Episode 019 (Bonus): How Do Stories Change Lives? Feat. Randy Kim and Tracey Nguyen Mang (AAPIHM 2/3)

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Transcript

THEME MUSIC begins

James: You’re listening to Self Evident.

James: And this is James Boo, filling in for Cathy Erway — on the second episode in our three-part series for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

James: In our previous episode, which was titled, “How Do We Go Beyond Representation?” all of our guests were questioning the premise of representation as a goal...

James: I’m very sympathetic to the feeling that we’re hearing the same story, trying to teach the country the same lessons over and over again — about the model minority stereotype, and how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are not monolithic groups.

James: But at the same time, one thing I’ve learned while making this show is to respect where people are at.

James: And to be clear, I’m talking about Asian Americans, not the whites.

James: I’ve had to recognize that it’s not “the same story over and over again” for someone who’s living it for the first time, or talking about their experiences openly for the first time.

James: Because it’s difficult, right? It’s extremely difficult if you’ve been denied the tools to process your own experiences.

James: So if we feel trapped in a cycle of re-hashing the same talking points, then it does help to track down the origin of that cycle.

James: So today I invited two people who know a lot about this process.

Randy: My name is Randy Kim. I go by, he / him / his pronouns.

Randy: I'm a queer Southeast Asian, mixed Vietnamese and Khmer American.

Randy: I've been born and raised in the Chicago land area, and I'm the host and creator of the Banh Mi Chronicles podcast since October, 2019.

Randy: I am also a board member for the national Cambodian heritage museum in Chicago, and I'm currently pursuing my master's degree in nonprofit management at DePaul University.

Tracey: I am Tracey Nguyen Mang, and I go by she and her, and I'm the founder and the host of the Vietnamese Boat People podcast.

Tracey: I was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, which is a beach coastal city, and my family and I fled Vietnam by boat when I was three years old. I pretty much grew up in the United States on the East Coast, and a couple years ago, as I was trying to document my own family's diaspora story, I discovered that there were others going through a similar journey.

Tracey: And so I started the podcast as a way to share my own story, which is season one. And then as a nonprofit to then help other families and individuals capture their stories.

Conversation With Randy Kim and Tracey Nguyen Mang

James: We are doing this series, you know, nominally because it's Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage month. And when I say that  it's that time of year, what's the first thought that comes to mind?

Randy: It feels like it's a burden sometimes, when we have to excavate and try to bring up people who are not named Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, but to bring up names like Grace Lee Boggs or Yuri Kochiyama, or other Asian American artists and activists and educators and leaders who have been doing the work, but often are not ever discussed as part of our history...

Randy: ...while at the same time, it's also an opportunity to celebrate, to reflect and to honor our ancestors to honor the people who have been creating our history and setting the blueprint for us to take actions.

Tracey: You know, honestly, I don't even remember growing up ever celebrating this month. And if we did, I felt like they brushed on, perhaps just topics about our culture, maybe our food, the types of cultural dances, we have holidays, whatever it might be, our dress attire...

Randy: Hm. I also echo that same thought as Tracy here because I wasn't taught Asian-American or Asian Pacific Islander month at any point until I was close into my thirties, when I got involved with Asian American queer / trans movements.

Randy: I learned about the Chinese exclusion act. I learned about Vincent Chin. I learned about Grace Lee Boggs through my organizer friends. I wasn't learning that in K-12 or in college.

James: We all have this, like, memory of not receiving any kind of education. 

James: And part of that is because actually it didn't exist.

Tracey: Mmhmm.

James: I think the formality, right, of having kind of a government-commemorated honoring of Asian identity and experience began in the late seventies more as like a week, and it was part of a congressional resolution. And I don't really think there was an official month until the early nineties.

Tracey: That makes sense. Now that you're giving us a history of when this all started, because yeah, I don't remember it at all.

James: I always say to folks, if we're having this conversation, that I grew up in a 40% Asian town. Most of the kids around me were second generation, just like me from various different backgrounds. There was zero Asian American education... (laughs)

James: Like, a lot of these resources and consciousness were definitely not there...

James: ...It was a culturally white town. This was the eighties. I grew up next to Ronald Reagan Park. Everyone is trying to be the best American they can be.

James: And even if that included a real baseline of people, just being very matter of fact about like, "Oh, they're Korean. Nothing wrong with that!" — it doesn't reduce the experience of trying to achieve and trying to assimilate and having unspoken rules about how you manage race.

