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"Where Y'all Really From" is part of the Louisville Public Media Podcast Incubator. We get support from the Eye Care Institute's Butchertown Clinical Trials.

-----Before you go: Every immigrant family has to decide what their relationship will be with their first language. Some parents insist their kids speak it, some turn away from it entirely, and some land somewhere in between. We’re talking about it later this season, and we want to hear from YOU. Do you speak your family’s first language? How does language shape the way your family connects? Visit whereyallreallyfrom.org and click “talk back” to let us know. We may feature your answer in our future episode.

He never changed his mind about that calling. But along the way, he added other titles to his bio. Like author, small business owner, mentor, philanthropist, and yes, TV personality, though that’s his least favorite to talk about.

We sat down with him to talk about the link between food and identity, his work with The Lee Initiative, and the incremental nature of saving the world. "Change doesn't happen because one person waves a magic wand," he says. "Change happens because millions of people do millions of small things."

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Before you go: Every immigrant family has to decide what their relationship will be with their first language. Some parents insist their kids speak it, some turn away from it entirely, and some land somewhere in between. We’re talking about it later this season, and we want to hear from you. Do you speak your family’s first language? How does language shape the way your family connects? Visit whereyallreallyfrom.org and click “talk back” to let us know. We may feature your answer in our future episode.

Our need to process these events is too urgent to wait for our next season launch. We need community and conversation now. So today, Nima Kulkarni and Charlene Buckles sit down and talk about what happened, how intra-community violence hits differently and mental wellness in our seniors.

We also talk about how our instinct to mourn in silence can impede our healing, and how to be a good ally to your AAPI loved ones after trauma. And we've put together a list of AAPI mental health resources. You can find it here: lpm.org/AAPImentalhealth

We're almost ready to launch season two, and we'll be tackling issues like parent/child relationships, interracial dating and marriage, how knowing or not knowing your community of origin's native language affects your sense of belonging... and more. We'll see you soon, and in the meantime, please take good care of yourselves.

Thank you so much for being part of our inaugural season!

Gerek is a four-time Olympian who took home team Bronze Medals in 2016 and 2021. And Lee is the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Champion, a three-time Olympian, and the most decorated women's foil fencer in U.S. history.

When they're not training for or competing in the most elite fencing tournaments in the world, they get plenty of rest. Just kidding! They're both in med school at the University of Kentucky.

"We were friends for a long time. The fencing world is pretty small," Gerek says. "We were on a lot of world championship teams together growing up." Gerek is from San Francisco. Lee grew up in Kentucky, and she says all the fencers from their two clubs were friends: "There's something about the casual San Francisco energy and maybe like the friendly, southern hospitality of Kentucky, that somehow works very well together."

It must work very well together; they got married in 2019.

"We share every single success and it just like, it's, it's additive for us. But if you see us practice, that is a different story," Lee says. "I don't like to lose! And I mean, I know Gerek's not very good. He's like number two in the world. I shouldn't be so hard on myself."

In this episode, they talk about their Olympic experiences, their philosophy on loving what you do, and the work ethic they inherited from their Asian parents—Lee's mom is from the Philippines and Gerek's mom is Chinese, born in Taiwan.

Angelika herself was born in Williamsburg, where everyone knows everyone else. "I do feel like I am part of the community," she tells Dan Wu, on this week's episode. "But then there will be moments in time that I will be very aware that I am different." She elaborates:

<blockquote>Take, for example, when the George Floyd thing happened and people were very divided in this town about what that meant. Some of those instances I feel like I'm very separate from what other people believe or think, and they don't sometimes realize that I am half Asian American. I am half Pacific Islander. And so the things that they say are hurtful, but at the same time, sometimes I think they don't realize that the things that they say are hurtful, because they just see me as another Appalachian woman.</blockquote>

"It's like the positive and the negative all rolled up together," Dan says. "Like you're accepted enough to be part of their racism."

Angelika works as an advocate for victims of intimate partner violence and sexual assault in Whitley County. She says about 10 years ago, she shifted her focus from intervention to prevention, which meant broadening her scope from individual victims' situations.

"If I want to get rid of domestic violence and sexual assault in a community, then I really need to look at the community as a whole," she says. "The criminal justice system is a reflection of the community it serves. And so we say things like, we don't believe women should be sexually assaulted. But we also say things like, maybe she deserved that because she was at the wrong side of town, and she was wearing a short dress."

She says that kind of cultural change is slow, but it's possible. "If enough people believe in the same message, we just all have to get together with one voice to make that happen."

A warning for cynics: Listening to this conversation may give you a touch of that same optimism.

Some immigrant parents refuse to speak their native language around the kids, because they want them to focus on learning English. Some kids end up being de facto translators who bridge the language gap between the family and the outside world. And fluency, or the lack thereof, becomes part of the whole package of identity, and longing for a deeper connection with the family's roots.

For this week's guest, Joann Lianekhammy, language acquisition has been part of her life from literally the first moment. Because Joann was born in an ESL class. That's not hyperbole.

