But Where Are You Really From Podcast

Angela Lin 0:14
Today we are going to talk about a part of your identity that I think a lot of people are afraid to discuss in polite company. But here we go. We are going to be talking about religion and spirituality. And today we have a special guest to help provide a different perspective. Her name is Lindsay.

Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)

Lindsay Liu 0:35
Hey, guys. I’m Lindsay. I’ve known Angela and Jesse for probably since our high school days. So it’s been a while. I’m actually a little bit different from both Angela and Jesse in the sense that I’m actually part of generation 1.5 as an immigrant, so I wasn’t born in the US. I was actually born in China, but I came here right before kindergarten started. I think at around like five years old, you still kind of do remember like, you know, your time there because your cognition would have kicked in by then. Thank you for having me. This is definitely a topic that I actually really enjoy talking about. So I’m really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jesse Lin 1:09
Thanks for joining.

Angela Lin 1:10
I think a kind of baseline place to start since we are talking about religion is for each of us to discuss first what religion we were raised up in, because oftentimes, individuals are not the ones who choose which religion their family brings them up in. So let’s first talk about how our families chose to introduce religion to us.

Jesse Lin 1:31
I met Angela through the temple that I went to growing up and my parents were Daoist. So that was the religion that we followed growing up. And Daoism has a combination of a lot of different things. But there’s some aspects of Confucianism, there’s some aspects of Buddhism, but to be honest, we at least myself, I wasn’t really immersed in what the religion actually meant. For us, it was kind of just like a weekly nice gathering for me to hang out with my friends Angela and other people who were at the temple so it was more of a social kind of situation or place for me.

Angela Lin 2:11
I echo that obviously since we were raised in the in the same religion so Daoism I actually don’t know if my family were Daoist prior to moving to Southern California or if they were Buddhists because like you said, Daoism is like, a sect of Buddhism, which is largely practiced in Taiwan. But yeah, same here. I think we were too young and also the language factors also part of it that like most of the scripture, or the books, I don’t know how to call them but like they they’re written Chinese like ancient Chinese. So we did study them. They made us like, memorize the texts and like recite it back, but we didn’t really know what we were reciting or like, what it meant, so for sure, I echo that it was more just like an excuse to be with my best friends and for our parents also hang out with their friends. But Lindsay, you have a very different experience from us. So how about you?

Lindsay Liu 3:08
I actually started off atheist. My family started off atheist. I think both of my grandmas at around roughly the same time when I was still in China, they both kind of tried to understand Buddhism and like tried to dabble in it and stuff, but I think neither of them really got into it that much. We were just largely atheist growing up and then I actually didn’t become a Christian until our family moved to California when I was around eight years old.

Angela Lin 3:34
So then it was from eight years old at some point your parents decided that they wanted to test out Christianity or to join the community or how did that happen?

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Lindsay Liu 3:45
When we moved to California we were moving from Iowa so largely like white community, when we moved here for my dad’s postdoctoral at the time, and when we first came like we didn’t know anyone and I think this is something that Asian communities in like probably Western countries, and stuff, at least, you know, in America, they do really well. They really welcome you in, you know, just on the basis of your ethnic identity. And when our family moved here, you know, we were sought out by the Asian American community at this church that was actually half white, half Mandarin speaking. And obviously, the main reason why they had been interested in us was largely just because we were Chinese American. That’s kind of how we were brought in. It wasn’t really like my parents sought it out. It was just more of a community relation.

Jesse Lin 4:28
Now that we’ve kind of established what everyone’s background is, where does everyone stand today in terms of their religious or spiritual beliefs?

Angela Lin 4:37
I’m this kind of like hodgepodge, I would say I mostly aligned with being agnostic, where I like definitely believe that there is something higher but I don’t know what that is necessarily. And I don’t want to put a name to it. But I would also say I’ve had this like added layer of spirituality that came after I did psychedelic drugs, which we talked about previously, if you’re interested look back at that episode. When you go through these kinds of spiritual experiences through those drugs you are open to up to this feeling that everyone is connected that there is this energy that flows through like all living beings, and that there is a sense of like a greater power, greater entity or purpose that kind of like drives everything together. And during that experience, I also was able to connect a little bit deeper with this like Daoist background that we were brought up in. I did have visuals and connections with Buddha. So I would say after that I am now more agnostic leaning more towards like spiritually Daoist.

Lindsay Liu 5:47
For me, I’ve grown I think, in my Christian faith more and more so over the past years, particularly since college ended for me and I joined like a really close Church communitytThat’s really helped me to really grow in my faith.

Angela Lin 6:03
Jesse and I are pretty ignorant in this topic. We know that there’s like all these different branches of Christianity, right? Like Protestant, Presbyterian, I don’t even know the rest. So like, is there a specific branch that you’re part of? And if so, why?

Lindsay Liu 6:20
I’m part of the Protestant Christian church, I think the one I would most closely associate with is probably of evangelical Protestant Christians. If you were to go into more like am I Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, something like that. I don’t particularly identify with those because that’s not the style of church that I go to, and I’m not sure that I belong there.

Angela Lin 6:41
What does evangelical mean?

Lindsay Liu 6:43
So evangelical is a larger umbrella of Christianity, particularly I think, Protestant Christianity. Basically evangelizing is to share the gospel like the message of Jesus Christ among you know, just everyone your neighbors and the other nations everywhere. Evangelical Christians is broad in the term where we basically just recognize that that is what we’re called to do by Christ. And that is how we live.

Angela Lin 7:08
And Protestant versus Roman Catholic?

Lindsay Liu 7:11
I’ll be honest, I don’t I don’t actually know much about Roman Catholic churches. Basically, the Roman Catholic Church has a lot more like ancient kind of rituals and stuff. There’s kind of like a lot more layers to it in the sense of they believe in things that the Protestant church doesn’t believe in. So for example, the Protestant church is largely centered on the belief that your only way to salvation, salvation that is from your sins is that you would need to know Christ and that it’s that personal relationship with Christ that gets you there. Whereas like, for example, the Catholic Church, they look at it more from the perspective of well, you need to also like venerate to pray to Mary, Mary, who’s Jesus’s mother. There’s things like penances when you do something wrong or when you sin to ask for forgiveness and things. They have kind of more things that are needed in order for you to get to salvation, whereas for Christianity, it’s all founded on one thing, and that’s kind of the root of the fact that it’s all based off of salvation from Christ alone. And by faith alone.

Angela Lin 8:10
Jesse?

Jesse Lin 8:11
I’ll keep it short and sweet. I also identify as agnostic, I do believe that there’s a higher power, but I’ve never had an experience that validated this feeling. And I told you earlier about this idea of Pascal’s Wager, which is this concept created by the mathematician Pascal who says that sacrificing a few earthly pleasures is worth it for potential entry into heaven, even if you don’t believe because you can lose a few things now, but supposedly, the afterlife is infinite, right? So you have infinite more loss to suffer, if you don’t believe so. That’s kind of like how I feel about it a little bit like I do believe but mostly because it’s like weird not to given that everyone generally has very strong spiritual or religious leanings, and it doesn’t hurt me in any way to try and like manifest that belief, you know?

Angela Lin 9:15
Let’s get into the meat of this. Another kind of baseline thing that we want to iron out first is this difference between the term religion and spirituality. Because I think oftentimes these terms are used interchangeably, but they do have different meanings. And so to start with organized religion, we have the dictionary definition here. It is a structured system of faith or worship, especially one followed by a large number of people such as Christianity, Islam or Judaism. I think the point here is that like the emphasis is on the word organized that there’s like a structure around it versus spirituality, I feel like it’s harder to define. I don’t actually agree with the dictionary definition so I didn’t bother writing it down. So I thought it’d be interesting for us to have a discussion around that. Like how would how would you define spirituality? Because I feel like for me, a lot of what you said Lindsay resonated with me in terms of like having that personal connection. That is what I kind of associate with the idea of spirituality that like it is a personal decision of yours to have this relationship with whatever the higher power is, or like this feeling of connection between everyone and it is for you. That’s how I see it. How about you guys?

Jesse Lin 10:41
I agree. I think when you talk about religion, and especially organized religion, there’s definitely a lot of negative connotations with it. And I also feel like spirituality is something that is more personal than organized religion, like organized religion, to me is the structure, the bureaucracy, the how you go about being religious versus like your actual connection.

Lindsay Liu 11:03
So I think for me coming at this from the perspective of Christianity, so I think Christianity is actually interesting because when I think about it, is it a religion? Or is it more spiritually based? And I would personally define it as probably both. The way that I see it is because the organized religion part of it, and that comes from things like the fact that we believe in the Holy Bible. And then also I would say, like, you know, church itself is organized in the sense of how you go about it and things and the community component of that. Well, that’s definitely organized. But I would say, though, to reduce Christianity to just those two elements, you’re missing the spiritual element of this, you know, that personal relationship with Christ. And ultimately, I would probably identify that as more spiritual because it is a personal relationship with Christ in the end.

Angela Lin 11:50
So how big of a role does religion slash spirituality play in everyone’s sense of identity and your sense of self?

Jesse Lin 12:03
it doesn’t really a whole ton just because I don’t think about it all that much. And it really only comes into the periphery of my everyday when it starts to become not a personal spiritual thing, but kind of like a social thing when they’re like overlaps, or conflicts from the social component between like organized religion and like the things that I generally believe in outside of religion.

Lindsay Liu 12:27
I think, originally, when I first came to faith, I first thought of it as like, oh, this is going to be a part of my life. And then as I got to understand the gospel more, I thought that okay, well, maybe this should be a bigger part of my life. And then as my understanding grew even more and my relationship with Christ developed there, I thought, okay, this should be the biggest part of my life then. But I’ve come to know that that’s actually all wrong that Christianity is my life. So yeah, so it’s involved in every thought, every decision just every facet of my life.

Angela Lin 12:58
For me, I feel like, spirituality is underlying in my sense of identity, but it’s de-prioritized. A big realization that I had, especially on those like spiritual experiences is that it is really easy to get bogged down in your everyday life. It’s part of me for sure, but I don’t think I pay enough attention to it or spend enough time kind of cultivating that, and it’s something that I want to work towards. But I’m not, I’m not putting in as much effort yet as I want to.

Jesse Lin 13:32
So one of the kind of side questions related to this that we wanted to ask was, how do you reconcile your personal beliefs and your personal spirituality with non inclusionary like parts of Christianity? What do you feel when you see a different person who practices a different kind of Christianity saying things to other people that are really hurtful or exclusionary or don’t really feel like it’s part of what Christianity or the Bible teaches?

Lindsay Liu 14:04
if I’m to be sincere about my faith as a Christian, which is founded on God’s word, which is the Bible, I can’t just believe and agree some part with some parts of it and not other parts of it. This would mean that even for parts of the Bible that our culture nowadays may call out as non-inclusionary. I would need to trust that God has always had a greater purpose for these things, beyond what I can currently understand right now. And in action, though, as Christians, we’re called specifically by the Bible over and over again, to love others. This command to love others, as ourself is really the core of that. So basically, when Jesus walked the earth, He showed a love for people that was radical for his time, but he did it in a way where he didn’t change who he was or compromise what he believed. And so we as Christians are to model after his way of loving and I think in practice, honestly, the church fall short of this love. And I would say that that’s largely because the church is made up of sinners to begin with, you know, people who do fall short of being able to achieve this kind of love.

Angela Lin 15:10
So what would you say is your truest spiritual experience that you’ve had that made you feel close to God or to a higher power?

Lindsay Liu 15:21
I think it was when my seven year relationship with my college sweetheart had ended. We were engaged for a year at the time when that fell apart. I think that experience if I had to pinpoint something that was revolutionary and convicting of my faith and radically just changed how I viewed God how I viewed my relationship with Christ. I would say that that would probably be the moment.

Angela Lin 15:45
Is that because after that really difficult moment you found strength in this relationship, or what was that that this moment kind of triggered?

Lindsay Liu 15:58
Yeah, I think strength is definitely something that came from that because I think when you’re in that position, you know, you’re you feel like you have everything, well…I felt like I had everything robbed of me. And so I did feel very weak. So strength was something that I definitely sought. I think I also wanted to be at the core of it to be loved when you’re when you’re breaking up with someone you feel unloved. And so I felt like strength was one thing that was given love was one thing that was given. But I think ultimately, just feeling his presence being so real through that whole process with me, was just radical, because I think presence is something that you really need in order to have a genuine relationship with anyone. So if you can feel someone’s presence there, then I think that really makes it real to you and kind of solidifies that you have this. This person in your life.

Angela Lin 16:51
Jesse?

Jesse Lin 16:52
I would say that I haven’t had a come to Jesus moment for lack of a better term, but I do kind of resonate with what you’re saying Lindsay in the sense that like, when I look back at parts of my life that I thought really sucked, or were really dark, and at that moment, I was like, I’m never gonna crawl out of this terrible disgusting like slime pit that I fell into. It doesn’t suck so much now. So it feels like there’s some progression to where I am now. I just don’t necessarily attribute it to something like religious or spiritual, but it is something that I can look back and say that I’m grateful about, if that makes sense.

Angela Lin 17:37
For me, I feel like I had a triggering moment – it was my MDMA journey. It was an extremely spiritual experience for me and what you said about just like feeling and knowing that presence was with you, I felt that instantly when I was in that journey of like, I knew that I was connected to everything and every spirit. And this connectivity was not like a learning I had, it was just like I just knew it in my soul. And from that point that really like opened up my spiritual like willingness to look at the rest of the world. But then, when I did ayahuasca, I mentioned that I saw Buddhas and they were essentially like three Buddhas that were like circling me. And I felt just this protection from Buddha and it was like, they didn’t have to say anything it was I knew that they were there to protect me and that they were always going to be with me and have always been with me throughout my life. And then my last kind of piece of the puzzle was so we talked about how part of the reason Jesse and I didn’t connect with Daoism when we’re growing up is that it was taught in Chinese and these books like we couldn’t read Chinese. It’s it’s hard right as like a kid. And so even though we were taught the Dao De Jing, which is like the main book in Daoism, we didn’t know what it meant. And so after I had these spiritual experiences, I felt like it was worth seeing if I could connect with these texts now as an adult after having these experiences, so I bought it. And as I read through it, there were so many things in there are so many teachings in there that I was like, this is exactly what I need in my life. And these are like the struggles that I have with like myself growth, and this resonates a lot with me. And I wish that I had been able to connect with this sooner in my life than now.

So you know, aside from that period in your life that helps you find your relationship or develop your relationship further with God. What do you do on a daily basis that helps you renew or build that relationship?

Lindsay Liu 19:58
There’s definitely things that as a Christian are supposed to help us, you know, build that relation, that ultimate goal of building that relationship with Christ. Part of it is definitely reading the Bible. And so I think for me, I’m currently doing two Bible studies right now both of them are like doing it what’s called inductive style. And basically, it kind of reminds me of what Angela just brought up about trying to understand like, original text. Part of the inductive Bible study is that you go into the original Greek, so trying to understand which Greek word was specifically used in this passage in this verse to try to get the author’s original intent and like a more fleshed out understanding of what they were originally trying to say. So yeah, so reading the Bible, praying every day is really helpful. Prayer is really just this relishing in this gift that I have this direct connection with Christ, and that to act on it would be to pray and to establish that relationship and to keep that up. And then I would say the next probably five component that we’ll talk about is going to church – community, being involved with in community. And the reason why this is important is because Christ does describe the church specifically as his body. And so you can already see from there that Christ and the church body have a very close relationship that is meant to be a consistent and like a regular part of the faith and the walk.

Jesse Lin 21:22
What about you, Angela, I mean, you mentioned that you want to do more things to develop yourself spiritually, and you’ve got the Dao De Jing translated are there like other things you’ve been doing to try and widen that?

Angela Lin 21:33
So I would say the things that I do that are not on the daily, but that helped me remind myself of this connection with spirituality are reading the Dao De Jing and also there’s this book called Journey of Souls. And my therapist actually recommended to me like a year ago and it like it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It is written by a psychiatrist who specializes in past life regression. And so the book is all about the findings that he has discovered through his clients sessions in therapy about eternal life. In his sessions, he’s able to use hypnosis to get the clients to essentially remember some of the past lives that they’ve had. So then they’re able to discuss kind of like their transcendence into just like their eternal souls, their actual selves. And so that book reminds me that this life on Earth right now is transient. And it’s not who we actually are. It’s like one phase of who we are, but who we really are is the soul that’s inside of us. And so when I read that compounded with the teachings from the Dao De Jing, it translates in a daily life into the way that I carry myself with my interactions with people. I think my practice of being more spiritual is remembering who I actually am. And so when I’m feeling like superheated, super angry, or whatever the like negative feeling is I have to remind myself of that knowledge and then remind myself that like, this is temporary, this is a test, this journey of self growth is the way to be closer with spirituality and to be closer with my soul.

Jesse Lin 23:36
Wow ,I love that. I actually the only thing that I was gonna add is that I kind of do the same thing. I feel like to be spiritual you have to be you have to introspect once in a while, right? Like you’re saying, either through prayer or through what you’re doing every day where you’re like taking a breath. And personally, I’ve also been doing that more and more just because I’ve noticed that my temper does also get really out of control sometimes. But then when I stop and just like talk to myself about the situation I mad at, it may not necessarily be like a religious practice, but I also want to achieve a state where I am less bothered all the time. So, Lindsay, you mentioned that a huge piece of Christianity is this body of Christ, the church and the community. How important is that in your life?

Lindsay Liu 24:28
So I think in terms of like, the church body and the importance of it, I think it’s crucial, honestly, to be part of one, being part of the Christian body is really important and being part of the church is really important because it’s through the church community that we can practice loving and serving others and that we can also receive that kind of love and being served as well. So that’s part of it. But you know, also it’s just his design for us as well. Like, you know, it’s not good for people to be so lonely and is one thing and I would also say that as an example of how the church community is so important when it’s coming together is the fact that Jesus calls us to care for the marginalized, to care for the people that are probably being unseen or you know, uncared for. And you know how the church can actually actively do that is to come together and to support these people. So I think that’s another facet. The church is supposed to very much take care of those within it and the community surrounding it.

Jesse Lin 25:27
Angela what do you feel like the community that we were in growing up, how important was that for you?

Angela Lin 25:33
Oh, incredibly important. I mean, not because of the religion though. Like we already talked about this, But the best thing that that organized version of Daoism did for me was meeting you and Karen, who is our other best friend. We’ve all been like, extremely close friends since we’re like five years old, essentially. So and that’s gonna continue for the rest of our lives. So even if like we are all in different paths or levels of connection with that original religion, the ability to have met you guys and to spend every week with you and like develop our friendship is unparalleled.

Jesse Lin 26:10
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. I also have to say that looking this is like another one of looking back moments where I’m like, that didn’t suck as much as I felt like it saw during the middle of it. But, you know, when we have to do those classes and learn the text and stuff, like at the time, it was kind of like a little bit of a drag. But now that I look back on it, it’s not that I took a lot of learnings away from it, but it gives me more appreciation of the value of those things in the context of our heritage and our history,

Angela Lin 26:41
Digging more into the Asian piece of it because we often like to contrast kind of East and West. One of the things that is interesting to us is that so you and your family are from the Eastern world, right? But you subscribe to a religion that was founded in the West. Do you ever think about that? Like, does that ever bother you in any way? Or like, Yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

Lindsay Liu 27:10
Yeah, I definitely know what you’re asking where you’re coming from. And it is a very interesting thing. So when I looked into this more, I think one thing is that the Bible actually the start of it, it’s actually before, I guess, like that more visible split between East and West. It’s older than that, in the sense of just existence. So an example of this would be Noah’s Ark. So Noah has three sons, and actually it’s from his sons that the different continents and the different like, you know, ethnicities and things split off in such. Given that I would then say that while it is kind of a religion that has had more visibility, and you know, is more perpetuated from the West, I don’t know that I would necessarily call it a Western religion though, even though I understand that you’re you’re saying that it does seem to have come from the West. It certainly didn’t come from East Asia, for example. And I was actually looking into this more recently to kind of really think deeper about my Chinese American identity. So thinking about that more, I was researching the Chinese church. And I was actually finding things about how you know, Christianity is actually really just blowing up in Asia right now for one and you know, the projected numbers and the increased growth is just crazy. And I even came across this one resource that said that there’s actually more Christians now in China than registered members of the Communist Party. Whether or not that one fact is true, I think it’s safe to say though, that Christianity really is increasing and increasing rapidly in the East.

Jesse Lin 28:42
And then final kind of fun question related to East versus West. Do you still partake in any like Asian woowoo superstitions, like superstitious Asian things like you know, you go to some houses and they have that octagon or mirror hanging over the door or you have some, you know what I’m talking about?

Lindsay Liu 28:59
For sure, I’m pretty sure my mom has that in the backyard.

Actually, when I was last talking to Angela, I was giving her a tour of my room after cleaning it. And there’s just this red thing hanging on the back of it that I don’t even know when my mom hung that up probably when I was away at college, and I can’t take it down because it doesn’t match anything in my room, but it’s there out of respect for her. And I guess that’s kind of where my answer for this is. I think there’s a difference between partaking in these kinds of, you know, Asian ancestral rites and rituals and things and then also genuinely like believing that on the inside, you know, for it to kind of sink in deeper. I think it kind of comes down to, again, that relationship with Christ. So if this is going to be something that I do that’s going to affect my relationship with Him, then that’s going to be an issue. But if this is just something that is not going to affect me on my relationship with Christ, and this is more of you know, trying to show love and respect for somebody else. And that’s kind of where that line is drawn. And they’re aware that, you know, I’m coming at this just from that perspective, then personally, I would, I would say it’s okay. Like I haven’t, I haven’t destroyed that octagon mirror that’s somewhere in our house or taken down this red thing. I mean, also recently, I was back in China for my grandmother’s funeral, you know, I was there to kind of be part of with with the family to kind of send her off and it’s very ritualistic, you know, when you when you bury somebody and stuff in your family in Asian cultures. So, you know, I came for the tomb sweeping. So I came for that. And you know, it is kind of like a ritualistic practice. And I had to kind of really think about this deeply and really pray about it as well and is doing these rituals going to inhibit my relationship, my walk with Christ, this is going to be an issue, or am I making this clear to my family that I don’t believe in what these practices mean, but I’m doing this out of care, love and respect for you. You know as a way of you know, honoring our, our family as a whole.

Angela Lin 31:11
Okay, so a lot of heavy discussion today. So to close it out as you know, since you do listen to our podcast we always like to close with a sweet treat and our Fortune Cookie closing section and so for today as a kind of pick-me-up related to the topic, our ending question is what are you most grateful for as part of your current or previous religious slash spiritual experiences?

Jesse Lin 31:44
I will start this one growing up in the Daoist temple, I’m most grateful for having met you and Karen and having that friendship obviously, which is very much still an anchor for me now number one and number two, I am grateful for the kind of like rote memorization exercises they made us do because my memory is so shot right now I’m so glad they made me do that otherwise, I would literally not remember anything.

Angela Lin 32:12
For me, I am definitely very grateful for you and Karen in my life. But the second thing I’m grateful for is just the eye opening-ness of the spiritual experiences I had in putting me on the right path for self growth, because I really do think that the way that I actively work through my spirituality is through my self growth. So to be conscious of my actions, and like the motivations and the drive behind that and to be able to kind of manage that better. That’s something I’m very grateful for.

Lindsay Liu 32:45
For me. I feel like there’s a lot I think, probably the major thing is knowing that basically the foundation of Christianity is that you know, we didn’t do anything to deserve or to earn the status. The idea identity that we have that is based in Christ. That’s something that I’m really grateful for, because then that relieves me of that pressure to live up or to perform. And that also makes me realize, though, that it is truly just by that grace that Christ has given me that I know him and that I’m able to be saved, that it’s not possible to earn it, like I can’t be smarter and earn this or someone else can’t be smarter than me and earn this or someone else can’t be too stupid or whatever to to know Christ, because that’s not how this is based. And that’s not how this works. Actually, I would call that in pretty inclusionary. So I think that that is actually really something that I’m really grateful for. And then secondary, I would also say, yeah, community, the community that it’s brought for me is is huge as well. Being able to walk with people that share my worldview, and that support me and that encouraged me and that they’re praying for me as I’m struggling and I’m praying for them as they’re struggling and that we’re just, you know, mutually helping one another. But beyond just helping each other that we’re trying to strive for really loving the world, the way that Christ loves the world.

Jesse Lin 34:01
Well guys, if you liked the episode had some feedback or wanted to tell us something about your own current spiritual or religious experiences, feel free to email us at telluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com that’s Y-O-U-R-E. And as always, please rate us five stars on Apple podcasts, si vous plait, and if you come back next week, we’ll have a new episode for you then.

Jesse Lin 0:15
Yes, this week we are talking about money, honey, because personal finance and financial literacy is super confusing. I’m sure many of you have talked to your friends about saving and investing and like retirement and all that. And probably the consensus that everybody’s come to is that we don’t really know generally, what is going on? So first off, like why is financial literacy confusing? I think the main thing is that nobody’s actually taught how to manage your personal finances like from elementary school to high school to even college to I’m sure you have some experiences to add Angela regarding business school, but like it’s just not a thing. Like people don’t tell you how to invest your own money and make money for yourself.

Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)

Angela Lin 1:02
If you think about how important it is to understand how money works and what you need to do to manage your finances properly to like live a good life, it’s crazy that no one teaches you that and yet you learn about like things that may not be applicable to your daily life in school, but you would never learn how to like manage your money and I went to business school twice, I did undergrad, business school and I got my MBA, and they don’t teach personal finance in business school. If you think about it, there are just so many basic concepts that everyone should know if you are going to become an adult. But like no one teaches you and then suddenly, when you’re like 18 and older, you’re just like, slapped with a bunch of terms on anything you try to sign up for and it has words like principal, interest rate, like terms and conditions and you’re like, I don’t know sure sign and like you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, because no one explains to you just these, like, basic building block concepts that everyone needs to know generally, if you’re gonna do anything, get a car, get a house, card, like anything.

Jesse Lin 2:17
Well, I also think when you’re younger, like you’re not as stressed about how you might need to save for larger life things later on in life. So I definitely feel like when I first graduated, I had basically one major financial goal, which was to pay off my student loans, but then everything else I was kind of just like, I’m just gonna put it off, you know, I’m young, and basically most of my paycheck goes to like paying off all my necessary expenses and then the loan. So for a lot of us, we didn’t even think about spending time in our early 20s like investing in growing our understanding of personal finance just because you’re so stuck in like the mill trying to like make your way out of this like, money in and money out kind of situation.

Angela Lin 3:02
Yeah, I also feel like there’s definitely the like more responsible half of that, which is what you said. I also feel like our generation is pretty obsessed with lifestyle, right like so even if you make like $30,000 or whatever you like, want to be able to have bougie brunches, and like, go on a trip now and then somewhere and so there’s also this emphasis on like short term desires versus like planning for your future. So I think that also plays into it. Because definitely, like my first job living in New York, making literally $40,000 like paying off my student, I still was like, I want to go to like, unlimited Mimosa brunch every weekend, and I wanna like, go to Cabo. And like, I still made those things work somehow, but like, I had no savings. I didn’t have a savings account didn’t exist.

Jesse Lin 3:52
Wow. I think it’s funny. You mentioned that it’s easy for young people to sign up for some major financial decisions early on in life, such as signing up for a huge loan for school. You also have all these services from your bank, financial institutions that make it rather easy for you to get money. But don’t explain very clearly what the consequences of accessing that line of funds means, right? I mean, if you look at student loan terms and conditions and credit card, that pamphlet the insert that comes with your credit card, I’m like looking at it like, I need those like old people glasses just to like read like tiny fine print. Yeah. And it’s like, it’s confusing, right? So you think it’s really easy to get access to credit and suddenly have all this money and then you spend all of it but then on the flip side, you don’t understand the consequences of how much you have to pay back later on.

Angela Lin 4:49
Beyond like not understanding the way that these terms are laid out by companies and also being more like short sighted sometimes with the things you want to spend money on. I also feel like once people start going into the workforce, and they have some disposable income, you know, ready to be put to whatever they want to do with it, most people don’t know where to put it. So you are like losing out on a lot of opportunity to make more money with your current money through like investing or other means, because all you know how to do is like put it into a bank account, which you’ll just earn nothing. So people just don’t know what to do with their money even if they have that like I should save mindset.

Jesse Lin 5:34
So before we get into tips, you guys might be wondering, but you’re Asian. Aren’t you guys good with money? So we asked ourselves this question too, because we were like, wait a second, we don’t have any financial literacy skills. But our parents really focused us to try and get that cash monies right so there’s definitely an obsession with money, particularly the country. status and bragging that comes along with a larger disposable income. Our parents are in some way shape or form very competitive. So they love comparing deals that they’ve gained or like a really great bargain that they found. So there’s a lot of that kind of obsession with money and finding really great deals.