James: But both of you grew up in completely different circumstances, I think, than I did. So I'm curious to know how you see the world differently.

Tracey: So, northern Virginia, where I did most of my growing up actually has a very large Vietnamese population.

Tracey: What happened for me was I ended up being in a part of town in the public school system where it was divided.

Tracey: And so here I was in high school, probably one of five asian kids, maybe one of two Vietnamese kids.

Tracey: And then 10 minutes from me was Eden Center, which is, you know, Vietnamese restaurants, Vietnamese population, so I had the best of both worlds.

Tracey: But did that mean that I was more confident or did that mean that I was sure of my identity? It absolutely didn't.

Tracey: Even being surrounded by the community, in both ways, kind of made me even more confused to be honest.

Randy: If I have to look back into my childhood...

Randy: It was very difficult knowing that the first time I was told that I was Vietnamese and Cambodian was actually my second grade teacher bringing that up.

Randy: She announced to the class, like, Hey, you know, Randy is Vietnamese and Cambodian. And I'm like, "Really? I thought I was American" —

Tracey: Wait, Randy… How did your parents not tell you?

Randy: You know, I've never asked them that. However both of my parents came into the U.S. only a few years before I was born, and there was so much trauma.

Randy: My dad escaped from the genocide and my mom came into the United States with her family, by boat.

Randy: I think my family, my parents, especially were in survival mode, and my parents were trying to find a way to make a good living for my brothers and I, and I guess that they never saw it as a priority to really help me understand that.

Randy: Because that was part of the recipe for academic success, is having to learn English, having to sacrifice part of your culture as a way to be seen as successful.

Randy: And it became consequential when I couldn't speak my parents' native tongue, it became consequential when I did not have a community of Vietnamese and Khmer folks to talk to.

Randy: And if there were family friends, it would always be this comparison of who's doing better than who. And that never felt safe for me. 

Randy: In fact, I felt, like, this sense of resentment of my own identities... and also throwing the queerness on top of it…

Randy: So there was a lot of intersectionalities that I was really struggling with, that it took me a lifetime to come together and realize that this is a narrative that I have to reclaim for myself and for my own survival and for my hopes to thrive.

James: In our previous episode, one of the guests raises an interesting distinction, which is that we often trace racialized harm and the way we think about ourselves back to childhood.

James: And with pushes, for media representation as adults, we're trying to address something that happened to us when we were young. Something that we lacked when we were young.

Tracey: Definitely everything that I feel like I've done in the last few years with the Vietnamese boat, people, podcasts has stemmed from things that I have either experienced as a child or basically shut off as a child.

Tracey: Being a refugee, being from an immigrant family, being of a very low social and economic class, I mean, I grew up in subsidized housing.

Tracey: So that in itself, I think is heavy for a child.

James: And there are so many other resources we can think of — mental health resources, family care, the ways that we're taught to just communicate with each other, the way that classrooms are run — that don't have anything to do with the media, and are still greatly deficient.

Tracey: So in the early eighties, when we first came to the U.S., and we were in New Orleans, English as a second language, ESL, did not exist in schools.

Tracey: So back to your point, James, like, being pushed in school and not being taught English, being kind of just surrounded by other kids and learning as you go and watching TV so that you could speak the language, was how I grew up, and how my siblings grew up. 

Tracey: I've told this story a couple of times on some of my events, but you know, I was born Nguyen Quan Truong-Anh.

Tracey: And let me just tell you like a lot of us, there were jokes nonstop about my name.

Randy: Mm.

Tracey: And I got free lunch, even the lunch lady (Iaughs) couldn't even pronounce my name.

James: (chuckles)

Tracey: And by the time I was like six years old, my sister came home one day and was like, we're going to rename you, Tracey. And I became Tracey at that point for my entire life. 

Tracey: You know, being in a classroom or being in an environment where people can't pronounce your name or not even taking the time to learn to pronounce your name makes you feel, like, invalidated.

Tracey: It makes you feel like you have to adjust, you have to assimilate, you have to change who you are or where you came from in order for other people to accept you.

Tracey: So you are very right, that it doesn't depend on the media for representation. It actually depends on the community that you live in, or systematic structures, like a school system, to, you know, make space for that and to educate their own teachers, that this is important for a child's upbringing.

