Your Mama's Kitchen is brought to you by Rivian.

My family love them all because you walk in there, you have no history.

Nobody knows that you're poor.

Nobody knows what neighborhood you come from.

Nobody knows that you came here on a bus. Nobody knows

that you have food stamps.

You can dress to the nines and you

enter this egalitarian

utopia of the mall.

The truest town square

in America. Nobody knows

where anybody is from,

but everyone gets to go to Godiva chocolate.

Hello, hello, welcome back to your mama's kitchen.

This is the place where we explore how we're shaped as adults by the kitchens that we grew up in as kids. Of course the food,

but so many other things also. The music on the radio, the way you would eavesdrop on your

parents, the way that food in the kitchen would provide a taste of home from a distant land.

I'm Michelle Norris. And Ocean Vong is our guest today. Ocean is an essayist.

He's a novelist. He's a professor. He is a poet. He is the author of a poetry collection called

Night Sky with Exit Wounds. It was published in 2016. And he made quite a splash with that volume.

He won a T.S. Eliot Prize and a Whiting Award. His loosely

autobiographical debut novel on Earth were briefly gorgeous, was also a worldwide sensation.

...