Self Evident: Asian America's Stories

We asked our listener community, "How did you learn where you come from?" What came back was a wide range of personal stories about how tricky it can be to access our heritage. From kids going to culture camp, to adoptees making journeys to their birth countries, to Asian Americans of all ages realizing that they're inevitably going to lose a piece of themselves — we explore how we fit in with wha...

U nder the Trump administration, the United States has pushed aggressively to deport Southeast Asian Americans with criminal records. Hurt that members of the Vietnamese community would support this action, guest producer Thanh Tan (creator of the podcast "Second Wave") seeks out the people at risk of deportation — and the organizers fighting to keep them in the only home they've known. Along the...

Three intimate conversations reveal how we deal with changes to our most deeply rooted identities, and how we tell the people who matter most. "Unspoken" Documentary filmmaker Patrick G. Lee tells Cathy about the unexpected ways that coming out affected his family. "The Debut" Producer Preeti Varathan and her cousin Srinidhi unpack complicated feelings about their larger-than-life, coming-of-age m...

Gabe's always felt distant from his parents: not Filipino enough for his dad, not affectionate enough for his mom. But when he moves back to his white-bread hometown to donate a kidney to his dad and work alongside him at the "Fiesta in America," Gabe is forced to rethink the way he's seen his family, his heritage, and his lifelong struggle to belong. Share your story and keep the conversation goi...

Sharmin Hossain, a member of New York's Bangladeshi Feminist Collective, helps us take a hard look at the roles of class, colorism, and cultural education within the broader conversation about Asian representation in America. This interview was one of many conversations we had when producing Episode 002: "The Non-United States of Asian America." To hear more about the impact of caste on South Asia...

Do you have a story about going to language classes, Saturday schools, religious community groups, clubs, music lessons, or other alternative classrooms where you learned about your culture or heritage? Was it a positive, negative, or mixed experience for you? We're producing an episode of the podcast exploring the ways that we learn where we come from — for better or for worse. And we want this e...

Self Evident tells Asian American stories — but that term itself, "Asian American," can mean many different things to different people. In this episode we present three stories from our listener community to explore the ways "Asian American" reflects both representation and exclusion, empowerment and stereotyping, under the diverse umbrella of Asian American identity. Share your story and keep the...

What does it mean to be excluded from the American Dream? Two stories, set 100 years apart, explore this question from the perspective of immigrants who think they've made it in America, only to find out that their dream comes at a cost. "No Place Like Home" At the height of America's Exclusion era, an Indian immigrant's quest for prosperity ends in a tragic realization that being a "good immigran...

Self Evident is where we decide where we're from, where we belong, and where we're going. Here's a peep into the stories we've presented from Asian American communities, and the reason that we make this show. Subscribe today, and visit selfevidentshow.com to stay in touch!