Randy: Thank you for bringing up your history of your name. Because for myself, my parents chose not to give me a Vietnamese or Khmer name. My name is Randy Kim.

Randy: Now people always ask me, “How is your last name, Kim? It's a Korean last name.”

Randy: When my father came to the United States, I think he was sponsored through a Catholic agency, And I think they gave him the last name because, you know, he didn't have his papers. 

Randy: And in fact, I learned much later, like a few years ago that my dad was going to call me Rady, which was spelled R-A-D-Y.

Randy: And I'm thinking, “Well, why couldn't he have named me that?” And my mom said it was because he was afraid that people were going to make fun of me. 

Randy: And in some ways it spared me the torment that I was already getting from a lot of my classmates for a very long period of time.

Randy: And at the same time it created this sense of this loss.

Randy: Of... I don't have a Vietnamese, I don't have a Khmer name. I don't even have a nickname for that.

Randy: And so I often have to keep reminding myself of knowing that, yes, my history is very complicated, but I don't need to be in forever grieving of that name.

James: I really appreciate just how open you're both being and sharing these deeply rooted experiences.

James: You know, the way I feel about this is — with media representation in particular as a point of discussion and a place to invest our hopes to invest our pain or to invest our actions — I, I shy away from anything that tries to heavily weight the value of what you consume. 

Randy: Hmm.

Randy: When I think of representation matters, especially as an adult, sometimes that hashtag really gets under my skin, more than anything else.

Tracey: (laughs)

Randy: Uh, it, it really well, I'm being very nice. It really gets on my nerves all the time.

Randy: I say this because I was growing up wanting to be a journalist. And I remember covering the Southeast Asia symposium at College of DuPage. 

Randy: And that was the first time I got to learn about my Southeast Asian history, and specifically the first time I learned about the Cambodian genocide.

Randy: I was doing this piece on it and I took this photo of the Apsara dancer. The good news was that the Apsara dancer was featured in the front page of the college newspaper. However, the article, the piece that I was working so hard on, never made it.

Randy: And a few years later, I would get an internship, and I remembered the mentor that I was having to work with,  side by side and he would make comments and he would ask me, well, “How does it feel to be the only Asian person here?”

Randy: It was very micro-aggressive, but it was also very intentional.

Randy: And after I had left the internship, I was trying to get onto these interviews with some of the big news media corporations.

Randy: And every time I would walk in, it was a sea of white people.

Randy: And one interviewer asked me, "How do you think you will handle being the only Asian person?"

Randy: And to be honest with you, it sank my confidence. I realized that this is not where I could be.

Randy: So when I think of the “representation matters,” I do think, yes, it is powerful to have Asian faces, Asian bodies, in the work that we should be doing.

Randy: However, it doesn't solve tokenism. It doesn't solve the inequities. It doesn't solve the power imbalance that, white gatekeepers have while giving crumbs to Asian or other BIPOC folks.

Randy: And so we're still seeing that, and I hope that we get to really see when there's representation, who’s pulling the strings behind it. Who's creating it, who's on the board, who’s making the decisions.

Randy: Because I look at my young 20 something year old self.. and had I had a mentor who was Asian, maybe had I had other faces who were in leadership that were Asian... that might've been a different story.

James: When we think about, I guess, the impact of storytelling...

James: From your experience and what you've done with the Banh Mi Chronicles or Vietnamese Boat People, What is the process of just literally how a story improves someone's life?

Tracey: Yeah... Sometimes I feel like an imposter, first of all (laughs), because I have no background in journalism or communications or storytelling.

Tracey: The people that I interview are mostly people who fled from Vietnam as a child or as an adult.

Tracey: And so my conversations with them have been like me sitting at someone's dinner table or having coffee with an uncle.

Tracey: I basically sit down and just want to hear their story the way that they want to tell it.

Tracey: And a lot of my interviews will last at least an hour and a half sometimes. I think my longest one was four hours.

Randy: Oh my goodness. (laughs)

James: (laughs)

Tracey: Yes. And with my dad, it was six hours, but you know what?

Tracey: I'd never even talked to my dad that long. So I was like, so fascinated.

Tracey: You know, these people hadn't talked about this past in so long and it felt almost rude to interrupt them when they're sharing something so intimate.