Angela Lin 6:25
Yeah, I think there’s also there are a couple sides so the obsession with money so like definitely there’s the bragging rights part of it or like everyone Asian parent wants to be like, absurdly rich so that they can like show off their giant house and their like, flashy car to their friends. Also, that their kids make a shit ton of money because their doctors or whatever, so that they can, like openly brag about their salaries because that’s definitely a very Asian thing. It’s like, there’s no taboo around talking about how much money you make, but like flipside of this, like luxurious image is that then like you said, they’re obsessed with like finding good deals. And I think that has a lot to do with the immigrant mentality, this mentality of like, I have to like, penny pinch and like coupon clip and like, make sure that I’m saving where I can because I can’t afford much. And like, I also moved to this more expensive country where even if I’m making more money, I’m spending more money. So like, I need to, like, find these deals where I can. So there’s this practicality of it. But for sure, there’s that weird, like very Asian bragging thing where it’s like, hey, like, you know, this used to cost $1,000 and I got it for 300 like, they love to brag about that shit, even if they’re rich, like they could afford 1000 they’re like I got it for 300, it’s pretty funny.

Jesse Lin 7:47
Yeah, I love that. You mentioned that it’s an immigrant mentality because we’re talking about financial literacy and managing finances and the whole coupon clipping like, deal hunting kind of situation is a very kind of like poor man’s way to manage your money, right? You’re very, very in the weeds in terms of every cent that you spend. But for us, we’re kind of talking about how you can take money that you have and turn it into more money rather than how you can save in its expenditure. So that is where I think our parents, as you mentioned, since they didn’t grow up with a lot, don’t have much experience to share with us on how to do that.

Angela Lin 8:28
I feel like we should give credit where credit’s due. I feel like our parents understood that you should invest your money like there is the potential to make more money if you have your money work for you a little bit through investments. But I don’t think they had the like, solid foundational knowledge around how to make the right investment choices and because of that, they didn’t teach much to us because there wasn’t like a solid base to go off of. So even though I passively saw and understood that they were investing money to try to earn more money, I was not taught any like this is exactly the method. This is the type of research you should do. And like this is what it will happen if you take these steps because I don’t think they have those steps.

Now, what we wanted to transition into was giving you some financial advice, and we want to start this section off with a huge glaring in your face emergency lights everywhere disclaimer that Jesse and I are not financial experts by any means. But we wanted to pass on some advice that has worked well for us. To be totally fair some of you might be listening and probably a lot of what we’re going to say you’re gonna be like I’ve known this for years. I think we’re thinking of broader population. There are a lot of basic building blocks of personal finance that a lot of people don’t know that we wanted to surface some of those things to make sure that everyone is at least covered from like the baseline level of things that can help you in your own personal finance. And for those who already know all this stuff – good for you, you probably know more than we do. Write us in tell us what you know. The first piece that we think is really important to cover is how loans work. And we’re not going to go deep dive here, but I think I mentioned this already up top, like there are just some building block terms that everyone needs to understand because loans are part of everything you want to do in your life. So Jesse already mentioned student loans. So as early as when you’re 18 years old, and you start going to college, you already have to sign like a crazy loan or multiple loans to be able to afford your college tuition. Then as you like progress into your adult life. There are a lot of big milestones that require loans as well home ownership when you think of like mortgage payments, those are loan payments that you’re essentially making against the value of that house. So like the basic building blocks of a loan are the principal, which is the amount of money that you have agreed to take out to borrow. So let’s say you want to borrow like $10,000, right? That’s your principal, then there’s the interest and the interest rate. So this is how the people who lend you that money, make money, they are not lending you money out of the kindness of their heart, they’re trying to hustle and make their own money. So when you sign up for a $10,000 loan, let’s say you sign up for a terrible interest rate, a 10% interest rate. That means that depending on what the terms are of your loan, you’re going to have to pay 10% of $10,000, every few whatever of your term. What people don’t understand is that when you take out $10,000, depending on how long it takes you to pay back that loan, you probably ended up paying a lot more than $10,000 at the end of it when you actually pay it back. Because when you start making loan payments, you first pay the interest part. So like if you’ve already accrued $2,000 of interest, even though you’re making like a $100 payment a month on this loan, you would be paying 20 months of interest payment first, just to pay off what that person is making and money off of your loan before you even chip away at your principal. So it’s really important to understand what exactly the terms are in terms of like how long you have to pay back that loan, how frequently you’re expected to make interest payments, what those interest payments are, and when interest starts accruing, because one thing that totally screwed me and I’m sure Jesse as well is with student loans in particular, some government loans are more generous, and they have interest terms where when you’re in school, you don’t have to pay any interest like interest doesn’t accrue while you’re still in school. When you graduate that’s like the first day that interest starts accruing. Unfortunately, there are also other loans. None of those loans have this like generous term. So the day you sign the contract to take out the loan, you start accruing interest. So like I took out my loans, two weeks or whatever, before I started business school in 2015. And I started accruing interest then so it was accruing every month for two years, and the day graduated and I made my first loan payment back it was all going towards interest not at all towards the principal yet. It is pretty important to understand the difference between these things and like the details of the loan contract that you’re getting yourself into, because if you don’t pay back your loan, where you like, you start defaulting, you’re not making your payments and you’re not clear what those details are like the fine print, you’re probably pretty screwed because most of these payment terms and the like fine print on if you start defaulting are like pretty harsh towards people who take out loans. So please please, please understand at least what principal, interest, and your contract terms are, and you should at least be like 60 to 70% set on being on a good path for taking out a loan on anything.

Jesse Lin 14:22
So now that we know how to avoid terrible debt, we want to talk about how to save for when you’re a granny which is retirement accounts. It’s really just important to have some money saved for the future because you don’t want to be working forever and you do want to be chillin in Ibiza on the beach at some point when you’re old. There’s also this weird idea that once you contribute to a retirement account that money is locked up forever until you retire. This is not always true with some retirement vehicles allow you to withdraw the money early without any penalties for big life events like a down payment for a home or if you have some like serious emergency events where you really need the money like a surgery or accident or something like that you can borrow from those accounts as well. So it’s not like the money is locked up forever. I think the first thing we’re going to talk about which is the most common is a 401k because most people will receive some form of it through their employment. What is a 401? k? I have no idea what it stands for. So I can’t describe that for you. But I can tell you it’s not a pension. I thought it was a pension when I was younger, where you just like pay into it and you get like magic money out when you’re old and retired. All of the money that you pay into a 401k is indeed invested in quote unquote, the market, which includes stocks, bonds, and other financial vehicles. And this is super important because people think that their contributions in 401k are somehow like holy or safe, and they’re just gonna be there forever. It’s not true. Your money is invested in the market, which means as the market goes up and down, your investment also goes up and down. So there’s this idea that you can kind of just like set it and forget it. And for the most part, this is true within retirement investment things. You don’t really want to be moving stuff around a lot, but you should be cognizant of what you have invested the money in so that you aren’t hit like with a huge shock later down the line when you find out that the market has crashed and all of your retirement savings are gone.

Angela Lin 16:24
And that happened in like 2008 even during the quarantine like when quarantine first happened shelter in place first got put into place in the market was fucked and like my 401k took a huge dip and I was so sad. That understanding is critical that people know that that money is not just money that’s in a bank account, it is in the market and also when you first enroll in a 401k I think it is important to like just know what you’re getting yourself into, at least at the high level, like when you are forced by your employer to open up a Vanguard account or Fidelity or like whatever their retirement partner is it will show you which fund you are invested in, and they usually do it by your age bracket. Typically the rule of thumb is that if you’re on the younger end, the mix that they decide to put you in is like more heavily skewed towards stocks because when you’re younger, you are able to withstand higher risk of like, you know, the market goes up and down. So like if the market drops 1,000,000% tomorrow, like you might be fucked, but then it could also go up like a ton. And the rule of thumb with the stock market is that over a long period of time, like 10 plus years, it usually way outperformed bonds or like safer assets. So that’s why if you’re younger, the mix is pretty high in stocks, like mine is 80% or more stock. Yeah, like 20% bonds and like other safer things, but as you age, they naturally start then like shifting you into different funds based on your age bracket. So if you are like 60 it’s like the opposite. Like it’s very much all bonds. So like just know what you’re getting yourself into at the high level just like know, click into your little account, look at what that fund is made up of. So you know, and then you can watch the market. And if you feel like things are moving not in the way you want it to with stocks or whatever, you have at least the knowledge that you can do something about it versus just letting it like all go to shit.

Jesse Lin 18:22
So how should you nurture your relationship with your 401k. The first is you should contribute up to the match that your employer gives you if you can, because the match is basically free money for you. The second thing is once you have factored in all of your necessary expenses and you find you have kind of money leftover and you’ve contributed up to the match, it still might be a good idea to contribute more, especially if you’re not really doing anything with that money because the more you contribute, the less you’re taxed, so there’s some short term benefits there as well. So then the next investment vehicle that there is is an IRA account, which you can also have along with a 401k, or it can be your primary retirement account, if you don’t have a 401k. There’s two types. Basically, one is tax exempt until you withdraw the money, and one is the opposite, you’re taxed already so when you withdraw the money, you’re not taxed again. The real benefit here, I think, if you’re younger and your income is lower, basically is your contribution to an IRA account is tax deductible also, which means that up to a certain income bracket, whatever money you’re able to contribute, you can deduct from your taxes. So it’s just another way to save for the future. And also make sure you get a little bit cash back from now from the government.

Angela Lin 19:37
If you are trying to level up like I’m trying to level up but full disclosure, I’m still learning about this one. There’s an advanced type of retirement account that’s called a solo 401k. And I’m learning more about it right now so if I misspeak, forgive me. Basically this account is for anyone who can consider themselves self employed. So this could mean you’re literally your own boss and you have your own business. And that’s like your main gig or it could mean that you have like a side gig. You could even be like a Lyft driver or whatever. Like, as long as you have some side income that is paid to you as an individual, maybe you’re a freelancer or contractor or whatever it may be, you are eligible to create a solo 401k because it’s kind of like if you think about you are your company, you are like sponsoring an employer 401k for yourself. But the benefit of this and why I’m interested in it is that you have way more control over the type of things you can invest in with your retirement money. 401k and IRAs, these are more traditional retirement accounts and the things that the financial institutions that hold these retirement accounts invest in for you are like the stocks and bonds, these more traditional type of investment vehicles. The solo 401k, you are the one that decides what you invest in. You can still invest in stocks and bonds and all these more typical things, but if you want to invest in riskier things because you like have a little bit more knowledge on what it takes to be actively investing and things like Bitcoin even or like real estate investments, or gold or like anything that you want to invest in, you basically can. Versus if you wanted to invest in those things with a traditional 401k or IRA accounts, you can’t do that.

Jesse Lin 21:22
So the next thing I want to talk about is budgeting. Budgeting is so important. It’s one of these basic financial literacy things that nobody tells you how to do. Why is budgeting important, you cannot figure out how much money you’re going to save if you don’t know where you spend your money. So tracking what you’re spending is super important. You don’t need any fancy tools to do this. If you have Excel or a spreadsheet or like a basic whatever you can start tracking your money. If you want to understand more in depth like where all your money is how much money you’re earning, you can also use a budgeting tool. There are free budgeting tools like mint.com there are paid budgeting tools like YNAB which stands for you need a budget what it all it comes down to is just start figuring out where you’re spending your money right now. Once you know then you need to decide if what you’re spending your money on is absolutely necessary things like rent, utilities, your phone bill, your groceries. So once you account for all of that, then it’s trying to think about like what you want to do long term. Do you want to go on a vacation for two weeks in Asia in two years? Do you want to be buying a house in five years? Do you want to buy a boat for when you retire? These are all things that you should probably just have a think about what you want to do, and then figure out how much money you have to save every month to reach that goal. Then it’s time to start thinking about budgeting for discretionary spending. So things that you do now that are fun, like going out, restaurants, and that way your budget considers everything important and fun in your life, both now and long term. Something really important that I want to impart when I was setting my budget that I didn’t do do a great job of at first is you should set realistic budgets, meaning that if you start tracking your spending, and you’re spending $400 a month on restaurants, you’re not going to be able to meet $100 budget for restaurants, it’s just not gonna happen. You’re never going to meet that budget, it’s going to make you really discouraged from trying to budget and then you will fall off your budgeting plan. So it’s really important when you set your budget to be realistic with it, even if it is a little bit crazy. Like if you’re spending $400 a month on restaurants, it’s really not going to go down to 100. But maybe you can make it down to 300. And so you have to balance what you want to do long term with the realities of how you’re spending now.

Angela Lin 23:35
Now that you have an understanding of what you want to save for how much you need to save and for how long to save up for that thing. We also want to bring up that there are some really easy ways to save your money without even thinking about it because I think one of the barriers people have is thinking about like, Oh, now I have to like be more disciplined. I have to like save X amount of money and like put it away physically somewhere and like think about doing that every month. But there are ways that you can do it kind of what you said before the set it and forget it type things. And I do want to preface this as for the people who like don’t want to actively invest in stuff and like play the game. But if you just want to save money so one thing that’s really easy is when you think about your direct deposit from your employer, I don’t think everyone knows this, but like your direct deposit doesn’t have to go 100% of your paycheck into one account. Most people do it that way because they’re just like, just give me all my money. But if you are have already set this budget where you’re like, okay, I want to save $100 a month then you can set up a different account and automatically set your check payment every month to have $100 of your monthly salary go into your other account. You will never miss it because you literally will never see that money so you probably won’t even notice that that’s going there every month. But after you check in after a few months, you’re like oh my god, there’s like $1,000 in here. Or, if you are willing to be a little bit more of an active player in managing your money, you could just carve out that hundred dollars or whatever you want to carve out every month and invest it yourself in other things. So I think that leads us into our final topic, which is investing. I did want to start this section off with two books that like kind of changed my entire outlook on investing and what that could mean and how easy it could be and what kind of impact that could have on your life and like the choices you have. So one of them is called The Richest Man in Babylon. This book was written like a long time ago, the late 1900s or something. It’s a fiction novel font size, like 16 less than 100 pages, like please just pick up this damn book and read it. It’s just the easiest analogies to understand even like set in Babylon a long ass time ago when they’re talking about like gold coins and like silver coins like that’s the currency they’re talking about, but its super easy to grasp. It’s similar to what Jesse was talking about before understanding how much money you’re making and like carving out a bit of it for yourself every month. But the main thesis of this book is paying yourself first. So it’s actually going in a slightly different order than what Jesse laid out in the budget making section which is like if you make $1,000 a month, the first hundred dollars you keep for yourself before you even think about the rent and the like other things you owe money on because then you’re prioritizing you and why you want to do for yourself with that money. And then from there, you invest that money in other things so that that hundred dollars becomes $200 and $1,000. That’s a basic concept of that book. But it’s so simple that by chapter two, I was like, Damn, why don’t I do this? So I would highly recommend that book and then a natural step for a lot of people who like start this kind of journey is then the next book is Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and this book came out like 20 to 30 years ago. I think like Jesse you and I, like both our parents read it when it first came out. I think they read it because it’s written by an Asian dude, but very much similarly like builds on those foundational concepts of like, why should you be shackled to certain restraints, you can find more flexibility and control for yourself by learning a little bit about like how money works and what you can invest in to, like, make the money work for you. So these are two books, I would highly, highly recommend everyone to read.

Jesse Lin 27:29
When we’re talking about investing, which I’m not a super expert in, everybody’s different and your appetite for risk is different. I don’t like things that are super risky. Things that are generally not risky: putting your money in a savings account. Most people will not have enough money in the bank where if the bank goes bankrupt, you will not get your money back – it’s insured up to a specific amount. Past that you can invest in things that are like low risk financial investments, which I personally really enjoy because they’re the more I set it and forget it financial vehicles. There are things like index funds, which are type of ETF or mutual fund, there are also bonds, gold and precious metals, you’re not going to get a ton of return investing in them, but you get kind of a sense of security that your money will grow, albeit at a slower rate.

Angela Lin 28:16
Do you want to explain to the listeners what an index fund is?

Jesse Lin 28:20
So an index fund basically is a portfolio of stocks that mimics the composition of the stock market itself. So instead of being invested in like 30, stocks of Tesla 40, stocks of Apple or whatever you’re invested in this fund, which has some investments in all of those things, as well.

Angela Lin 28:39
So the name of the game with investing is diversification. So that’s another like basic concept everyone should understand. And that basically means that you spread out your money into many different types of things so that if your money tanks in one area, it’s kind of like set off by a different area. So you’re not just like losing everything. So that’s why index funds are pretty popular with like the more risk averse type investor because you’re still getting some of the benefits of volatility of the stock market, how it could go pretty high up but you are inherently diversified because you’re not invested in like one stock or like one industry openly. So then moving into riskier types of assets, there’s kind of like medium level risk, and then higher level risk assets. Medium level, I would say stocks are definitely they definitely fall into this bucket. They’re also like different kinds of stocks. So there are stocks that pay dividends, which means that every quarter however frequently they tell you, they will do it, they give you some money back depending on how many shares you own. So my mom loves these because she’s like, I get guaranteed money, but there are tons of stocks that don’t do that and you’re just banking on them kind of growing in value over time. And so you can sell it at a higher price than you bought it. That’s the basic concept behind a stock and what you were hoping to gain from that. I’m sure there are many other investment vehicles within this kind of like medium level. And then the higher level, I definitely would not recommend that you even touch any of these unless you feel like you know a bit more about what it takes to invest and like are doing a bit more research into the companies that you’re buying these types of investment vehicles from, but there are derivatives and basically what these are or things that you can invest in that are derived from another asset. So an option is not a share of a company, it is the option to buy or to sell a share or many shares of a company. So you can see that it’s like one step or many steps removed from the underlying asset. So there are a ton of crazy types of derivatives that like I have no idea about, but the draw of these types of assets are that you can earn a lot of money by doing these because it’s like, it’s so far removed that like you can kind of gamble on like bigger pieces of the pie, but you can lose a shit ton more money as well. So for frame of reference, the like 2008 crisis happened because of really crazy shit happening with derivatives where the underlying asset was mortgage payments on houses, but these derivatives became other derivatives and like it just like cycles into these crazy things where you were like 20 steps removed from the underlying asset and then like, it all just like blew up and like went to shit. So I really would not recommend higher level risk types of investments unless you already know a thing or two about investing in are like actively kind of keeping up with the research and like have some justification for why, why you’re investing these things.

Jesse Lin 31:48
So can you explain to our listeners why currently the stock market seems to be doing well, but we also see reports of record unemployment and things that seemed to indicate that the economy is not in a good situation.

Angela Lin 32:04
Well, the easy answer is that the stock market is not the economy. So I think people often conflate these two things because they’re like, oh, well, you can like buy shares of a company and like a bunch of companies are listed in the stock market. So that must be the economy. But actually, the stock market is overly skewed into certain types of industries and certain types of companies. So for example, if you look at the top three biggest market cap, so like the highest valued companies on the US stock market, they’re all tech companies. So like these companies don’t produce anything like Google produces like services, right? Like they have search and like there’s like the cloud, like you know, things that are not tangible. The economy, you see all this unemployment because it’s based on a lot of physical things like you need retail, you need farmers, you need physical labor in certain things. These people have lost their jobs because of the pandemic, but they are not Google so like that’s not being reflected necessarily in the stock market. The second piece is that what people also don’t often understand is that the stock market is based on perceptions versus necessarily reality. So the reason why people can make a lot of money sometimes on the stock market is that they are taking advantage of short term miscalculating of the value of things so the reason why a stock markets really high right now is that people have this perception that oh, we’re on the up, well before the most recent news of COVID, right? Like there was this idea of, okay, we’re like past the worst the economy is going to pick back up and like I can go back to work soon I can like spend my money and like do these things. So then people have more confidence in companies doing better. So then because they have this confidence, they’re like buying more shares of stuff. So then they’re inflating the value of all these companies. But then the other rule of besides like diversification is that the stock market always corrects itself. Companies are valued at a certain value for a reason. And so when they’re overinflated because you’re like overly thinking that this company is gonna, like grow at a higher rate or like come back at a higher pace than it actually is going to when it doesn’t meet that performance, then the price drops a lot because then it’s the market being like, alright, that was incorrect, let me like, bring it back down. That is the main difference is that I think people don’t understand it’s not reality based. It’s perception based and it’s cyclical. So I think that’s part of why we talked about like, please even just have like a basic understanding of the market when you have a retirement account, because even if you don’t want to invest actively in stocks, or an options or like anything crazy, again, your retirement account already is exposing you to the market understand that the market is cyclical, it has ups and downs and like we might be coming up onto a recession soon. Who knows. So like, just be you aware that like that will happen and either be willing to like take the punches of we’re going to take a dip for many years and your money might not come back for many years or be a little bit more active in that decision and like, take that money out for now and like put it somewhere else, or shift your mix into bonds or whatever so that you’re not losing all that money when we do.

Jesse Lin 35:25
Alright guys, welcome back to the closing section of our podcast, the fortune cookie. As always, if you like this week’s episode, if you have questions about the tips we shared, if you have better tips to share with us, feel free to email us at telluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com, that’s Y-O-U-R-E, or you can DM us on Instagram. Alright, so this week’s sweet treat topic to encourage you guys to make good financial decisions is we’re going to talk about what are our biggest financial achievements so far?

Angela Lin 35:57
Hashtag humble brag. So my biggest financial achievement was paying off my student loans. And I definitely, yes, I will say I did it twice because I had undergrad and then I had masters, the same month that I paid off my undergrad loans. I signed my contract to take on my masters loans. So I have like one day of celebration of freedom before that, and I’m so happy to say that as of last year, I paid off my six figure debt.

Jesse Lin 36:36
So paying off student loans was also a big achievement for me, in part because it showed me that the whole budgeting process and not indulging in everything now does have some kind of rewards in the future. And when the process of paying off the student loans was done, I was like really proud about it because it was just a way to validate the fact that you can basically budget and there is like a light at the end of the tunnel. And it was just like my first adult achievement. You know, it’s like the first thing that I was able to say that yes, like I accomplished other than the fact that I’m employed.

Angela Lin 37:14
Cool. Okay, well, so if you enjoyed this episode, please write us in again, like Jesse said, but also rate us five stars on Apple podcasts, thank you, but also in all seriousness, this is the first episode where we gave kind of like advice. So if you enjoyed this format, please do write us in because we’re experimenting with what’s interesting and what’s helpful to you guys. As always, come back next week, where we’ll have a fresh new episode for you then.

Angela Lin 0:16
Today, we thought we’d lighten things up. We’ve had some heavier topics, the last few episodes. So we wanted to have something a bit lighter, obviously, we’ll still go into some kind of serious implications of these things. But for something fun, we wanted to talk about the concept of beauty and the standards of beauty that are held within both our western world as well as in the eastern sphere that our parents raised us in. Let’s start with why we wanted to talk about standards of beauty. I think one of the big reasons is that the way that we look and the level with which non Asian people think that we are beautiful and attractive is a big thing part of the broader concept of representation. Because previously we talked about media representation and how often or not often Asians are represented there. I think that speaks volumes to how broadly our looks are accepted within Western culture. Because if the most beautiful people within our society the like actors and actresses and models don’t appear frequently in Western culture that says a lot about kind of like how much we are accepted, and also what people think is normal, the more they think our looks are normal, the more we are accepted as normal.

Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)

Jesse Lin 1:39
I would say we’re not seen as abnormal. But if you’re talking about beauty and how it plays into your own self confidence and self image, it’s really hard to feel beautiful when you don’t see yourself in all the places where people are usually glamorized. It’s really Hard to feel beautiful about yourself when you just don’t see yourself. Sometimes we feel like we’re in this Limbo, right? Like, we don’t really fit in here in America fully, because we don’t look a specific way. But we also don’t really fit into Asia either. Like when I go back to Asia, someone can clock that I’m not somebody that lives in Asia like really, really quickly. Like they’re like, oh, you’re a Westerner, even though we look outwardly have the features of Asian people. I think this is really affected how we felt about ourselves growing up. Personally, I kind of just went like in very many different directions. I had like a long phase where I was just like in that whole, like I don’t care how I look at phase just because I felt like everyone else was so much further or cooler or better looking that like it behooved me better to be like on the completely opposite end of it, so that I would stand out more.

Angela Lin 2:48
I definitely always cared about how I look but for me, it was more like I just always wished I was like either a super cute popular blonde, white girl or I was like a stick thin Asian girl because I didn’t really fit in with either of the stereotypes of what beauty or like attractiveness would look like depending on which world I was trying to fit into. So if like within Orange County right we were like surrounded by beautiful rich white people. I didn’t look anything like them. But also when I tried to compare myself to Asian people, I was like, oh my like stomach’s not as exactly flat as theirs and like, how come when I eat less food than they do? I’m like, fatter than them. It fed a lot into my insecurities. Because I didn’t quite into either world.

Jesse Lin 3:38
I echo that and I feel like we just responded to it in very different ways. Like, I was like, oh, I see this, but then I was like, there’s no way I’m gonna get there. So then I basically just went a completely opposite direction. But then I think also like, depending on what other parts of your identity are different communities you belong to some of these standards of beauty is deals can be amplified in even like more negative way. Like as a gay man when I first started like hooking up with people like using apps and stuff, honestly it was flabbergasted how like openly rude people were about who they wanted to sleep with. You would frequently see profiles or play with not interested in fat people are not interested in feminine people, we don’t like Asians, we don’t like black people. You take someone who isn’t represented who already has a difficult time seeing themselves and then you throw them into this like pool where people are like, No, no, no, no, no. And so you further feel like rejected and you don’t even really know yourself yet, so it’s like this double whammy feeling in terms of how those standards of beauty can really amplify negative emotions around your own self worth and how you see yourself.

Angela Lin 4:49
That’s so fascinating because unlike straight dating apps, no one can say those kinds of things because it I mean, it’s still racist and like discriminatory in the gay world, I just I guess I don’t understand why it’s okay to say those things there because in the straight apps like you would get canceled, you know, if you wrote any of those types of things, the like, closest thing that anyone could write is like girls who were obnoxious and would write things like must be over six feet tall to talk to me, or like, you know, those things like that. But they could never write things like explicitly not into certain races.

I mean, Grindr is like a special microcosm of like nastiness in general. But with all these things, that’s just like the clear representation of how people already acting and even if you didn’t have that, so visible, it’s still how many people feel and like enforce the standard of beauty.

Disclaimer, today we’re going to be talking about standards of beauty. And I think we’re going to make a lot of comments that like might be somewhat offensive, because beauty in and of itself is something that’s super subjective. And also, we’re talking in broad strokes here. So like a lot of what we say is the standard of beauty is like our perception of what that is, we recognize we’re not like catering this necessarily towards all the different minority groups because for sure, I think there’s some nuance so today we are largely talking about white society, because that’s mostly what you see in media. All right, let’s start at the base level. What are some of the traditional standards of beauty from our our motherland so let’s talk about Eastern culture first. What are some of those typical standards of beauty for women? It is really this like super pale as fuck like skinny as fuck girl ideally your quote unquote tall but I think that like range of tallness is different in Asia because everyone’s short there. So like, I remember when I was growing up, my cousin was like, No, five, three, but like, I’m a midget. So I’m super, super short I’m only like five feet tall. So for me like five three was like so tall, right and like, and all my aunts and uncles would reinforce this, like, Oh, your cousin is like super tall and skinny and beautiful. And I was just like, Oh, cool. Let me like continue to feel bad about myself. But in Asia, I think for a girl it’s literally like five, three, up Considered tall. Also the like paleness I think it really does stem from like thousands of years ago in Asia of like, yeah, if you’re pale it means you were rich enough to stay indoors and like under sun sun umbrellas and stuff to like make sure that you weren’t the one working out in the fields doing manual labor. That’s what being tan indicates. So that’s like the origin but obviously that’s like perpetuated and changed into like different reasons nowadays there’s also obviously influence now with like, white people and Western culture wanting to look a bit more like them that’s playing into it. But yeah, for some reason, it’s like continued into today that like tan is not beautiful in Asia. And then the skinniness is interesting because something that’s like continue to bother me forever is just that in Asia, they like don’t care how you were skinny as long as you are skinny. So like most people who are skinny are just skinny fat and they like don’t work out at all they have like no muscle whatsoever. They just like starve themselves so that they like appears skinny on the outside even on if on the inside they’re like super unhealthy, like dying inside because I remember when I was a kid or not a kid like a teenager and I went back to Asia and I was always super jealous of my cousin because she was quote unquote tall five three and skinny and like typical super skinny flat everywhere Asian and I was like, I could never look like this. But anyways, I was already into that phase where I was like really self conscious of how much I was eating and like because I thought it was fat. So when we’d go out i i’d always be like, silently observing how she was eating to like figure out how she was so skinny and literally she would just like not eat all day and then she would take me to a cafe where they had this like the brick toast you know what I mean? Like thick, French toast with like scoops of ice cream and like syrup and shit, like condensed milk and shit everywhere. And that would be all she ate that day technically, but it was like the fattiest most unhealthy food that there was and that’s like, that’s how a lot of Asian girls are skinny fat is like they deprive themselves of most food, but the food they choose to eat is like, so unhealthy and terrible for you. It was also reinforced by my mom, because she’s also super skinny, but like skinny fat for sure. And like, there’s this like, actually, I saw this I think on like Asians Never Die or something recently. Asian parents are constantly telling you you’re fat, like when you gain you know 5 pounds or whatever. Yeah, they’re so in your face about it and like rude but then they’re like, you’re so fat. How’d you get this fat and then dinnertime rolls around and they’re like, here’s all this food. And like, if you don’t eat at all, I’m offended. It’s like, I’m sorry. I don’t understand how you think this is happening.

