Welcome to strangers from KCW and Radiotopia.

I'm Leah Tau.

And when you become a parent, you get to witness the purest form of love,

which is not the love you have for your kids, great as that may be,

but their love for you. I remember one time my son's father

looked at our little boy and said, wow, he just loves me. And even if I let him down, he will

wrestle with that love. Even if at one point he hates me, he will still love me. And he wasn't flattering

himself or bragging. He was awestruck by the responsibility we have as parents to try to live up

to that love, to earn what we've already been given, and to make that attachment as unfraught for them as possible.

I feel daunted by that at times. When I screw up a bit as a parent, I know that I'm making

a small but unerasable scratch in the purity of that love, and I know the day will come when all the rosy filters my son is seeing me through at the moment

will fall away, and he'll be face to face with the flawed reality that is me.

My only hope is that the love will be strong enough that I'll be forgiven my mistakes,

and that as I grow older and more frail and possibly more flawed,

he may feel tenderness even for that.

And judging from today's story, I like my chances.

Here's Susan Shu.

My father was a Chinese man who immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s, and he came here for graduate school.

And my mother was from Wisconsin. She was of Swedish and German background, and they met at the University of Wisconsin, and they actually secretly eloped because my grandparents were pretty racist, and they didn't want my mother marrying a non-white person. This was in the 1960s when interracial marriage was less common, but that's not really what this story is about.

Because Susan's dad, who'd been a bright young man

and the great hope and pride of his family in Taiwan, developed some problems that had

nothing to do with race.

...