Tracey: But I also have gotten a lot of people afterwards telling me how therapeutic it was.

James: (laughs) Oh my God.

Tracey: I know. And, and I'm happy for that. I'm happy that even though I'm a stranger, I can provide that ear for them, for something that has been so, like, hidden for so long, because either nobody wanted to hear it or they didn't feel like anybody wanted to hear it.

Tracey: You know, it doesn't heal them, but I think it starts to open the door for dialogue and we do get a lot of feedback from listeners that said, Hey, you know, I got my dad to listen to your podcast on the way to the grocery store and I couldn't believe it, then he started telling me about his story.

Tracey: And those are the kinds of feedback that really, you know, makes our heart melt because that's exactly our mission; it's like, we're trying to help people understand, connect, but then also to have that dialogue.

Randy: I think the genesis and the whole process of storytelling comes from creating the space for it to be both safe, but brave.

Randy: Because oftentimes we keep thinking to ourselves who wants to hear stories? Why would I want to be vulnerable in front of strangers?

Randy: Why would I want to put myself out there and maybe get gaslit? 

Randy: I've been in storytelling in the past where I've done it in white dominated spaces, where there's like only just the few, same, BIPOC folks.

Randy: It's not a very comfortable feeling for me. Because I'm telling stories about my family. I'm telling stories about my own trauma, but then the other storytellers would talk about crappy dating experiences, and I'm, like, thinking to myself...

Randy: It doesn't feel... equitable. It doesn't feel authentic to me.

Randy: We deserve to be in spaces where we could tell stories to people that need to hear them, and that they need to be accessible, and our young versions of ourselves who are here right now need to hear them. 

Randy: And that's something I think about, I think about people in rural communities who don't have access to being in diverse physical spaces.

James: It's heartening for me to hear both of you walk through how you see the impact being made by your work, because I think it's a question we don't often ask in a really plain way. It's like, "What do I think I'm doing?"

James: And what I'm hearing from both of you is. That you're leading this process of making more space for people who just wouldn't be there in the first place.

James: Tracey, when you say people say that the experience is therapeutic, I've heard the exact same thing. You know, I've done hundreds of interviews, and…

James: I always feel a little weird when someone stops halfway and says, like, “Wait, are you giving me free therapy?” And I’m like...

Tracey: (laughs)

James: We have this often unchallenged assumption that we're here to serve, quote, unquote, "the market," and we're so used to everything being turned into a chance to exploit who we are.

James: So to make people just recognize themselves, I feel just matters a lot.

James: On that same note of therapeutic activity, like… what have you learned about how people heal?

Randy: Mm. Hmm. (laughs)

Tracey: (laughs)

Randy: I think I'm gonna try to take a stab at it. 

Randy: Well, healing is lifelong as I'm learning.

Randy: Because we're constantly having to unlearn. A lot of the toxic damage that we do to ourselves or that we've had to absorb for so many years, whether it's to intergenerational trauma, whether it's do assimilation, whether it's to, other forms of colonial or state sanctioned violence.

Randy: I think the idea of healing is giving yourself pause, giving yourself time to rust, to honor yourself, and to also use your imagination, to see the possibilities of what can thrive.

Randy: You know, through the podcast…

Randy: Even when I have done my research, even when I've had discussions with my guests, well beforehand, I often somehow bring up a story that I have never told before.

Randy: When I interviewed Phuc Tran, when I read his book, "Sigh, Gone" —

Randy: "Sigh, Gone" was a very powerful memoir for me. It really opened up challenges of my own childhood. And I talked about the time when my dad berated me during my eighth grade graduation.

Randy: And being able to share that story on my own terms was part of my own healing.

Randy: It gave me permission to say that it's okay to tell your story. It’s OK.

Randy: And it's a gift, but I think that people's healing is very, non-linear, it's an ongoing process that we had to do for ourselves and  not be afraid to ask for it to happen. 

Tracey: Gosh. It's so hard. I don't know if I'm going to be as articulate as Randy...

Tracey: You know, I used to think that a big part of healing was to be able to talk about it. But I'm not so sure that that's the first step. 

Tracey: I think what I've learned along the way, is that even if someone doesn't talk about their own experience, they get some sort of sense of healing by listening to others that are going through something similar or by being a part of a community that is sharing, even if they're not the one vocally sharing.