Jesse Lin 11:01
So from the guys perspective, I think that there are like two paths that people walk. Generally speaking, there’s the very like Kpop like pretty flower boy look. And then on the other side, there’s definitely like a more traditional like, athletic male masculine look. Everybody kind of generally knows what the K pop boy look is like, it’s definitely more quote unquote, feminine. They’re definitely like more conscious or aware of the different things that they’re using. So they’re doing like a lot of makeup. They’re dressing in like very flashy ways. And on the other side, like for like a more traditionally athletic looking man, I think it’s very similar to a Western sense of beauty. You’re looking for someone who’s like very athletic, somewhat built. They look like they could play sports, stuff like that.

Angela Lin 11:49
So speaking of the Kpop look, I think one thing that’s interesting is kind of the bleed over between like this more effeminate look. Because they borrow certain things from like Asian women culture, I guess in terms of the the look and the products they use and whatnot and in women, I’m not sure if this like translates over to all the Kpop pretty boy looks too, but in Asian culture, the double eyelids is something that’s like, really important. I desperately wanted double eyelid surgery when I was like 13. And this is like a very common surgery. There are a couple of reasons why Asian women like to do it. One is that we constantly have the stereotype that like Asians have really tiny eyes, right? And that’s both perpetuated within Western culture and also an Asian culture. Also, double eyelids as a feature is something that I think is more associated with Western culture because Asian or non white people are the ones that have single eyelids. So it was just like again, you’re trying to kind of like check off these things that will make you more like westernized and fit into those traditional standards of beauty. So I don’t know if that’s the thing was on Kpop or like the pretty boy look, but I wouldn’t be surprised I guess if that’s like super popular in Asian women culture. But you learn some interesting things about the, like acceptance or lack thereof of this kind of ascetic, right recently?

Jesse Lin 13:28
Yes, Yes, for sure. So when we’re talking about like, standards of beauty, a lot of times we think that like, these are like organic things that like surface society, and like kind of spreads out. But when we look at Asia, like you can actually see some of it is like directed. When you look at China and a lot of the aesthetic kind of bleeds from Korea. The government actually very recently kicked up their propaganda machine to try and exert some control over what a real man should look like. And if you look at the old communist propaganda you see these like very atypical looking Asian men in terms of how you would think of Asian men from a Western perspective. Like they look kind of like footballers, they have like very chiseled jaws. They’re usually dark skinned. There was even one in the article that I was looking at the dude was like shirtless and like he wasn’t jacked, but he was like, pretty built. And so it’s interesting because the government there is trying to like direct people away from this more like feminine aesthetic because they feel like it doesn’t fit into, you know, how a man should appear. And a lot of those things kind of dovetail with social things that are happening in the space. So I think originally when there were all these feminine men coming into the picture, it was okay. But then you start to get more movements like LGBTQ people becoming more visible and they also look like that and quickly you have like connection between those two things and then becomes not okay. So then a lot of these things are kind of like public pushback against what you perceive as like outsider group that has some kind of negative association with it. And they want to move to the other side where it’s like more masculine man. So you’re not like as connected to that.

Angela Lin 15:12
Right, because when we had Tong on last week, she talked about how China obviously is like, still super homophobic and like, you just don’t talk about it anyway, if you are. But it’s funny because you you said like, in your research, that it’s not considered something gay.

Jesse Lin 15:31
Well, specifically the Kpop stars, what I read was that they don’t think of these things as a gay thing. Like they think of putting on makeup, having really nice hair or having really nice clothes as a way to present the best version or your best self to the people that you care about. And those people perceive that as an effort, you know, to look nice, and they appreciate that the culture is also slightly different, where a lot of the socialization for guys is between guys, so you’re like you have a much closer male relationship to your friends then I feel like you have here where it might be perceived as like gay. So I think we should talk about probably the other side of the puzzle which are the standards of beauty here in the wild, wild west. I think we both agree that the aesthetic is still very much like WASP or Baywatch like you have you’re tall muscle man and you’re like beautiful buxom ladies and everyone is blond hair and blue eyed and you know, they look like they came off the cover of like a Men’s Health or like Shape magazine or something like that.

Angela Lin 16:40
What I find interesting is that the continued trend of what is like most popularly seen as beautiful still kind of falls into this like Aryan world, which I think it’s kind of fucked up because obviously that came from like, Nazi world but it is still like you said, like blonde is still preferred over brunette, blue eyes or green eyes, right? Like the more like lighter colored eyes are more interesting and more coveted and Jewish people aren’t like super represented.

Jesse Lin 17:14
Yeah. And there’s some like specific characteristics that we kind of already drew out. But like, you know, for a guy, it’s like you’re muscular. You’re really tall. Your skin tone is darker. It’s better than if it’s paler, but obviously not if you’re dark enough to be a minority. That’s a no no. From the face standpoint, like I feel like a lot of what’s more coveted is like the strong jawline and like very well defined features. And then I think two more like guys kind of situation is like the ability to grow facial hair seems to be a big thing. Like you want to be able to do that because that’s seen as a, like oh, manly, like grow a full beard. And then the last thing which I find the most amusing is like a comparison of basically like penis size. And obviously, as with everything America, the bigger the better. What about for ladies?

Angela Lin 18:00
Definitely like big boobs are ideal in the in the Western world, big ass as well somehow if you have both even better flat stomach, which the thinness of Western versus Eastern, I think has this distinction here because even though both worlds want you to be thin, I think in America, fitness is very important. So they don’t want you to be skinny fat per se, they want you to be like, fit so you want to be lean, but you also can’t be like, then muscular like you don’t want to like threaten the masculinity of male counterpart. There’s just like so much of I want you to be this but not to that extent.

Jesse Lin 18:48
I mean, we kind of talked about how we don’t feel represented as minorities in basically everywhere, but is that completely true? Like I think there are some standards of beauty that are like slowly changing and being like, absorbed into like the popular zeitgeist, but it is not like fully accepted yet. For example, like, let’s look at like some pretty common supermodel Naomi Campbell and like Beyonce and Tyra Banks, like in general, they have like features that are more similar to like white people features. Yeah. And so it’s like easier for people to accept their beauty into the ideal standards of beauty.

Angela Lin 19:32
Yes, they look like white people, but with dark skin, like, I don’t know if you watch this movie in the 90s, but early 2000s I don’t remember but Tyra Banks was in a movie with Lindsay Lohan child Lindsay Lohan called Supersize Me.

I remember, but she’s so beautiful. And looks so anglicised that she is basically black Barbie like she played a Barbie doll in that movie that came to life

Jesse Lin 20:08
There’s definitely now this kind of like moving towards the middle like I guess I’m merging of the two looks where darker skinned people are moving to be lighter skinned and some lighter skin people are moving to be darker skin like Ariana Grande. I feel like a lot of people forget that she is an Italian white girl – she looks very dark. She pulls off a really good like you think that she might be like Latina but she’s not. So there are definitely I feel like there’s this like weird middle space where they’re trying. They’re trying to move into this space is just kind of like a weird, amorphous like, you may not be the like race that you may be but that’s somehow beautiful for you.

Angela Lin 20:55
But okay, so yes, there is this kind of merging of People are trying to like kind of wanting to be what they are not. But I think on the like more uplifting side of it, there is a different trend where we’re like progressing into, especially in the world of like fashion and also in Hollywood. There’s this like newer embrace of wanting to represent minorities in more of like the way that they actually look in terms of like some of the features that are more traditionally ethnic. So like, for example, I feel like now with black people, like there’s this big embrace of showing off your like natural look in terms of your hair. Because I think up until this point, everyone felt like if you wanted to be accepted in western standards of beauty you had to have weaves in and like straighten your hair so that you would look more white because those are the hair styles that white people have. And, again, I do think that plays into why like Beyonce and Tyra Banks were like super popular was because they they always had hair where they looked like super luscious, like, you know, the curls and like the hair that emulated white women. But now there’s this embrace, like just letting your actual natural hair show, which oftentimes is like curlier. And like, you know, there’s like, fro’ sometimes, but like, just letting that beautiful natural hair texture like shine and welcome that as something that is beautiful in its own right, outside of these, like more traditional standards of beauty that have been enforced over and over again over many decades.

Jesse Lin 22:36
Yeah, I think that’s great. I mean, we’re also seeing a lot more representation in terms of different gender expressions and body types. So like trans, like I’ve definitely seen more trans people visible in advertising campaigns and like people that are not like skinny, skinny like or traditionally like you would appear on a photo campaign.

Angela Lin 22:56
Now that we’ve talked about the two different standards of beauty between east and west, I think one thing we wanted to discuss was why there’s this kind of taboo within Western society where it feels like if you want to put in more effort into your appearance, whether that’s as little as like, styling your hair, or it’s as much as like, veering into trying makeup and like more androgynous types of clothing and whatnot, like, there’s this, like, people kind of poo-poo it for some reason as like when you try to like take extra care of yourself and like present yourself better. Like why do we think that is?

Jesse Lin 23:39
I want to say it’s because these looks are sometimes associated, like I mentioned before with the LGBTQ community, or they’re associated with some other marginalized group where people are like, we don’t like we don’t want to see that. And so like when they see people veering, towards that direction. They’re like, oh, no, like, you don’t want to be like a part of that. That’s like the weird outside thing that you don’t want to be connected to. I think also part of the reason is that the guys here don’t have very close male friendships with other men like in terms of talking through their feelings and stuff. And I think part of that also goes to like, how much caring you’re taught to show for yourself, right? So I’m now watching queer, thanks for the recommendation. But one thing that I felt was so striking is that a lot of the times when they’re one on one with the person that they’re working with, they don’t seem to personally have an issue with any of the tips or things that they’re being asked to do. And in fact, when they’re confronted with this idea of it is okay to care for yourself and doing these things as an act of caring for yourself. It’s like a different orientation. Like they understand that this is for me, and like it’s for me to feel better and it suddenly is not a you know, somehow it’s not a gay thing even though most of the for me tips has been given by like quote unquote the gayest is why all the Fab Five. Like you have a super gay man telling you to take care of yourself with things that you would traditionally think are gay but you don’t take it that way once you understand it’s not that it’s just about taking care of your appearance and how you want to present to other people. So a big part of it is really just feel like people have the wrong perception of wearing moisturizer and doing your hair nice. Like these are not things that make a person gay. These are things that make it seem like you care about how you appear to other people. And that in and of itself is not a bad thing.

Angela Lin 25:49
Yeah, it’s so funny because earlier you were asking like who decides what is like okay and not okay, right. And like, I feel like there was this unspoken decision a long time ago that in order to be a masculine man, you had to like not care at all about what you look like. The less you cared about what you look like, the more manly you were. So like you could be sloppy and like look like shit and just throw on the dirty shirt you have on the floor and like that’s manly as opposed to like putting in a bit of effort into how you’re presenting yourself. Because somehow then that again kind of like attacks your level of masculinity that you are giving off to everyone else which is kind of crazy because that’s not at all how it is in in Asia or Europe because even those those like you talked about in Asia, there’s like the pretty boy K-pop people and also the like athletic more traditionally like manly people, but even the ones that fall into the like athletic manly side, they care more about how they look and present themselves then in the in Western culture because they still like make sure they have like the cool haircuts and like they’re like wearing like cool brands, like they still care about those things, even if it’s like presenting a more like sporty or like athletic look. So that’s always been super interesting to me. And then also Europe for sure. Like, I definitely remember in college, there was someone that I met who was from Europe who’s from like Belgium, or whatever, and something came up or someone was brought up something they liked. And he said he liked it too. And they’re like, oh, really, usually only girls like that kind of stuff. And he was like, I’m sorry, I’m European, like, I’m comfortable enough in my masculinity that I don’t feel threatened, like liking something that is more traditionally feminine. And that always stuck with me because it’s like, yeah, why isn’t that the case that like, I guess if you like something here and you’re a straight man in the in Western culture that like if you happen to like something that falls outside of the definition of like, traditionally masculine and that means you were like, your masculinity is being threatened.

Jesse Lin 28:02
I think it just goes to show that standards of beauty are strange and often contradictory, right? Like we we talked about how there are these like perceptions of beauty for both men and women and from the man side that ideal look requires a lot of work and effort, but then you look in like real life and people are like, oh, no, like we don’t want to necessarily be associated with doing these specific things that would lead you to that ideal look. So I guess at the end the day like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And then you know, we have these standards, but they’re really sometimes there, they’re really sometimes not there

Angela Lin 28:45
Welcome back to our fortune cookie closing section because we always like to end on a sweet treat. And the sweet treat today should be really fun for you guys because it is at our expense. Today, we’re going to talk about fails in fashion and beauty of trying to become white essentially through our lives and one of the big things that Jesse and I both partook in when we were in our teens was trying real hard to become emo kids. Well, we did succeed and become an emo kid. Yeah, but aesthetically, I think we were trying really hard to copy that like typical white scene emo kid look of like the angular hair and like choppy layers and like wearing all black and like, for guys is like wearing for some reason, women’s skinny jeans, and all this shit. And I think we succeeded and nailing that look. But something that we realized which was fucking hilarious was like, when we adopted this look, and you took us outside of the context of the US and you put us like side by side with just like Asian people in Asia. We’re like, do we look more Asian for some reason now then like before, because a lot of the more angular and like super layered hair styling was already happening in Asia like way before the emo scene. Yeah, so like take away the of course like dark eyeliner and like wearing all black or whatever but like the hair alone and us being Asian, we’re like fuck, we’ve somehow like became more Asian even though we were trying to become white,

Jesse Lin 30:23
The hair was intense. And the hair was the thing for me in high school like basically as I mentioned, like I didn’t really quite care all that much about what I was wearing, but my hair was like the point of expression. I had periods where I had Justin Bieber hair. What I wanted was like this way the surfer dude hair but obviously Asian hair just grows straight. So you know, did with it what you could and then for a period I had a fauxhawk for a while. Yeah, that was, that was real as well.

Angela Lin 30:53
Super fail. So we went through our emo phase and then a different phase we went through was the kind of preppy phase where we were also super into Hollister and Abercrombie. At least for me, I was obsessed with the show Laguna Beach. So I definitely was like, I need to buy more Hollister like these beautiful white girls on Laguna Beach, but like it kind of backfired. And for me at least, it made me feel worse about myself because for anyone who’s ever tried on anything at Hollister and Abercrombie, they’re made for anorexic people like they make triple xs as a size because people are so skinny that wear these clothes. So whenever I wore it, I always felt like fucking obese because the clothes would be like kind of tight, right? And like, I’d have to buy like, I don’t know, medium instead of triple extra small. Yeah, it totally backfired because at the time, I was like, why is this so expensive? It was like $50 or $60 for like a shirt or whatever. And I’m like, I have to save up all my money to buy this shit and then also buy really expensive stuff that somehow still makes me feel bad. I don’t know.

Jesse Lin 31:56
And then they went bankrupt. I guess that people started feeling like I don’t want to feel bad anymore. I’m not going to shop here.

Angela Lin 32:02
Or maybe they got sick of smelling the fuckin perfume cologne they pumped through the air.

Jesse Lin 32:09
Alright guys, if you enjoy this episode or you have some fun stories of hashtag failing at being white to share with us or if you just have any other opinions about the standards of beauty we discussed in the episode please let us know you can write us at telluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com that’s Y-O-U-R-E and of course you can hit us up on all the socials.

Angela Lin 32:33
Yes, and also we already said this but if you’re in Asia or you lived in Asia before or you have exposure to especially like Korean and this like pretty boy culture. We’re very interested in hearing more about that because we don’t have like firsthand experience. So email us we want to hear about it and also come back to us next week because as always, we will have a fresh new episode for you the following week.

Angela Lin 0:15
This week in celebration of America, we wanted to talk about what it really means to be American and all the good and bad that kind of comes with that. So let’s start off with the building blocks of being American. For me, one of the biggest first things that we’ve definitely talked about a lot is the concept of individualism because especially in contrast with our Asian parents upbringings and the cultures back in Taiwan, China, etc. Whereas very communal based, America is one of the like uniquely different countries in the world I think that is like very focused on you as an individual. What you want to do for your future. And that’s why the label that people give for America is this like land of opportunity for you to like, make a life for yourself. And we’re also kind of like obsessed with this concept of winning. But I think that’s all tied up into this individualist, self centered kind of way of thinking.

Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)

Jesse Lin 1:21
Yes. I also think that from this individualism and this idea of you’re coming here to seek opportunity, springs, this very tight looking perspective, where you’re only looking towards the future and the possibilities of what you can achieve versus reflecting on the past history and learning from that. I mean, our country is fairly young, it’s like 200, something years old, but obviously, we know there’s a lot of problematic history that’s important to learn from. And with this idea of like individualism exceptionalism for looking a lot of values. Usually drowned out or forgotten. A lot of us have studied like American history, obviously in school, but you don’t really understand what it really means on a personal level. So there were never really humanized stories about how people suffered, you only really got to see the exceptional individuals who came out of that. But you don’t hear stories about just your regular person who was working as a house slave on a plantation or person who was just farming as that slave on a plantation. And I think those are really important stories to hear and really makes it personal for you

Angela Lin 2:36
Yeah, another big piece of being American is that we don’t have a singular heritage, or common ethnic culture or anything with each other because we are a country of immigrants. So like the unless you’re a Native American you weren’t, you’re not American from like birth. So because of that, it’s gonna be difficult for people that come from such different cultures have different values have different languages to come together and like try to find common ground. But on the flip side, I actually find beauty in that we’re this melting pot. So unlike most other countries in the world, we are one of the unique places where people from all over the world come together and coexist.

Jesse Lin 3:28
Yes. So I think something else really interesting and really unique about being American is how much we love, our rights and our Constitution. And I think this is really, really interesting topic because I personally have not seen people been so invested in a document that is more than 200 years old as a way to validate their current existence. It’s so interesting. I feel like this is another uniquely American thing where you’re like being are my rights and they’re mine and I can do whatever I want.

Angela Lin 4:04
I mean, it goes hand in hand with individualism, because you’re out for yourself. So you’re like, hey, this country was founded on us all trying to like advance ourselves, we broke free from the chains of Britain to like make our own way. So like, who were you just in my way with my right to do like wherever the fuck I want so that that is like you know even though we have these like disparate cultures that come together in America, that is one of the like core things we all have in common, which is like, I’m here to do what’s best for me and I can do whatever I want. Don’t trample on my rights. Like that’s a common way that we all think. And so there obviously a million rights that we could discuss, but there are two that I think are very top of mine, one of which is the right to bear arms. This specific right in particular has gotten a lot of attention because of the increased amount of mass shootings. And so this one’s so interesting because it is one of the like foundational rights that Americans have. But it is become so politicized that like the left and right have completely opposing views on this, the right is focused on like, I want the right to bear arms so that I can protect my family, I can protect my land, I can protect me, right. And so, on the left, it’s focused on like, Okay, well, what’s the damage that can be done by you bearing arms or not not like you specifically, but if like these mentally unstable people who are the cause of these mass shootings, if they’re bearing arms, like what’s the implication for society? So it’s been a really interesting debate, I think, because there’s so much like villainizing on both sides.

Jesse Lin 5:49
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean hand in hand with that is the whole idea of freedom of speech, right that you can say whatever you want, and, you know, it doesn’t matter what you say you have the right to make that speech. But the same with the right to bear arms, there’s a broad level of interpretation amongst the public. And some interpretations on both sides are incorrect in terms of what the law actually covers.

Angela Lin 6:12
There’s also just this like huge gray area right now. And when you say something that is not at the like, prevailing narrative that’s being discussed, you get cancelled socially via social media or like socially by your friends, like you are being punished for your freedom of speech.

Jesse Lin 6:33
I think where there’s some confusion is that people think that they have the freedom of speech with impunity, meaning that they can say whatever they want with no consequences. And the thing of course, with both of these things is again, it’s so me-me-me centric, right? Like you think about the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was written like forever ago, man, like there’s no way that the founding fathers could have conceived that these rights would be used in the current ways that they are right now, but the interpretation is very me.

Angela Lin 7:06
Okay, let’s get into the shit. Are you proud to be American Jesse?

Jesse Lin 7:10
That is a really loaded question. I think there are many things that I like about being American. I like the diversity that we have in our country. I like the fact that there are so many minority groups that are loud and vocal about their existence in this country. I like my life in general. But I think when you look at the history of America, what’s happening now and the history of America, in the international sphere, there are situations where we are on the right side of history, but there are also situations that we’re not and aside from that, it’s hard for me to feel proud of something that’s so abstract. There are many different things that make up being American. And most of those things are kind of individualistic, right? They’re unique to each individual person. And there are no real shared ethnicity or heritage or qualities that make a person uniquely American. So for me, it’s really hard to say that I am truly proud of being American just because of the problematic history and the fact that it’s such an abstract concept.

Angela Lin 8:20
But you don’t like hate being American, you wouldn’t like give up your citizenship.

Jesse Lin 8:25
I think it really depends. I mean, changing your citizenship in general is not something that anybody does lightly, right. Like once you lose your citizenship, it’s really difficult to gain back, you know, you kind of have to weigh all the pros and cons based off of the things that I was talking about in terms of the attributes of the country that I love the people, the places and the things they think would have to be equal to in a new place for me to give it up. But I don’t want to say that it’s like not feasible. It’s just a more logical choice for me that I would need to have enough benefits to consider doing or changing my citizenship.

Angela Lin 9:00
Yeah, you and I have different views on this like concept of pride and being American. So it sounds like obviously you like different parts of being in this country and the people here but you’re not like necessarily proud and like going to be yelling at the top of the rooftops about being American versus I have always been like, incredibly proud of being American. And I think though that comes from a place of privilege. Honestly, it’s because when I think about being American, I think about the privilege I have over people with different nationalities in terms of so many things like the quality of life that we have the economic power that the country has, and when I fly to different countries, I rarely have to think about if I have to have a visa because the diplomatic relationship America has with most other countries in the world makes it so that you never have to think about it if you’re going to be accepted once you’ve landed in a country. When I was younger and I went back to Taiwan, it would definitely be like, I get to live in America but you guys are stuck here which is like you know, these are not like great things. That’s why I’m caveat being that like this comes from a place of privilege that I’m thinking about all these things. But like, I think that’s also tied to why you are not so eager to give up your citizenship because even if from like a social norm standpoint, you’re not like so, so proud of being American, you wouldn’t so easily throw away all the privilege that comes with being American so many people fight hard for years and years and years to gain the citizenship because it is one of the most powerful citizenships you can have in the world. And so that feeds into my pride for being in this country. And it’s not like necessarily a good thing, but it’s because I feel like I’m like on the top of the world compared to other people. So I think that that is like the root of where my pride comes from. But I like that I agree with you. It’s not a perfect place. But I also could never fathom that there’s another country that I think is like infinitely better than America that I would like choose to live there over this place for the rest of my life, right, like maybe a portion of my life to get it from taste or whatever. But like, even when I live abroad for a few months at a time, I always miss coming home, like, whenever I pass customs, and they’re like, welcome home, like seeing that flag. It just I love America.

Jesse Lin 11:33
I have to agree with you the things that you said, I’m very thankful for those things. And just because I’m not necessarily like proud of the country doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize that there are many, many benefits in being a citizen here and that many people have struggled to try to become a citizen here. A lot of people come here chasing this idea of the American dream. Do you believe that that’s like a legitimate thing for a lot of people to achieve?

Angela Lin 11:57
Oh, that’s a loaded question. I didn’t know that you were going to phrase it like that. I believe in the American dream, it’s not an equal opportunity to achieve that dream for everyone. Obviously, people come here as immigrants but totally different resources, connections, education levels, language ability like that totally affects your ability to achieve the American dream. So I don’t think it’s fair just like any person, regardless of circumstance who lands in the US is going to have the same ability to achieve the American dream. Do I think that even the people with the worst circumstances if given infinite amount of ambition and perseverance, do I think it’s possible for them to achieve the American dream? Yes, but I think there are so many other things weighing people down that don’t come here with the right kind of circumstances and like a leg up that many people give up and like it’s hard to achieve if you don’t like push through forever, but there’s always like these outliers, right? Like the pursuit of happiness. Perfect example, literally a guy’s homeless with a child and he was hiding his homelessness while he was interviewing for jobs to make a better life for himself, and he did. So like, it’s fucking hard, but I think it is achievable. But people are not all equal in terms of the where they start part of it all.

Unknown Speaker 13:14
I agree with you, for the most part for all that I think everybody comes here with this golden idea of what America is like, and everybody is trying to achieve it. But I do think that the perspective is very myopic, because everyone thinks coming here will somehow make them exceptional, or that they’re landing here, they will find themselves in exceptionally different circumstances. And from that perspective, I think that the American Dream is not exactly true, because let’s face it, not everybody is exceptional, and not every place in America is exceptional. So as you also mentioned, it really does depend on the circumstances of the person but for sure, I think everyone has a very hopeful view and perspective of how their life might develop.

Angela Lin 13:59
Do you feel like this vision and this like hope that you’re gonna have the potential to become exceptional here is one of the big reasons that your parents immigrated here.

Jesse Lin 14:10
Yeah, for sure. I don’t think they were planning on being exceptional. Not that you don’t want to be exceptional, but like we’ve talked about this before about how the standard of living and the pay gap is so dramatically different between Taiwan and here even for basic service jobs. So I think their idea was that they would be able to come here with the levels of attainment that they had and generate a lot more than they would have. In some aspects they were able to do that but obviously everything scales right so you make more here but you also spend a lot more here so I do think that that part of the we’re gonna be so wealthy and well off piece of the dream was not quite achieved, but it definitely is one of the reasons for sure that I think my parents came here

Angela Lin 14:55
Mine too. I don’t think they thought they were going to be exceptional, necessarily. But like my dad, because he was an entrepreneur before he started that business after we moved to America so I think he’s like one of the most ideologically, like American of us all. So I think he in particular did come here thinking like, I am sick of working for other people and like being told what to do for pennies, right? Like, if I’m ever gonna do something for myself and like, be my own boss, this is where it’s gonna be. So I do think that’s a big part of why they came here and like not to say of course, like, my family’s not rich and like, he wasn’t exceptional to the point where he became like, okay, it’s whatever, but like, he did just fine for us. And I like I never felt like I was want for anything. So it did good for coming here for sure. So let’s get into the meat of like the cultural difference. Obviously, there are like great things about being American. But I think there are also things that we can take from our Asian culture in terms of the thinking some of the practices. One of those things is the communal thinking and I think the good thing is that we have made a little bit of progress in this sense because despite us being very me-me-me overall and like certainly people are somewhat breaking this right now especially in certain states, but during quarantine, I do feel like we have increased our level of societal concern for each other. When I am waiting in line to get into a supermarket now it makes me feel so good when I see that like everyone is the six feet apart. They’re all wearing their homemade masks, they’re like more aware of their surroundings and who’s around them and their behavior around each other. You’re actually considering other people in your environment as opposed to like just being on a you rampage which is like our usual way that we operate. So I don’t think we’re like at all to like the degree of Asia for example, where like if you have a minor cold you wear a mask so that you don’t spread your germs. Other people like that is ultimate like concern for others. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that. But like it is a nice little silver lining that I’m seeing that like we’re making baby steps towards that communal way of thinking through the quarantine.

Jesse Lin 17:13
This is a good change to highlight. I think it’s also worth talking about the differences in how we treat more vulnerable populations, especially when we’re talking about the elderly population in the US. I mean, we’ve seen a lot of different reports about coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes, people being thrown out by nursing homes because of economical reasons. Like ideally, that should never be the case that a person would find themselves at the end of their life without a place to live for purely the fact of money.

Angela Lin 17:44
Yeah, for those that don’t know what Jesse’s talking about. So literally a bunch of people that have like dementia, or like, you know, difficult conditions for the caretakers to deal with have been dumped on the streets to become homeless. So that their places could be taken by COVID patients because the profit per head of a coven patient as opposed to that dementia patient is much higher. So the nursing home makes more money by dumping these people literally on the streets, but and not even telling their families they did that. And also, one of the things everyone’s shitting on New York about is that half your people that died are because Cuomo chose to have all the old people with COVID go back to the nursing homes, right to like, infect everyone else. And so half the cases of the people who’ve died so far in New York are old people in nursing homes, which is real bad.

Jesse Lin 18:38
Yeah, I mean, it just really shows that like the vulnerable populations are especially vulnerable at this time. And I feel like at the very beginning, no one really even thought about what would happen to them, right. Like you were just concerned about regular people who are contributing to society, and then we forgot about this whole, you know, subset of the population.

Angela Lin 19:00
And that’s because we don’t treat our elders the same way as an Asian culture where they literally like live with you another part of your extended family. It’s like it’s very easy to forget about your old people when they’re segregated into these old people homes and not like seen on a daily basis.

Jesse Lin 19:17
And it’s quite difficult, right? I mean, for some families, it’s not possible for them home with elderly parents, they just don’t have time or resources. But I think this is a good segue to our next topic about how we should as a society provide the means of support for these elderly people when their individual families may not have the economic means or time to do so. And one of these things is a universal health care system. I mean, Taiwan is a tiny ass frickin country and it has universal health care system. It’s just ludicrous that they have one and we don’t have one.

