Hi!

Hello!

How's it going? Oh my god, it's been so long.

It's been a minute. How are you?

This is Wenwen Yang.

The last time we spoke felt like another lifetime ago.

I talked with her for an episode our team did on class anxiety during our very first season.

Um, oh my god. I think it's been how long about a few years since we've talked?

Yes, yeah. It was 2019.

Wenwen is a listener of the show and back then she wrote into us with a question.

She asked, how do you be middle class?

She wanted a kind of guidebook.

She explained how she grew up poor,

but now she was making decent money and struggling to figure out the norms of a class she wasn't born into.

Like, how do I navigate it without signaling to other people that was like, she's new here?

Wenwen grew up in a household where money was tight.

Her parents are immigrants from China. Her mom was a seamstress, her dad worked at a restaurant.

She'd only see her dad at home once a week just because he worked so much.

Then after college, Wenwen got a job working as a revenue analyst making $50,000 more than her parents combined.

Which meant she'd officially entered the middle class. And she felt pretty lost.

Like, she told me about this one time she went out with her coworkers to lunch.

It was like a nice restaurant, close to work.

...