April 8, 2021 • 53 mins
Ly Tran’s father refused to accept any kind of weakness in his children—not even something as commonplace, and easily remedied, as poor vision. So when then-eight-year-old Ly brought a note home from school informing her parents she needed glasses, he flew into a rage—setting Ly up for years of struggle and secret-keeping as her eyesight continued to worsen, which impacted every facet of her life.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. By
the time I was ten, street name signs had disintegrated
into a blurry haze of green and white unless I
was almost directly under them. I couldn't read colored words
against the background unless there was enough of a contrast,
and I couldn't read the aisle signs in the supermarket
(00:21):
unless I squinted. Faces started to look the same to me,
their features indistinguishable. I became anxious over my inability to
recognize people as they approached, but I learned to use
the idiosyncrasies of their gait and the particular way their
bodies occupied space to identify them. And when that failed,
I learned to look down at my feet while I
walked to avoid accidental eye contact with anyone I couldn't recognize. Eventually,
(00:47):
as my sight worsened and my squinting powers failed me,
I developed a new technique. I would push the bottom
lid of my eye inward and upward to narrow my
field of vision until my eyes were almost closed, but
not quite. This technique was more effective than the regular squint,
and for a time it worked. It was almost like
a super squint. Walking alongside my mother and father. One
(01:10):
day in a right aid pharmacy, I decided to try
out my new technique in order to read the signs
hanging above the aisles. My father had walked ahead of us.
I held on to my mother with my left hand
and pushed in the bottom lids of my eyes with
my right, using my thumb and index finger. Suddenly, my
mother's face was close to mine, her eyes wide as
(01:30):
she bent down towards me. Gale, what are you doing,
she whispered, harshly, Oh this, I said, nothing, just trying
to read the signs. Don't let your father see you,
she said. She pulled my hand down and forced it
against my side. Stop pretending you can't see, or you
really will be blind. You know how your father feels
about that. She glanced nervously towards my father. I'm not pretending, mom,
(01:55):
I really can't. What is it? My father had started
to walk back toward us. Nothing, my mother said, quickly,
straining up. There was something in her eye and we
were trying to get it out. It's out now, though
she squeezed my hand, almost crushing it. That's Lee Tran,
reading from her debut memoir House of Sticks. Le's is
(02:16):
a story of loyalty, family, tenacity, and a secret she
kept for a long time, so long it very nearly
destroyed her. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(02:40):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
What was the landscape of your childhood before you were
three years old? And then after I was born in
(03:03):
a small town in southern Vietnam. In nine my family
and I were able to immigrate to the United States
through a program known as the Humanitarian Operation, which helped
resettle former prisoners of war here in the States. And
my father was a former pow. He's spent almost ten
(03:25):
years in the re education camps of Vietnam. And you know,
that was our lucky ticket out. And so we we
came to Ridgewood, Queens in the middle of a blizzard,
no less, so it was neat, let's just say, very
cold for us of Vietnmee people. And you know it
(03:46):
was it was really difficult to navigate this foreign country.
None of us spoke the language. I know. I was
only three and I had three older brothers at the time,
the oldest of which was just nine years old, and
so finding a way to make ends meet it was
really difficult. But a family friend introduced us to this
(04:09):
sort of home sweatshop labor and so that's what we did.
And it required us to borrow a sewing machine from
the company and then we would sort of work to
pay it off over the years. There will be a
weekly quota and you know, maybe one thousand ties or
(04:30):
two thousand commer buns, and we had to deliver it
every week. So that was my first job as a toddler,
which was to to help my family make these ties
and commer buns. And I separated the materials, gave them
to my father who would then sow the ties, and
then my brothers and I would take it out from
(04:51):
underneath the sewing machine and turn it inside out and
it was just this little family assembly line. Yeah. We
we did that all the way up until I was twelve.
Describe your mother for me, Well, my mother, she's a
very fiercely independent woman, um, and she was sort of
(05:16):
the main reason that we were able to keep it
together as a family. My father was incredible as well.
You know, he tried really hard to just get us
through the system. We would spend a lot of days
at the International Rescue Committee, and he would take down notes,
you know, exactly where he needed to take us to
(05:38):
get vaccinations, for instance, to get to go to the
food stamp office, and to get my brothers enrolled in school.
Whereas my mother, you know, she was more responsible for
just calculating how much money we would need to put
(05:58):
food on the table while also keeping us warm. And
she was also part of the reason my father wasn't
so abusive all the time. You know, she would find
ways to calm him down whenever she saw his temper
get out of hand because of the PTSD that he
suffered from. So during that time, she would always ask
(06:23):
us to learn Vietnamese. She would sit us down, tell us, okay,
notebooks out, we're gonna learn Vietnamese, gonna speak only Vietnamese
in the house. Because I don't want you to forget
your roots. I don't want you to forget where you
came from. So I was really diligent. I love language,
and I think she's the reason I love language. Whereas
(06:45):
you know, acentimes my brothers would get to go out
and play in the park and say, oh yeah, we'll
learn later. Mom, and she would say, okay, Lee, you stay,
and I would ask, well, why why did they get
to go off and play? But now I don't regret
that I stayed because I can speak, read, and write
in Vietnamese. And it was during that time that I
(07:07):
heard a lot of stories from her. She told me
all of these stories about herself in Vietnam, about the
time that she ran away from a matchmaker because she
did not want to get married um, and about how
she took on her family's business in Vietnam and was
a merchant and she would ride her motorcycle to all
(07:28):
these different shops and deliver goods and everyone loved her.
And it was just a really great time for me
to spend with my mother. But at the same time,
she was also really strict in terms of teaching me
how to be a good at housewife, which was so
sort of antithetical to who she is on the inside.
