How to talk to a parent about their past

Life Kit

NPR

Health & Fitness, Self-improvement, Kids & Family, Education, Business

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You might not know a lot about your parent's life before they had you: their childhood dreams, their first love, their heartbreaks. If you're a child of immigrants, there might be even less you know due to language barriers or traumatic experiences. But all of these things are passed down through generations. This episode, journalist and writer Aarti Shahani interviews Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, and three other writers about how to unpack your parent's past with them — and how doing so can both bring you closer and help you better understand yourself.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Christian nationalists want to turn America into a theocracy, a government under biblical rule.
0:07.0	If they gain more power, it could mean fewer rights for you.
0:12.0	I'm Heath Drusen and on the new season of Extremely
0:15.0	American I'll take you inside the movement. Listen to Extremely American
0:19.8	from Boise State Public Radio, part of the NPR Network.
0:24.0	Before we start a warning, in this episode, we'll be talking about suicide and abuse.
0:29.0	You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.
0:37.0	Hey, Andrew Limbaugh here in for Mary Osagera.
0:40.0	Here's the origin story for today's Life Kit. When Arthy Shahani was NPR's technology correspondent,
0:46.0	she published her first book, Here We Are.
0:49.0	It's a memoir about her and her family's immigrant experience.
0:52.0	Now, Arthy doesn't come from a family of engineers
0:55.1	like the people she reported on.
0:56.9	Instead, her mom was a seamstress.
0:58.7	Her dad, Namdev, was a shopkeeper.
1:01.4	He had a side gig, though, of being Arthy's arch nemesis, you know, the man
1:05.9	policing her dating and dancing and skirt lengths. He was the type of dad who worried more
1:11.6	about his daughter's marriage prospects than her career ambitions.
1:15.2	Then Nam Dev got arrested for selling calculators to a drug cartel.
1:20.4	He landed in Rikers Island and then was put into deportation proceedings.
1:25.0	In a weird way, this legal crisis led to the two becoming friends.
1:31.0	Arthy stopped going to school to help fight her dad's case and when her dad was in jail,
	...

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