Angela Lin 19:48
I mean, this is such a big topic. It’s like universal health care is just like one of the ongoing bullshit of America. We’re one of the few countries in the world that does not have it still. Everything ties back to the individualism because choice and capitalism. Like it sucks, capitalism is one of the things that like makes America great and powerful for sure and gave us our position in the world. But it’s also the reason so many of our systems are fucked up. Because you know, health care is impossible right now because our health care system is privatized and has too many conflicting incentives to make it so that it’s like beneficial to the providers and all the insurance carriers and whatever to get all American citizens equal access to affordable or free health care.

Jesse Lin 20:32
Oh and it’s not that you know, many countries in Asia are socialists or communists. I mean, it’s just the one but on paper, but it’s just the idea of the collectivism versus individualism. The reason why we haven’t been able to get traction around universal health care is that everyone is still thinking of it as an individualistic thing. They’re like thinking about it in terms of my choices, my coverage, how much I have to pay, and they’re not thinking about as a group how everybody would benefit from system that covers everybody, including you. I think that’s a huge point. Because collectivism is not an exclusion of you, it’s not putting everybody in front of you, and you get nothing out of it. It’s just envisioning a world where it’s you and other people and putting that as your like, main perspective.

Angela Lin 21:17
Yeah, so we have a few things that we could learn from our older heritage or Asian culture. But there are definitely things that America has uniquely above Asia and above other countries. And one of them is the ability to keep inventing new things, new ways to do things, the like creativity that is involved in in doing that, and in arts and all that. And generally this like originality, I don’t think that spirit can be fully replicated anywhere else because we are so individualistic and focused on like advancing ourselves and doing things differently better than anyone else. That is why we’re so good at inventing stuff and coming up with new original ideas. So it’s hard for other countries to replicate that because they’re not so self absorbed. Other countries are good at imitation and maybe even like pushing it further once they get the original idea. But a lot of the original ideas come from us.

Jesse Lin 22:23
I think there’s also a very much a culture of risk taking embedded in America. I mean, if you just think about our parents and all the immigrant families trying to get their way here, that is like your first engagement with America is to take a huge risk, a huge leap of faith that your life will be better here. And we definitely also see that in terms of like entrepreneurial ventures and just in general the risks that people are willing to assume.

Angela Lin 22:47
Another thing that America does relatively better than Asia and other more homogenous societies is America is uniquely this melting pot, even though right now in the society for sure we have like a lot racial injustice and it’s still deep rooted and it’s still perpetuating into modern day. In relative terms compared to other countries, especially those that are more homogenous, we are way less racist than other countries because we have this diversity. Like yes, we still are racist for sure we have not obliterated that, but it’s not to the same degree as in other countries because frankly, when you step outside a lot of states in America, you have a mixing of many different ethnic background people. So like when you see different people, often different types of people often you can’t be as racist as someone who just like straight up hasn’t seen anyone that doesn’t look like themselves.

Jesse Lin 23:45
Yeah, I agree with you. I think because there is a larger diversity of people here we are actively confronted with the idea of racism and potentially saying racist things versus like an homogenous society where you don’t see people like that you never actually think to even think if you’re racist or not, because Cuz you don’t have to think about that, right? Like everybody you see is exactly alike. We also discussed this a little bit briefly, but we cannot get away from the standard of living man like it’s one of the key things that probably is a huge factor in deciding if you would take citizenship elsewhere. For better or worse, I can make a lot more doing what I do here than anywhere else in the world.

Angela Lin 24:23
I think a big part of that is our place in the global society. And the importance of the dollar in the world is unparalleled. We are what other people fix their currencies against. So how could we not be doing well and have a better standard of living than other places.

Jesse Lin 24:44
We also have very strong diplomatic sway in almost every international governmental body, I would say an outsize influence and you know, these things are not things that people normally think about, right like you don’t normally think about what’s the UN up to or what’s NATO up too, but there are important institutions and structures in place to protect the international community and we have a huge voice in all of those institutions, which means that our agenda is always pushed in those institutions.

Angela Lin 25:14
And speaking of having a voice I think one of our other advantages of being American is that English being our main language here it’s a privilege because like especially like you and I have traveled internationally before outside of even just Taiwan like other countries that we don’t speak the language and it’s a privilege to be able to land in almost any other country and be so ignorant that all you can speak English and everyone can still understand you or at least like an a broken English level, right? They could understand enough to help direct you to whatever you’re actually looking for. Like our country does not prioritize learning secondary languages besides English. You don’t have to to like get by in this country versus so many other countries, they have first like a national language that everyone can speak, then they’re like various dialects that are regional. And then probably they also forced their people to learn English because they know that if you want a say in the global community, you need English in your repertoire because it is not only the only language we speak in America, which is where a lot of people are trying to seek opportunity, but it is also the only universal language across the world. It’s something we have as an advantage over other countries for sure is the importance of the English language and how easily we can go anywhere with that and be understood.

Jesse Lin 26:43
What are some things you would change about our country?

Angela Lin 26:46
For sure, I would improve our level of social responsibility for each other as a society, even if we try to hold down the me-me-me factor, just 25% that’s going to go a long way I think having awareness of consideration of and like empathy for other people is something that I don’t think most people would disagree that they want to do those things but like when you consider the way that we act and the choices we make as a society, it is very focused just on me, me, me and like I do think this pandemic is teaching us to be more socially responsible than we were in the past. I just hope that it sticks and the other like, huge thing that’s happening right now besides the pandemic is everything that got sparked with the George Floyd incident that like spotlight that the racial injustices of our society has been given now, I think that this has sparked a new movement and consciousness within our society that it’s gonna be hard to go back from. So I do think like, even though it’s causing really like tough conversations, a lot of not always positive things like canceling people automatically not always great, but like it is forcing us to face these situations and the inequalities and like come up with solutions that are more beneficial to broader society and these marginalized communities than we have been thinking about before. So I do think these are really two very like collision course things that have happened to us, but then the short amount of like four months timeframe, but they’re so instrumental, I think, in starting to like slowly change our very centralist way of thinking in this country.

Jesse Lin 28:34
Speaking of social responsibility, I think something that I would love to see across all spectrums, and across all of us is more responsibility and ownership over the heritage of our country. We see that on both sides, right people on the more political part of the spectrum, disavow everything that’s happening right now regarding Black Lives Matter, even though it’s a completely merited response to the racist history of our past. But on the other side of it, when you think about more progressive or left leaning voters, a lot of the times what I hear is, you know, these things are happening and it’s the fault of the Conservative Party that’s in power right now. And it’s not related to us. And the truth is, it’s related to everybody, everybody votes, everybody has a voice. And we all have to take responsibility for what’s happening in terms of what our country is doing. Simply saying that this is not a government that reflects my values doesn’t change the fact that they’re dismantling people’s rights, that they’re doing terrible things abroad, like we need to come together and own that and part of that is accepting the history of our country as it is that it isn’t just rainbows and glitters exceptionalism for all 200 years of our country. There have been a lot of really terrible periods in our country in terms of oppression of minorities all throughout, and I think this is a really important lesson for everyone to learn because it’s something that can root and ground people and really humanize what our history has been. For example of the German society and how they educate their new generations regarding the history of Naziism in their country. If you look at this comparison, I think it’s very clear what the problem is like the German people are teaching their own people about the oppression that they created against the Jewish people. In our society right now, the oppressed people are trying to teach people about the oppression that happened to them, trying to convince them to change their minds. Like it shouldn’t be incumbent upon the oppressed population to explain why they’ve been oppressed, to explain why they’re angry about things, like it should be very clear to those of us with privilege that there is a very huge gap between what we have access to and what those who are fighting for their rights now have access to it’s very, very different. So I would love to see society, take ownership of that narrative and really educate future generations so everyone can have a great common understanding of what the rights and wrongs were of our country, be proud of the good things but also be ashamed of the bad things so that you feel motivated to enact changes to try to rectify that.

Angela Lin 31:12
Like even just base level way that we talked about doing that is just standardization of the way that history is taught, right? Because we were skewed like you said, like we think very narrowly that like the experiences that we had growing up reflect everyone else’s experiences growing up, but the history that we were taught in California are very different from the textbooks that are being taught in other states, especially like the South, for example. So one small step, it’s not going to be easy, but standardizing the materials and the way that educators are teaching the youth about this shared history that affects all of us.

Jesse Lin 31:53
Yes, absolutely.

Hey guys, welcome back to the sweet treat part of our podcast – Fortune Cookie. If you loved our Murrica’ episode, please give us some feedback. Shoot us some love. Feel free to email us at telluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com. We would love to hear all about your patriotic stories. What you love growing up in America, what you love about America. Again, drop us a note, send us a DM and we look forward to hearing from you. So I’ll kick it over to Angela to introduce what we’re gonna be talking about for our sweet treat.

Angela Lin 32:36
So what we want to talk about today is what stupid thing we love about the US. My favorite thing about the US is like the over the top love of everything, Murrica’, which like, play into that as well, but like, I think we’re the most obnoxious country when it comes to our patriotism. It’s like how many times have you been in a drunken sports bar and suddenly the whole crowd is chanting like you say, you say like, we are so obnoxious and I fucking love it and wearing everything American flag, like I owned at least five or six different American flag apparel pieces before and like, we’re just so obnoxious about it, and I love it and like, even just saying, like, Murrica’, like that, like, I fucking love it. And like Fourth of July comes around. We’re like fucking rowdy and like, just crazy. And I just love it. We’re just so obnoxious about our love of the country.

Jesse Lin 33:42
Okay, so I will talk about what I love to which is also I think, distinctly ridiculously American, which is the annual Nathan’s hot dog eating contest. I just think it’s such a provincial thing in a sense because it is very localized to New York City, Coney Island. But it’s been so sensationalized, like nationally that people are aware of it. And it’s just one of those things that’s like so extra and you just don’t know why it exists and like it really just only exists here and that’s why I love it. I always love to see every year the news come out about it, they’ll have a blurb and it’s always the same guy that wins. I just think that the whole concept of it is just pure American ridiculousness.

Angela Lin 34:24
Well, all in all, lots of things to love some things not so great. But with that said, Happy Fourth of July. Hope everyone is celebrating America’s birthday in as safe of a way and as fun of a way safely as you can this year. So until next time, when we have a new episode.

Jesse Lin 0:14
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s Pride Month in June. So we’re doing a pride oriented episode where we talk about all things gay and what that means to all of us and to help us explore all the different spectrums of a rainbow. We have a special guest joining us today, Tong.

Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)

Tong 0:33
Thank you, Jesse. Hi, everyone. My name is Tom Zang. I’m here to provide some diversified perspective in the LGBT community. I consider myself a lesbians. Actually, I don’t know like a bisexual I don’t know how to like really define myself but like, I’m happily married with my partner and currently live in Redwood City and California. I know Angela through work and just know that she’s an awesome person, and would love to share my perspective on the special occasion. So glad to be here.

Angela Lin 1:06
Yeah, Tom is one of my favorite ex co workers, so really happy to have her on. So we have the two of you are bringing different queer perspectives. Pride means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So I think we wanted to start off this episode by asking, what exactly does pride mean to you?

Jesse Lin 1:26
For me, I just feel like pride means to celebrate yourself and just be unabashedly like who you are. And being gay is part of that. And that’s worth celebrating. But I think it’s also worth celebrating all parts of you that make you the person that you are including being gay. And when I was younger, it was like not really that much thinking for me in terms of where things were for the LGBT community just like 50 years ago and like all the work that has been done to get us to where we are now, but now that I’m older and we’re seeing all these kind of social movements Pride more and more means like thinking back about also like how hard people worked and fought to get the rights that we have today so that we can go out to bars and socialize with gay people without being scrutinized, like we can exist in society without having to defend our existence, like constantly on the same kind of level that the people in the past it it’s about remembering that as well.

Tong 2:21
Yeah, I think the accepting who you are elements really resonate a lot with me, I think my journey of discovering who I am and then accepting my identity as a lesbian come later in life because I actually grew up in China and then didn’t have a lot of exposure earlier in my life. And then once I discovered that aspect of myself, I think pride meaning is a constant journey of accepting who I am, and then discovering that element and what does it mean to be me and how do I fit back to my family, my culture and also what kind of life do I want to live going forward and I think to justice point of really remembering the people who fought for you before and then why we can have this current society like with the support that we have and celebrating for me is also really precious to be able to live in California where I can be openly gay and to you know walk on the street with my partner and just don’t feel like I need to be self aware of maybe I’m different

Angela Lin 3:29
Guys I screwed up but goosebumps from your answers like I feel so tinglies I love it. Yeah, cuz obviously I’m just bringing the ignorant straight person view to this episode but for me I just like haven’t spent that time to like deeply think about what the pride celebrations mean on those so many different layers that you guys just laid out. For me. It’s just like it’s always seems like it’s just this huge happy celebration like always brings me a lot of joy. To see all the people just like being themselves in the streets and like letting loose and it always feels like there’s a lot of love in that environment. So I’ve always associated it with just like a lot of positivity, love and excitement and energy. But for you guys, that means so much more because of like the history of what it’s taken to get you guys to be in a more equal state then you’ve been in the past, so very cool.

I think in order to talk about sexual identity, there is this broader topic of sex, dating, the concepts that we were raised around given our cultural upbringings as being Taiwanese and Chinese. So let’s start off first with the way that we were brought up by our parents, and how that’s affected the way that we look at sex. My perspective is that in general, it was just like, something you don’t talk about, even though it’s like, you all know this thing exists. And that’s where babies come from, but like, let’s just play ignorance is bliss and like, never discuss it.

Jesse Lin 5:40
Maybe there was like one conversation about how to stay away from like, inappropriate materials. And that was basically

Like, basically like pornography. They’re like, Don’t look at pornography

Tong 5:53
Yeah, like my parents is so funny. Growing up, I will have like this question like, where do I come from, and there was say, oh, you’re worse out of the stone or oh, we just like got you found you outside the hospital. And that’s like literally their answers to me and sometimes I really concerned like, I might really like your kid. I don’t know what kind of like motivation or whatever. But like when I talk to my friends from China, that’s like, not uncommon for us to get these type of answers.

Angela Lin 6:23
I’ve never heard that is that the Chinese version of like, the stork dropped you off?

Tong 6:27
Yeah, like yeah, I think in the ancient literature from China like there was like this. Yeah, Monkey King, actually. So I feel like they just thought this is like a cool reference stories, but yeah, they never are willing to talk about this.

Angela Lin 6:44
Yeah, we understood that like white people have these birds and the bees type conversations with their kids, but that’s just like not not a concept that happens with Asian kids because it’s an uncomfortable topic for Asian parents, so they just don’t have it. So let’s talk about how that kind of like absent conversation and the attitudes that our parents had towards sex dating and marriage kind of affected our attitudes towards that growing up and how it might have changed since then, after we’ve like had our own life experiences. So I think one of the important things to discuss first is kind of like when you think about dating and marriage as concepts, how are they different in the US versus in Asia? My perspective is that in the US, it is like a lot of casual dating versus what I heard from like my cousins who grew up in Taiwan and like later moved here, it’s more like you’d like someone and then you like tell them you like them. And then when you agree to go on a date, then you’re like in a relationship.

Tong 7:52
Yeah, I think it’s just like a really serious I felt like before I came to the state, there’s no definition or concept of dating. To your question around growing up in China, how do I treat like dating or even marriage, those concept didn’t exist prior to college. Because all your way to like the college entrance exam, your whole goal is to study. So like it’s also viewed as like guilt in a way if you’re dating. So if you’re actually dating, everyone will think you are like a bad student.

Angela Lin 8:27
So literally no one dated in high school?

Tong 8:30
I mean, like, you cannot prohibit it from people’s feelings for each other. But I don’t think it’s a healthy way of educating what is marriage? What does it mean to be in a relationship and all the responsibility and then suddenly, we’ll get into college when you’re like 18, 19 everyone expect you to start dating. So you’re just like this huge gap of expectation is really weird.

Jesse Lin 8:53
That’s so funny because I have kind of the same experience when I was younger, like even in my teenager years like it has school when I would have like aunts and uncles visits from Taiwan, or they were just called, they would like always ask my mom like, is he dating anyone? So I, I thought what Angela said was the case where it was like they’re always dating and it’s always wholesome. And I would always get these cute little stories about how like, my cousin’s has a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and they were like, maybe like 11 or 12.

Angela Lin 9:20
Maybe it’s slightly different between Taiwan and China, then?

Tong 9:25
If the parents think you’re not serious, then it’s okay. When you are actually really serious about the relationship. That’s when there was a lot of resistance from your parents and future whether the relationship will affect you

Angela Lin 9:38
Hilarious, because I feel like my parents tried to bring some of that mentality into my life. When I was growing up. They were like, you’re not allowed to date until college. And then as soon as I started college, it just became serious. Any person you date from now on, I’m going to assume you might marry them.

Jesse Lin 9:57
You know what, it’s interesting that both of you have That experience because my parents never asked about my dating life really until like, the very end of college. And I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that I’m a man and you guys are women. When people would ask, it was easy to put it off because I would say like, I’m working on my school, my career, and it would be enough to like, satiate people for the time being.

Angela Lin 10:24
I definitely think your gender plays into it because there’s like two factors that are one is like, don’t get married too late, because then you’ll have problem with getting pregnant with children. But second is like getting pregnant early is a problem. So they want to make sure there’s zero possibility you’re gonna get teenage pregnancy or anything like that. That’s my perspective. But Tong, I don’t know if you have a different perspective from actually growing up in Asia.

Tong 10:47
Yeah, my parents and family definitely want to be nosy about everything. But because I left China, so I actually came to the states right after college. So I used to every year reason that Jesse mentioned, I was like, oh, I’m doing grad school, I need to focus. Study. And then later, I started working so far away from them so they cannot see my actual life status. So I always like use career as a shield of like not wanting to have that discussion with them.

Jesse Lin 11:20
Do you feel like that’s like changed after you started dating people honestly, like the whole dating thing from my parents have been really limited in terms of like, the more mechanical stuff like the whole birds and the bees conversation that that’s still has never happened. Really the only information that they ever gave me was that like, you’re seeing someone like just make sure that’s someone that will treat you well.

Angela Lin 11:39
The way my mom always posed sex to me was like, it is kind of mechanical, like you said, Jesse, so it’s hard to have like real conversations with my parents about relationships and definitely never sex. Because like my mom, for example, when I did start dating and I was like maybe she has advice for me. Like I then I learned actually, my dad was her first ever boyfriend and then they got married. Like, there’s nothing to draw on.

Tong 12:09
Yeah, I want to say like, I think my parents, my father’s especially they gave me a lot of freedom and autonomy to make decisions like life decisions. And I think with that, like kind of space and autonomy, they trust my decision in like, whoever I decide to be a life partner before like, that’s all before they know that I was like, gay, okay. Until then, I feel like they’re all like, pretty hands off. In terms of like, if I’m dating someone, because I think my mom was telling me whenever she talks about my relationship issues with my with my father, and he will always say, oh, like, Tong will be fine. She knows what she wants. So I feel like in a way, I was grateful for that.

Angela Lin 12:54
Now we’re transitioning into the topic of sexual identity. Let’s start with something that is most fundamental. At what point in your lives did you first know that you were attracted to a person of your same gender? Was there like an aha moment? Like, oh, why do I think that person’s cute? Or was it just like you, you just always knew is just like an underlying thing.

Tong 13:18
So my sexual awareness that I’m actually gay was pretty late, I think was when I was like 25 or 26. Almost. So that’s when I started working in New York. At the time, I was a reporter. There was this girl. She was like, openly gay. And she started really chased me in terms of like, she wanted me to be her girlfriend in a really open way. And this time, I was like, I think I refused her for three months because like, up to that point in my life, there’s no option that I like I could be dating or girl. Yeah, it’s just like not in my education and not in everything that I was brought up to. But then I like started treating her as a friend. So I friendzone her. Like we go out to eat when we go to the beach, I think like that change. It’s not like an aha moment. But it’s just like gradually I realized I care more about this person who I am with. And then the way that I’m feeling about myself when I’m around that person, it just, like, gradually added that the more I get to know her and get to know more about myself, I just thought like, yeah, there could be this possibility. I started to try to explore this concept. But immediately I got into this self denial moment and then really like, starts questioning if there’s anything wrong with myself. And I think at that time, I had a bestie in New York, like just like really randomly, she was going through the same thing. So we support each other, telling each other it’s ok, it’s totally normal. I think um, yeah. And a lot of like, reflecting on what really matters to me and a relationship and then realizing that person, the sex is not an issue for me. So I decided to give it a try. And that’s how I started my first relationship with a girl.

Angela Lin 15:20
How about you, Jesse? When was when did you first know?

Jesse Lin 15:23
You know, I was thinking really hard about this when we first discussed this, and also while Tong was talking, but honestly, I feel like when I hit puberty, and I started to, like, have a concept of what sexual attraction was, like, I feel like I always knew. And like there was never a point where I was like, attracted to girls. So for me, I don’t think I had like, I think I had an easier time than you did Tong because I never had a moment where I had to, like requestion all of my life’s attractions and like to make room for a different set of people because I feel like I always I always knew.

Angela Lin 16:00
So to that, and Tong, you already kind of talks about your process and how long it took you to accept yourself. But I’m curious about how long it took both of you to reach acceptance but also to the point where you were willing to tell other people.

Tong 16:15
For me, it was right away. Once I decided I want to give this relationship a try. I immediately told all my closest friends in China, and then the friends circle I have in New York, and just didn’t feel like if there’s a need for me to hide. Definitely, except for my parents, my folks at home. But I was pretty open and honest with everyone around me.

Angela Lin 16:40
How did that go? Was it mostly positive or did you have any like people who you wish would have taken it better and didn’t

Tong 16:47
No, I think all my friends were super supportive. I think I was really pleasantly surprised by my friends who were still in China. And then some of them even started a conversation with their parents because they know me and then what I later realize is parents can be really reasonable and open about LGBT as long as you’re not their kid. Yeah, that conversation was helpful and I was really like, you know, felt like fortunate to have all my friends to support but the family part was like a whole nother story

Angela Lin 17:24
Well, maybe we’ll get to that but I want to make sure Jesse gets to his cause I seem to remember going through this.

Jesse Lin 17:35
Yes, so many phases. Honestly, like I think I’m still working to like accept all the parts of myself and love myself as I am. When did they actually start telling people end of high school basically, is when I first started telling people and obviously I told Angela first and I didn’t even remember this but you did when I when we were discussing this but apparently I told Angela first that I was bi because I was like, still really confused about the whole thing. And I think that was just like clinging to the straightness of it all to be like, this is like the north on the compass. Like, this is what everyone else’s so like to say, like completely know, and to let go of that life raft was so terrifying that I couldn’t even be like completely honest to you about it and even to myself. But yeah, so I told Angela first then I told like a handful of other friends from high school and then from college onwards, it was basically just kind of like if anyone asked, I would tell them the truth unless I felt like uncomfortable about it. And then obviously the same with the family like some people know, some people don’t know.

Angela Lin 18:39
Yeah, let’s dig into the family piece. First, do both of your parents know? And if they do, how long did it take you to decide like I need to tell them it’s gonna be fucking hard, but I need to tell them and did you tell both of them at the same time or was there like one parent you’ve kind of trusted more than the other to take it well? How did that play out?

Tong 19:02
Jesse, you go first.

Jesse Lin 19:07
Okay, okay. Not both of my parents know only my mom knows, as far as I’m aware. And it was something that I didn’t tell her until basically, like I was about to graduate from college. And it had been sitting on my mind for a while. But there are a couple of reasons why I didn’t tell her like the first was, I wasn’t sure if she was like, ready to hear that. And so I was putting it off trying to and at that time, there was like, actually a lot, a lot of stuff going on regarding like gay rights, gay marriage, and all that stuff. So I was kind of like, trying to get a feel of like, how they’re reacting to all this news, to understand where their perspective sat on it. The second thing was, you know, was a struggle for me to accept myself as who I am. And so I think even in college, like I wasn’t so comfortable with myself yet that I felt really strongly in my position to go to my parents and be like, this is who I am. There’s no like if ands or buts about it. I don’t know. I think that there was just like I’m was scared to tell them and shatter the illusion of having a good relationship with my parents.

Angela Lin 20:12
Tong, how about you?

Tong 20:13
Yeah, so I’m thinking about the story just like makes me feel like, you know, nervous or even just like a lot of traumatic memory. So I actually dated with my first girlfriend back then for like, almost two years. And then I applied to PA school and got accepted to Stanford, which I thought was a huge personal accomplishment on my part, and then it just like with a lot of exciting things happening in my life. Somehow I just got this courage. I need to tell my parents I’m actually dating a girl and this person is so instrumental in getting into business school and supporting me to get to the next stage of my life. So I flew back to China to my stay with my family the summer before business school. And then the second to last week I’m at home, I broke the news through my mom. And to my surprise, she took it in like calmly and like was pretty receptive to that. And then we had a really like honest and deep conversation about what does happiness and good marriage mean to her. And that was the first time we had talked about all of this and I felt like she was really supportive. But then my mom actually called my dad the night I broke the news to her and then somehow in her recount of the story, my dad thought I’m gonna like go with this girl get married and like leave the family. Yeah and then like he stormed home. He was on a business trip. He decided to come back home already. And then it was not good. Yeah, so like a conversation about like me having with my mom feel like pretty proud to share my life update to be really like ready to be open with them turn into a fight from my dad. And then like a conversation turned into like, there’s so disgraceful of who I had become. And then my dad went all the way to like disowning me, and then how can he even like, go back to my grandparents that I raised a monster. So like everything happened so quickly and then that conversation just became really traumatic, like even now thinking back, I still feel the pain in me. And I remember I was sitting in the living room while he was going on with all the speech. I just felt like so – I just don’t know why I existed. Basically, I feel like all my existence prior to that was denied. And then it doesn’t make sense for me to even go to Stanford and they were like trying to get my passport taken. So all of that so like, it was like a really hard stance for me to keep fighting. And I think I made a compromise saying like, okay, let me see what can I do with it? Like I don’t want you to feel like this hurts. But then also, I was like, I didn’t know how to process all of that, basically.

Angela Lin 23:08
I feel like you’re so harsh on yourself because of the way they, you know, reacted, but I don’t think you should look at the way you presented it to them as like being impulsive. This is something that was like a big part of who you were. And that was bringing you a lot of happiness and like support in your life and you just wanted to share it with them, like coming out in general is going to be difficult for anyone. But there’s like this added layer because of our cultural upbringing of family values, prolonging the legacy of like your family’s name and like having children and honoring your lineage, that kind of stuff. So how much of the fear of bringing it up with your parents was attributed to like the cultural upbringing piece versus just like general fear of telling them something that’s not society’s definition of normal?

Jesse Lin 23:59
You know, like, we grew up In California, so the Asian upbringing was there, but I don’t think it’s as surrounding, as I think it would be if you grew up in China, where everyone else has the same kind of situation. So from my perspective, yes, the cultural pieces like kind of important, but at that point in my life like my parents in sometimes now, they still feel like strangers in the sense that I don’t know them as well as I would like to. And what if I were to tell them this big secret about me and then that was just it. We don’t really know each other that well, and I’m exposing to them a huge piece of my life and they were to reject me for being honest about who I was that was like such a scary concept that I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do it until I was basically at the level where I was like, I feel safe emotionally with who I am and also I feel safe in the sense of like, I’m not going to be like broken and on the street, if I get disowned.

Angela Lin 24:49
I think you’re right. The fact that your first gen I’m sure plays into a lot of like whether or not the cultural aspect of it had like a heavy hand and how you perceived how like burdensome that conversation would be. Tong I’m curious about how much the Chinese-ness of it all played into how you were feeling about it since you did grow up in China until college right?

Tong 25:13
I didn’t realize the conflict until I went through it. My whole like upbringing in China, it was just like no homosexual like there’s just not a concept so they just like it never occurred to me that I like I just never really tried to go deeper to understand like what is like LGBT. What does it mean to be part of this community or even like support them but then after came to America, I think Jesse were you said like you know, seeing all walks of life and really like a you can be whoever you want to be. And all of that, like thinking is really encouraging and powerful. So being able to, like really understand what drives me and who I want to be but then like those two elements just clashed really in a way that I never thought it would be after the coming out process. So I still like today I’m constantly struggling my responsibility to my parents to my family versus like I want to live a life that I feel I’m staying true to who I am. I don’t want to live a life to fulfill my parents dream.

Angela Lin 26:24
We talked about filial piety as a previous episodes. sense of duty is strong for sure. Many reasons, okay. Okay. heavy stuff. Thank you both for sharing those experiences and sorry to make you recount some not so fun parts of it. We talked about in general, the US being a place where you can like be who you want to be and own that identity for yourself. I’m curious how that played out when you first entered this community with other gay lesbian and bisexual people. And like was that a full embrace? Was it everything you hoped for? Or was it like there was some surprising not so fun moments in that too?

