Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories,

exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Lisa Lee Herrick is a writer, artist, and community organizer.

In this essay, Lisa recalls growing up in California as the child of Hmong refugees.

Though her parents wouldn't speak of the family's past,

she encountered the stories and traditions of her ancestors on the afternoon she spent cooking with her grandparents.

As she became aware of her family's traumatic history in Laos that led to their migration to the United States,

she also came to know the power of food to sustain cultural traditions

and carry forward legacies of resilience.

I was born into a storied universe, into a demon cosmology of sound and ether that passed from mouth to ear for generations,

and the walls of my father's house were raised by the excavated bones of ancestors whose names lacked shape or form,

save for the pursing lips of the old storytellers.

My ancestors died, never holding a pen, only shovels and sticks, and then guns.

We did not have an alphabet until the Christian missionaries arrived.

Before then, all words were sacred and committed to memory.

My ancestors' stories traveled by breath alone, like the seeds of future

forests carried upon unseen wind. This is how we survived chaos, by speaking the names of our

fathers from time immemorial. Today I struggle with how to tell my family's storywrite because

the elders are already gone.

Their memories haunt me, but their faint shadows will not turn to ink.

...