THE DAILY NEWSLETTER

Sonic Postcards Across the Ocean

Seeing yourself in another’s story, amid anti-Asian racism during the pandemic.

By Stella Tan
 April 10, 2020
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Jiayang Fan and her mother, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, in July
1992, their first month in the U.S. after moving from Chongqing, China.
Our producer Stella Tan on today’s episode:

I first heard about it from my roommate. As coronavirus cases climbed in the United
States, she’d seen reports of Asian-Americans being targeted in New York City.
Should she, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, wear a mask in public or not? She
wasn’t sure which would draw more attention.

I noticed the personal stories and articles picking up on social media. In wading
through comments and in conversations with people around me, I felt a hunger both
within and outside the Asian-American community to talk about this discrimination.

But with the coverage came a lot of questions. What was reasonable caution, and
what was bias? Did the severity of an attack change its newsworthiness? What was
the right way to talk about these incidents when they felt newly threatening to some,
but were already daily realities for others?

Several of the articles mentioned a tweet from Jiayang Fan, whose writing I’ve

admired for a long time. When our team decided to tackle the story of racism against
Asian-Americans, I called her up, along with Michael Barbaro and producers Lynsea
Garrison and Neena Pathak.

What struck me about our conversation was how openly Jiayang grappled with her
complicated feelings, and the many ways she turned over in her mind what had
happened to her.

She spoke of the paralysis she felt when a stranger looked directly at her and verbally
assaulted her outside her apartment. But she also looked at herself in the eyes of her
mother — an immigrant whose religion was survival, as Jiayang put it — who might
shake her head at her daughter for making a big deal out of so little. And she
imagined herself in the place of the stranger who accosted her. Had he lost a job, or a
loved one, because of the pandemic? Was his anger just waiting for a target?

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She didn’t have answers. But she had a lot of memories — of how her earliest beliefs
about identity were formed, of watching her mother pretend to be in on the joke
when someone made fun of her pronunciation, of the pride she felt when she could
say, “C’mon!” to a friend in English without thinking about it first.

There’s one part of her story in particular where I saw a piece of myself. In today’s
episode, you may have noticed warbly, dreamy sounds of a tiny voice speaking
Mandarin. That comes from a cassette tape that Jiayang’s mother made with her in
China in the 1980s. Jiayang told us that her mother would mail these cassettes
overseas to her father in the U.S. in lieu of phone calls, which were too expensive.

In the cassette tape, a 3-year-old Jiayang recites lines of Tang Dynasty verse that
Chinese parents love to teach their children (sort of like “Humpty Dumpty,” but from
700 A.D.). As I listened to the tape, I realized that I’d heard recordings of myself
reciting the same verses as a kid, but in Cantonese.
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When my mom and dad, as immigrants, found it difficult to take care of an infant
while setting up their lives in a new country, my grandparents brought me back to
Guangzhou, China, and raised me until I was 4. They did what Jiayang’s mom did,
recording my early fumblings and sending them across the ocean. Those sonic
postcards helped my parents hear my first words.

Jiayang’s story is her own, but you might find echoes of yourself in it, too. Listen
here.

Talk to Stella on Twitter: @stellatan.