Jesse Lin 27:06
I think the key here is be who you want to be. And who I wanted to be was like a big question mark. So I struggled a little bit to find what it means to be gay for me. I was trying to fit all these stereotypes that you see on on the television. And I think I tried that for a little bit. And it was just not for me like it was fun for most parts of it. But it was also very tiring, not fulfilling. The friends were not really as good of friends as you thought, but I’m not gonna I won’t lie, like the whole process of finding what kind of gay person you are, is it’s very fun. I mean, for me, I went out a lot like I met a lot of people. They did a lot of crazy stuff like, and still am, but yeah.

Tong 27:51
Yeah, I think my entering to the LGBT community was when I started b-school. You know, like at the school, you have all this like communities and groups. So there was a pride group on campus. And then that’s how I got to meet a lot of like LGBT folks. The group really created a really safe space for people to share. So we have like Coming Out Day and we have retreat. So as through that bonding experience, I really understood how strong the support can be because you share some like, pretty tough experience and you come out stronger. Like the groups at the school will be the main social circle, and I also met my wife through b-school. So that’s just like a huge bonus.

Angela Lin 28:38
I’m curious if you did have any experiences going out into like LGBT society in Asia and what that like versus in the US?

Tong 28:48
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think my kind of experience will my wife is from Malaysia originally so I can see like, through her lens and I think it’s definitely pretty tough for her as well. Because I think from another perspective, which is religion, her mom is a really Christian person and it’s just like really hard for her to like she tried to come out to her mom for like 10 years now. And she still cannot like really fully accept who she is. And then I think when I was traveling in Taiwan or Taipei specifically, like we weren’t, like going out to like, gay bars per se, but like when you’re like touring the site or going to like restaurants or cafe if you see like people that you can tell their lesbian, you can check them out. And there are a lot of people that like, I feel like it was like more accepting, in a way I feel like especially young people, and I see a lot of girls were like, you know, holding hands and like, all of that, but not like really in the deeper sense. Like I have friends who are LGBT like who I met through b-school that went back to China, and I think there’s still a real struggle for them.

Angela Lin 30:15
Alright, let’s close out with our fortune cookie closing section because we like to end on a sweet treat. So let’s completely break from all of this. Let’s shed some of the heaviness of today’s conversation and just end with something super fun. I am curious to know what famous person was your first sexual awakening? Like for me? My first sexual awakening was Kocoum from Pocahontas. You remember him? He’s the suitor that her dad wanted her to marry. Oh, he was so hot. He was ripped. He was like, stoic, so handsome. And when she was like, I don’t know if I should marry Kocoum. And I’m like, you’re dumb bitch you should marry Kocoum, forget john smith. So he’s mine. How about you guys?

Jesse Lin 31:06
I want to say it was like really Jay Chou because at the time, it was like kind of the same time as puberty and both Angela and I were like getting into like more Asian stuff and it was also time that he was getting really popular and I just remember there was like a picture of him I don’t think was an album cover but with some kind of like publicity image of him just like shirtless and I was like, that is really sexy.

Tong 31:33
I couldn’t really think up at the time, but I think my friend asked me a question like, if you can, like fantasize or think about like someone you want to kiss or makeout who that person would be and then I think that person will be Keira Knightley. Yeah I don’t know however just like love all her movies and I even like been to Broadway when she was in town for a play. Just like something about her. Just make me feel she’s super attractive.

Angela Lin 32:00
Yeah, she’s super elegant, beautiful.

Tong 32:05
This is super fun. Thank you for having me.

Jesse Lin 32:10
Alright guys, so I think we had a pretty fun episode when we come up with some interesting and heavy topics. So as usual, if you guys have any stories or feedback or anything you want to share with us regarding your experience as a straight person, as an LGBT individual, please feel free to send us some love, send us an email at telluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com that’s Y-O-U-R-E. And as always, come back next week, we’ll have a new episode for you then.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Angela Lin 0:15
Today our topic is model minority. And we’re going to explain a little bit more about what that means and where it came from. But before we go into the topic, we did want to address that. Obviously, there’s a lot of shit going on right now in society. And there’s a lot of racism, oppression, violence towards the black community being put under spotlight right now, unfortunately, because of the really horrendous treatment of George Floyd. And we’re certainly not tone deaf to what’s happening there. But the way that we wanted to approach this topic was through the lens of which categorization the Asian community has been placed within society by the white community, which is this model minority concept and how it is a different reflection of racism and is also a way in which society has kind of pit Asian collective races against the other minority races, including the black community.

Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)

Jesse Lin 1:18
So let’s get into it. What is the model minority? Let’s ask Wikipedia. So Wikipedia says a model minority is a minority demographic, whose members are perceived to achieve a higher degree of socio economic success than the population average, thus serving as a reference group to out groups further according to Wikipedia, the origin of model minority actually came about in a 1966, New York Times mag article about the Japanese. And the article basically detailed out how the Japanese have a really strong work ethic, really strong family bonds and those things led them to have a lower propensity to become a problem minority. A few other factors that they’re looking at Asian people were not a huge part of the minority population in the US at the time. They also mostly ran like successful businesses or there was the idea that they were somehow contributing economically to the country. We know Asian people tend to be less vocal about their problems and their issues. And we don’t necessarily see a lot of Asian people being super loud and vocal about their rights, historically speaking. And of course, there’s also the idea that the level of educational attainment of Asian minorities was equal to that of the white population. So we were on equal footing to be able to understand each other.

Angela Lin 2:43
The fact that this new york times article came out in 1966 is like a very interesting time for that to come out because it was only two years after the Civil Rights Act passed, and like we implicitly benefited from the very strong hard fought victory of the black community within the civil rights movement because it encompass all people of color, we were able to benefit from that dramatically and like earned a privilege to then like enter society at a point where we weren’t supposed to be discriminated against at least to the degree with which black people were prior when they were straight up like slaves and then segregated. So when you mentioned things like Asians are model minority because they have successful businesses like I remember I watched on Netflix, there’s a series called explained I forget which episode it was, but it was largely about kind of like racial disparity, and like a big reason why the black community continues to be behind is because there was like a law in place that made it so that black people couldn’t hold land so and that ripple effect continued on into like, the reason why black people continue to be poor and like stuck in underprivileged situations, so like I feel really bad and privileged that the idea of like successful businesses is attributed to the Asian community because we were able to be given that kind of opportunity, because we were not black.

Jesse Lin 4:22
Yeah. So one of the things that we wanted to talk about is that model minority is an offensive idea, but I think that a lot of people wouldn’t say that it’s a racist idea. And I want to explain to you guys why’s a racist idea. First of all, it’s a stereotype that you’re trying to box a group of people into. The second thing is it ties attainment a level of education or a level of economic success to a specific race. It also masks a lot of the troubles that the Asian community have been having, like not everybody comes here and is rich and successful already. A lot of Asian people who are coming here and struggling, they’re working really, really blue collar jobs, and they’re trying to make ends meet. The fourth thing is that it really gives control of how acceptable it is for us to exist to another group of people. And that’s obviously not what we want, like we want our own agency, our own definition of who we are. And then lastly, I think that it pits us against other people, we have something to gain or we have something to lose when in fact, we’re all basically below the people who have control of everything. We’re all the same in terms of the struggles, the needs, and what we have to gain from being completely equal.

Angela Lin 5:43
Right. Yeah, I think one of the most important things was talking about like the wanting to have agency and like control over our own selves. I think another reason it’s a racist concept is that inherently by calling us model minority You are still labeling us as minority first, right? Like that’s the way you see us is that we are already inherently separate from you. We’re not equal to you.

Jesse Lin 6:13
So when we’re talking about model minority, I think it’s really important first to examine actually how we’ve fed into the stereotype, or how we reinforce the stereotype, right? Because we’re reviewing the things that make up the model minority before those aren’t really bad things like yes, successful business. I would love to have that. Yes, educational attainment, I would love to have that and all those other things. I think there are a lot of reasons why we want to play into the fulfillment of the model minority concept. And the first is basically privilege. Angela and I grew up in a very well to do suburb, which at the time, I feel like growing up, it was mostly white people, a few Asian people, kind of like changed since then, but growing up we were like witness to the kind of privilege That the white majority had, and there’s a desire to have the same level of privilege, of course, why wouldn’t you want to be like that? Why wouldn’t you want to have doors open for you magically that other people can’t have open for them? So primarily, of course, we wanted to have access to that level of privilege. And so of course, we played into this role thinking that we would somehow attain that same level of privilege,

Angela Lin 7:23
But spoiler alert, we will never achieve. So playing into like, why would we want to fulfill the model minority. So beyond privilege, I think it also goes back to what you’re saying before, like the label in and of itself already classifies us as separate from the white majority. But I think in a way in trying to like have a good education, be successful in business and like kind of rise up we’re trying to build up our credentials and things that bring us validity as humans in a way that makes us feel like we’re erasing the part of us that makes us different from the white community. So like somehow the success that we’ve attained will help us erase the fact that when they look at us we’re still seeing for our quote unquote yellow skin I hate when people say Asians with yellow skin, but like that is what people look at us as right like that. Ideally, there’s this color blindness when when they see us because they’ve like recognized all of our accomplishments and therefore somehow able to achieve that equality with them. But again, we just will, we’re never going to do that. I think it’s just like this lofty goal and like aspiration, but it’s not something actually achievable because we were already put as this other category in and of itself by being labeled as model minority.

Jesse Lin 8:47
No, I mean, definitely make sense. Like you’re trying to surround yourself with the things that you think will defend you or guard you for being overtly perceived as the other. So of course, I think pursuing those things is a natural reaction to that kind of pressure.

Angela Lin 9:00
Yeah, I think another thing that ties really closely with that is like so we’re trying to attain this level of success and like you race the outward difference from us. And I think a big part of where we more stereotypically feed into model minority is where we choose to put our efforts in terms of the types of jobs that we go after, like, every Asian parent wants their child to become a doctor. Of course, the reason why the Asian community really values those types of jobs is not really because the model minority like I’m not going to attribute that to white people as we want to do that. It’s because our parents are immigrants that came from like an unstable environment. And they want to ensure that their children have economic stability, and having high wealth is a surefire way in their minds of like ensuring that security so that’s why they want us to have jobs like doctors, but to the point of like achieving this level of success and still not making you the equal of that White majority. I think a perfect case in point is right now during the COVID crisis, like I feel like there’s so much that happened within the last like three to four month timeframe that like it’s easy to forget all the things that have been happening. But don’t forget, we’re still in the middle of this pandemic. And like the COVID anti Asian racism, while not at the same degree as the George Floyd stuff was alive and well prior to this beat, and Asian doctors who are putting their lives on the line every day to treat COVID patients are still being harassed on the streets because they’re Asian, even when they’re in their scrubs on their way to the hospital to work there like 20 hour shifts to save some of those assholes lives like it does not shield you just because you have the status in society.

Jesse Lin 10:51
I mean, I’ve seen so many examples from not just Asian doctors, but also for talking about members of the black community. I’ve seen so many like tweets from people who are like I just got pulled over by the cops for no reason. These are people who you would call quote unquote passing or model minority. There are people who could blend into a fancy society mixer or dinner you might meet them at the Met Gala or whatever. But outside of those spaces, you’re minority-ness ethnicity becomes like the first thing that people associate and all the negative things associated with that what job you have, how rich you are, how famous you are, I don’t think any of those things matter in the face of this kind of racist reaction.

Angela Lin 11:34
Yeah, I’m reading this book right now called biased and it’s written by a Stanford professor who specializes in racial bias, and she’s an African American female. And one of the stories she tells in her book is at night before her Harvard graduation. The night before she and her friend had been doing some fundraiser, like really, you know, they’re model citizens. They’re doing good for the community and they were driving back to their apartment and they were stopped by police and like rough house essentially because they’re black she explained this experience being so crazy because she had been in this bubble and like she thought having this like Dr. title is like putting her in a different sphere. And it wasn’t in terms of the way that the police saw her. And yet Yeah, actually, when she was been put in jail, she and her friend were able to get bailed out immediately because they had the police call like someone high up at Stanford who vouch for them, like get them the fuck out of that jail right now, like you do not have the authority to like, please, yeah, unless you have other privileges that were given to you because of like a certain status you’ve gained within society. Like it’s really hard to break that initial gut reaction that people have when they look at you just based on the way you look at when you were born that way, which is insane.

One of the other reasons how Asians fulfill this model minority idea or keep it from being brought down is engagement with the community and I’m specifically talking about older Asians, like our parents age who immigrated here a while ago. I feel like generally speaking, they’re not as politically active in the US, especially like I mentioned parents our age. I’ve never heard my parents discuss anything US politics really No way. No way. And it’s crazy because my dad is a very political person. But the only politics he follows is Taiwanese politics. While it’s not directly related to the idea of model minority, it does prevent us from overturning that because we’re not being vocal and trying to put people into places of power that represent us more.

I do think it extends beyond just our parents generation, though, I think there is a trickle effect from like the way our parents brought us up into like our threshold or appetite for like being loud in the political sphere as well, and actually is a good segue into another piece, which is that our upbringing is a big part also in terms of the way that we present ourselves. The way that we are unconsciously contributing to that model minority categorization, which is like in general, Asian cultures are fairly polite and like we’re taught to be no fuss kind of people. And so one example I find really annoying, and I don’t want to like bash him as a whole human because to be fair, I haven’t like research all of his thoughts on every issue or anything like that. But like Andrew Yang is someone who people praised a lot during his presidential run because he thinks out of the box on a lot of issues, but like I was really turned off by him when the COVID crisis first broke out and all the anti Asian racism started happening we covered an op ed basically telling us to fulfill the model minority stereotype better to try to deter racism against us he didn’t obviously use those words to basically was like, Yeah, I know people are hurt right now because of all the racism like against us. This is our chance to like prove how good of citizens we are by being even better at providing help to the community. I’m like, Are you fucking kidding me right now?

Jesse Lin 15:09
For a political candidate? I think it was more tone deaf than I think people were expecting. Yeah, I will say on the other hand, if it if a person is going to get to that level where they’re threatening violence against the person that they don’t know, for reasons that are superficial, like race, that’s not a person I want to talk to. That’s not a person I want to convince because they’re not going to be so I mean, his op ed is fallacious in a sense, because those are the people he’s asking us to be more American to. Why would I go do that? I’m not going to talk to the KKK Red Dragon about why he should be nicer to me and how I’m super American like no. So that definitely also like rang true for me. Because I was like, Okay, I remember when I was like that, but now I know that I’m not going to waste my time and energy talking to someone who wants physical ill on me

Angela Lin 16:00
I think that’s fair. And there are definitely people like that, obviously, because there are all these cases of violence and like racist acts, yeah, happening out in the world. But I do think the majority of people have this like leeway gray area threshold where you could have a good conversation with them. But I agree with you that like the people who are literally harassing the Asian doctors on the street and like punching people in the face and all that shit, like those are not the people that are going to be persuaded by discussion and discourse. But I don’t want to feed into the narrative of like, it’s all just us versus them and everyone is either with us or like evil and against us. This episode, I feel like it’s the most heated we’ve ever had real. Okay, I do think we need to discuss the dark side of like, let’s go even darker side of this category, which is the fact that being placed into this model minority category has benefited us and given us a level of privilege above other minorities like the black community like little Latino community that we didn’t ask for. But like by being put into this bucket, we got those privileges and we need to recognize that and how that has affected kind of the way that we are viewed and how we interact with other minority communities. There are kind of a lot of different ways in which that privilege comes out. One of which is that in terms of where society accepts us as being allowed to be in there’s like people talk about like, quote unquote, white spaces, as opposed to black spaces and we as Asians because model minority is kind of ranked as like just below the white society. We are allowed into these white spaces

Jesse Lin 17:54
Put it more simply, I’ve never had the cops called on me for tailgating a lady into her apartment building and I’ve done that many times when I’m trying to visit people, you know, I’m like I was buzz buzz buzz no one picked up I follow somebody in the building. It’s never been a problem and obviously like the media brings up cases that are quite egregious for obvious reasons, but the fact that these cases exist at all is a problem. The fact that there was a man for watching in Central Park that got the cops called on him by that lady, that’s a problem like that should not happen

Angela Lin 18:24
Dude. I’m so ashamed of that incident because I only recently found out that that woman is a booth MBA alum and I’m okay so like, our whole MBA community is like real but that’s what is being represented as like our legacy and also that man because I read up on it more he’s a Harvard Graduate himself. It’s like okay, lady like you think you’re so much better than this man just because you see him as black and only black but like he’s just as if not more educated than you are and like he’s just asking you to abide by the rules. Everyone else is up abiding by this insane I think there’s also this like implicit privilege and bias that has been built into us by accepting the fact that we are categorized as model minority in terms of the way that we see our rank in society. And like this is not something I’m proud of, but it’s just like a fact. I think in terms like the way the Asian community sees ourselves. I think part of it is the way Asians from Asia like think about different races, but part of it is certainly our place within American society where there’s like we as Asians are above the other minority classes, like the model minority concept was built in a way that already pit us against each other without our consent for that to happen. But we bought into it ourselves. Like when I was growing up, my parents definitely didn’t talk about black people and Mexican people in like the same light as Asian people. So there’s like this unspoken ranking of like, how worthy and how valuable different minorities were. And certainly we were positioning ourselves at the top of that chain.

It’s so interesting just how pernicious that is like the fact that there’s a ranking in the minds of immigrant people, our parents who came here, maybe in the late 80s, early 90s. And they already have this structure built into their head that like white people obviously because they control everything, no choice, but then it’s us. And then it’s like everybody else. Like it’s crazy that that structure exists because they weren’t even in this country for that long.

I think there’s like a lot of bias that is already built into the way they operate. But I don’t want to give them a free pass I know a contributing factor to the reason why Asian people already think of black people and other minorities as like less than is any homogenous society that does not have a diverse range of people to be looking at every day is already implicitly going to be more racist than other societies like ours that are mixed because they don’t see these people all the time, they’re just only used to the same people who look like themselves, and then put them into a society like ours, where it’s like mixed amongst a lot of different people, they’re already bringing that mentality in and then like further stratifying the classes of people from there.

Jesse Lin 21:22
I think as part of the privileges that we get from the concept of model minority is that there are a lot of positive things associated with that stereotype that are assigned to us. So things like being smart or working successful or studious, and obviously these are better than some of the other stereotypes assigned to the latino or black communities who are, you know, often thought of as criminals or drug dealers or whatever but you’re successful and then people are thinking that you stole your spot. You’re an immigrant, you came here on H1-B. So there are like all these like small, like micro-aggressions that you have to deal with. way that are related to these positive characteristics.

Angela Lin 22:02
Yeah, I agree. I think that in general the Asian community more often than not deals with microaggression forms of racism as opposed to the blatant like, outright and violent way. So I agree with you, like, we we deal with these microaggressions all the time. But like, to the point of the privileges that we’ve gained, it’s not so bad to have to fight against this like idea that we’re successful and smart and blah, blah, blah, as starting at a basis where you are assumed as a criminal or like someone violent or whatever, and then having to build an uphill battle to overcome that stereotype to prove like, actually, you’re the Harvard graduate who’s like a law abiding citizen or whatever, you happen to be black. So I agree, they’re just like, lesser struggles that we also have to combat these like quote unquote, positive stereotypes, but like all in all, it is another one of the privileges that we have the model minority, that like, these are the worst types of stereotypes that are associated with us that we like stole your job because we are too smart and too hardworking.

Jesse Lin 23:10
There are like a few other things, other privileges as well. If we think about just all of the material things we have access to, I mean, we’re talking about jobs, Asian people get preference, I think for specific jobs and careers in hiring, like if you’re hiring an engineer or you’re hiring an analyst or you’re looking for like a diversity hire, I think those are all privileges that we get the benefit of

Angela Lin 23:34
But that are also like on the backs of the work that like African American people put in during the Civil Rights Movement continue to die for in modern society, right?

Jesse Lin 23:46
And then another important thing that has been a huge push overall is access to housing. I mean, it’s something really obvious I feel like a lot of people don’t really think about you know, of course I can find place to live if I have the money to pay for it, but for a lot of latin and black communities and families, that’s not true. Like they can get turned away by a landlord. Obviously, that’s not legal. But that doesn’t mean that that kind of discrimination isn’t happening. And we know that it is. But I can speak from personal experience. I’ve never been turned away from an apartment application because of my race, like I put the money in and we get a response. There’s all of these things that we don’t necessarily consider privileges access to things that are everyday necessities, in the sense to survive that we don’t have any any problems getting access to because of the idea of model minority.

Angela Lin 24:33
If anything, when you’re applying for an apartment and someone sees that you’re Asian, they’re like, oh, they’re probably they probably have a steady job and like are gonna be quiet. Yeah. Bring back that biased book that I am reading. She brought up that I think it was around the 60s there were housing laws all across the country that literally wrote into law, that you could not sell a house to a black person or you could not qualify for like the home loans or whatever that you needed, so that like motivated a lot of house sellers to not want to sell to African American people and therefore, like kind of coerced them into the ghettos actually. And like it’s had a ripple effect into modern society in terms like where African Americans are congregated within the community. And I told you about this the other day, but like she did the super interesting study where she basically showed two different test groups, the same house and the only difference being that in one of the test groups, they were shown in the living room a picture of this like well to do dressed up nicely African American family that was dining in the in the living room, implying that they were the previous owners of the house. And just because of that image alone, that group perceive that house as being valued at $20,000 less than the same house without that black family.

Jesse Lin 25:59
That’s crazy.

Angela Lin 26:00
Yeah. And they thought they immediately believed that that house must be situated in a worse, more dangerous community than the other house that had no humans presented there with no information to justify that

Jesse Lin 26:15
For those of you at home who want to look it up quickly, it’s called redlining, which is like literally at some point in the past, the government drew red lines around black communities or areas where it’s like high risk and said, this is where black people can live, this is where Asian people can live, and this is where white people can live – like it’s crazy.

Angela Lin 26:33
So case in point, we recognize our privilege. We know it’s fucked up.

Jesse Lin 26:45
Hey, guys, and welcome back to the closing segment of our podcast, the fortune cookie. So we wanted to kind of continue the conversation and discuss how the model minority concept is changing. So I’m gonna draw you guys a bad fortune first and we’re going to talk about how this concept of model minority is changing for the worse. Obviously, with all of the things that are happening around COVID-19 a lot of really just gross nonsensical stereotypes have come up about how Asians are dirty, they don’t have proper hygiene or they eat all kinds of like weird bush animals or stuff like that, which is completely not true and like obviously did not exist as part of the model minority stereotype. I think a something else that’s really true, especially for neighborhoods I’ve seen in New York, where it’s a traditionally let’s say, white upper class neighborhood or like very homogenous. A lot of Chinese people are moving here to the US. They’re buying. They’re buying houses together and moving in together. And there’s this idea that, you know, somehow Chinese people have all this money and they’re coming here and they’re like taking over our neighborhoods and like ruining the neighborhood, or they’re taking all jobs or whatever. And again, this is like kind of what I said about like the positive stereotypes turning negative now they’re mad about the success they’re mad about the fact that we have money, they’re mad about the fact that we can get jobs

Angela Lin 28:17
Right one of the main reasons they called us model minority was because we were highly educated and able to have successful businesses and now you’re pissed that we became so successful that we have more privilege than you do sometimes and being able to like pay all cash for properties and things like that.

Jesse Lin 28:34
Yeah, what’s up with that?

Angela Lin 28:38
It’s existed forever, but I think like people have come out with feeling like they have more liberty to voice their opinions about these things since Trump was elected frankly, which is like they’re a broader societal fear of like this foreignness and like the foreign invasion, so like, you may be Third generation Asian American, but like you’re just out in society at a store or whatever, and you’re talking in your Asian language and people will like get really pissed at you and like, maybe call you out, maybe harass you because you’re not speaking in English because they’re seeing you as like foreign danger, foreign invasion. And again, it’s just like it’s only based on how you appear. Alright, so there are some not so fun progressions of racist stereotypes around us. But fortune cookie, as you know, is supposed to be a sweet treat. So we did want to then segue this into how these labels on the Asian community may be changing also for the better. So I think one of them most prominent ways as happening right now is that we as Asians are starting to recognize our privileges. And the Asian community is starting to get loud and are speaking out against these injustices. This is progress in a lot of ways, because prior to this, like you said, our community has largely like abstained from, from participating in the political sphere. And this is just the time that we’ve recognized like, we cannot stay silent here because any injustice against you is an injustice against everyone in the community.

Jesse Lin 30:23
Yeah. And I love what I’m seeing because I think people are contributing the ways that they feel comfortable and, and you’re turning some of these attributes of model minority into ways that can help other people. If you have a high paying job donating to organizations that can help out the situation. If you’re a lawyer, you have expertise becoming a legal observer. I think it’s really great that people are pulling these things that are, you know, that traditionally fuel this structure in this box and using it to help other people

Angela Lin 30:55
We covered a lot today. A lot of different topics, a lot of different nuances. here and we know that the current, the current environment evokes a lot of different opinions. So I think this is especially the time that like, we’re very interested in hearing your opinions about what we’ve discussed today. What’s happening in the world right now, where the Asian communities place is.

Episode 12 – Reflections: Azn BBs All Grown Up

Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)

Angela Lin 0:17
Today we are creating a different mini series within our podcast called reflections where we want to give all of you your chance to tell your listener stories. There are a lot of reasons why we want to share listener stories, one of which is that usually it’s just Jessee and me talking. Sometimes we have guests to bring in an outside perspective, but it’s fairly limited to to us on the microphones. So we wanted to have listener stories so that we could get different perspectives, not just our own.

Jesse Lin 0:52
Piggybacking off of thought we started this podcast with the idea of trying to become closer to our community what it means to be Asian Americans. So we want to open that dialogue, create an open forum with you guys and build that community so we can feel closer to a group of people and can better understand what it means to be Asian American.

Angela Lin 1:13
Because we want to tap into the broader community by bringing in your stories and a broader diversity of voices into the podcast. We wanted to make this content frankly, more interesting and more relatable to more of you since Jesse and I only have so many of our own experiences. So I’m sure by bringing in other people’s stories, there’s only more to be shared and feel akin to

Jesse Lin 1:39
We also want to use this opportunity to share and amplify lesser told stories. So things we may not be so familiar with from our experience as being Asian Americans. So again, please do send keep sending us messages, feedback and stories so that we can continue to share them back out to everybody that listens.

Angela Lin 2:01
Okay, so I think we’ll just dive right into our first listener story. This one is from Julie. And here it goes. When I was in middle school or high school, I was not in a great mental state. This translated to physical manifestations, which is why my mom took me to see a doctor. After the test came back with no physical reasons causing my condition. The doctor said that I was probably depressed. She prescribed me medication to help and recommended a therapist. When I asked my mom if we were going to fill the prescription. She said they’re wrong. I was a doctor in China. So I know best. There’s nothing wrong with you and you need to just buck up. Every time I struggled since then I go back to my mom’s words about bucking up and getting over it. Even when friends would tell me to go see someone. I didn’t believe them because my mom told me it wasn’t for me way back when I didn’t really realize how much it affected me until recently. when I started working in consulting, and was staffed on a really hard project that required me to work 120 hours per week. I didn’t get my period for months because I was too stressed. I eventually had a mental breakdown at work and had to go on medical leave for a few months. I didn’t tell my mom the real reason I was taking medical leave. And I told her I was taking time off between projects. She didn’t ask what the medical leave was for, but I think she could sense that I was taking it for mental health reasons, but didn’t want to confirm that. Looking back on it now, talking to someone really helps me a lot. It gave me time to reflect on why I didn’t talk to someone sooner and made me realize that therapy is normal. If you break your foot, you’d go see a doctor and mental health is just like that. I might not need to see someone all the time. But if I get sick mentally I should go see someone.

Jesse Lin 3:50
I really feel for Julie like I can’t say that I’ve been in the same situation. But definitely I’ve been in this situation where I’ve just found it really hard to talk to my parents about things that were like really difficult in my life. I didn’t come out to my mom until I was like 21, like, basically about to leave college. And then we didn’t really talk about it for like, a few years after that. And in between, like, there was so much stuff happening in my life. But because I was gay, we just didn’t communicate about it. But I think at the end of that time period, it was very difficult. But I did sit down and have a conversation with her about it. And I think we’re in a better place for it. I do want to acknowledge that it is it can be very difficult sometimes to have conversations with their parents because of the language barrier because of the cultural barriers, just the difference differences in our lives. But I think despite that there’s some common ground that can be found. So I hope that Julie and her mom can really connect on this at some point in the future.

Angela Lin 4:51
Yeah, beyond the language barrier and cultural barrier. I also feel like there’s just this like additional barrier with Asian Parents have like, they just don’t like to or know how to talk about emotions like hard topics like that. Because I feel like when I’ve been like really sad in the past and like, try to have those conversations with my mom, she just doesn’t really know how to react. And so it’s kind of similar to what Julie is saying here like, either she kind of brushed it off or she’d be like, Oh, well, you’ll get over it or whatever, because but like I could tell that she wasn’t saying that to be mean or like crude about it. It was more just like she didn’t know what else to say. So she was just like, No, well, let’s let’s just quickly move on because I’m uncomfortable trying to like navigate your sobbing. Me.