Tracey: It's that human connection. It's feeling like you're not alone, I think, is a big part of healing, from what I've learned.

Tracey: Some of the things that I've heard interviewees say is, "Oh yeah, when I, you know, tell my children this, or when I tell my husband this, you know, it's interesting and it's fascinating.

Tracey: But then when they see that my story was part of this huge evacuation of Da Nang, all of a sudden it is like, 'Wow, you were part of that? Wow, you've lived through that?'”

Tracey: Like, to know that their individual experience and story was a part of history... their story has become a part of a collection of others that together makes what they've experienced more powerful, and more meaningful.

Tracey: But along the way, I feel like my listeners probably heal more than my interviewees.

Tracey: And so I think that's why for me, what I've learned, is, it's not really about talking about your experience, but it's about hearing others talk about similar experiences.

James: When I call you both up, I was thinking about that question of just, like,  "How does the story actually create social impact?" 

James: I made a documentary film that was about a 74 year old  grandfather, who had moved from the South in the fifties to Oakland, California, and wanted to open a restaurant.

James: But he couldn't. Because he was black. And he went to work for an oil company.

James: And then after retiring, started this little diner inside a closet of a hair salon.

James: And then eventually, as they were, after 25 years, shutting down the business.

James: I made this film that was about the process of letting go of all that.

James: But this movie will never be seen by almost anybody. I really didn't know what I was doing, I don't have all the legal permissions, I can't, like, take the risk of trying to put it online even for free...

James: You know, I think in many ways I'd be considered a failure, like, "Oh, great. You did this story and no one's going to see it and it's not going to make an impact."

James: But I had an experience where we did take it to a few film festivals, and one of the festivals flew him out to New York City. So at this point he's like 76 years old.

James: And I realized he'd never been there before. Like this is a guy who's lived through so many things, like so many stories to tell you.

James: Never been to this part of the country until he was in his mid seventies. 

James: He had a great time, he was appreciated.

James: And I was telling my friends who used to go to this diner with me later, it was like, "Oh yeah, Jodie flew out... did you know he'd never been to New York?"

James: My friend said, "Oh, wow." and she said, "You did that"

James: I had to learn to accept, like, "Oh yeah, that was, that was an impact."

James: And I don't even care, like, if nobody ever sees the film, because throughout this whole painful process, the idea that, um, this man could really see his life reflected, and then go to a place he literally had never been before...

James: ...was enough for me.

Tracey: Mmhmm.

James: I think we get really caught up in the idea that a story will be impactful if it reaches a lot of people.

James: And what I hear you saying is it's more about reaching the right people at the right time.

Tracey: Yes..

Randy: Mmhmm.

Tracey: Yes, absolutely. I love your story, because when people hear the word impact, they automatically assume quantity, volume and broadness, right? That's, that's what people translate impact.

Tracey: But you know, your story is an example where it's changing someone's lives or the way they think, or how they feel about themselves and that's impact.

Tracey: I mean, the name of my podcast is so niche. It's like, you know, definitely having done this for a little over two years, we always toy with, you know, should we be broadening our topics? Should we be, you know, talking about what's happening today on, you know, the Asian-American community.

Tracey: And, and so like, yes, all of these things are very important issues and if they could come up in this podcast and how we curate the stories? Absolutely.

Tracey: But one of the things that I feel strongly about for our show is just staying true to the mission.

Tracey: It's okay to be small and it's okay to be niche.

Randy: And I think what Tracey really summed up here is that we don't go in to get 10,000 streams or downloads or listens by the end of this month.

Randy: We don't go in with that agenda.

Randy: My professor said something to me that resonated with me a few months ago and she said, people don't want to know the “what” in your question.

Randy: They want to know the "why" in your work.

Randy: And I think about why do I want to start a podcast? What am I trying to accomplish out of this? What do I want the outcome to potentially look like?

Randy: I don't expect myself to make my podcast the ultimate impact maker or to revolutionize how our stories are being told.

Randy: That's not the goal. The goal is to start the conversations that we need to have, to hear the conversations that we need to have.

Randy: When we are at a time where the safety of Asian folks globally are at risk, it's also important to figure out who the helpers are, who can we turn to? How do we become the helpers in this?

Randy: And I think that's what the impact of our guests’ stories can really do. When we start to see the hope and possibilities of what can be achieved in a time, that can feel so darkening.

