantly clear how they suffer. But that's not the interesting thing I'm talking about. I'm talking more about the things they don't want to admit to you that they hide. Yeah. That's what I mean. It's the stuff that they're not putting out there. When you know it, you're like, oh, and that's cool you're sharing that stuff with your kids and being more vulnerable with them. The interesting thing is I've lived in the U.S. for 20 years. So I want to preface it with, I've also evolved in my relationship with my parents. I do want to ask them more questions. I do see them as flawed humans, more flawed than when I saw them growing up or even in my 20s, and it's okay if your parents are flawed. But at the same time, you're right, we do have these heated discussions, especially with my kids about respect, disrespect, language, vernacular, and I'm learning to unlearn a lot of stuff that was taught to me about what that dynamic should look like. And being a middle child helps because I was always this rebellious kid who pushed those boundaries. So I guess the transition is easier for me than probably my sister, who's always and still is this perfect eldest daughter who could never do anything wrong. So I guess that dynamic is really interesting. Emily, I do want to pivot here about your conversation with Syla and Shaquille. And I want to thank you for asking Syla this one question, which I wish people asked more of Muslims. How did 9/11 impact you? I was outdoors leaning up against a brick wall, and I could almost hear her thinking, "Why is this person calling me?" So I told her about the show, how we examine the impact of one historical event on a family, and then said, "I just want to know, how did 9/11 impact you personally?" She started to cry and went quiet for a long time. Finally, she said, "Sorry, no one has asked me that before." You know, as a young Muslim at the time, I didn't have kids. I was in my 20s, and I had just moved to the U.S. Having gone through that post-9/11 resentment of the U.S. towards Muslims has changed me, and I'm pretty sure a whole generation of Muslims in ways that we can't even describe. I do wish Syla could talk more about how it impacted her as an individual. Despite her family dynamic, is that something that Syla was not willing to engage in? First of all, I want to say thank you for saying that. It is, I think, so many more people, Muslim Americans, South Asian Americans, have deserved that question for a long time, and I'm glad you know that and feel that. I mean, you know that. And I'm someone who grew up outside the New York City area, and my understanding of 9/11 has really deepened and evolved since I was in sixth grade. I loved getting to know this family, and was, again, amazed by the depth of my own ignorance. Syla, I can't speak for her. She hasn't listened to the episode yet because she just got back from Hajj today, and she might even be listening to it right now. So I don't know her reaction to the episode, and I can't speak for her, but one thing I will say about all of our sources is they're kind of at where they're at in their processing, and something I noticed about Syla is whenever she wants to, you know how I say in the story that Syla seemed like she didn't want to talk, but did? There's that moment where I'm like, "What does that mean?" She goes, "Just ask your questions." I'm like, "What does that mean?" And she's like, "Just ask your questions and get it over with." And then like two hours later, she still wants to talk. She's so pushed and pulled in the piece. And another thing she does that I think I say in the story, I can't remember, is like often it's more comfortable for her to talk about her family than about herself. I think that she answers in family and not in Syra, but she's discovering Syra as a person who's not responsible for raising her kids like right now, this very moment. Since we recorded that interview, Syra has gone to London, she's gone to Uzbekistan, she's gone to Saudi Arabia, like this woman is traveling. And when I was checking in on Shaquille, he was going to visit his niece. He was going to be a family uncle guy, you know, like I'm not saying it's because the podcast, I just think our podcast intersected with people who were already in a process of change and they were just willing to share that with the public. And that's cool. Yeah. Even until the very end, I was like, "Syra, talk to Emily about how it impacted you." And that was probably me drawing on my experiences. So I'm so glad that you had that conversation. Because even to this day, Emily, we see this, right? It's so easy to vilify Muslims because the dehumanization that started before 9/11, we are seeing it play out in what's happening in Palestine right now, right? It just doesn't matter, no matter how enlightened you appear, educated you appear, whether you wear hijab or you don't wear hijab, whether you are integrated or not, your humanity just doesn't matter to the American public in general. So I am so glad you brought it up because we need to have more conversations around how Muslim diaspora has dealt with being traumatized, terrorized by something that happened 22 years ago. It