Jesse Lin 5:47
Honestly, unfortunately, I have to say that the brunt of that work like the onus of it is like on us. And what I mean by that is when I finally talked to my mom about it, I was in a place for I felt like I fully accepted myself like I was okay with being gay. And because I was comfortable with that, then I was able to have what I felt like was a no pressure conversation with my mom to be like this things like that what we discuss is still here, and I’m still here and like, I’m still fine, and I’m still okay. But we have to talk about it, because it’s a huge part of my life. And I think the same thing with mental health, like, we have to talk about it is a huge part of your overall health and your overall life. But unfortunately, like I said, I think the onus has to come to us where we have processed it enough that we can have just like a normal non pressure conversation with our parents about it because as you mentioned, they don’t necessarily have the facilities to deal with those like emotionally charged conversations.

Angela Lin 6:47
Another big thing that stood out to me was seeking help because I feel like some people’s like hesitancy with trying therapy is a feel like once you start therapy, you’re like, I’m going to have just go to therapy for the rest of your life or something. It’s like that’s not the case. Like you can choose to do that because regular maintenance of your mental health is a good thing. And if you can afford to do that, like good for you, you probably should, but like I think a lot of people do more like what she’s saying. It’s like, recognize when in your life you need it and like seek out that help for those specific moments in your life. But it’s not like a lifelong commitment or anything.

Jesse Lin 7:27
Yeah, no, I agree with that. But I just want to add, there’s nothing wrong if you need to go see a therapist all the time. Like if you have a weight, if you have any other chronic condition, you go see a specialist all the time. So it’s kind of the whole like go see preventative care doctor, like your primary care versus going to Urgent Care like you shouldn’t feel like you have to go to the psychiatrist psychologist at the very last minute when you’re like stretched to your breaking point like, you know, if you start to feel a little tattered at or under the weather, mentally speaking, you should just go if you can afford it Hopefully it doesn’t matter how many times you need to go, you should go to take care of yourself.

Angela Lin 8:05
Okay. Well, thank you, Julie, for sharing your mental health story. I think it’s really important for people to be sharing those kinds of stories again to like normalize that seeking help is good. It’s normal and it’s healthy. So do it. Whatchu got Jesse?

Jesse Lin 8:22
Yeah, so our next listener story is from Annie. And here it goes. First of all, thank you for creating this awesome piece of media. When I listened to the pod I find myself usually nodding through each episode because of how much I recognize the points you make, and the ways you to have navigated the Asian American experience. I’ve been enjoying the fortune cookie recs so far too. After listening to your latest episode on filial piety, I wanted to share my experience with this old ass Confucian virtue because it’s one where I actually had a slightly different experience than what you both share. While I know what filial piety is, its expectations, duties etc tied up with it. My parents actually hardly emphasized the virtue when they raised me. For sure I did what I was told mostly but when we did fight, they never pulled the you’re being a bad or unfilial daughter card. I’m now working, but they don’t ask for part of my paycheck. My mom has even told me that when she gets old, I should put her in a retirement home. I’m not the one that immigrated 7000 plus miles from the land of Confucius to a foreign country. Yet, I was the one that was scandalized when she said that there are probably a couple reasons behind this. My parents are slightly more westernized than average immigrants. And I’m naturally not the rebellious type. So I doubt they weren’t ever really concerned I’d disgraced the family name. But I think a considerable factor among these is the fact that among our extended family back in China, where that virtue is much more important, filial piety hasn’t really worked out great. Namely, there’s a ton of drama between the generations on my dad’s side, there’s currently a large schism between his mom and his younger sister and her immediate family. And on my mom’s side, her sisters have squandered most of their mom’s savings on bad investments and personal expenditures. Are my grandmother’s taken care of by their relatives. Absolutely. All their material needs are addressed but a lot of tension and animosity exists as well. My maternal grandmother lives with her eldest aunt, they can’t stand each other and both regularly call my mom to complain about the other. Not a great case here for why filial piety is a rewarding virtue. That’s not to say that filial piety is altogether bad. The fundamental value of taking care and loving your parents is important, but the unilateral responsibility that it places on the child ends up undermining the virtue. On both sides of my family the soured relationships stem from the dismissive upbringing my aunts received, with all the attention directed to the eldest child instead, in classic traditional Asian fashion. It’s understandable how they’re bitter as adults having to be eternally obedient to someone who has wronged them. Would there be less drama if there was a virtue on how parents should treat children at the same intensity and obligation of filial piety? I don’t know. But I think the longer these generational disputes have dragged on, the more my parents have shied away from passing on to me the same sense of totalitarian obligation, the more they tell me that my life is my own. Another hot take from my mom – parents in China have kids for the sole purpose of having a caretaker when they age. In any case, I know I’m very lucky to have parents who believe that and despite what my mom tells me, I have no plans to put them in a retirement home, which I guess makes me filial by being unfilial. Anyways, thanks for reading my long winded thoughts. Sorry, Angela. I know you told me a few paragraph tops but you can’t stop the overachieving Asian.

Angela Lin 11:45
First of all, beautiful email Annie. Like what a beautifully written email. Well, I feel like there’s so much to unpack in her email because even though she called them out, she said it was about filial piety, and like it kind of is but it’s also about just like all the other embedded values of Asian culture, like how the eldest son is more valuable than everyone else and therefore is treated the best and that how that causes resentment. And I love Well, no, I don’t love but I like that she pointed out that the grandma is taken care of physically but then there’s all this like chaos happening around. And I think that’s really like a product of the fact that filial piety again is like taught more the delivery is wrong, right, like we talked about last time is at its core, it must have been created because it is like showing gratitude and love for the gift of life right and like bringing you into the world and the sacrifices parents made, but the delivery is like you owe me this. You’re obligated to do this for me. You know, then, of course the kids are like, Okay, well, we have to take care of you technically. But like, even by hearing that there’s like conflict amongst all the family and whatnot, just makes me feel like they missed the point. It’s like there’s taken care of to check off the box. But there isn’t the like return of love and gratitude and like, kindness that is at the core of what that tenant was founded on.

Jesse Lin 13:28
Yeah, that’s actually kind of what I related to as well, just because we did talk in our episode regarding the relationships our parents have with their grandparents, but I feel like this was like even more of like a page 6 expose on it, which is like so interesting, because we often tend to think, at least for me, I tend to think that my parents are kind of just cool with it. Like they’re like, whatever, like, we’re happy about it, but we can see I think it’s generally most people aren’t like chafing against it in one way, shape, or form. And I think we feel More even further away from that, because we weren’t even born in a society where everyone else is kind of doing the same thing like we’re so far removed from that we’re like, looking at and we’re like, this doesn’t make any sense at all. Like, I love you know, if I want to love my parents, I love my parents and I show that love how I want to, but there shouldn’t be an obligation that says Like, I must do X, Y and Z in order to showcase that I care about my parents.

Angela Lin 14:25
Yeah, I love that her parents are more willing to like adapt because even though they were born in China, and more the ones who moved to the US they clearly have like very much embraced the the western, like positive sides of Western culture, and like decided to actively rid themselves of a lot of like toxic parts of eastern culture. And I just love that it’s the perfect way to to adopt the two identities. I think it’s like cherry pick the best parts.

Jesse Lin 14:58
Flexibility is key. And I think is where we both also landed and probably where Annie will land as well in terms of how you want to approach filial piety, right? You don’t want to be locked into like a contractual agreement with T Mobile for the rest of your life like you want to like, enjoy the time you have with the people you love the way you want to.

Angela Lin 15:17
Yeah, and I love that she’s unexpectedly filial, although she was taught to be unfilial. All right, so let’s get into our last story of the day. This one is slightly different because it comes from Sarah, who is not an Asian American, she is an ally? That’s the right term? Okay, so I remember complaining when we were studying abroad in Madrid about feeling like an outsider. I couldn’t go outside without someone yelling rubia at me, and people were rude all the time when I tried to speak Spanish. This is nothing in comparison to your experience of racism. And I shut it down because I was having a pity party for myself. I still think about that a lot and feel really ashamed. I never apologized for that and told myself you probably didn’t remember anyway, listening to the podcast made me feel like I should have been a more supportive friend at that time. Even if you don’t remember that specific instance, I still was contributing to that. I’m sorry for not listening to you then. Hearing you both mentioned feeling like an outsider made me reflect on how I’ve done shitty things like that, and how they might have more of an impact on someone that I might have realized. I think stories and different perspectives like on your podcasts are really helpful just broadening people’s perspectives and making them empathetic. Yay!

Jesse Lin 16:48
Thank you. I think that it’s really interesting because we’ve talked a lot about how the concepts of identity overlap with some concepts of stereotypes which overlap some concepts of racism. And I think with all these things is like initially, it can be very isolating to be put in that situation. And I think I definitely see that in this story. So I just want to say about that experience. I think for anyone when you’re accused of being something negative that’s related to your actual being like a sexist comment has been made to you or racist comment or anything like that. A lot of people tend to turn inwards. And you’re kind of stuck in that space for a while until you feel so comfortable with whatever it was that the person attacks you’re with. Like you’re now you’re so comfortable in being a woman, a man, being trans, or you’re so comfortable in being Asian or African American or whatever, that it doesn’t bother you. Then you open up and once you do that, you start to see most everyone has had an experience like that. And I think that’s what I’m seeing here from Sarah, which I think is great because the whole purpose of our podcast in general is to create this idea of community so that everyone can have an experience where they feel like they can be connected to other people. And this is one of those experiences.

Angela Lin 18:12
Yeah, I obviously related a lot with her experience because we…well all of us here studied abroad in Madrid. But, but like she was called rubia which means blonde, so I guess because yeah, a lot like naturally blonde people are not that common, yeah, in Spain, so it was more just like they called her that because she’s like, she stands out right. And it was like the first time in her life It sounds like that she was standing out in like a broader society and I think you said this also happened to you, but like, yeah, you and I were called like China and Chino all time while we’re there because if white people are few and far between Asians are like even more ridiculously exotic right? I think the difference though, is that that experience for me in Spain was the most eye opening for me as well, where I was like, I’ve never been so aware of being Asian as like living here. But when I do reflect on it now it’s like, yes, but there, we talked about this whole time, like they’re microaggressions where you were meaning to like, be reminded of how you look and what like group you belong to even in these, like more diverse societies that we live in. So in Spain was like, this funhouse mirror version of microaggressions.

Jesse Lin 19:40
Yeah, I think it’s what I like to call casual racism, which is that like, when you tell people like that’s wrong, they’re like, oh, no, I’m not racist. It’s not that like you’re overtly racist, but like the things that you’re saying are still racist. Like, yes. And that’s, I think that’s the other thing that I wanted to say that’s great about the story is that not all people have that revelation, some people stay stuck in that inside world. And you end up seeing people who can’t relate to other people who see the things that are going on right now. And they’re like, Oh my god, the shoes at Aldo are on fire instead of like, what’s happening with the people. So I think this is a really great example of someone who has also been through some kind of really uncomfortable commentary about themselves, took some time to digest it, and then opened back up to share their story and to be enveloping in their experience.

Angela Lin 20:36
Yeah, I do love that she was able to reflect on it now and like see how it is parallel to a lot of our stories as well but it kind of also makes me like, sad in a way because she like literally had to be in our shoes to understand that. So it makes it hard for me to imagine people who don’t physically like get insulted or like attacked or whatever, in the same way that people of color do that they are not going to be able to empathize with that unless you’re put in a similar situation which I wouldn’t wish on anyone but like, I wish empathy could be like, more easily understood yeah feeling than than having to like, experience it yourself.

Jesse Lin 21:24
I agree with what you said, I don’t think anyone really wants to go through, go through what that means. And I can’t even imagine what that experience might be like for the African community right now. I don’t think that anyone is saying in general, I don’t think anyone is saying like you’re you should understand the pain exactly as is like it’s a learning process for everybody, especially as you mentioned, those people who will never understand what it means because they don’t walk in our shoes. They can’t they don’t look the same way. They don’t have the same upbringing. But the idea is that you examine how you’re thinking about it and ask questions and like strive to understand. That’s the point. It’s not that you’re ever going to achieve 100% understanding of, of what’s happening and someone else’s life experience.

Angela Lin 22:09
And that is exactly why we’re doing these listener stories. Give a megaphone to everyone to tell your personal experiences so we can all learn from each other.

Jesse Lin 23:00
Welcome back to what is normally the fortune cookie section of our podcast. But now we’re going to be taking listener questions. If you guys don’t know already, aside from the stories that we’re telling in the front half of “Reflections”, we’re also taking listener questions. So if there was something you didn’t quite understand in one of the episodes, or you just had a follow up question regarding the topic or something you wish would have been covered, please do send it to us. Email us at telluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com. As always, that’s Y-O-U-R-E.

Angela Lin 23:35
The question for today is, is there a split between the family that is still in Taiwan and the family living in America? Do you feel that there is any jealousy or bitterness?

Jesse Lin 23:47
Hmm, that is such a tricky question. Okay, so, obviously very two different sides of my family on my mom’s side, the family it’s really just my mom that lives in the States. Everyone else is still back in Taiwan. I don’t know if there’s any jealousy or bitterness per se, but definitely I know that my mom misses her family a lot. And she misses like the moments that you can only experience or be a part of like when you’re there. And, you know, my grandparents are getting older. So I definitely know that there’s some wistfulness on her behalf to be there more frequently and be more present. On the other hand, I do think that she’s kind of resigned to the fact that she’s going to be living here like forever until she passes. Her and my dad paid for a plot in Rose Hills. Rose Hills is like the Beverly Hills of where you want to be buried. It’s so popular. So yeah, I think she’s kind of resigned and made peace with the fact that she’s probably gonna live here until she passes. And then on my dad’s side of the family, I don’t know if there’s any jealousy or bitterness because of the distance but definitely a result of the distance is that some family members we’re not able to be caring for my dad’s mom and dad, when they were kind of getting to their end of life stages. As we discussed in the filial piety episode like that can create so many tensions. So my second oldest uncle was in Taiwan the entire time. So he basically wasn’t able to do really anything because they’re so far and then there was a lot of expectations placed on my oldest uncle who’s the eldest, obviously, is the doctor and like, basically makes a ton of money. And he also lived pretty close to my grandparents, like no closer to LA, which is like 45 minute drive, but still pretty close. So I think from that perspective, there was definitely some tension because they’re kind of like, you’re the oldest like you should be assuming most of the responsibilities and he probably like us didn’t really feel that way. Like we’re all here like we should all share the responsibility. So I definitely felt that there was some undercurrents of tension there.

Angela Lin 25:59
Interesting. On my side, I feel like similar to yours and that like the mom’s side and the dad’s side is is very different. Like I already said, I’m not as close to my dad’s side because he’s the youngest of the many siblings. So like, all my cousins are a lot older than I am. So it’s hard to relate to them. No, but I’m already like, naturally much closer to my mom’s side because I spent more time with them. When I did go back to Taiwan. So similar to yours, I don’t think there’s jealousy or bitterness per se, but there’s the like, unspoken divide, because like you just can’t get as close to people that you aren’t around all the time. So like I am the closest from like the cousin side with the ones who moved to America because I was able to like, either live with them for part of my life or like spend a lot of time with them and the aunts and uncles there too. So Like when we’re all back in Taiwan, it’s easier for me to like gravitate towards the people I’m comfortable with then to try to like extend into the the cousins that are like haven’t seen in eight years or whatever, right? So it’s not, it’s not jealousy or bitterness. It’s really just like level of comfort because of how close we’re able to get with which country you happen to be in. But with that said, when I do talk to my cousins about where they’re at with their lives, and like, how much money well, we didn’t talk about how much money we’re making to like, compare ourselves, it was more just like, I don’t know, it, like somehow came up. They weren’t bitter towards me that I was going to make a ton more money than they were it was more just like a sad reality that we both accepted, but like this is due to the fact like we live in different countries where the standard of living is very different. So that’s just how it is. So there’s a sense of guilt on my side if anything else not really jealousy or bitterness.

Jesse Lin 27:53
So in summary, family is complicated but not overtly jealous or bitter. Thank you for the question.

Angela Lin 28:01
Yes. So as per usual, we would love if you could help promote us. So if you haven’t already, like follow and subscribe to us, please do but the newer thing that we keep pushing now is if you could rate us five stars on Apple podcasts that would help alot in getting us up in the search ranks so please do that if you can come back next time for a new episode.

Episode 11 – The Freedom of Controlled Substances

Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)

Jesse Lin 0:15
This week we’re taking a topic detour and we are talking about the funniest thing of them all drugs. So I think that this is quite an interesting topic for us to discuss because drugs have always been very taboo within Asian culture, and also just in our conversations with our parents growing up, it was always a very hard line in the sand, don’t do drugs, like you’ll end up in a bad place and bring shame upon the family and all that. And I don’t know if you ever had this experience, but whenever my parents brought up stuff like that, they always have like anecdotes to back it up so they will be like so and so’s cousin’s wife. And now they’re divorced, and she can’t see their children anymore or something like that. So..

Angela Lin 1:06
Always like five steps removed.

Jesse Lin 1:09
Exactly. So many of those examples. And so it was like very clear that drugs were bad even though for the most part, when we were growing up, what fell into the category of drugs was really basically like drinking, smoking and marijuana. And there was like, not even anything else ever.

Angela Lin 1:29
I don’t think our parents even know necessarily any…

Jesse Lin 1:31
Yeah, for sure. It doesn’t. Like I don’t think those things even exist for them. And of course, we both grew up in a very well to do neighborhoods. So I’m sure nationally, there was a lot of D.A.R.E., what does D.A.R.E. stand for again…

Drug abuse, reduce

Reduction Education.

So obviously we went through a lot of those courses in, I think elementary and probably middle school as well. And maybe even some of high school and I remember they would bring like a police officer and the police officer would be like, here the sentences for people who are caught with these kinds of substances, and they were basically just tried to like scare you away from doing them. So that was like an added thing in the pile where you were like, No, don’t do drugs, like it’s scary and you can get arrested. And die. Yeah.

Angela Lin 2:49
So let’s get into a high level overview of the types of drugs that we’re going to be covering in today’s episode. Such a fun topic. And so we’re not going to go into like the science of it all, but we did want to talk about them in terms of like, what the core effect is, and like what purpose people use them for. So the four key drugs that we’re including in today’s episode are alcohol, marijuana, MDMA, and broadly psychedelics. So starting with alcohol, I think the main reason people get drunk is to just kind of like loosen up, get out of your head, like giving you courage honestly to like do things you’ve always wanted to do, but it is dissociative because you’re kind of trying to like distance yourself from yours, your inhibitions your time, I kind of like create the space so that you’re this somewhat alternate version of you. Then with marijuana, it’s kind of like similar but opposite. So I would still say marijuana is dissociative and that you’re trying to relax to get out of your head have fun generally, but it’s very like it’s a relaxant. Then MDMA. MDMA is known as kind of like the happy drug, right? Like it’s just this very like connecting type of drug. And MDMA is used both recreationally and it’s also used for therapeutic purposes to like be more introspective and use it to help you kind of work through some of your issues if you turn inward, which then leads to similarly psychedelics. So this is a whole different sphere. psychedelics are a broad category of drugs that the connecting factor is that all these drugs have trigger DMT which is the chemical that makes your brain hallucinate. So when you’re on psychedelics, you can visually see things like either aren’t there or like our slightly altered version of realities, so psychedelics, definitely a lot of people take recreationally. And also psychedelics are certainly very much used now for therapeutic uses. It’s getting a second wave now in terms of like acceptability and the the benefits that can come from using guided therapy sessions with psychedelics.

Jesse Lin 5:19
I think that in general, my experience along with everyone else’s experiences the same where alcohol is basically like the first thing that you’re introduced to because A it’s legal, and B, it’s pretty easy to get even if you’re under age, there’s like less taboo around it – it’s legal. So even though we’re under 21, and we’re obtaining it illegally, it’s not as bad as if you were getting like marijuana, which is like completely illegal. You have alcohol basically like everywhere you go. But I think that it also has some of the worst backlashes just because I think of the setting that you’re typically using it in is you’re with a lot of people. It could be a personal setting, but could also be a professional setting. And both those settings are situations where if you’re a little too loose that could be very very bad.

Angela Lin 6:02
I feel like some of my biggest mistakes in my early to mid 20s were on alcohol the dumb shit that happens when you blackout that’s what I mean by dissociative. It’s like you literally are like out of your body out of your mind when especially when you’re at the point of blackouts

Jesse Lin 6:19
Also a little misleading because people always say like, oh, alcohol lowers your inhibitions. So they’re like, it’s like your real self coming out. But like, when you’re at that level, you’ve lost so much of yourself that it’s not your real self anymore.

Angela Lin 6:31
I will say I don’t want to like demonize alcohol completely. It’s not like you and I don’t drink alcohol we certainly do, but I feel like I especially as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to appreciate the use of alcohol more and like I opened up a can of beer after work when I leave now to like de stress from the day but like one is enough.

Jesse Lin 6:51
There’s a certain level of mandatory ness to it. Think about like company happy hour, networking events. There’s almost always alcohol involved in that. People might say that they respect your choice not to drink. But there definitely is some like low key pressure from people being like, hey, how come you’re not like being fun?

Angela Lin 7:12
Alcohol is one thing that the peer pressure started when we were like 13 and has will continue for the rest of your life because everyone’s kind of constantly judging you as to why you’re not drinking when it’s in a setting that everyone else is drinking.

Jesse Lin 7:27
Yep, I think the next level down is marijuana. Everyone who studies abroad takes that like mandatory trip to Amsterdam, but really for the longest time like I’d never felt the effects of it because I think that was really cautious and like how much I was taking and then after a while, I was finally just like, you know what, I’m just gonna try it because I’ve done it these few other times and like nothing has happened for me so I feel pretty safe in doing more and eventually like going through that made me land on my preferred way of doing it, which was edibles

Angela Lin 7:58
My foray into marijuana was similar. My first time doing it was in Amsterdam because if not here then were so I did a brownie and it was out of this world like caught me so high beyond belief that I was like fuck this I never want to get high again. It was like I had no idea where I was it was the time where like if I sat in a chair sort of like sinking into..had no idea humans were around me until they talked loud enough that I focused on them. It was too much from that I kind of like swore off marijuana for a very long time like several years until it got legalized in California. I went from Amsterdam then swearing off for many years then just doing like gummy slash mints. After I did psychedelics I just, it’s not the same anymore because psychedelics are super like about introspection. And so after being in that kind of headspace doing marijuana, that’s totally about like dissociating and going out of your head. I was like, I don’t like this the way that I see the line in the sand of like the drugs that we listed earlier. So alcohol, marijuana, MDMA and psychedelics is that alcohol is addictive. Hmm. I think people can debate me on the marijuana piece. But theoretically, I don’t think marijuana in and of itself is addictive. I think people can get addicted to that state of being really relaxed and just disassociated from yourself and your issues, but not like your body is craving the marijuana and like if you don’t have it, you’re gonna like need another hit in the next five minutes. That is like actual addiction. And alcohol is addictive.

So we’re sailing out of the light party drugs and we’re going into the full party drugs are gonna be talking about MDMA next or called Molly and or called ecstasy. I actually was introduced to this pretty recently, when I went to like this world pride party with a bunch of friends and it was like face meltingly awesome. I don’t remember much of the night like I wasn’t blacked out. It was just Like my brain was not recording anything that was happening. You just feel like super happy everyone you interact with you’re like, I’m immediately like in love with you like I’ve known you for like million years and you’re my soulmate. It was just such a very transformational experience because you’re just so happy that you’re like, I can’t believe that I can get to that level of happiness in my life. And for me, it doesn’t diminish like your current state. It’s just kind of like you understand that you can’t always be that happy in your life. Like it’s not possible. But there are moments where you can get there

Do you feel like that state feels really genuine to you, even when you’re off it

Jesse Lin 10:38
Well it depends, I think, on a few things. I mean, the first thing is like obviously afterwards, I thought about what I was feeling and most of it is powered by the drugs right like the people who I went and partied with that night I literally just met even now like when I think about that night and those people its just like a tug at your heartstrings. The other thing that I do thing is super important with like, all of these things is your intention going into whatever you’re doing with the substance. So for me, I had two very two clear intentions as to what I wanted to do. Number one, I wanted to be able to stay up all night because this is like a party that goes from like 12 to six I was like, there’s no way that I can be alive without some help. And number two, I just wanted to dance my ass off combining those two things. It was like perfect

Angela Lin 11:25
Was the like decision to try this quote unquote, more hardcore drug for the first time driven by something else because we are talking about what was the thing that got us over this hump of like, Asian parents bring us up to think all drugs were like, absolutely evil,

Jesse Lin 11:41
Mostly pragmatism and curiosity. The people I was going with, I was like, I’m pretty comfortable that they would not be steering me wrong or abandon me. Yeah, I trusted them. And then the thing was, I just want to try it. Like I had like heard things about it and obviously done my research before and like ask people like their own experiences were with it. But I was just really curious about what it would feel like and everything kind of just aligned. I had the place to be I had the people to be with, I knew what exactly I wanted out of the experience and the substance was available.

Angela Lin 12:14
I think trust is like a really big factor in terms of like why people decide to go over the hump of like taboo or skepticism prior to trying a more hardcore drug. For me was the same way and I think this is where Jesse and I will start like diverging a bit in experiences because for the rest of these drugs, for me, it was therapeutic. So in our previous episodes, we talked about mental health. I talked to my therapist, and actually this therapist that I was going to was a therapist that specialized in psychedelics. I first went to see her just for like regular talk therapy for several months. So like no drugs at all involved, just to like build up our relationship and build up that trust. I read this book called “How to change your mind” by Michael Pollan, which covers he covers MDMA, but he also covers all the psychedelics, I found this book super compelling because it was really scientific the way that he wrote it. So like, when I first started seeing this therapist, she was like, from the spectrum of woowoo, to science, where are you? Both, like, that’s a really funny way to put it. But for me, I think I’m somewhere slightly above in the middle. So like, I am more science based, like I need like the data to back it up. I need a rationale that makes sense for why you should take a risk. But you and I were raised Daoist there was like certain, you know, like spiritual elements and not totally just like sciences is it and there’s nothing else out there in the world. So when I read this book, I was like this perfect because it’s science based. So Michael Pollan is a New York Times best selling author but he’s a specialist in plants so he’s written a bunch of books on like regular plants. And then he wanted to investigate psychedelic plants and other psychedelics. And so the first half of the book is all just research. So he talked about like the history behind for example, like LSD. The benefits that first were discovered around it, how it got, like banned later and, and all these things. So just like kind of laying out, like what are the facts behind these drugs. And then the second half of the book was super compelling because it basically was like every chapter, he did a different drug. And he was someone who, like, never did any drugs. So it was like very easy to put myself in his shoes. So I think MDMA was the first one that he did as well. And he basically wrote it, like first person account like, this is what happened, this is what I saw. This is my experience. And so because of like, bought in by his first half research, and then felt like I was along for the ride and experiences, I was like, This seems logical and like he seems to have gotten really strong benefits from doing that. Like I’m open, but yeah, so MDMA, I took it as my first therapeutic drug. And it’s still my favorite trip I’ve ever had. Honestly, that’s for similar reasons like even though you and I did it for different reasons like recreational versus therapeutic, it has the same effect in terms of like making feel really loved and like connected to everything and everyone. For me it was really interesting because when you do drugs for therapeutic settings, you turn totally inward so what that means is like you’re lying down for the whole session and you have an eye mask on so you’re like not focused on the like outer stimuli of like, what’s happening in the room you’re focused really on you. You do see things similar to like in a dream like when you dream at night, see things that like feel really real to you, but there’s always kind of that like fuzzy haze over things for you like no, this is not like reality. For me. I like had these beautiful visions and it was very spiritual and I worked through a lot of shit especially with like my family and relationships. Some things like that I felt this like really deep unconditional love for my family that I like had never felt or like expressed before. And for me feeling that was like uncovering the truth. So it didn’t feel like it was because of the drugs. It was like the drugs helped me get there to realize like that was always there, there was no way to lie, what you feel is like is there and it’s going to come out.

Jesse Lin 16:24
I think there are similar experiences because you uncovered your love for your family. And I uncovered that I could find more happiness in my life than what I had

Angela Lin 16:33
Just to bring the woowoo in here for a second one of the main insights that everyone says when they do psychedelics like biggest insight is that we’re all connected. Like every everyone and everything is connected. And it’s a very woowoo concept, but I feel like even you doing MDMA for a party use you felt that like that’s why you felt so connected with those random people. It was like yeah, you don’t know those people but like at the core, as humans, we’re all connected, right?

Jesse Lin 17:02
I mean, you just you feel the wave of energy from other people. It was a very connective experience, like super empathic, and how do you feel now that you’re like a few months down the line from that session in terms of the feelings that you’ve uncovered

Angela Lin 17:17
When you do drugs for like introspective use, you’re going to come up with like a lot of big insights and discoveries about your life and like the people in them and stuff that are very true. But like when you’re on these drugs, you have no inhibition in terms of seeing the truth. And when you’re in your normal life, you have like all these layers of additional things that are kind of like hiding the truth. So like, you have insecurity you have like you’re holding grudges from past shit that’s happened and all that’s like kind of covering up what was underneath. I still feel like those insights were very true and like the love I felt was very true. But I kind of constantly have to remind myself to feel that because there’s so much other shit that’s easy to pile on in normal life. So now ee’re like truly diverging because we have you and I have respectively like different drugs that we have tried the other hasn’t. So I want to hear more about your last drug.