Her parents were refugees from Laos, and refugees were required to take an ESL class at Western Kentucky University, which was taught in a building called the Rock House.

"One day, they're in class, and my mom starts going into labor, right then and there," she says. Her dad asked someone to call an ambulance. But baby Joann was a little too ready:

My mom's like, 'No, this baby's coming,' and she pulls down her pants. My dad's like, 'what are you doing?' Because, you know, Asian culture, modesty is everything. You do not show, like, anything. He pulls her pants back up. And she was like, 'Are you crazy? I said, this is coming, the baby's coming now.' So he ended up having to deliver me right there in the Rock House, in the middle of class.

And while Joann Lianekhammy first met her parents in a language class, it took them a while to really, truly communicate about some important things. In this episode, Joanne tells host Dan Wu a story she never expected to have: her coming out story.

Culture shock doesn't even begin to describe the immigration experience of this week's guest, Ie Meh. Ie was born in a Karenni refugee camp in Thailand, and lived there until her family moved to Bowling Green when she was 12.

She's 23 now.

Because she and her family weren't citizens of Thailand, they weren't allowed to leave the camp where they lived. "We don't have any sense of belonging," she says. Her dad filled out paperwork to move to the United States, and they ended up in Bowling Green, but the transition was tough.

"We never ride a car, never in our life," she says. But they had to take a bus to the airport, and then, of course, a plane. "All of my family threw up," she remembers.

They also had misgivings about their new home.

"There was a rumor that Kentucky is not good place to live. A lot of people said that the community here are not open minded people," she says. "But we love it. We love Kentucky. We love Bowling Green."

In this episode, Ie tells Charlene Buckles her incredible story, and why she wants to go back to the refugee camp--after she finishes med school. "I'm hoping I can make a difference," she says. "I love my people. I don't want my culture, or any other, to be erased."

On this week's episode, host Dan Wu talks with Donna Lee Kwon and Jon Silpayamanant about all things music. Donna is an associate professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Kentucky, and the author of the book "Music in Korea: experiencing music, expressing culture." Jon is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and music educator, and the founder and artistic director of Saw Peep - An Intercultural Orchestra.

Donna Lee Kwon grew up playing classical piano, which placed her right at the center of a pervasive stereotype: "The Asian classical music prodigy," she says. She thinks of it as a variation on the model minority myth. And it comes with a lot of pressure. "If you don't live up to that, you're just like, nothing, basically. It was hard being a young Asian-American musician who did not play perfectly."

Now, in her ethnomusicology classes, she debunks another myth for her students. "They've grown up in this system all their lives to believe that Western classical music is superior," she says. "That is why it's worth spending eight hours a day doing that." But she teaches her students to see music as "a window to understanding other cultures."

Jon Silpayamanant sees that decentering of male European composers as part of his mission too, particularly in his work with Saw Peep, which performs music from the Silk Road, South and Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean.

"We've just suppressed or hidden or excluded all of these histories of classical music outside of Europe, for one, and then of course, women and people of color in European countries or Western countries," he says.

Music by non-Western composers is no less valuable or enjoyable just because it might challenge mainstream audiences' expectations. "Some of these traditions have existed for centuries. They're no less developed than Western classical music. There's so much out there," he says. "And I think there needs to be a narrative about that. And a narrative about how Western music, in general, has excluded all of that."

And then, of course, the conversation turns to what Ozzy Osbourne would have composed had he been around during Beethoven's era, and vice versa.

But what if you're three?

That's the question at the heart of this conversation between host Charlene Buckles and Melanie Parker, a Filipina Kentuckian who grew up in Whitesburg.

Charlene tells the story of a friend whose half-Black, half-Asian toddler was approached at the zoo by an adult who asked him where he's from. "This is something that I still go back and forth on talking to my son about. because he's only three," she says. "I thought I had a few more years to even start talking about these questions that people might ask him."

Melanie's oldest son is just about the same age. "I think you and I are well equipped to answer that question now. We've gone through it. We have the grit. We know the nuances of that question," Melanie says. "But I immigrated here when I was six. They're three. It's a lot. It's a lot to consider. Amidst potty training, making sure they wear their mask, is answering that question: Where are you from?"

This episode dives into the difference between racial legacy (which Charlene describes as "what our parents have essentially taught us: It's okay, you're fine, you're gonna be fine. This happens to us, and just take it in stride") and racial literacy--the ability to examine racialized situations, process them and react authentically. And Melanie recites the lovely list of affirmations she shares with her son.

But it wasn't until college that he realized it could be more than a way to get out of writing papers. "I didn't even know film schools existed," Naveen says. "I had no idea that it was something that you studied. It just wasn't in the realm of possibility."

He talks to host Dan Wu about his work, and they discover some of the parallels between art school and culinary school (the main curriculum is mostly European and the classes about Asian work are electives).

His short film, "Pinball," is a modern folk story centered around an immigrant teenager who wants to participate in a school bus race at his local speedway. It's a fish-out of-water-tale that was inspired by all the time Naveen spent riding buses when he lived in Los Angeles.