(07:50):
But I think after marrying my father and seeing how
difficult it was to be a wife, and especially in
my father's household where yes five of older sisters who
were very abusive towards my mother because they felt like
she wasn't a good enough housewife, she didn't know how
to cook when she first married into the family, and
(08:11):
so they would keep her up at night. They would
throw hot water on her just to sort of show her, Okay,
you are now our servant, basically, and she didn't want
that sort of fate for me, so she said, Okay,
you need to learn how to cook, you need to
learn how to sweep, how to full clothing properly, and
(08:31):
you know, you need to learn all of these things
so that you can have a better future and not
like the future that I had. Buddhism is central to
the Tran household. One of the first things Lee's father
does when they settle into their new home and queens
is to build an altar high up on their living
room wall, one which will eventually cover the entire wall
(08:55):
from end to end, to honor the Buddha and the bodhisattvas.
There's a framed picture of the Great Shaki Yamuni Buddha,
the awakened One, as well as a picture of kwan
Ambo Tat, the Goddess of Compassion. Call out her name
three times when you need help, Lee's father tells her
she has a thousand arms. Her arms will reach you,
(09:20):
So I was struck with the significance of the altar
in your family's home, and the deities and the saints
and the role that they play in daily life, and
in the idea of protection and the idea of fulfillment
of hopes and desires, and how deeply that was internalized
(09:46):
in you as a child. Sure, yeah, I think it's
different for my father versus it's meaning for my mother.
But I know for my father when he was in
the re education camps or even just before that, serving
as a soldier in the war, and not knowing, you know,
if he was going to live one day or die
(10:06):
the next, having a faith to hold on too, and
just believing that there is someone, some Buddhisatta or Buddha
out there watching over him, which was so powerful. And
at some point in the re education camp he sees
that one of his fellow prisoners had had caught a
turtle in his trap, and coming from a Buddhist background,
(10:30):
he felt sorry for the turtle and couldn't bear to
see his his fellow prisoner kill it. And he said
he asked if he could trade scallions for the turtle,
and the prisoner said, short, you know, I don't know
what to do with this thing anyway, And my father
put a splint on the turtle's broken leg and set
it free. And this was a story that he would
(10:51):
tell us when we were younger. Say, when I released
this turtle, it took a few steps and turned around
to look at me, and then it nodded at me
three times, and three days later I was released from prison.
And just this story is something that has stuck with
me throughout my entire life. And it's such a a
(11:12):
symbol of the faith that my father had in Buddhism
and these spirits that protected him because he thought this
turtle was some sort of incarnation of the Goddess of
compassion and the turtle was sent to save him. You know,
in those conditions, I wouldn't blame a person to hold
on to something like that. And for my mother, you know,
(11:35):
when we were in Vietnam, actually all of us, at
one point or another, we would get severely ill, especially
coming from such a rural place in Vietnam where there
were shamans and witch doctors and not really medicine that
was too modern at the time, and so she would
often pray. But the power of prayer also gave her
(11:58):
the strength to take her children from place to place
and and just pray that, you know, some miracle would arrive.
And oftentimes a miracle did somehow arrive, and we all
endured through our illnesses and survived. Lee's father was one
(12:18):
of almost two and a half million South Vietnamese soldiers
who were captured and then forced into backbreaking and often
dangerous labor sweeping mine fields, digging wells and trains, cutting
down trees. He served a ten year sentence. He rarely
spoke of his time in the camps, with the exception
of the story of the turtle. Could you talk a
(12:43):
little bit more about your father's both his temper and
his strictness. It was difficult for me. I remember one
time I was going home from somewhere and I was
walking with my father, and he went into the store
and bought me a possible which was such a surprise
for me because at the time we were so poor
(13:04):
that asking for treats, asking for snacks, which most of
the time just out of the question, and the fact
that he just went to the store and bought me
a popsicle, I was so so happy and excited. No
skipping um and I looked up at my father. I
remember a moment of such deep love for this man
who gave me this popsicle, and he remember him looking
(13:25):
at me and considering me, and then just out of nowhere,
smacking me. He says, don't look at me like that.
And I was so shocked. I didn't I didn't know
what had happened. My possicle fell out of my hand.
And that moment was not a rare one. And it
wasn't just me, you know, my my three older brothers,
we also sort of suffered through these tempests of my father's. Yeah,
(13:49):
it was really it was tough. It was tough to
to navigate such a difficult relationship while at the same
time loving him and fear him. You know that it
was difficult to reconcile those two emotions. And there it
seems like there was also an understanding that he had
(14:13):
really been through something and that the ten years that
he spent as a pow were at the root cause
of his rage and his tyrannical behavior, That there was
a reason for this that was embedded into the family
culture as well. Yeah, I think this is something that
(14:36):
would be uncovered as time went on, you know, because
when I was a child, I didn't. I sort of
just accepted it. I accepted his outbursts. But as I
grew older, I began to question it. And I remember
an episode in which he was yelling at my mother,
and I thought, why, why is he doing that? At
the time, I was split between my loyalty towards my father,
(15:00):
my life. He towards my mother, and that's when I
started to think, that's not okay. You know, he can't
treat my mother that way. And out of that questioning,
I started to think about his past, which he he
doesn't really talk about much, you know, I would only
see it through snippets of conversation, or once in a while,
(15:20):
when he was in the mood, he would just offer
up like a glimpse of what his past was like.
Or other times, whenever he would beat us, my mother
would say, you know, stop that crying, don't be mad.
One day, you'll understand. Sometimes she would explain a little bit,
but nothing too in depth, perhaps because she didn't think
(15:41):
that we would be able to understand at such young ages.
But definitely when I got older, I wasn't quite able
to forgive him yet, but understanding where he was coming
from that he was this prisoner of war and that
re education camps really dealt a blow to his is
psyche and just traumatized him in such a horrendous way
(16:06):
that you know, he's still to this day has nightmares
about it. And those nightmares were a part of your
childhood hearing him, you know, having nightmares, right, yes, absolutely,
I would, you know, wake up in the middle of
the night, you know, this man is this screaming and
my mother is struggling to hold him down and to
wake him up. Sometimes you would walk in his sleep
(16:26):
and run from one corner of the house to the other,
telling her we have to go. You have to grab
the children there after us, and she's saying, what hoo
are you talking about? Calmed down? You know, and so yeah,
she she really had to be strong for us as
well in terms of getting him to calm down while
trying to shield us from what he was going through.
