Self Evident: Asian America's Stories

The LahPai family’s arrival to Virginia from Myanmar was highly anticipated: the local resettlement agency prepped their home; the local religious community was ready to provide support; the family’s U.S connection lived just minutes down the street. Even with these support systems, resettlement was (and still is) not a straightforward, clean-cut process.

Why is that? In this debut episode from Resettled — a series by Virginia Publ...

Today, we're sharing some work by our friends at Immigrantly, a weekly podcast that features deeply personal conversations about race, identity, and the immigrant experience. This episode features a conversation between host Saadia Khan and reporter Neda Toloui-Semnani, who wrote a book called THEY SAID THEY WANTED REVOLUTION: A Memoir of My Parents.

To finish that book, Neda went through a whole journey to learn about the life her...

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Just before I gave birth to my daughter Acacia, I turned 36. And on my birthday my mom sent me a birthday card that was full of heartfelt words — more than she’d ever written to me before. On the last night of her visit to help me take care of Acacia, as she read the card aloud, I realized how I was — and still am — a part of the lives that came before me.

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At the moment my mom steps onto a small fishing boat off the coast of Cambodia, headed for a refugee camp in Thailand under cover of night, she becomes the head of our family. It takes her less than a year to make it safely to her new home in New York, give birth to me, and learn how to be a single parent in the U.S. But it will end up taking her decades to process what she’s overcome, what she’s bec...

Reunited with my cousin Lynn, my mom becomes a gold dealer to support her growing family — and realizes that the charmed childhood she had in Cambodia is nowhere to be found for her own kids. She recounts the joyful memories that helped her hold on for more than five years as a refugee in Vietnam, before making the decision to leave both countries for good.

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Lisa Phu grew up telling a story about how her family left Cambodia as refugees, to start a new life in the United States — but for the longest time, she’d never heard this story firsthand, from her mom, Lan.

After Lisa gave birth to her first daughter, her mom flew across the country to meet her first grandchild. And during that visit, she finally shared the re...

When you get into a taxi, you usually know where you’re coming from, where you’re going, and what you’ll do when you get there. But what about your taxi driver – someone whose work is in constant motion, moving from destination to destination, meeting new people by the hour? What was the road that brought them to this moment, what is the journey they'll take next?

When Augustine Tang’s father passed away, Augustine decided to inherit his taxi medallion – the license that had allowed his father to drive a yellow taxi cab in New York City for decades. But the medallion came with a $530,000 debt trap and years of struggling to escape it. Augustine’s friend Kenny, a fellow taxi cab driver, committed suicide. So did several o...

Amidst the ongoing crush of anti-Asian violence in America, Producer James turns to a personal source of restoration: ska music (yes, that ska music).

When he was a teenager, the do-it-yourself ska scene — and an indie record label called Asian Man — taught him to take racism serious...

The Covid-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of caregiving work — and the ways that this work is overlooked, under-resourced, or placed as a burden on families without a sense of fairness or compassion. In this episode we’re sharing two stories that show people taking on the role of caregiver, and asking: Who gets to be healthy in a world that leaves so many people with family as their only l...

For so many Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Spam is a beloved classic food, showing up in everything from musubi to fried rice. But behind that nostalgia is a history of war and colonization, and the inheritance of both favorite foods and hidden traumas.

Korean American playw...

Community Producer Rochelle Kwan (a.k.a. YiuYiu in her DJ life) gathers the DJs who joined her in curating our first annual mixtape — to chat about how we can use music to reconnect our diaspora communities, across generations and borders.