Jesse Lin 18:12
The last real like hard drug that I’ve used is ketamine. Basically ketamine is also a dissociative, but it’s much more effective, let’s say than alcohol or marijuana you feel like this complete level of emotional dissociation at the peak of it that is like so weird like I’ve never felt this way in my life before. So the first time I did it was with a friend so it was like not a therapeutic setting, but it was very like tranquil safe like at home in my apartment setting. When I tried it. I was talking to my friend about like, all of basically a collapse of my personal life over the last like month or two. And normally when you talk about that stuff, like you get upset, right, you can feel it building and you and then usually that like for me, it comes out in the form of like me just bawling. And while I was on it, I could still feel it, but it felt kind of like my emotions were out of my body and I was viewing them like an outsider. So I could feel this deep well of sadness and unhappiness and like despair, like all this stuff that I’ve been feeling, but I was like, no, thank you. I’m good. Like, that’s how I that’s how I felt about it because I could like pull it to the side. And being able to do that helped frame it differently. Like the emotions don’t steer me like they’re just this part of me that I can like dive into or dip into when I want to, but like, I don’t have to, I think it was actually very helpful because I was able to, like split the emotional part of it away. I was able to talk a lot more about things that were on my mind it made it so was like okay for me to go to those areas. And it was helpful because it was stuff that I had to get off my chest at some point.

Angela Lin 19:54
That’s amazing. Do you feel like the impact of that experience was longer lasting? Stand in that session like

Jesse Lin 20:01
I got stuff off my chest that I was basically like holding there for a really long time. And just by saying it out loud, made it easier for me to approach those topics later on. And obviously, like during this time, I was also in therapy and like journaling. So I was doing a lot of introspection in general. So combining that with those behaviors made it easier for me to like, analyze what I was feeling and process it more effectively.

Angela Lin 20:27
And that’s why it’s so interesting to me because even though you call it a dissociative and it is because you’re literally able to remove your emotions from your body as you’re saying, but I feel like it’s at the same time super introspective, right like because even though you didn’t do it with a therapist, you worked through a lot of shit. And you were able to do that because you were able to dissociate from the emotions

Jesse Lin 20:53
The prescription version of it is used for treatment resistant depression, I think for very much the same reason because it allows you to square yourself in a sense and better get a new perspective on what you’re feeling.

Angela Lin 21:06
Yeah, ketamine is used a lot with PTSD patients now, therapeutic settings exactly for this reason, because they’ve gone through a lot of shit that they need to process and it’s normally too hard or like gets blocked out. But this helps them do that in a healthy way. It’s so interesting. I love that, like, we have so many overlapping ways that we talk about these drugs like because you keep talking about what is your intent with this drug, right. And like when you do psychedelics, or MDMA in a therapeutic setting, there were like a number of things that you have to prepare ahead of time. And one of those things is literally working this thing through called intentions like what are your intentions for the session, like what are you trying to get out of it? What issues are you trying to work through? And then the other stuff is like very related to everything we’ve already talked about, which is like people always talk about set and setting. So set your mindset like where are you when you’re going into that drug because if you’re like fucked up if you’re like super depressed if you’re whatever, like the rest of your trip is going to be that way versus like, if you go into open minded and positively that’s also going to affect it. And then setting where physically are you. So like for you with Molly, right? Like it’s super fun and like a party setting with people you trust. That’s a really like purposefully chosen setting for you versus like, I don’t know, if you’re like, in a sketchy part of town, you randomly pop Molly like, I don’t think you’d be like, having a super fun time, even though that it’s like a happiness inducing drug. When people talk about having bad trips on psychedelics, it’s often because you’re either in the wrong mindset, or you’re in like a bad setting physically, that is like going to cause you to have bad thoughts and then spiral out of control.

Jesse Lin 22:52
So tell us more about your experiences with psychedelics.

Angela Lin 22:56
Yeah, I’m gonna just group them. So I’ve tried mushrooms, ayahuasca, and San Pedro. So the mushrooms I did with the same therapist that I did that MDMA with, but the ayahuasca, San Pedro I did in Peru at the sanctuary that like is largely there to help people do ayuhuasca retreats. My experience with psychedelics has been really interesting when you do it for therapeutic settings, all of these things have, we’re going deep into woowoo land now, but like they all have like a spirit attached to it. Part of the thing with psychedelics is a big reason people have bad trips is because you’re trying to control the journey that you’re going through. And so the like, number one thing with psychedelics is that you have to just let go, that spirit that’s guiding that drug knows what’s best for you and what you are best going to tackle on this journey. So even though you had those intentions of like, I want to work through my fear of XYZ or like my bad relationship or whatever it may be like, that’s nice, but like there’s a chance that you’re not gonna cover any of those issues on your journey because maybe the drug knows that like you had this really deep trauma in your childhood that you’ve been bearing for your whole life that you need to address that first. So we’ll take you there. So like the mushrooms are often spoken about as these tiny little men or little gnomes or whatever and like sometimes people actually see like these little gnomes or like little mushroom men running around. Supposedly, they’re these spirits that have been out in the forest for like, all of time, basically. And they are they’re like mischievious that that plays into like your experience with them. And ayahuasca they call ayuhuasca “her” like, they refer to it like a person and they call her like mother or grandmother. Ayuhuasca is basically a vine that’s grown in the Amazon and when mixed with other plants activates the DMT. And that tea that is made from these herbs is what you’re drinking. That is what people call ayuhuasca when you’re high on ayuhuasca it is this mother figure that is like guiding you through. And some people see her in their visions and stuff. So like, there’s this like spirit behind all these drugs because they all come from nature and they’re not addictive. And honestly, actually, after you do a psychedelic trip, it’s like such a deep experience because you’re working through all the shit that’s gone on in your life. You’re crying, you’re like processing the whole time. It’s like real deep therapy. At the end of it. You’re just like, so exhausted. There’s no way you’re like, hit me up with another. Like it’s not addictive at all. Like anyone who’s done psychedelics for therapy knows that you’re like I need five years of another one of those.

Jesse Lin 25:42
I think we wanted to take a moment and really talk about like, why most of these things are banned. Generally, everyone agrees that that has been due to the fact that we’re like in this ongoing war on drugs to try and limit access to the substances and also penalize people who tried to access these substances. Most people have come to the consensus that the war on drugs is generally a failure. It hasn’t really stopped the supply chain of drugs.

Angela Lin 26:08
I think part of why the war on drugs is a failure is that they treat marijuana for example the same as like heroin really bad for you shit that is like addictive and ruining people’s lives because once you take one hit like you can’t get yourself out of it. Marijuana, you know, it’s a natural fucking leaf that like, exists in nature and is now legal in many states. But like New York, for example, it’s still illegal and like, you could still go to jail for possessing, right but like is that the same level of effort and like destruction to society as a heroin or opioids and like shit that like is really destroying people’s lives.

Jesse Lin 26:47
That’s a vicious cycle in a sense, because like to prove that a drug has used and to move it out of a specific schedule, you have to do research against it right? Now there are I think some trials to study the effect of psilocybin and LSD and MDMA in therapeutic settings, but for a long time, it was very difficult to do that because it was like a catch 22. Even if you wanted to prove that the substances were helpful, you couldn’t because they were so illegal that you can get your hands on them. I feel like the scheduling like how dangerous this drug is, are not necessarily arbitrary, but they haven’t been revisited in a way that makes sense scheduled II which is less restrictive and can be used for some prescription purposes include amphetamines, methamphetamines, cocaine, morphine, oxycodone, so like there’s a lot of stuff on there that have been problems, especially when we’re talking about like prescription drug abuse. Yes, that are it’s like somehow on balance, like you have all these things that are causing much more public harm on schedule II where people can access them in some legal settings versus schedule I where no one can access them at all

Angela Lin 27:55
For me I did I definitely didn’t know until I read that Michael Pollan book, the war on drugs started, you know, a long fucking time ago like in the 70s. LSD was a big focus what’s ironic about that is that ever since then people have looked at LSD as like this like crazy, dangerous substance that like no one should take but actually, when it like first was created, it was proven through many clinical trials in therapeutic settings to like have huge breakthroughs. And when the war on drugs was first waged, they basically ordered that all of that evidence was destroyed, and then it was placed into that schedule that you were talking about. So there’s so much irony in all of this because it’s like you need the evidence to prove that there’s benefit but you ordered all that evidence to be destroyed, and therefore now all the other associated drugs that have the same types of benefits are fighting this uphill battle. It’s like reprove what was already proven decades ago by the LSD research. Okay, so then they’ll talking about like the future of drugs and specifically these types of drugs that we talked about today in terms of how much acceptance it’s going to gain in broader society and specifically in like Asian society, where it’s like currently super frowned upon because some of the especially the, like Southeast Asian countries, you can go to jail for life or like anything jail. Yeah. Or like is especially if you’re dealing if you’re trafficking drugs, you could face the death penalty, it’s like really harsh there so much should we really think it’s gonna change in the near to long term future

Jesse Lin 29:30
Okay, so my hope is for America and Asian Americans that perception will change by legitimizing the uses of these substances in therapeutic settings. And so the studies that are being conducted with FDA on these substances, I think that’s really where it starts where science helps to legitimize these substances as treatment for some psychiatric problems. We all know that Asians love authority and they love authoritative information so I think that that will like trickle down.

Angela Lin 29:59
I definitely think that science of it all is going to change things in the future. But I’m pretty pessimistic about it. Like, I think it’s going to take a long time for Asian countries, even with the science backing it. And it’s because therapy as a whole is not super, like widely accepted within Asian culture. So there was like a double barrier to get past for them in terms of like seeing the value of these types of drugs, so maybe sometime in the future, but I think it’s gonna be like, whenever the US or Western cultures are like super open about it, it’s gonna be like 50 to 100 years past that, I think, for people to be open to it.

Jesse Lin 30:39
I will definitely take time, but I think that this is the right way to do it to make it more legitimate from a scientific standpoint.

Angela Lin 30:54
We are now in our fortune cookie closing section. And before we go to our sweet treat, we want to as always invite our listeners to send in your personal stories about today’s topic, which is any experience you’ve had with controlled or otherwise substances and whether that’s been good or bad, we want to hear it and also about kind of like why you decided to try those substances despite your Asian upbringing. We want to hear from you email us at tell us where you’re from@gmail.com again, the you’re is Y-O-U-R-E.

Jesse Lin 31:59
Awesome. As Angela mentioned, we’re going to talk about our best experience slash memory that we have had on substances. And I will kick it off. I can’t say that I’ve had a memory because it was not a memory, it was an experience. But the very first time that I tried MDMA was the top of the tops. It was just like such a great time, dance my ass off all night. As you mentioned, it was just it was just good. Like you feel so connected to everyone that there’s this like feeling of closeness that you have had before, but not with so many people at the same time. So that’s what was so great about it. You just like feeling so deeply rooted with other people.

Angela Lin 32:42
I think we have a similar experience. So my best experience was also on MDMA, that first time I ever did a drug facilitated therapy session. So I will throw into two key things I remember from that. So first is like, as soon as it actually hit me, I was Like, oh my god, this is like the most, like you’re saying like, this is like a different state of happiness that I’ve never felt before. So I had my eye mask on, and she was playing music. And it was like I was melting into the music. Like, I could see the wavelengths of music like dancing in front of my eyes. And I like at first I was like observing it, but then eventually my body like, disappeared. And I was just like, I melted into those wavelengths until we were just like, I was the wavelength. And it was just like this beautiful feeling of like connectedness like you’re saying, and like totally out of body because I was like, I am not just this body. I’m like the spirit and I’m like, this energy and I’m connected to all the other energies. So that was like one key thing I remember. And then the other I’m gonna go super woowoo here, which is like, that whole experience is very spiritual for me. And like I distinctly remember there’s this like, recurring theme that was happening throughout my experience where I was kind of like gliding through the planet and like sometimes I was this bird like a hawk or an eagle or whatever I was like soaring through across like rivers and oceans and forests and stuff and then sometimes it would panch like it wasn’t me as the bird It was like this like bird kind of creature thing that I I knew was Mother Nature, but it was like this kind of like mixture of different creatures. Like I was like being carried by mother nature to like, across the planet to like, show me all these beautiful things and like take me on this beautiful adventure So, so beautiful. It was just like you’re connected to everything, everyone all energy. You’re like, it was

Jesse Lin 34:50
Amazing. Yeah, that sounds like such a great time. Well, if you guys really enjoyed listening to us talk about how much of a great time we had. We hope that You will like follow and subscribe us please take some time rate us on Apple Music. Let us know what you think. Let us know how you think about the episode and obviously check us out again next week. There will be another episode for you as well until next week

Episode 10 – Confusion-ism: Filial Piety 101

Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)

Angela Lin 0:09
Hey, everyone, I’m Angela Lin.

Jesse Lin 0:11
And I’m Jesse Lin. And welcome back to But Where Are You Really From?

Angela Lin 0:15
This week we’re super excited to have our second guest on the podcast one of my best friends, Jenny.

Jenny Tangen 0:22
Thank you guys for having me. It’s been way too long to see your beautiful faces. And you were both in New York together at NYU. Angela met my freshman year gotten to see her grow and Jesse still living vicariously through you and your adventures. A little bit about me personally, I’m originally from Houston, Texas. I kind of grew up as a feisty little kid trying to follow whatever her brother did. Truly my upbringing was how do I prove myself and my worth with my family then decided to leave Houston area and go into the big city and that was a big change for me. A lot of my friends stay in Houston and kind of lived that life there. And for me it was a big shift moving to New York. So it’s great kind of landing there and meeting you guys.

Jesse Lin 1:12
So this week our episode is about filial piety which some of you may or may not have heard of. But before we jump into the definition of what it means, I’d like to open a question to everybody here, which is, what do you think of when you think of the word parents

Jenny Tangen 1:29
Have to make sure my parents maybe don’t listen to it? I would say definitely authority but probably love safe space for me guidance. It was a little bit of tough love, but definitely met.

Angela Lin 1:45
Well, that’s my first thought was like, people who gave birth to me, raised me.

Jesse Lin 1:53
I would also say just somebody who’s like there for you, and why I asked this question is I believe that most people think about their parents and context of yourself and your concept of your parental figures are all grounded around your personal self and how they’re oriented in relation to you. What’s interesting is that when we introduce this concept of filial piety, it’s like completely opposite. So filial piety is kind of one of the main precepts of Confucianism. In the cliffnotes version, it’s basically a spoken or unspoken kind of form of obligation to your parents. So it’s not just that you follow your parents because they’re authoritative, or you respect them or you love them, but you have this life, karmic debt to your parents. And you must always be trying to resolve that obligation. What’s that mean? Like? How do you resolve this obligation to your parents? So you can do this through physical care through love, through service, respect, and also acts of obedience. Initial thoughts?

Angela Lin 2:58
Well, first thing that came mind is something that we talked about a lot, which is the juxtaposition of Western upbringing and an Eastern upbringing. And it’s funny that all three of us still said the same thing in terms of like, the the parent definition being centered around us. Because I mean, at the end of the day, we all three of us grew up in the US. So I think all of us are still very kind of like self driven, because that is American culture. It’s interesting, for sure, because Jesse and I were raised on this concept of filial piety where yeah, if you take a step back and think about it is like, you’re not important in this context. It’s just your parents that are important and like, you’re just kind of a shadow behind that.

Jenny Tangen 3:42
I love that karmic debt, you know, and illustrating that made it a little bit more easier for me to understand. And when you say obligation, it’s interesting because I feel like my parents it was more a sense of empowering me. For them it wasn’t so much as an obligation or a debt to pay with them. Never really seen it. It’s like I’m the the shadow of them versus they’re kind of pushing me up the pedestal a little bit and look at what we’ve given you and this platform that you can be on and how do you kind of raise that to the next level.

Jesse Lin 4:13
That’s really interesting because I feel I kind of vacillate between the two of you. I feel like when I was heading off to college, it was all very focused on myself because I had like, spent so much time trying to develop who I wanted to be and it’s like, the chance to do a fresh start and then kind of after college and towards now I feel more of the pull of obligation in a sentence that I’m not really sure if it’s just like the distance makes me miss my parents more or make me want to do more nice things for them. Or if it’s this shadow of my childhood coming back to haunt me, but like, it’s definitely been kind of like up and down in terms of like, how I how I feel about it.

Angela Lin 4:51
The way that Jenny you described your parents that’s kind of like putting their hopes and wishes into empowering you is not fully the way our parents probably found us off which is more like they had a lot of hopes and wishes for us which is why they like move to this country so that we could have a better opportunity but then there’s this associated like weight and guilt that’s put on us because they already sacrificed so much. So then when they’re trying to like make sure you succeed, it’s making sure you succeed in like their definition of success. And if you have a different idea, you’re going to be constantly kind of like pushing against the current.

Jesse Lin 5:32
You just have to work like two times three times as hard to like prove to your parents set like where you want to go is like also a valid path because they just have this like tunnel vision of we see these like very successful figures and we want you to be one of them. And that can only be like one of three things.

Jenny Tangen 5:50
I’m curious like what I growing up what was like the tactics used because I could see like, for me, it was like you won’t get go far if you don’t do your homework or you’re not disciplined and it was it I feel like those tactics were all focused on me versus I’m curious to hear what tactics maybe or how that translated in your household. What was the threat behind your like daily chart?

Jesse Lin 6:14
I don’t think there weren’t guilt trips. It didn’t work that way was mostly like authoritative, like, it would be like, do this, do that and we would do it.

Angela Lin 6:21
Yeah, I think Asian kids are generally just afraid of their. So you know, if they tell you to do something, you don’t do it, you talk back like they’re gonna get loud and you’re gonna be afraid. So you’ll you’ll just do it.

Jenny Tangen 6:35
So you guys didn’t need like the incentive or the trade off like it was like do your laundry or you can’t go see your friends.

Angela Lin 6:41
Now that’s like, that’s too soft man.

Now we have a good sense of what the concept of filial piety means we want to go a little bit deeper on the extent to which it has been flowing through our various experiences and let’s dig a little bit deeper into like the ways that it might have come about. The sense of filial piety is your relationship with your parents or the parents or the center, so the role of your grandparents in all this is also like something worthwhile to talk about. Because even though your parents are receiving this, like obedience and deference from you, they are supposed to be giving that to their own parents. So how much time did your parents really spend with your grandparents growing up or even now?

Jenny Tangen 7:32
Well, from my side was interesting because my grandparents were based in North Dakota and then another set in Missouri. We didn’t spend much time with my grandparents in North Dakota, aside from like summer visits and occasional phone calls. My mom’s mother, she did live with us for a period of time when she became ill, which was an interesting setup for our family because her relationship with her mother was actually not great. There was no obligation on her. And just because the way she was raised, she felt that she didn’t earn that obligation. So limited touch points with my grandparents but a little more so on my mother’s side, just given the situation and her coming to live with us at the close of her life.

Angela Lin 8:20
Was your mom and only child or why did she feel the need to..

Jenny Tangen 8:25
To take her in?

Angela Lin 8:28
If the relationship wasn’t good

Jenny Tangen 8:29
I know, it’s a long story, but essentially, she’s one of three sisters. She had a close relationship with her dad, her younger sister took that ownership when my grandfather fell ill. My grandparents were divorced at that time. And then in that period of our lives, my mom felt like she could take the burden on a little bit more than the other sisters and just felt like it wasn’t it was unfair to ask that of her little sister to take on another ailing parent. So honestly, I think it was more her sense of obligation to her sisters than to her mother.

Angela Lin 9:07
That’s super interesting.

Jesse Lin 9:09
That is really interesting.

Angela Lin 9:10
Yeah, I think that’s fairly unusual for like American families to take in the the grandparent right to live with them. Like my impression is kind of like if you grew up in the US, it’s kind of like you’re 18 get out of the house and like you’re like a separate human like where you grew up, and like you’re now all adults and like living in your own bubbles on the like Asian, well, Chinese specifically side, given the concept of filial piety actually, one of the main tenants of it is that when your parents grow old, you have an obligation to take them in that like they are supposed to live with you. So like you’re this huge family of you know, your your spouse or kids and and then the generation before you

Jenny Tangen 9:59
Which is interesting because there is a sense of guilt I would say in terms of like my mom feeling like, well, what are we going to do? We can’t necessarily put her in a nursing home, but do we bring her back into our home? I mean, it wasn’t a natural decision for her to say like, let’s have her live with us. It wasn’t just assumed that she would come live with us. I think the first instinct is like a nursing home. Eventually she did go into a situation where she had her own setup it wasn’t a nursing home but it was her own living area but with like two other people and they had a live in nurse kind of tend to them that way as she was ailing and then eventually went into hospice care, which is also interesting. I would be curious to get your thoughts on you know, not only when outside of when your grandparents just need to come back and live with a family unit but when they’re ailing. Like what’s the process like that with your families that more it tending to them to the very end or is it kind of seeking out this hospice care as an option too or is that kind of frowned upon.

Jesse Lin 11:13
So I can speak from my own experience. And I want to caveat that because it’s not a very typical experience. I lived basically across the street from my grandparents, my dad’s parents, what I observed there was that there was not really a talk of like hospice care at all like if there is like somebody in the family that is able to take them in like, they won’t even talk about something like that. And my dad is one of 1234. So he has four siblings, both of my two uncles and one on both live basically like in the same town that I grew up, so I don’t think it would have been acceptable for anyone to be like, let me put them in eldercare or hospice care like because there are living descendants that are supposed to be obligated to take care of them. But Angela, what about you? I mean, your your parents grandparents are not here. So

Angela Lin 12:06
Yeah, my experience a little bit different because when I was growing up, I already only had one grandparent, so I only had my mom’s mom. And so it’s a little hard for me to say because she was in Taiwan. So I only saw her in the summers when we would go visit and when she was getting sick, I was in America so I couldn’t really like and really young, I think I was only in middle school at the time. So I like didn’t really understand what was going on. But for my understanding for sure, like all of her children, I’m sure we’re like trying to take care of her to the best of their ability till the end.

We went a little heavy with the first topic I would say. So hopefully we lighten it with a few other notes.

I got some dad jokes. Yo you got some jokes?.

Jenny Tangen 12:53
To lighten the mood? I say that and now I have nothing. Yeah, let me let me simmer on it. I’ll pick a good one.

Angela Lin 13:06
So one thing I want to talk about is the various expressions of filial piety like how those obligations were kind of communicated to us in terms of what our parents expected from us. One is for sure, like, you always have to listen to your parents no matter what you have to be a good kid like this is emphasize pretty hard, like the good and bad kid and like there’ll be the good kid and like not talk back to them. Then there are other things are just kind of like a little random or like specific to Eastern culture. So one is that when you grow up and you start making money, you’re expected to carve out a portion of your salary to like act as an allowance. Yeah, for your parents, which I think Jesse and I are probably have had like different negotiations about this topic but like theoretically, that is one that you’re supposed to to be held to and then the other is…

Jenny Tangen 14:04
My mind is blown on that.

Angela Lin 14:05
Well, let’s stay on the topic for a second. I know, for me at least, like when I first heard that I was like, What do you mean? Like, why? Why would I owe you money? In a sense, especially like Jenny, you and I had been friends, right when, like, even after we graduated from NYU, and we got our first jobs like, I was making, like, $40,000 a year. I’m like, how do you get your money? Yeah. 40,000 in New York with student debt from a private university, like, so I think I’ve had to, like, battle my parents a bit.

Jenny Tangen 14:42
I’m sorry. For context. How did this come up? Like, do you remember like, where your parents did a view down and like had this conversation with you? Or is it just kind of like, understood that that’s…

Angela Lin 14:53
well, I think it’s funny because Chinese parents or maybe all Asian parents, I feel like They don’t have a lot of tact. So like, I feel like when they first brought it up to me, it was just a normal day. We were like talking about other things. And they’re like, hey, when you get your first job, you know, you’re supposed to like, give us 10% of your salary. Right? I was like, What?

Jesse Lin 15:15
Wait a hard number? That is a liberal interpretation of the text.

Angela Lin 15:28
Did they ever tell you to do that?

Jesse Lin 15:31
So they mentioned a lot of things in passing, that kind of are like nudges. So my cousin is like a huge credit card churner. So he does like all of those points things. And my parents would very frequently be like, oh, your cousin just took your on uncle trip to Taiwan. They flew business class now would be like, okay, like, that’s great, but I make $35,000 a year, so you’re gonna be waiting. And I think as I got older and it became more clear that I was not going to be like broken, sad forever, they would start dropping hints, like during specific occasions. So like my mom would say like, Oh, it’s my birthday, like, are you going to treat me to anything nice? Or she was saying the same thing about like Mother’s Day and my dad’s birthday. And obviously Chinese New Year when you get older, you’re expected to give red envelopes back to your elders. So they also remind me of that ever Chinese New Year. It’s not subtle. It’s very, very oh what are you going to get me this year?

Angela Lin 16:38
So Jenny, I think you’ve already peppered in with a lot of great color on on these topics. But we’re now shifting into like, very specifically, how this concept of filial piety differs from Western or American culture, in terms of like how you perceive your relationship with your parents. So definitely like a grain of salt. I think the way that Jesse and I are thinking of this is like, also very stereotypical and like we’re kind of like casting this stereotype over all Western culture. So I think we wanted a real person to like, be

Jesse Lin 17:17
Keep us honest

Angela Lin 17:18
Call you out on our bullshit. So one of the things that we have the perception of and I think we grew up as Asian kids, we grew up like kind of being jealous of this, which is like Western kids seemingly grew up with their parents feeling more like friends rather than authority figures. Like there was a more like, friendly relationship and like some of my friends even call their parents by their first names, which I thought was super weird.

Jenny Tangen 17:47
So definitely exists. I had friends growing up where it was like, it could have parties at their house and you know, their, their parent was there. It was cool that you had like a little wine cooler. In high school, and I was, you know, not cool enough to be invited to a lot of those parties. But I was like, wow, this is different. I will say I definitely had a really close relationship with my mom to the point where I didn’t really view her solely as like an authority figure. She was definitely my mentor, someone I looked up to. I felt like I could be completely honest with her. And she definitely encouraged that.

Angela Lin 18:28
That’s cool. I feel like the way you described your relationship with your mom, I’m like, pretty jealous of that for my parents, especially my mom, who was the main one raising us when I was growing up because my dad was an entrepreneur. So he had a company that was based in China so he would like fly back and forth every four months or so. So my mom was a consistent one like every day we saw her and I think it was just easier for her to set rules that you have to follow and like this our relationship, so I definitely did not feel like I should go to her for it. Or like counseling of any sort. It was like, I was just there to like, say no, and I’m gonna go to my friends, get advice and to tell them what’s actually happening with my life.

Jesse Lin 18:31
My relationship with my mom is still evolving. When I was younger, from grade school to high school, I would not to say that she was a friend, not that we didn’t have a close relationship. But up until very recently, I knew very few things about my mom, like in terms of her life when she lived in Taiwan. And it’s only as I’ve gotten older that I’ve started asking those questions and I feel like she’s been more forthcoming. But you know, before then it’s not like we discuss those things. And I’m not really sure why that is, but because we never had those conversations. It’s like hard to picture person as your friend, right? Like, you don’t know anything about them. They’re just kind of like they’re in your life. So that’s kind of how I felt towards my parents. Like we’re very close, but I knew really nothing about them.

Angela Lin 19:55
It’s also part of Eastern culture. I think you don’t express or share your life without being asked about it, like, it’s not just something you would do. And so if you only have this like a one dimensional view into this person, how could you possibly think of them as anything but just like a supporting cast character in your life? Right?

Jenny Tangen 20:14
Yeah, that’s interesting, too just knowing that it sounds like you’re not willing to kind of share or divulge vulnerability. And the only like connection I could make on my site is my dad is more stoic, like military, a little bit more of like a southern type of thing and not wanting to divulge things. It’s interesting that there’s like this tinge of like, how vulnerable do you want to be with your kids? And like, what’s the balance between being like the authority figure versus like vulnerability, but I’m curious like as you guys age, have you noticed your parents be more forthcoming about, you know, their experiences and you know, wanting to try and build a relationship outside of just the parent role?

Angela Lin 20:59
I definitely noticed that shifted my parents after I started working in New York when they realized like, Oh, wait, she’s gonna like stay there. We’re not gonna see her at all. I think that shifted things because they’re like calling me all the time. I don’t want to call them back. It’s a bit of like vicious cycle because if you’re a grown, if you grew up with parents that like didn’t want to create a really like two way dialogue type relationship, then it’s hard as like a young adult to recognize that it’s important to start building that relationship. So I think especially in my early 20s, I definitely was just kind of like, Well, you didn’t treat me like you loved me when I was growing up. So I don’t why should I like reciprocate with something else? Now? It just like makes me a little sad that it took so long to like, be open to want to build a solid relationship with them because they’re getting old. So it’s just like, yeah, I feel a little sad for lost years. So now that we’ve talked about what filial piety is holistically now that you have a concept of all of it, where do you personally stand on the concept of filial piety being taught to all Chinese children as like a major way that you were expected to live?