Tracey: I mean, with the whole stop Asian hate campaign and just the racism that's happening all across the country, being at the forefront of the media, I'm seeing advocacy and communities coming together to celebrate the month.

Tracey: And I've lived in my town in New Jersey for the past six years. And this is the first time I'm actually seeing other Asian families and parents coming together to celebrate the month in our town.

Tracey: And I think that's a great thing, you know, it's unfortunate that it takes this type of hate and media to make it happen.

Tracey: But, you know, all things have to rise at some point, and so I feel like this year it’s been a lot more prominent. And it’s exciting!

James: And so how do you think we can make the best of this month?

Randy: Continue to honor ourselves, continue to learn our history, to unlearn what we've been taught in our schools and to unlearn the — the trauma that we've had to inherit from our families and from the environment that we grew up in.

Randy: Also investing and our Asian-American communities who are doing important work, who are building our communities, our businesses, podcasts, content, creators, authors, musicians.

Tracey: YES.

Randy: We have to support them not just for this month, but as part of our practice and investing in them gives this leverage that we can have to create more art, to create more equity, to create more accessibility and how our society can be re-imagined into.

Tracey: I see it as it, you know, a month where we could take pride in our stories.

Tracey: Because you can't really share and amplify your story or your community's story, unless you have confidence in what that is.

Tracey: And I don't mean like confidence to, like, get on a stage and share, but just internal confidence and pride in what it is.

Tracey: What I would love to see evolve out of this month is having it be more a part of the education curriculum.

Tracey: Like I said, I don't remember celebrating this at all, growing up, but you know, now that I have children in grade school, like, it's become more evident for me that, wow, they're not learning this at all in school

Tracey: Maybe there's an announcement that it's Asian Pacific American heritage month. Maybe there's like a book or two read, but there isn't the depth in really learning about the history.

Tracey: I just would love to see that change. I feel like it will. I feel like now is our time, and it's happening in my town and I'm so proud of it and, you know, I feel like it hopefully will only go up from here.

MUSIC starts

James: Well, I really want to thank both of you for being with me today and I really admire all your work and not just your work, but all the care that you show on the perspective you have.  Just as people in this great nation on fire that we live in.

James: So if people want to follow you, where can they keep up with what you do? 

Randy: People can follow me on Instagram @thebanhmi_chronicles. They can also check out my Facebook page, go under "The Banh Mi Chronicles." And also you can listen to the Banh Mi Chronicles on any streaming services, Spotify, anchor, Apple podcasts, and whatnot.

Tracey: Check out our website at vietnameseboatpeople.org.

Tracey: But we're also on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. " Vietnamese boat people" is what you want to search for.

Tracey: And I would say definitely listen to us, let us know what you think, but there are other ways for people to share their story if they don't want to share it on the podcast or through an oral history project.

Tracey: We do have a community blog and we publish people's original writings, whether it's personal journals, you know, photography, poetry, artwork, whatever it is, and it's just another thing that we created so that there's space for individuals to, you know, share their journeys with others.

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Credits

THEME MUSIC begins

James: Thanks again to Randy and Tracey for joining me today! You can find out more about them in our show notes.

James: And I’m also sharing some work by Anjali Enjeti, author of the new novel, “The Parted Earth.” She was all set to join us, but unfortunately had to take a rain check.

James: Anjali, we missed you, and hope to have you back soon. 

James: We'd love to hear what you think about these bonus episodes, too. So if you have any feedback, you can email team@selfevidentshow.com to let us know. 

James: Today's episode was produced by me, James Boo, with help from Harsha Nahata and Timothy Lou Ly. Our Senior Producer is Julia Shu. Our Executive Producer is Ken Ikeda.

James: Make sure to subscribe where you get podcasts — and check back next week, when our dear friend Alex Laughlin is hosting a conversation about what it really takes to create a more equitable workplace.

James: Until then, you can follow us on social media (@selfevidentshow), where our team is going to be sharing events, movies, music, and books that we're excited about.

James: Self Evident is a Studio To Be production. Our show is made with support from PRX and the Google Podcasts creator program.

James: And of course, from our listener community.

THEME MUSIC ends

James: If you stuck around to listen to this to the end, then I guess I can just say, I hope you have access to a therapist who is not a podcaster who himself needs a therapist... (laughs)

James: And I’ll see y’all next time.