(16:48):
And that was that was hard. You know, as children,
we didn't we didn't let on that we knew what
was going on, probably because we were really just afraid
to see our father like this. But we knew that
come morning time everything would be okay again. We'll be
right back when we starts school. She has very little
(17:24):
grasp of the English language, unlike her brothers, who went
straight into the school system when they emigrated. She's been
home with her mother for a couple of years, speaking
Vietnamese and listening to her mother's stories. So Lee is
placed at first in English as a second language. She's
socially awkward, kind of doesn't know how to be. She
(17:47):
hasn't learned any social cues, so she's a bit of
a loner and academically challenged. But it isn't until the
third grade that a teacher notices that Lee is having
trouble seeing blackboard, and she sends Lee home with a
note to her parents letting them know that Lee needs eyeglasses. Yeah,
(18:07):
in the third grade, you know, they had like kids
line up to take the Snell and I chart, which
you know everyone knows is the one with the big
E on it. And I got a letter then to
him that said, hey, your daughter has a stigmatism and
she might need glasses. And my father just completely freaked out.
(18:29):
I had no idea what was happening. He took the note,
ripped it up, and told me never to speak of
it again. And he was cursing at me, and I
didn't want to do the wrong thing. To me. It
was a homework assignment that I had to do, you know.
So I was like, oh, my goodness, but I need
to sign. I don't know what to do. So I
tried again to ask him, and he smacked me, and
(18:51):
I was just so furious. He told me that the
government was after me and how could I be so
stupid as to give in to the government wanting to
take away my eye sight? Because he thought that eyeglasses
were a government conspiracy and if I ever wore glasses,
my sight would worsen, and it was just deployed by
the government to get me to be dependent on eyeglasses. Um,
(19:15):
so the more my eyes I would worsen, I would
have to buy more glasses. And he explained the whole
thing and so and that was the end of the discussion,
and I thought, Okay, I guess he has a point.
You know. I mean, I was eight, So you proceed
through elementary school and middle school and you need glasses
(19:36):
and you don't have them, And what's that like, Like,
what was your experience actually of the world around you
that you could see or that you couldn't see. What
was it actually like sort of being you during those years.
It's so funny because I don't even remember the moment
in which I realized that I needed glasses. It was
such a gradual process. Even during the snow and chart
(19:58):
I thought, Oh, I can't see those letters, but they're
so far away. Why would I need to see those letters?
You know? I just remember, Yeah, around the fifth grade
is when I'm walking in the street and I realized
I can't even see the street signs anymore. And it
felt like just my perception of the world was just
(20:20):
getting narrower and narrower, and it felt like I was
looking at the world to this foggy window. But no
matter how much I tried to rub this window, it
just wouldn't unfuged. And so it was hard. But I
think my father was very successful in sort of convincing
(20:41):
me that, no, this is how everybody's eyes work, and
you know, you're it'll be fine. You also had an
older brother who had eyesight that wasn't excellent, and it
had managed to excel academically even with his poor eyesight,
and even with no glasses, so you should be able
to do the same thing, right exactly. Yeah, my brother
(21:02):
Long I think he also had the same note sent
home in the third grade. I don't know if he
went through the same exact experience in terms of my
father ripping up his note, but I don't even know
if he even gave the note to my father. But
he was able to do well in school because his
prescription just wasn't as high as mine, and so even
if he sat at the back of the class whom
(21:24):
he was still able to see the board, whereas my
vision just deteriorated as the years went on, and the
more that I wasn't able to see, the more headaches
I got and the more stressed I became. And so
for my father it was so clear it was just, well,
you're a girl. That's why you're not doing well in school.
(21:47):
That it was as easy as that. For him, it
was just a simple matter of gender differences in terms
of intelligence. He felt like, well, boys are just smarter
than girls, and then that's why my brother was able
to do well. And he said, you know, it's okay,
you don't have to do well if you you don't
get it. I mean, he just chalked it up to
(22:08):
a lack of intelligence as opposed to just seeing that
his daughter needed glasses dearly. When Lee's in the eighth grade,
she takes the standardized test that will determine where she'll
go to high school. The best public high school in
New York City is the Bronx High School of Science.
This is one of those tests where you fill in
(22:29):
little bubbles, but Lee runs out of time. Her inability
to see has greatly affected her ability to master advanced math,
so she quickly and randomly fills in the remaining bubbles
just to be clear. This is a test that many
more privileged students spend years preparing for with hired tutors
(22:50):
and special courses, but perhaps the Goddess of Compassion is
looking out for her. Lee is admitted to Bronx Science.
At this point, her parents sweatshop labor has come to
an end, and Lee's mother takes a course to learn
how to be a manicurist. She teaches Lee as well,
the two of them practicing on orange peels and fake nails.
(23:13):
Her mom works at a series of nail salons until
she ends up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, at a salon she
eventually buys. Lee's parents dream of being business owners in
America comes true. So now Lee's in ninth grade, attending
Bronx Science and working part time in her parents salon,
where she often witnesses clients being rude berating her mother
(23:37):
for her limited English. Lee swallows her anger and keeps
her head down. At school, she keeps her head down
for a different reason. She doesn't want anyone to notice
how much she's struggling. It's a lot to endure. So
now you're at Bronx High School Science, and you know,
(23:57):
one of the things that strikes me in your story, Lee,
is the the appearance from time to time, at really
important times of angels, you know, of of just people
who I mean, it's the thing I found most moving
really about your story is that there were these people,
(24:18):
these adults who responded to you, who saw something in you,
who went above and beyond, and there was this kind
of ongoing compassionate intervention even as there was so much
else that was so incredibly difficult. And one of the
(24:39):
first of those was this very kind professor when you're
in ninth grade who offers to get you a pair
of glasses. Yeah. Yeah, this is in the ninth grade,
and I hadn't had the courage to really tell anybody
yet that I was really suffering and couldn't see. I
just kept asking to choose if I could sit in
(25:00):
the front of the classroom. I did tell him that
I couldn't see, but that I was waiting for medicaid.