was horrific. But it's impacted Muslim diaspora in ways that people cannot even fathom. No. I think people cannot even fathom, they genuinely don't know. And there's just no words for how these communities have been dehumanized. It happens to populations, historically, there were other times when different groups were "yeah" and I know the mechanics of how it happens, it's happening right now, it never makes it right, and so maybe that is my bias. I guess I'll just always be protective of family, period, and people should have a right. I don't know, I don't know what I'm trying to say, I guess it feels like the bare minimum I could do as a journalist and you shouldn't even have to thank me, it's like the bare minimum. Like I don't know what journalism is for, if not to uphold moral values and protect people's right to live, like what is it for? And I'm so grateful genuinely to the Syed family for being willing to do this because it was hard to find someone who wanted to talk about this. There's a lot of fear with speaking out, even now I'm worried that they're gonna get emails and calls and I can't protect them from that. But you know, Shaquille was also followed by the FBI, so like if any family can handle it, it's this one. I felt so almost vindicated, right? I felt like she is acknowledging the trauma, the terrorization, and the humanity of Muslim existence, right? Because when you're asking Muslims this question, you're really recognizing their humanity, which again, look around us, we don't see it. It's so easy for American public to wipe that out and they do it time and again. It was happening in post-9/11, it was happening in 2016, it's happening today, it was happening before 9/11 to be honest. But just recognizing that and looking at Muslim identity beyond those reductive descriptors, it's such a low bar, right? It's such a low bar, it's like, it's such a low bar! We have so much to be ashamed of, I mean, I don't speak for journalism, but yes. Can I shout out a podcast you might enjoy? Yeah. Anissa Khalifa hosts this incredible podcast called Muslim in Plain Sight that's about growing up in the shadow of 9/11, she co-hosted it with her friend Hadija Khalil. That's a really great listen. It's one of the few podcasts I've ever heard about being like a millennial in the aftermath of 9/11, but you're right, there's like nothing, nothing. And they're speaking from like a personal experience where I was like, "Journalism, this is not how it's been covered." On a lighter note, if you could create a visual or artistic representation of inheriting, what would that look like? Sadia, this is the most unbelievable question. There's this incredible illustrator named Brachita Art. She makes these really beautiful watercolor illustrations. She herself, I believe, is Asian American. And there's this incredible one called Generational Trauma Healing that it's of a family tree and the trauma is depicted as blood. Let's just say it's depicted as red paint, but it's blood-like and it's like trickling down the branches. And then there's these like blue lines of healing at different levels of the tree. And some of the trauma like makes it to generations further down, but some of it doesn't because the healing literally stops it. It dissipates. It dissipates. So, yes, you're connected to people, biologically speaking, but that doesn't mean it's a foregone conclusion you'll become them. And I think so many more families, immigrant families, refugee families, indigenous families, black families, they deserve to heal. Why can't media be about that, too? Why does it always have to be about the who, what, when, where, why? Why can't it be about how things feel and how we heal? Why is that not a legitimate form of journalism? So this illustration, to me, I have not told Brachita this, but this, to me, is like the best visual I can think of when it comes to what inheriting is like. It's that you get to choose. So in the end, if you were to define the United States of America in a word or a sentence, this question, the dreaded question, I should have prepared an answer. All that comes to mind as a single word is unlearning. Oh my gosh, yes. We have told ourselves our history in a few ways, but in order to be truthful, we have to really unlearn those ways. Absolutely. Emily, this was so good. I am so glad that you and I had this conversation. I'm grateful to you for even creating these spaces because they are very rare, and I hope more exists after us. So as you can probably tell, this was more of a therapy session for me. Tell me how you like this conversation. Based on FII, we do have a channel on Apple Podcasts, and thank you to whoever has subscribed. We really appreciate if you guys haven't. Check it out. You can simply subscribe and get all our different podcasts ad free. Thank you for spending this time with us. Don't forget to come back for these important conversations. This episode was produced by me, written by me, Sadia Khan. The editorial review is done by Shea You. Our editor and sound designer is Hazegh Ahmed Fareed. Our theme music is by Simon Hutchinson. Other music by Epidemic Sound. See you next week. Take care. [Music]