Naveen also worked on a documentary about Eric Garner's family for AJ+. He says films like that challenge him in different ways — as a filmmaker and as a person.

"It's so hard, especially when people are recounting stories of such pain," he says. "You just want to like, put your hand on their shoulder and be a little bit more human. I'll try and kind of nod to them and like, understand that I am not hiding behind this camera. I do hear you."

"The mentality is that you keep things within your family," Uyen says. 'I remember trying to find a Vietnamese word to translate what I do for a living, and that's difficult because it's not a common thing."

This instinct toward secrecy is familiar to host Charlene Buckles, and they try to unpack it together on this episode.

For Uyen's family, the secrecy surrounds the time her dad spent in a prison camp after serving in the South Vietnamese Air Force. "I realize now that I think my parents, in their attempt to protect us, did not share a lot about the hardship of what they went through," Uyen says.

For Charlene, it's a family member's disappearance at the hands of either rebels, or the government. "With my mom and my aunt's generation, they have suppressed a lot of what happened to them," she says. "It's very hush hush, no one really talks about it. They don't want to talk about it."

Uyen and Charlene share some of their own family stories and talk about trying to heal from generational trauma and break through the stigma of seeking mental health care — and in Uyen's case, providing it.

Danni is an Affrilachian poet, a mom, an educator, and a knitter. She lives in Lexington. Danni's dad is from the Philippines, and her mom is half-Japanese, half-white. "White American, Japanese, Philippines..." Dan says. "Three countries that literally have been at war with each other, colonized each other, brutalized each other in every direction in that triangle."

Danni responds : "How do you decolonize when you're the product of colonization?"

Her parents met at a Japanese restaurant in Lexington, where she was waiting tables and he was a dishwasher who worked his way up to Hibachi chef. Danni's maternal grandparents loved their daughter's boyfriend. Her dad's side? Not so much.

"My dad's mother, she was born in 1939, in the Philippines," Danni says. "So she grew up during Japanese occupation, and has a lot of deep-seated resentment and bitterness towards all Japanese people, people culture, everything."

It didn't take long for a similar barrier to spring up in Danni's own life. "I had a crush on a kid who was white, for a long time--like one of those like nagging crushes," Danni says. She thinks she was around 7 or 8.

"I confessed my my crush to this kid, and he told me that a 'brown skin' can't marry a 'white skin,'" she says. "I guess because that was his understanding of the world, because he'd never seen an interracial couple. So to him, it wasn't allowed. He even put his arm up next to mine to show me."

On this week's show, Danni and Dan dive into what it's like to interrogate your own personal and intimate relationships through the lens of what poet Claudine Rankine calls your "historical self."

Oh, and they also talk about poetry and knitting... eventually. Danni's book, "Two Brown Dots," comes out in 2022, and she reads a poem from it on this episode. You can find more of her writing on her website.

Sarah Trainor Graves was born in South Korea, adopted by an American family, and raised in Louisville. In this episode, she talks with Charlene Buckles about how having kids can change the way transracial adoptees think about their own roots.

In 2018, Sarah's oldest child, Miles, was born. "I remember someone telling me, Miles is the first person that you share DNA with that you're going to meet," Sarah says. "There was a sense of pride there, something that I had never felt before," she says. "He looks like me. I look this way."

But she knew he would eventually start asking the kinds of questions she wasn't sure how to answer, yet.

"Why don't Grammy and Poppy, my parents, why don't they look like you? Or why why do we look this way? I was totally ill prepared to answer those questions," she says.

Sarah dove into learning more about her own history and getting more in touch with her cultural identity -- a journey she says she's still on. "Because if I don't know who I am, and if I don't know where I come from, I can't raise a child that's half Korean."

Dr. Bendapudi was brought on at UofL following some serious scandals. In the corporate and institutional worlds, we often see women and BIPOC replacing white male leaders in times of controversy.

“It’s called the glass cliff,” Bendapudi says. “Their likelihood of success is less because they’re not walking into something that’s smooth sailing.”

How can people in that position succeed when it almost seems like they’re set up to fail? “My mission now is to make sure there are many women and people of color who are in positions of power,” she says, “so that if one person fails, you could absolutely say that person is a bad leader, but you wouldn’t be able to say, ‘well, we tried a woman president—that didn’t work.’”

Where Y'all Really From is part of the Louisville Public Media Podcast Incubator. We get support from the Community Foundation of Louisville, Podchaser, Rankings.io and the Eye Care Institute's Butchertown Clinical Trials.

Where Y'all Really From is part of the Louisville Public Media Podcast Incubator. We get support from the Community Foundation of Louisville, Podchaser, Rankings.io and the Eye Care Institute's Butchertown Clinical Trials.

"Where Y’all Really From" is part of the Louisville Public Media Podcast Incubator. We get support from the Community Foundation of Louisville, Podchaser, Rankings.io and the Eye Care Institute’s Butchertown Clinical Trials.