You know, I was waiting to get a pair of glasses.
And obviously that was alive because I knew that I
could have gotten glasses at any point except that my
parents would disown me. And you know, I told one
student who had attended the middle school with me, and
he also got into Brock Science. And when he heard,
(25:23):
he was just so shocked and he said, this stuck's ridiculously.
You need to tell somebody. And I said, no, no no, no, please,
don't tell anybody. I'm going to get in trouble. Thank goodness.
He did not listen to me, and he told an
eighth grade teacher. And this eighth grade teacher was actually
not even a teacher of mine. He just headed the
chess club, which I was a part of in the
(25:45):
eighth grade. And so, you know, one day I get
a message and email from Mr de Chanct. He's a teacher,
and he says highly. I heard from Michael that you're
you're not doing so well, and I would really love
to help you out. And so we meet in my
neighborhood in Ridgewood and he says, you know, I need
(26:05):
you to be able to see. You really need to
be able to see to do well in school, to
have a good and bright future. And he says, this
will be our little secret. Don't tell anybody, don't tell
your parents, and and just keep these glasses in your
locker at school. What's the worst that can happen? Nothing,
You know, as long as you don't tell anybody, you'll
be able to see, and you'll be able to get
(26:26):
better grades. And it was just such an incredibly compassionate
and kind gesture. And also, you know, putting on glasses
for the first time and being able to see and realizing, oh,
my goodness, this is how I'm supposed to see the world.
Is this how everybody sees the world? You know? I
looked at a tree right outside of the glasses place
(26:47):
and saw the veins on the leaves and it was
so shocking. But at the same time, as much as
I wanted to be able to see as a guilt
was so overwhelming too, because I thought, oh my god,
I betrayed my parents. They're gonna just only they're going
to find out somehow. Even if they don't find out,
I'm doing something wrong, I'm doing something that they don't
(27:11):
want me to do. So I took off the glasses
right away. You know, I tried to use the glasses
as little as possible during school, and before I knew it,
I started not to be able to see again. You
know that the board started becoming blurry, and I just
didn't understand what was going on. I thought, oh, oh
my god, wait, why is my vision plummeting again? And
(27:33):
then I sort of recalled my father's words, saying that
the government was after me and that glasses are designed
to keep you dependent on them, and second you put
them on, your eyesight was going to deteriorate. And that's
that's exactly what was happening to me. And so I
confide it in a friend and she said, oh, yeah,
(27:54):
that's normal, that's just that's just your body growing and
everybody's eyes change, especially those with my opia. She said,
one year, I had to get my glasses changed three times.
So yeah, that's all you need. You just need to
get a different pair of glasses with a higher prescription.
S right exactly, yeah, you know. To her it was
(28:15):
a very simple matter. But to me, I thought, oh God, um,
should I reach out to mister chunk It. And then
again that sense of guilt, that sense of having let
somebody down. Not only did I let my parents down,
but I let mister chunk It down, because all you
wanted was for me to do well in school. And
now my vision was slummitting again, and my grades were
(28:35):
also slummitting, and there it just seemed to be an
endless cycle, and I thought, oh God, maybe I'm cursed,
which is interesting. It sort of goes back to this
theme of mismaking or meaning making. You know, every time
something good happens, I think, oh it's an angel. Every
time something that happens, I think, oh, I'm just cursed.
(28:55):
Or Buddhism, there's this idea of reincarnation and if you
had done something bad in a past life, then you
would be reincarnated in this life with a lot of trouble,
or you would have to suffer more in this life.
And so I thought, oh God, I must have been
a horrible, horrible person in the past life. I never
reached out to missitor Chunket again. I was so ashamed
(29:17):
of myself and little, my, little, my grades just I
went from being an A student to just barely a
see student. Any number of stories we've told on this
podcast have had to do with the failure of adults
to intervene when a child is at risk, whether parents
or teachers or heads of institutions. But then there are angels,
(29:42):
adults who see what needs doing and by becoming involved,
can change the trajectory of a life. Mrs Walsh, Lee's
high school guidance counselor, is one of those grown ups.
At one point, she even calls child Services to intervene
a situation Lee and immediately diffuses by downplaying the severity
(30:02):
of her situation. She doesn't want anyone going after her parents.
But throughout Mrs Walsh is an unwavering source of support
and make sure these teachers know why she's having a
hard time in the classroom. So during this time, it's
my senior year and I have to apply for colleges,
(30:24):
and Mrs Walsh, she just went above and beyond. She
spoke to all of my teachers and told them what
I had been going through in. My teachers were really
kind and understanding, and so they didn't give me such
terrible grades. Are really generous with their grading, and she
wrote a really extensive letter of recommendation. She asked other
(30:46):
teachers to write letters of recommendation. And I think my
grades from my freshman year, when I sort of had
the glasses and when I was trying really really hard
and I wasn't sort of bogged down with depression. I
was able to get by freshman year, was able to
balance out my grades towards the end of my four years,
(31:07):
and that's how I was able to get into the
mcaulay Honors College at Hunter. We'll be back in a
moment with more family secrets. Things finally seem to be
(31:31):
going rightfully. She's been accepted in this big deal, prestigious
honors college. She's regularly seeing a therapist, a silver lining
from the incident with child services, and her brother offers
her a life changing present. Before you begin the McCauley
Honors program at Hunter, You're oldest brother, who had just
(31:54):
finished college himself, gives you a gift. Yes, it was
a graduation gift. And I had asked my parents to
go to my graduation and they said, oh, we can't
miss work, which I understood at the time, and so
my oldest brother and my youngest older brother, Tin and
Long they both agreed to go. And afterwards, my oldest
(32:17):
brother said, hey, I want to take you somewhere. It's
a surprise. And when he takes me to contact or
lends the shop that sells contacts and he buys me
a box of contact so that my parents would never
be able to find out, it was a life changer.
