Unlocking family history in 'Before Me'

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It wasn't until Lisa Phu had her own child that she started unlocking her mother's history. In her new 5-part series called Before Me, Lisa asks her mother, Lan, the questions she should have asked years ago. Lisa tells us what she learned in getting to know Lan in this way.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	What's good, Joe?
0:00.8	You're listening to Co-Switch.
0:02.2	I'm Gene Dumpy.
0:03.4	And today, I wanna ask a question
0:04.8	I've been thinking about a lot lately.
0:06.6	And that's how well do we know our parents?
0:10.0	Like who they were before and outside of being our parents?
0:14.9	We know the broad, biographical details of their lives.
0:17.5	Like when and where they were born,
0:19.7	where they went to school, how they met each other.
0:22.3	But a lot of their lives before us can be kind of opaque.
0:27.1	Maybe we just never really got around to asking them
0:29.8	about it, maybe they didn't get around to telling us about it.
0:33.1	Or maybe they didn't tell us a lot of stuff about themselves
0:35.1	because talking about those things is just so hard.
0:39.8	All those dynamics were true for Lisa Foo and her mother-in-law.
0:44.0	There were so many things Lisa didn't know about her mother's life
0:46.2	before her mother moved to the US when she was fleeing
0:48.7	the war in Cambodia, which meant there were a whole bunch
0:51.3	of things that Lisa didn't know about herself.
0:53.5	Like the fact that Lisa is ethnically Chinese.
0:56.1	Lisa didn't find that out until she was in her 20s.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.