Where Y'all Really From

The children of immigrants often have a complicated relationship with their parents. It’s not unusual for first-, one-and-a-half and second-generation immigrants to translate both language and cultural norms for their elders. And parents can feel the pressure of being their children’s only connection to the traditions, language and values of home. In this special episode, we gather the whole podca...

The holiday season is upon us, and so many of our celebrations are centered around a table full of delicious food. In AAPI families, cooking food is practically its own love language. In this special episode, we explore the ties between food, culture, identity and family, with Kentucky restauranteurs Dan Wu and Toa Green.

On this episode, Dan Wu introduces us to mother-and-daughter duo Joyce Chen and Xiao-Yin Chen. Joyce reflects on her early life in China and how she ended up in Harlan, Kentucky (which wasn't full of chicken farms, to her surprise). As a mom, she was determined that Xiao-Yin wouldn't miss out on any typical American experiences, and would have opportunities beyond working in Chinese restaurants or...

It's not unusual for young people to keep things secret from their parents. Having to repeat a college course, letting the apartment get too messy... but Nancy Ngo's secret was a little different. She didn't tell her parents she was in the running to be a 2022 Kentucky Derby Princess. "I only told them I applied after I got into the first round, because I knew they were going to be like... what is...

When Dr. Angela Singla was a little girl, she got sick during a trip to India. While hospitalized there, she had an eye-opening experience. "I saw a female physician come in," she says. "And I was just blown away, because I had never seen a female physician before." It started her on a path that eventually led her to become an OB-GYN. On this episode, Dr. Singla sits down with Nima Kulkarni to tal...

Your name is usually the first thing you share when you meet new people. And if you're an immigrant, your name can either make you blend in, or mark you as a perpetual other. Some immigrants change or shorten their original names. Some have their names changed by bureaucrats. Some keep them. And each outcome has its own set of emotional and cultural consequences.

It’s a phenomenon uncomfortably familiar to many biracial people. Not enough to belong to one group, too much to belong to another. In this episode, Charlene Buckles sits down with public interest lawyer Kaili Moss to explore this “third space” between Okinawan and Black, and how being a queer woman adds yet another dimension.

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. In this round-table episode, Dan Wu, Charlene Buckles and Nima Kulkarni unpack the nuanced ways language informs our self image and how we fit into our families and communities. | Learn more abo...

In this episode, Dan Wu introduces us to Teja Sudhakar, a poet and University of Kentucky graduate, originally from Chennai, India. Teja talks about her chapbook, "Looking for Smoke," and reads a poem called "The Interviewer Stands." She describes her lifelong love of writing, and how she made the decision to embrace it as a vocation. -----Before you go: Every immigrant family has to decide what t...

We’re back with an all-new season, and our first guest is Chef Edward Lee. When he was around 11, he told his parents he wanted to be a chef. “They were like, sure, and Bobby’s gonna be an astronaut. Great.” 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 th...

Hi friends, it's been a while. And tragically, we find ourselves in a situation similar to the one that inspired us to start this show in the first place. Violence has affected our community again, with two mass shootings in California during celebrations of the Lunar New Year. Our need to process these events is too urgent to wait for our next season launch. We need community and conversation now...

Sure, our season's over... but we miss you already! So in this bonus mini episode, our hosts Dan Wu and Charlene Buckles reflect on season one, which ran the gamut from interpersonal decolonization to Doritos and buttermilk. We're gonna go work on season two now, so let us know what you want to hear more about at wyrf@louisvillepublicmedia.org or at whereyallreallyfrom.org. Thank you so much for b...

We're closing our season with an interview of Olympian proportions. Fencers Gerek Meinhardt and Lee Kiefer are... pretty accomplished. 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 e...

Living in Williamsburg, Kentucky, a town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains with a population of 5,000, is a mixed bag for a Pacific Islander. Angelika Weaver's mom is from Kiribati, an island nation in the central Pacific Ocean (it sort of rhymes with "hear a bus," because -ti makes an s sound in the Gilbertese language that's spoken there). Angelika herself was born in Williamsburg, w...

The children of first-generation immigrants often have a complicated relationship with language. 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 whol...

-----------Note: this episode contains descriptions of violence in the context of a military coup, around the 9-minute mark until the 11-minute mark.------------------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 2...

"If Beethoven had grown up in the Bay Area in the early 1980s, he would have started a thrash band, probably." Irresponsibly wild conjecture, or another great conversation from "Where Y'all Really From?"  On this week's episode, host Dan Wu talks with ethnomusicologist Donna Lee Kwon and multi-instrumentalist and composer Jon Silpayamanant about all things music. Donna Lee Kwon grew up playing cla...

Being othered, or outright discriminated against, puts you on the spot. You don't know how to react, and you make a million instant mental calculations about the other person, their possible intentions, the context, the power dynamic. It can trigger a fight, flight or freeze response that you later regret. It's stressful and complicated, even if you've been experiencing it your whole life. But wha...

Filmmaker Naveen Chaubal grew up making movies. "For school projects, I would always try and sneak and maybe doing a video instead of writing a paper," he says. 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 rea...

Uyen Nguyen is a social worker and therapist. She's also Vietnamese American. And those things can feel at odds with each other. "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 week, Uyen and host Charlene Buckles share some of their ow...

Sometimes you expect to talk about poetry and knitting, but you end up talking about disentangling race, love and relationships. Or at least you do if you're Dan Wu and this week's guest, Danni Quintos. Danni is an Affrilachian poet, a mom, an educator, and a knitter. She lives in Lexington. On this week's show, Danni and Dan dive into what it's like to interrogate your own personal and intimate r...

After the Korean War, there was a sudden increase in Korean-born babies being adopted by families in Europe, Canada and the United States. By the late 1990s, that number had reached over 200,000. Now those babies are adults, grappling with big questions about identity and belonging. Sarah Trainor Graves was born in South Korea, adopted by an American family, and raised in Louisville. In this episo...

Dan and Charlene sit down with University of Louisville President Dr. Neeli Bendapudi. She’s the first woman and the first person of color to lead the university. Dr. Bendapudi was hired after a series of scandals -- not an unusual scenario for women and people of color taking on leadership positions. “It’s called the glass cliff,” she says. “Their likelihood of success is less because they’re not...

It's our very first episode, so we gathered the whole team -- Dan Wu, Charlene Buckles, Nima Kulkarni, and Mae Suramek -- for a good old fashioned origin story. How did this happen? Why are we doing it? And how do we respond when people ask us, "Where are you from? No, but where are you really from?"

Introducing Where Y'all Really From, a podcast about Asian Americans in Kentucky. Here's a taste of season one, launching Sept 21!