You know, this is a way for me to see
always and without my parents knowing that being helped in
(32:42):
some way, or without my father thinking that the government
was after me. So I start the Macaulay Honors College
fully armed. You know, I was finally able to see
and it's a fresh start. I can leave the path behind.
I'm seeing the psychiatrist and I just feel like the
tides are finally turning. Maybe I'm not cursed after all.
(33:04):
You know, this is I'm going to make it work.
You're living away from your parents for the first time.
You have a full scholarship, you have a stipend, you
have a dorm room, you have a laptop. You're all set.
Macaulay is one of these. This such an amazing program
in that if you're accepted then it's a full ride
and you get all of these perks. It really was
(33:26):
a chance for me to start over and to see
the world too. At that point, I had never even
been to a dinner. I'd never really been to restaurants
because my my family was too poor, and even going
over to other people's houses was such a rare occurrence
for me that now that I was living in a
dorm room and with other students and seeing like, oh,
(33:48):
this is what life is supposed to be, like, this
is how other people live, and it was really such
a great experience for me. It's such an eye opener
and so speak no pun intended, you know. I was
very ambitious. I took six courses my first semester, and
more than anything else, I wanted to prove to myself
and to my parents that I did belong in such
(34:11):
a prestigious program. My brother Long was also accepted two
years before, and he was doing very well, so I
also wanted to prove to him, like, hey, your little
sister can can make it here too. And so for
the first semester I had an a average I had
a four point oh, which was incredible. I felt like, okay,
I did it finally, but that all sort of backfired
(34:36):
on me somehow, And you know, the mind works in
such such funny ways. And after receiving that a, that
four point, now I thought, okay, I set this bar.
I cannot go below this are at any cost. So
for my second semester, again, six courses and all really
(34:57):
difficult somewhere, even senior level courses that I had applied to.
At that point, I just thought I was really hard
on myself. I was really ambitious, and I joined several
different clubs, I had two different jobs. I just wanted
to prove it, proved to everyone that I could do it,
(35:17):
and I just shut down at some point, I think
the first difficult assignment I had, or the first even
a minus I received, I couldn't handle it, and so
I stopped going to classes. I started getting nightmares about,
you know, betraying my parents or like my my eyesight
worsening or being blind. Even Lee starts buckling under the
(35:42):
pressure to do all the things she feels she has
to be perfect, otherwise she's a complete failure. Faced with
the impossibility of perfection, she finds herself falling apart. I
would stop eating, I stopped waking up on time. I
just stopped showing up to classes. During that time, you know,
(36:05):
friends started to get concerned. I told Dr Hayes, my
psychiatrist at the time, I said, I think I'm not
doing well, and he said, well, you know, it's okay,
You're you're going to get through this. You've got a
four point of from the first semester. We can just
get you a medical withdrawal. It seems like you're really depressed,
and you've been depressed all this time. It's it's okay,
(36:25):
you've got high functioning depressions, but you're going to get
through this, and there are ways to get around the
grade situation. When he spoke to me, I assumed that
he would just write me a medical note to get
me excuse my classes, because that's sort of what he
told me. But that's not what happens. What happens next
(36:46):
is something that Lee or anyone who newly could never
have seemed coming. A few days later, I received a
knock on my door in the dorms, and you know,
to security guards with the direct or of the dorms
behind them, and they said, are you Lee Tran And
I said yes, and they said, we have reason to
(37:06):
believe that you're a danger to yourself, so grab all
your things. Don't take too much because it will be
confiscated anyway, but just grab essentials and we're going to
escort you to the Mount Sinai psyche Ward. And I
was so shocked, totally taken off guard, but I just
(37:27):
followed them. And I was in that psyche ward for
about I think a week or two weeks and just
feeling so incredibly alone. The doctors and the nurses and
therapists and they all kept asking me, are you suicidal?
How are you feeling? And I don't know. I didn't
(37:48):
understand why they were asking me that, because the thought
never really crossed my mind up until at point, up
until they sort of kept asking me, weren't they also
telling you that they were trying to reach Dr Hazen,
that they couldn't reach him. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
Even on the first day that I was there, they said, hey,
(38:08):
we don't quite know why you're here, you know. I
told him I was very depressed and that I wasn't
doing well in my classes, and they said, yeah, that's
not okay, that's I guess that's a good reason. But
we were going to have to talk to your psychiatrists.
But there's a problem. We can't really reach him. So
unless we're able to reach him, that's when we can
provide a proper diagnosis and proper treatment plan and then
(38:31):
send you on your way. And so day after day
they would come into my room and say, we can't
reach him. We can't we don't know where he is.
So you're just going to have to be patient. And
I think at that point I felt really abandoned. I
didn't understand what was going on, and I didn't feel
like there was anybody I could really reach out to.
My friends all saw me getting escorted out of the dorms,
(38:54):
and that was such a humiliating experience. I couldn't tell
my parents. My parents didn't know where I was. I
could tell my brothers, and at that point I had
such little contact with my family that even if I
had disappeared for two weeks, they didn't matter. They never
found out. I can't underscore enough what a profound failure
(39:20):
this was on the part of the psychiatrist Dr Hayes.
It turns out that doctor Hayes wasn't reachable because doctor
Hayes had gone on vacation. He was very green as
a psychiatrist. Lee was his first patient and he thought
that a good place to deposit her while he enjoyed
his time off would be involuntary committal to a psych word.
