Inheriting

I’ve really been enjoying the new podcast series from LAist, called Inheriting. Journalist Emily Kwong leads Asian-American families through conversations about their family histories. In each episode, the children of immigrants come to Kwong with questions about specific parts of their family’s past. In episodes 1 and 2, Kwong helps someone get answers about what happened to their mother, a Korean woman who owned a gas station in Compton, during the 1992 LA riots. According to the interviewee, their mother was alone in the store during the riots and came home after one particularly violent night and never spoke about the experience. In episode 3, Kwong teams up with the daughter of a Cambodian refugee who was forced into the youth brigade of the Khmer Rouge to unpack her father’s experience growing up under a brutal regime.

Asian parents can be notoriously silent about their past, especially if it was difficult, traumatic, or full of hardships (and for Asian immigrants of a certain generation—they often are.) But then their children are left wondering about what’s been left in the shadows and are yearning to learn their parents stories so they can finally better know and understand not only their parents, but also themselves.

Inheriting does an amazing job of bridging this divide and results in moving tales, surprises and twists, and a intimate look at history.