Jenny Tangen 22:16
Oh, god, that’s a lot of pressure. You know, give my own opinion on that. Honestly, I think it’s, um, there’s definitely beauty to it. I think for me, it was interesting to kind of see like how your obligation is really just about love and the way you express that in different communities is very different. And that’s what I think I always had in my head, like, Oh, this is just a tool to get, you know, families and and their kids to like, live up to their expectations, but you guys have already set you know, your own expectations. So, in my mind, I’ve kind of transitioned that more to like this is just how your family unit comes together. And so I find it I like it. I think it’s cool. I would like it for my, you know, North Dakotan grandmother to whip me into shape. And, you know, she becomes the matriarch where we all go over to her house. Like I love that idea.

Angela Lin 23:14
I think my perspective on filial piety has changed a lot. I agree with you. There’s a lot of beauty in the concept. I think the delivery it needs works at its core, like you’re saying it is about love. And in my perspective, it’s like it’s about gratitude. You were given this, you know, unbeatable gift of life. And so it’s just different forms of showing gratitude for repaying this gift that can never be paralleled, right. So in that sense, I think that it is beautiful. So for my future kids, I think I would like to instill some of it but I also would take away a lot of the rigidity around like, you need to give me 10% of your salary like, Jesse?

Jesse Lin 23:59
Well, no, I agree. With all of that, I think that love and service obedience respect, like those are very nebulous things. So it’s hard to say like I’ve delivered enough, I fulfilled enough even saying that that’s kind of defeats the whole purpose, right. It’s not about like a quota. It’s about you finding your own gratitude, as you said, Angela, towards your parents for them taking you through, basically the process of becoming an adult. So I feel like the gratitude that I found now towards my parents that over the last couple of years kind of have has happened in spite of all that stuff. You know, like, I don’t believe in the rigidity of it, as you guys mentioned, like, I don’t believe you, you have to be beholden to somebody, but I do look back at my experience, and I see, you know, the places where my parents made a lot of sacrifices for me. And so that fuels my gratitude, rather than the idea that you must be obligated to feel gratitude for your parents.

So now that we’ve kind of discussed what filial piety piety is and our feelings about it, how do we think this concept is going to change moving forward?

Angela Lin 25:09
My perspective is that it’s never gonna go away. Like my dad said last time, like Confucianism is one of the core foundation pieces of Chinese culture. So like it will continue in some way or form. But there are a lot of things happening with like the way lives are led now that are bound to have an effect on like how strictly filial piety is adhered to. So speaking specifically on Chinese families, family members are migrating to different areas, especially in China, right. Like everyone’s congregating to like the big cities like Shanghai, Beijing and others. So like as you go to more urban environments that’s naturally kind of breaking up the importance of family because you’re just kind of apart and then even to like the greater extreme people are moving out of China, like our families did that early on, but like now it’s like becoming very common for especially mainland Chinese that’s naturally bound to like break up the family and break up your your sense of obligation.

Jesse Lin 26:14
I also think that families are just smaller. Now, you know, you don’t have the 10 brothers and sisters scenario that our parents grew up with. And I think the concept of filial piety is quite easy to swing when you have a village to take care of your parent, but when it’s just you, or you and another person that becomes really much more difficult to bear that burden. I was also thinking about how many single people are actually, as you mentioned, migrating out of rural areas into urban centers and how a lot of those people are either not going to have children, they won’t be able to find a partner or their families are going to be really small. So there’s going to be a huge growing elder population where there is nobody to support that individual. Finally I was also having this conversation with my mom she texted me this like funny picture of like one of those like man pulled buggies. And she was like, we never got to ride these when I was a kid because they were rich for rich people only. And I texted her back and I was like, well, now you drive a four wheeled car isn’t it amazing how quickly things change. But I think that’s a really nice illustration of how things have changed so quickly and how that can really affect how people can relate to one another. Even though we said that doesn’t matter as a part of filial piety it does in terms of like how much you want to care about the care that you’re giving other than it’s an obligation.

Angela Lin 27:37
And even though we talked about kind of like sense of self and being self driven as like a core Western tenant, I feel like even with young Chinese Taiwanese people growing up now like of course, I think we still have like a greater sense of obligation and like, you know, the eastern values were brought up to believe but young people are also now having like more independent ways of thinking and like desires for themselves. So I think that will naturally also pull people a bit away from like the communal core of where filial piety comes from. Right? Because it is centered on this idea of like you being a piece of this broader puzzle of like your greater family unit.

Jesse Lin 28:25
How do you think as you mentioned, this is gonna play out for like, Western based Asian American families?

Angela Lin 28:30
It might go away, honestly, because it really depends on like, how much you as a parent want to continue that legacy. And like even you and I just talked about with Jenny and like, there are only pieces of it that we feel are worthwhile passing down, but I feel like you know, Asian American families with further generations are gonna stray like very far from this original way of life. What about you?

Jesse Lin 28:56
I agree, and I guess it worries me a little bit. that there would be a situation if I had children that they would grow up without even being able to have that kind of family unit that they would be even further away from that. Because it’s something that’s causing me a little bit of like mental gymnastics anxiety right now.

Angela Lin 29:16
Yeah, I can see how, without the personal effort of the parents in question at the moment, it’s, it’s not likely that it will continue.

Jesse Lin 29:25
I mean, I think we discussed it though. Like, I think we’re going to pass down some of the tenants that are related to filial piety, we are in a position to do a better job of explaining its significance. And also focusing on the parts that really matter. I mean, like for my kids, like I don’t have any expectation that they will, like, uproot their life and come take care of me when I’m older, but I do have the expectation that they will do small things that demonstrate their love. I mean, the money thing, great if you want to give me some money, great, but I really would just like to have that feeling of gratitude and love.

Angela Lin 30:02
I agree with you completely, I think it’s more like our generation, we need to do like a remix of what the filial piety means. And really just focus on the core of it all like showing love and gratitude. And I think it is going to depend on us being vulnerable with our kids in the future, kind of like explaining where this comes from and why it’s important to us and hopefully ingraining that in their lives so they can appreciate it and want to pass it on to their kids.

Jenny Tangen 30:31
Okay, this is great. Thanks for looking me in on this. This was a lot of fun.

Jesse Lin 30:35
Yeah, it was.

Angela Lin 30:36
Jenny, thank you so much for joining us.

Jesse Lin 30:43
Alright guys, well now we’re at the very end of our episode, and as always, we like to close with a sweet treat in the fortune cookie section. Before we go ahead to share with you the funny part of the end of our episode, we would like to invite you guys to give us your feedback, your comments, share with us your stories. If you have any experience with this or you learn something new from today’s topic, you can email us at telluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com that’s Y-O-U-R-E.

Angela Lin 31:17
Yes. And Jesse mentioned her sweet treat and boy do we have a sweet treat for you. So you may or may not have noticed throughout the episode but Jenny, our guest today alluded to a dad joke that she really wanted to tell and she spent all episode you know, hyping it up and getting it ready so I think it’s pretty funny, at least her delivery is funny, so we’ll give it to you now for your sweet treat.

Jenny Tangen 31:46
I okay, so um, this is oh god there’s like names tied to this. There’s like this whole series of we’ll just say her name is Myrna but Myrna and I’ll say it in my North Dakotan accent. Myrna was, you know, trying to come up with a new carnation milk ad and so she loves carnation milk. Do you guys still like carnation milk? So it’s like little, a little milk in a can right? So you get the milk in the can. So she came up with a new carnation milk ad. Keep in mind this is my great aunt telling this this joke who is like, well in her 80s Elvis impersonator on the side. Crazy, riot woman. So, you know, Myrna went, went into that corporate office and she said, Ah, you know, I have an entry and here’s my entry. Carnation milk is best of all, no tips to pull. No shit the haul. No buckets to wash, no hair to pitch just poke a hole in the son of a bitch. And not as a joke.

Angela Lin 32:54
I don’t know it just happened. But yeah,

Jenny Tangen 32:57
I’m sorry. It’s like I think it’s more of the delivery just coming from the old woman say like, poke a hole in this son of a bitch but I promised a joke and I gave you a joke. Quality. Yeah.

Angela Lin 33:16
All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that seat treat. If you enjoyed this episode and continue to love our podcast we ask that you please continue to like follow subscribe, but also share, tell your friends about it. Tell your tell your mom, tell your grandpa tell whoever because we that that’s how this is going to continue in the future. We really hope to keep making new episodes for you. And with that said, Come back next week because we will have something new and fresh for you then and until next time.

Episode 9 – If There’s No Fortune Cookie, Is It Really Chinese?

Angela Lin 0:14
We are super excited today because we have our first guest ever on the podcast, my dad! Daddy want to tell the world who you are?

Jeffrey 0:23
Okay, we’re moving to California in 1989. So it’s about 30 more years, and I have a business before now I’m retired.

Angela Lin 0:37
Awesome. Well, we’re really happy to have you with us today. Thanks for joining.

Jesse Lin 0:43
So last week, we talked a little bit about Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and how far we have to go to get where we want to be. But I think we wanted also to spend some time to really dive into what we mean by heritage overall, and I think it’s really interesting to look at it from an Asian American perspective, because we have both the American part of it, and the Asian part of it. And if you imagine where we sit, we’re kind of like in the middle of that Venn diagram where we’re in a unique position where we don’t necessarily belong to one culture fully, and we don’t necessarily belong to the other culture fully. So part of why we’re doing this episode is to have a discussion around what heritage is and what it means to us as Asian Americans.

Angela Lin 1:33
Yeah. So what is your sense of what heritage or the DNA of your culture? What does that mean to you?

Jeffrey 1:45
Oh, when I moved here, I’m already 30 years old, so 38 years old. So that means my basic [identity is] already Taiwanese or Chinese. Moving here, I try to get into this community. So I think I’m more strongly tend to Chinese or Taiwanese. Here, I just learn. You’re probably more adapted here, but for me it’s just I learned something new.

Angela Lin 2:21
If you could only pass down three things to the next generation that describe what Chinese culture or Chinese heritage is, and what’s most important there, what would you…how would you describe that?

Jeffrey 2:35
Number one, is Confucianism. That’s what Chinese is. Number two is Taoism. That’s also Chinese. The number three is Chinese character, the literature. In whole Chinese has a 580 different dialects. They can communicate because of the same character, so that’s the most important thing [for] you [to] call you as Chinese.

Angela Lin 3:04
So I think the language is the easiest for most of our listeners to understand. Can you tell us a little bit more about what Confucianism is and why that is such a foundation for Chinese culture?

Jeffrey 3:24
Okay Confucianism, for a simple explanation is you have no you, that’s most different than America. America you have to be yourself. You is you, me I, but in Confucianism, all your life is to fulfill your obligation as a role in the family.

Angela Lin 3:53
What about Taoism? If there’s a quick way to explain why that’s so crucial

Jeffrey 3:59
Taoism is another way of Confucianism. Confucianism go into the community, the family, the country, but Taoism is go away from there, like a hermit. You go to your own. Yeah, you join the nature. You do your own things.

Jesse Lin 4:21
There is some traditional sense of me or self in that heritage, because a lot of times what we talk about is, there’s like a loss of self when you become just obligation to others. But it sounds like from what you’re saying that’s important. It’s important number one for obligation to others. And number two, the obligation to your own spiritual self. So there is both a community obligation and a personal obligation. And I think what we’ve discussed before is we feel like the personal obligation tends to be quite low on the list. We like to say it’s number two, do you see it that way, or…?

Jeffrey 5:00
That’s true. Yeah, even you want to have some achievement, that is for your family or for your country, not for yourself. But when I’m here, I was very [impressed]. Here everybody talking about self, you have to be extra doing efforts for yourself. And in school, the teacher here will ask you to express yourself. But back to Taiwan or China, they will teach you what you need to remember. They probably won’t let you to express yourself too much.

Angela Lin 5:51
Okay, so I think that was a really great and insightful view into how you think about Chinese/Taiwanese culture and how it differs from American culture. We wanted to talk to you about language. And I know you already feel a little bit bad that you didn’t pass on Ke Jia Hua [“Hakka”] to me, that I can’t speak that. But I think it’s still an accomplishment that Jesse and I can still speak Mandarin, which is the most broadly used Chinese dialect, right? But we wanted to ask you, if you, do you feel any shame, regret, “yi han” because we cannot fully speak like as perfectly in terms of vocabulary, or that we can’t write Chinese as well as people in China and Taiwan?

Jeffrey 6:47
Of course, yeah, in the heart, I feel I did not do a good job as a daddy to translate this language to you, let you speak, or… I know both of you are speaking very fluent, but on writing I think you mostly forgot. But I cannot say anything because my English is not good. So even I learn, but so I know how hard it is.

Angela Lin 7:17
So that’s very nice of you to compare Chinese and English to the same, but it’s not the same because you moved to America when you were almost 40. So for you to even be speaking English at the fluency level that you’re speaking to us right now is like, a huge accomplishment versus Jesse and I, well, you can debate this, but theoretically, we were born Taiwanese, so it’s in our blood, that we should be able to speak Chinese even though that’s a learned language still. So even considering that you still feel like it’s like balanced, that our Chinese is not as good?

Jeffrey 8:00
Yeah you are okay, you’re good. Both of you are okay for now. You can, you can pick up the character, you can read the newspaper, that would be perfect.

Angela Lin 8:13
So if our if our future kids could only speak Chinese as well as we can, and write as well as we can, you’ll be really disappointed?

Jeffrey 8:24
I hope you’re going to be better. But if that’s life, then let it be. Yeah, I don’t feel that’s a failure, no, not at all. Oh, one thing one thing I want to let you know my degree or how good my English is, when Johnny is in elementary school, he always been, “Hey, daddy, what this words means?” So I will explain, until fifth grade he show me, “what it means?” I said, “why don’t you check the dictionary?” That means I know, oh, my English is fifth grade.

Angela Lin 9:11
Jesse and I went to Chinese school til we were 17 and I’m pretty sure our writing and reading is the same as like a second grader

Jesse Lin 9:19
Also a fifth grader, yeah

Angela Lin 9:19
Fifth grade is generous I think.

Jesse Lin 9:23
So do you think let’s say an American Born Chinese person that doesn’t speak any Mandarin can really fully understand what it means to be a Chinese person?

Jeffrey 9:32
You can understand. Because when I [was] in Masters School, Masters on Religious Studies, there’s a lot of professors is Westerners, don’t know Chinese, but he teach, he teach Buddhism or Taoism. That means they learn from the translation. So of course you can understand but not very deep.

Jesse Lin 9:57
Do you feel like when you moved here and your English became good enough to speak with other people you were able to understand like American people better like American culture and American way of life?

Jeffrey 10:11
Of course, of course. When I first moved here you know, in Taiwan I have English class in in this Junior High, three years in in senior high, four years in college, and plus almost 10 years in trading but [when] I first moved here, they always, “What? What? What?” I get that response, I’m like “What? My English is not that bad, okay?!” So you know, I already learned like almost 20 years of English but if you don’t come here, you don’t have the chance to practice. So your English still not that good.

Angela Lin 10:52
How long do you think it took from when you moved here to when you started getting along with and understanding Western people, because you in your business, you had a lot of like American customers, and you had to entertain them and stuff.

Jeffrey 11:10
Several years, like in the office, our sales manager, saying that his mother is 73 years old. And I say, “Oh, she’s old” and that salesman almost want to fight me. “Hey! Get out! Let me get a fight. My mom is not old!” But in in Chinese old is a respectable, but here you call them old, they want to have a fight, “let’s fight.” So that part of culture difference we need to gradually learn. Like when I come here, they say, “Oh, see you later.” So I said, “Hey, why is it almost two hours I did not see you?” That’s you need to learn from the daily life.

Jesse Lin 11:59
So I think the last thing about languages earlier you mentioned the three most important things you wanted to pass down was Confucianism, Taoism, and the writing of the language. So how do you feel like the introduction of simplified Chinese like jian ti zi has maybe changed the way people feel about their heritage their culture, especially in Taiwan, because everybody there as I understand still uses the traditional version of it? So does it make it a little bit more difficult to relate?

Jeffrey 12:35
Exactly Yeah. For Taiwanese I thought the simplified Chinese is diminish the Chinese culture. It’s like the cut down the connection from the old one and the new one.

Angela Lin 12:49
But you use simplified! I see you post on Facebook. You use simplified Chinese!

Jeffrey 12:54
Yeah, I live in China for so many years. So I I don’t against it. Because, as I understand life is changing, even the culture, the food, everything will be changed. Don’t try to refuse it, you accept the change and go with it. There’s 1.4 billion people use simplified, so what’s good you try to keep that tradition.

Angela Lin 13:19
Although I would say I’m biased because I only learned traditional Chinese, right? Of the very little I can write, I only know how to write traditional. And I would say, like, when I lived in Japan, I felt really proud of what I learned, because the Japanese people use Chinese characters in a lot of their words, right? And so I could say, “Oh, yeah, this is this restaurant sells beef. Oh, this is a tea house,” whatever because I could read the traditional Chinese characters and there is kind of a beauty in that that I could connect with this other culture because I learned the original language of our culture. Versus like, the last time I was in China, I was like 18, or whatever. We went to Beijing. And I couldn’t read anything. I swear to God, I was like, I know how to read enough Chinese. I don’t know how to read any of this. Because when I see simplified, I genuinely, I don’t understand how you guys like people who are from Taiwan, understand simplified. It doesn’t look the same to me at all. I can’t guess what half of the words are based on knowing the traditional.

Jeffrey 14:32
You already know the complicated one. So the simple one easy.

Angela Lin 14:37
They don’t look the same. There’s like an X somewhere, I don’t know why.

Jesse Lin 14:41
So the next thing that we wanted to talk about: traditions and practices that we pass on. So I think the first one that comes to mind obviously is the biggest one that both Asian people and Western people recognize, which is Chinese New Year. We wanted to kind of ask you what this holiday really means traditionally to Chinese people. And since you’ve lived in America and you’ve also seen how Asian Americans and Americans in general celebrate it, what you see the difference is.

Jeffrey 15:11
I should ask you too! Two of you, except that red envelope what do you remember about Chinese New Year?

Jesse Lin 15:20
The envelope.

Angela Lin 15:20
Yeah, I remember having to call all of my aunties and uncles in Taiwan and then being judged because I didn’t know enough of the ways to wish Happy New Year to them. Before you get the red envelope, you have to like bai nian, you have to like tell all your aunts and uncles like oh, Happy New Year, hope you have like good health, hope you have fortune, like all these other sayings before they accept your like blessings and good wishes and then they say okay, fine, I’ll give you a red envelope. So I remember getting yelled at by like, Yi Ma. Like our big aunt, ’cause she’d go “You didn’t tell me enough. That’s only three,” and I’m like, “That’s all I know!”

Jeffrey 16:13
Chinese New Year in our culture, it’s time to pay back your debt. Before, everybody is poor, you probably borrow money, borrow something from all the people, you have to pay back before the Chinese New Year. That’s important. Second thing is you have to worship your ancestors, thank them for give you the life or give you the heritage and third thing is you need to go to the temple to worship God to give you a fortune or protection for the new year. And third, you have to visit your your uncle, your grandpa, all those to wish them a good New Year. Yeah, give them envelope if they’re old. That’s a culture, very important because it before it’s a culture, uh, agricultural country. At that time, there’s nothing to do because that’s wintertime. So they take as long as almost a month to celebrate the Chinese New Year, but now it’s different.

Angela Lin 17:26
But you, in Taiwan you still celebrate for like two weeks?

Jeffrey 17:32
Yes, two weeks almost. Yeah. Like Christmas here.

Angela Lin 17:36
Yeah. So you just laid out a lot of inherent meaning that is behind Chinese New Year, the values behind it, what’s important to continue each year with it. How do you feel about a lot of that not being carried over into the way that Chinese New Year is looked at and celebrated in the US because you just named all those things, we never did any things when I was growing up.

Jesse Lin 18:03
Some of those things we can’t really do, right? Like we can’t visit our elders, because they’re all in Taiwan. So there are some things that we simply like we just aren’t able to do.

Jeffrey 18:14
Lot of people still need to go to work at the New Year. So you really cannot do something, do anything here. Just remember to call your elders to wish them a good New Year. Happy New Year, something like that. That’s enough for here. Of course, if you can go back to your hometown, to have the whole new year vacation there.

Angela Lin 18:39
When you moved here, your first year living here and Chinese New Year came, did you feel sad that you weren’t able to celebrate it in the same way that you were used to, for your whole life?

Jeffrey 18:53
Of course, of course, for the first several years, three to five years. We will miss that part. Yeah

Angela Lin 19:00
I think we’re getting to the things that make up the sense of heritage and culture. And obviously all these traditions are part of what makes up Chinese culture. It seems like you’re very understanding of like different circumstances, it’s hard to go back and all those things, but how would you feel if like the next generation past Jesse and me like don’t know any of these traditions that are attached to Chinese New Year, they never even know that that’s what is behind that holiday?

Jeffrey 19:34
My thinking is that try to go back to Taiwan for the Chinese New Year at least one time or, or twice or something to feel the difference. But even in Taiwan, the the celebration also very decrease a lot, not as before.

Angela Lin 19:54
So it is changing.

Jeffrey 19:56
Changing, the world is changing Yeah. So you cannot do anything about that, just try to keep it if possible.

Angela Lin 20:04
Okay, so then moving into a totally different type of practice that comes from Eastern cultures, we want to talk about things that were started in the Eastern world, but has now been really embraced and become mainstream, very popular in the West. So things like yoga started in India and was like very spiritual practice, and now is just like, everyone does yoga. It’s like exercise, it’s any other exercise, or like meditation, you are a huge meditator. You meditate for like two hours every day. You’re very serious about it, because you’re very spiritual. So how do you feel about, now, meditation is becoming very popular where people turn on an app and they listen to the guy talk to them for five minutes and try to start meditating. How do you feel about these things?

Jeffrey 20:59
Culture when they move to different situation, different countries, they change. Like Buddhism in India is totally changed by Chinese. Chinese Buddhism is different with India’s Buddhism. And the meditation, I’m heavy meditation guy. In Chinese culture or Buddhism culture, it’s about enlightenment. You try to be get enlightenment, the purpose of the meditation, but when that introduced to America, it becomes almost like therapy. Oh, let you calm down, move away your anxiety, or your your trouble in mind, all those things. But that that’s a good because it fits. You have to be that way to fit into America. Yeah. I know that even the Christian church they also practice meditation. Culture is merging, like democracy from the Western, they try to be bring into China but they’re not very successful but at least people are starting to doing that, that’s also good to the life of Chinese people.

Jesse Lin 22:12
The next thing is we wanted to talk about how how you and other Chinese people view Chinese history. So when we think of heritage, we think of the history that comes along with it. And a lot of the way that history is learned in the US is it’s very factual and you try to learn from like, the good and the bad scenarios. So when you guys look back at your history, like are there are there things that you extract from that, like that you learn from that, or it’s it’s just history. Like you said, you know, it’s in the past it doesn’t doesn’t matter anymore.

Jeffrey 22:46
Not just history. If you memorize it and in sometime in your life, you will you will know what that means and you will use it. I hope that to you too. Yeah.

Jesse Lin 22:57
Do you feel like the majority of people are proud of the history? They’re ashamed of the history?

Jeffrey 23:03
When you went to Japan, right? You know, you want to know Tang dynasty, you went to Kyoto. They keep all the Tang heritage in Kyoto.

Jesse Lin 23:16
I didn’t know that.

Jeffrey 23:18
Yeah, their dressing, the tatami. Yeah, the oldest is Tang dynasty. Qing dynasty like 300, 400 years ago, the GDP is one fourth of the whole world, even in Qing they’re very strong. The prosperous is Song dynasty. Song dynasty is very good at doing the trade, international trade. So everybody is very prosperous, very rich, their life is very good.

Angela Lin 23:45
So when you when you think back on all these different dynasties, do you feel like knowing that history is really important for understanding who you are or like influences you in some way, knowing where Chinese people came from and how they progressed?

Jeffrey 24:04
Yeah. For me, as a Chinese, I have to know where we come from and how this 3000 years or 4000 years passed by. So what our strengths is, what our weaknesses, that’s important for Chinese.

Angela Lin 24:19
So if someone, like if we, Jesse and I don’t know, about these three, four thousand years history, is that shameful?

Jeffrey 24:30
You don’t say shameful, you say you will want to know sometime.

Jesse Lin 24:36
A question related to that is both you and my parents came from Taiwan, but most of the heritage or the longest piece of culture comes from Mainland China. So how do you guys how do you see yourself in respect to that, since you live in a different, a different place that’s not the land where all of that originated from?

Jeffrey 25:01
There’s a huge argument in Taiwan about independence and Chinese. Yeah, that’s probably I would say 60% voted for independence and 40% still think they’re Chinese, they want to merge with Chinese. The issue won’t be resolved soon. I should say that if China government, Communist Party, change to democracy, I think no Taiwanese want to be get independent. If they’re like Taiwan or like America, they have that democratic government, everybody is free, then who want to independent? No, the independent Taiwanese against the Communist Party, they’re so control, there’s no freedom, that’s the main issue, but that will change.

Jesse Lin 25:50
So then you would say that most Taiwanese people and most Chinese people would agree that they have the same cultural heritage background.

Jeffrey 25:58
Of course, they come from the one culture. Just now the two different region, they against the Communist Party not, not of Chinese.

Angela Lin 26:09
How do you prioritize how you see yourself between being Hakka, Taiwanese, Chinese, and kind of American? You didn’t choose to get your citizenship, but you’ve lived here for so long, you’re basically American. So how do you see your rank of your identity amongst those four things?

Jeffrey 26:30
I think first, I should say, I’m a Chinese, then I live in America, but also, I’m a Hakkanese. Taiwanese, I’m not thinking that very important.

Angela Lin 26:43
Well, you’re the pro China, you’re the you’re the 40%. So makes sense.

Angela Lin 27:27
We are now in our fortune cookie closing section and we always like to end on a sweet treat. But before we get there, we wanted to invite you to email us like we always do. I think this episode in particular is very different from our past. So if you have comments or suggestions for future types of guests, feel free to email us at telluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com, again the “you’re” is y-o-u-r-e

Jesse Lin 27:59
So, the first question that we wanted to all discuss together is what we are most proud of where we’re from.

Jeffrey 28:08
Taiwanese is very flexible, because it’s a small island and there is a strong enemy there. So we have to survive ourselves. So we try to be going all around the world, to get the business, get the support from all other countries. So that I feel very proud. We don’t limit ourselves in that small island. We try to be go out to the whole world. Oh, you’re talking about fortune cookie. Did I mention that story?

Angela Lin 28:37
Nope, but you can go, you can go ahead.

Jeffrey 28:41
When Angela was four years, three or four years old, we went to Hong Kong to have Chinese food, that Chinese food is very good. So after the Chinese food I asked Angela, “How is the Chinese food?” “Oh, that’s not Chinese food.” “Why?” “There’s no fortune cookie.”

Angela Lin 29:02
Guilty as charged.

Jesse Lin 29:06
So what about you, Angela? What are you most proud of where you’re from?

Angela Lin 29:12
Yeah, I have two answers because the where you’re from is kind of loaded. It’s exactly the dilemma behind our podcast name, But Where Are You Really From? So I would say from the Chinese heritage side, what I’m most proud of is how much influence Chinese culture and history has had on the world, from being American I’m definitely the most proud of our roots of like America exists because we defected from England. That sense of drive and independence is something I’ve always been really proud of for being American and it’s something that drives me.

Jesse Lin 29:54
I think what I’m proud of about being Taiwanese is not necessarily like the historical culture or heritage, but the legacy of my parents immigrating here. And just understanding how difficult it was to do that, at that point in time not being able to speak the language, not having any family or friends here. And that legacy of like hustle, drive, like being self sufficient with what you have. I think that’s definitely something that I have learned from them. And from the American side of things, I just think that there are sizable communities of different cultures and ethnicities in the US that you don’t, I haven’t personally found in any other major city, in any other major country in the same way. So I’m really proud of the fact that you can find those kinds of communities here. I think that says something about what kind of a nation this is.

Angela Lin 30:51
Okay, and then the last question that we have for you today. If you could only pass down one thing about being Taiwanese to the next generation, what would that one thing be?

Jeffrey 31:02
Confucianism, because when you think about Chinese or Taiwanese, that’s the only thing that makes it unique.

Angela Lin 31:09
For me, it’s the food. Especially as I’ve gotten older, and I wanted to connect more with our cultural roots. Food is a really easy way to connect with that, because you’re learning about who you are and where your people came from. And it’s also really easy to connect with other people through food. So it’s like a really lovely experience to be able to share your culture with others through that.

Jesse Lin 31:36
I think mine would be the language. I really do believe that you can’t really fully understand a culture unless you can communicate clearly with them. So that’s definitely what I think is what I would want to pass down.

Angela Lin 31:51
Hey, speaking of things to email us, why don’t you guys email us what you were most proud of where you’re from, and/or the one thing you would pass down to the next generation about your culture. I think we’d love to hear that from our listeners.

Jesse Lin 32:06
Yes, please. And as always, you can send those messages to our email, DM us on Instagram. Like, follow and subscribe, and we’ll be back with another episode for you guys next week.

Angela Lin 32:20
And with that…

All 32:23
Zai jian bitches!