(39:46):
I mean, that's really extraordinary betrayal. Yes, we had discussed
it in his office that he would find a way
to get me this medical withdrawal, But I had no
idea that I would result in a two weeks stay
at the psych board and to to not even have
contact with him to figure out, Okay, what do I
(40:07):
do while I'm here? What do I tell the psychiatrists
in charge? I just felt so alone. I felt like
he really did betray me. And then even after I
was released, I made one more appointment to see him,
and you know, he acknowledged that maybe he shouldn't have
gone on vacation. He said I was allowed to be
(40:28):
mad at him. Um, yeah, I thought mad. I mean,
is that even enough? Is that word even enough to
describe what I'm feeling right now? And I think maybe
that's when you know, the wall that I had built
up over the years to separate myself from my emotions,
(40:51):
like the negative emotions mostly, but even the positive emotions.
I think that's when that wall began to crumble, because
I felt so incredibly upset and I just never went
back to see him, and he never inquired after me
after that either. You know, it's interesting what you're saying
(41:12):
to about feeling some of those more difficult feelings. And
it strikes me that you grew up never being allowed
to be angry, Like there was no room for being mad.
There's no room for being angry. That was all your
father's territory. And as a girl, there was no room,
you know. I remember every time I would get angry,
(41:32):
my mother would say, look at yourself. Look at that face.
Is that is that your face? Is this angry face?
And you know, I couldn't even see my face at
the time, but I didn't want to look in such
a way that wasn't me, and so I just would
would fix my face very quickly. And yeah, anger is
just something that I very seriously allowed myself to feel.
(41:55):
And if I did feel it, I didn't have a
word for it. And during my sessions at Dr Hayes,
it was very clear that I was unable to put
a name to what I was feeling oftentimes, and so
you know, we had a lot of sessions in which
there was complete silence because he would say, tell me
(42:16):
about your feelings after I had told him everything which
I thought were my feelings, but it was just facts.
I would just tell him facts about my life and
he said, well, how do you feel about it? And
I just my mind grew a blank. And I think
now the word angry is certainly one of the words
that I would have attributed to what I was feeling
(42:37):
during those sessions. And was it during that time that
you went back home and ended up having an argument
with your parents and actually did crossover into anger exasperation
and you take out your contacts and show them and
there's a shift. Yeah. Well, at this point, you know,
(43:01):
it's my second year at the Honors College, and I'm
just so depressed after this this episode in the psych word,
I really just descend into a spiral of darkness that
I was impossible for me to get out of. So,
you know, my medical draw from the previous semester wasn't
enough for me to to do well in my second
(43:23):
year that hunter, and so part of the Honors program
is that you had to maintain a three point five
g p A in order to stay. And I was
not able to maintain a g p A, and so
I was dismissed from the Honors College and matriculated to
Hunter College. And I lost all of my privileges, all
(43:45):
all those parks, the dorm room, the laptop, the tuition,
I lost it all, and so I had to move
out of the dring. And this is when I realized
that no matter how hard I try, I'm just I'm
not going to going to be able to escape my fate,
which to me at the time was a fate of
(44:06):
working in the nail salon with my mother. So I
take all of my belongings home, and my parents are
there and they see my bags, and there's sort of
this the sense of we told you so, you're a girl.
The fact that you made it this far as already
(44:26):
so shocking to us. My mother says, you know, when
your father first arrived to America, his greatest wish for
you all was to to get past high school. And
that's it. And now you know your brothers are they're
going to be done with college, all of them soon.
And the fact that you at least had one or
two years of college, that's great, you know, but if
(44:50):
you didn't do well, then that was to be expected
because you're a girl. And I was livid just at
that point. I thought, you know, I've lost everything. I've
lost any kind of sense of dignity. I've I've lost
all hope for a better future. And I thought, you
know what, I'm just gonna tell them. I'm just going
(45:11):
to tell them I've been wearing contact all this time
because I thought, you know what, I think part of it,
I wanted to hurt them. Um, that's part of why
I took out my contact. I wanted to show them like, look,
I betrayed you, and I've been doing it all this time,
and it's because you failed me. I really needed to
see and you refused to understand that. And so here,
(45:35):
look at this. What do you make of this now?
And I think doing that was a breakthrough in my
understanding of my father, especially because I expected for him
to punish me, and maybe in a way I wanted
him to punish me because I wanted to punish myself
for being such a failure. But and he did. He
(45:55):
smacked me once, but he kind of just looked afraid.
He looked like he was going to cry. I remember
thinking about that expression and thinking, what is that. Why
did he look like that. I could have sworn he
would beat me or just own me or something, but
he just sort of looked like a frail person who
(46:17):
was scared and paranoid. And the more that I really
examined that expression, the more I realized, Oh, he really
did love me. And seeing the fact that I was
relying on these contacts, even against his wishes, is when
he realized that he had failed me as a father.
(46:38):
And what was this failure Lie saw reflected in her
father's eyes. It was a terror of imperfection, of vulnerability
in an unforgiving existence that allowed no room for it.
If Lee has something wrong with her, if her eyes
don't work, then perhaps she'll be left behind. This is
(47:00):
when the potent cocktail of love and fear can turn
into desperation and secret keeping. When he realized, oh, my goodness,
my child actually really does need glasses. She really can't
see like other people. That's when he realized, oh, my goodness,
I failed to keep my child healthy. I don't know
(47:23):
even to this day, if he realizes sort of the
damage that he like the extent to which she had
damaged me by not allowing me to to wear glasses.
But then Lee's dad does something so surprising, so extraordinary,
that no one could have seen it coming. Perhaps it's
because time has gone by, Perhaps it's because she's on
(47:46):
the road to academic and therefore future success. Perhaps this
is one of those nods of the turtle. He asks
Lee if she would like to have Lasik surgery. When
he saw an ad for la si surgery and he
started to really develop a relationship with me. He starts
(48:07):
to ask me about my contacts, and this is obviously
after I'm doing a little bit better in my life.
But he says, do these contacts hurt you in any way?
And I say, no, you know, I've been wearing them
all these years, if it's fine, And he's like, well,
have you ever considered lap sick surgery? And I think
(48:31):
I was just so taken aback, like fly on Earth?
Would you even ask about Lasik surgery? Do you know
how expensive that is? He just was so excited about it,
to the point where, you know, he he offered to
pay for it. He said, your mother and I have
some money saves that we can pay for this, and
I think he just wanted to make things right. I
think he wanted to be my father, to to fulfill
(48:53):
that role as my father. Again, you're back in school, right,
You're at Columbia at that point, and you're still an undergraduate.
I'm still an undergraduate because after I had matriculated to
Hunter College, there was a time when I just was
so depressed that I dropped out of college altogether. And yeah,
(49:15):
I spent two years just wandering the streets because I
didn't want to tell my parents that I had dropped
out of college altogether. I feared their viewpoints that was
expected for a girl to not do well. And then
another angel, another mentor, goes above and beyond. Lee runs
into a woman she knew in high school, a legal
advocate who she hasn't seen in years. This woman pushes
(49:39):
and probes, and Lee reluctantly ends up telling her everything
that has happened. And she told me to apply to
all of these different colleges, one of which happened to
be the School of General Studies at Columbia University. And
I laughed and said, there's no way that I can
make it there, but sure, I'll apply, I'll humor you,
and yes, somehow I was accepted to Columbia. And when
(50:04):
I was accepted, the admissions officer who interviewed me told
me that it was on the strength of my essay,
my personal statement, that I was accepted. And that's when
I thought, oh, my gosh, my my story. I guess
was worth telling. Prayer, supplication, blessing, bargaining. As a child,
(50:29):
while Lee knelt before an ever expanding altar and recited
Buddhist scripture she knew by heart, the air thick with incense,
another practice began taking root, a practice all her own.
She constructed a crystal dome of protection in her mind's eye,
one that would keep her and everyone she loved safe
(50:51):
from harm. You know, it occurs to me that you
write about your crystal dome of protection, that as a
child you would have trouble falling asleep or be afraid
of the dark, and create very meticulously this crystal dome
(51:12):
of protection over yourself, and then over every single you know,
one of you and your family, and then even then
over the monsters that you were afraid we're lurking in
corners because you felt sorry for them because they needed
protection too. I was just really struck by that and
(51:32):
that being you know, almost like a child's form of
a kind of prayer or looking for protection or causality. Yeah,
and it's funny because I do that choose this day.
So it's something that hasn't left me, you know. And
when someone in my family or a good friend of
(51:54):
mine goes away in a trip, I was just quickly
create a dome around them so that they can arrive
through the destination safely. I think it it comes from
my wish for us to be protected and all the
stories that my parents told me, and a feeling of powerlessness.
And for me it was it was one way in
(52:15):
which I could feel like I was in control of
my situation, which at the time, you know as a child,
there are all these events happening around you, your destitute.
You know your parents are struggling, and even though you
can't quite grasp what those struggles are because you don't
yet have the language or just wherewithal to understand, you
(52:37):
feel it on a deep level. And I think for
me that came out during these sleepless nights. I felt
that helplessness, and so I would just create these crystal
domes in the hopes that we could all be protected,
including the monsters. Family Secret is a production of I
(53:03):
Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethan Macaluso are the executive producers.
Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you have a
secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and
your story could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our
number is one eight Secret zero. That's secret and then
(53:25):
the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram
at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com, slash Family
Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secret Spot. And if
you want to know about my family's secret that inspired
this podcast, check out my New York Times best selling
memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
(53:51):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. By
the time I was ten, street name signs had disintegrated
into a blurry haze of green and white unless I
was almost directly under them. I couldn't read colored words
against the background unless there was enough of a contrast,
and I couldn't read the aisle signs in the supermarket
(00:21):
unless I squinted. Faces started to look the same to me,
their features indistinguishable. I became anxious over my inability to
recognize people as they approached, but I learned to use
the idiosyncrasies of their gait and the particular way their
bodies occupied space to identify them. And when that failed,
I learned to look down at my feet while I
walked to avoid accidental eye contact with anyone I couldn't recognize. Eventually,
(00:47):
as my sight worsened and my squinting powers failed me,
I developed a new technique. I would push the bottom
lid of my eye inward and upward to narrow my
field of vision until my eyes were almost closed, but
not quite. This technique was more effective than the regular squint,
and for a time it worked. It was almost like
a super squint. Walking alongside my mother and father. One
(01:10):
day in a right aid pharmacy, I decided to try
out my new technique in order to read the signs
hanging above the aisles. My father had walked ahead of us.
I held on to my mother with my left hand
and pushed in the bottom lids of my eyes with
my right, using my thumb and index finger. Suddenly, my
mother's face was close to mine, her eyes wide as
(01:30):
she bent down towards me. Gale, what are you doing,
she whispered, harshly, Oh this, I said, nothing, just trying
to read the signs. Don't let your father see you,
she said. She pulled my hand down and forced it
against my side. Stop pretending you can't see, or you
really will be blind. You know how your father feels
about that. She glanced nervously towards my father. I'm not pretending, mom,
(01:55):
I really can't. What is it? My father had started
to walk back toward us. Nothing, my mother said, quickly,
straining up. There was something in her eye and we
were trying to get it out. It's out now, though
she squeezed my hand, almost crushing it. That's Lee Tran,
reading from her debut memoir House of Sticks. Le's is
(02:16):
a story of loyalty, family, tenacity, and a secret she
kept for a long time, so long it very nearly
destroyed her. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(02:40):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
What was the landscape of your childhood before you were
three years old? And then after I was born in
(03:03):
a small town in southern Vietnam. In nine my family
and I were able to immigrate to the United States
through a program known as the Humanitarian Operation, which helped
resettle former prisoners of war here in the States. And
my father was a former pow. He's spent almost ten
(03:25):
years in the re education camps of Vietnam. And you know,
that was our lucky ticket out. And so we we
came to Ridgewood, Queens in the middle of a blizzard,
no less, so it was neat, let's just say, very
cold for us of Vietnmee people. And you know it
(03:46):
was it was really difficult to navigate this foreign country.
None of us spoke the language. I know. I was
only three and I had three older brothers at the time,
the oldest of which was just nine years old, and
so finding a way to make ends meet it was
really difficult. But a family friend introduced us to this
(04:09):
sort of home sweatshop labor and so that's what we did.
And it required us to borrow a sewing machine from
the company and then we would sort of work to
pay it off over the years. There will be a
weekly quota and you know, maybe one thousand ties or
(04:30):
two thousand commer buns, and we had to deliver it
every week. So that was my first job as a toddler,
which was to to help my family make these ties
and commer buns. And I separated the materials, gave them
to my father who would then sow the ties, and
then my brothers and I would take it out from
(04:51):
underneath the sewing machine and turn it inside out and
it was just this little family assembly line. Yeah. We
we did that all the way up until I was twelve.
Describe your mother for me, Well, my mother, she's a
very fiercely independent woman, um, and she was sort of
(05:16):
the main reason that we were able to keep it
together as a family. My father was incredible as well.
You know, he tried really hard to just get us
through the system. We would spend a lot of days
at the International Rescue Committee, and he would take down notes,
you know, exactly where he needed to take us to
(05:38):
get vaccinations, for instance, to get to go to the
food stamp office, and to get my brothers enrolled in school.
Whereas my mother, you know, she was more responsible for
just calculating how much money we would need to put
(05:58):
food on the table while also keeping us warm. And
she was also part of the reason my father wasn't
so abusive all the time. You know, she would find
ways to calm him down whenever she saw his temper
get out of hand because of the PTSD that he
suffered from. So during that time, she would always ask
(06:23):
us to learn Vietnamese. She would sit us down, tell us, okay,
notebooks out, we're gonna learn Vietnamese, gonna speak only Vietnamese
in the house. Because I don't want you to forget
your roots. I don't want you to forget where you
came from. So I was really diligent. I love language,
and I think she's the reason I love language. Whereas
(06:45):
you know, acentimes my brothers would get to go out
and play in the park and say, oh yeah, we'll
learn later. Mom, and she would say, okay, Lee, you stay,
and I would ask, well, why why did they get
to go off and play? But now I don't regret
that I stayed because I can speak, read, and write
in Vietnamese. And it was during that time that I
(07:07):
heard a lot of stories from her. She told me
all of these stories about herself in Vietnam, about the
time that she ran away from a matchmaker because she
did not want to get married um, and about how
she took on her family's business in Vietnam and was
a merchant and she would ride her motorcycle to all
(07:28):
these different shops and deliver goods and everyone loved her.
And it was just a really great time for me
to spend with my mother. But at the same time,
she was also really strict in terms of teaching me
how to be a good at housewife, which was so
sort of antithetical to who she is on the inside.
(07:50):
But I think after marrying my father and seeing how
difficult it was to be a wife, and especially in
my father's household where yes five of older sisters who
were very abusive towards my mother because they felt like
she wasn't a good enough housewife, she didn't know how
to cook when she first married into the family, and
(08:11):
so they would keep her up at night. They would
throw hot water on her just to sort of show her, Okay,
you are now our servant, basically, and she didn't want
that sort of fate for me, so she said, Okay,
you need to learn how to cook, you need to
learn how to sweep, how to full clothing properly, and
(08:31):
you know, you need to learn all of these things
so that you can have a better future and not
like the future that I had. Buddhism is central to
the Tran household. One of the first things Lee's father
does when they settle into their new home and queens
is to build an altar high up on their living
room wall, one which will eventually cover the entire wall
(08:55):
from end to end, to honor the Buddha and the bodhisattvas.
There's a framed picture of the Great Shaki Yamuni Buddha,
the awakened One, as well as a picture of kwan
Ambo Tat, the Goddess of Compassion. Call out her name
three times when you need help, Lee's father tells her
she has a thousand arms. Her arms will reach you,
(09:20):
So I was struck with the significance of the altar
in your family's home, and the deities and the saints
and the role that they play in daily life, and
in the idea of protection and the idea of fulfillment
of hopes and desires, and how deeply that was internalized
(09:46):
in you as a child. Sure, yeah, I think it's
different for my father versus it's meaning for my mother.
But I know for my father when he was in
the re education camps or even just before that, serving
as a soldier in the war, and not knowing, you know,
if he was going to live one day or die
(10:06):
the next, having a faith to hold on too, and
just believing that there is someone, some Buddhisatta or Buddha
out there watching over him, which was so powerful. And
at some point in the re education camp he sees
that one of his fellow prisoners had had caught a
turtle in his trap, and coming from a Buddhist background,
(10:30):
he felt sorry for the turtle and couldn't bear to
see his his fellow prisoner kill it. And he said
he asked if he could trade scallions for the turtle,
and the prisoner said, short, you know, I don't know
what to do with this thing anyway, And my father
put a splint on the turtle's broken leg and set
it free. And this was a story that he would
(10:51):
tell us when we were younger. Say, when I released
this turtle, it took a few steps and turned around
to look at me, and then it nodded at me
three times, and three days later I was released from prison.
And just this story is something that has stuck with
me throughout my entire life. And it's such a a
(11:12):
symbol of the faith that my father had in Buddhism
and these spirits that protected him because he thought this
turtle was some sort of incarnation of the Goddess of
compassion and the turtle was sent to save him. You know,
in those conditions, I wouldn't blame a person to hold
on to something like that. And for my mother, you know,
(11:35):
when we were in Vietnam, actually all of us, at
one point or another, we would get severely ill, especially
coming from such a rural place in Vietnam where there
were shamans and witch doctors and not really medicine that
was too modern at the time, and so she would
often pray. But the power of prayer also gave her
(11:58):
the strength to take her children from place to place
and and just pray that, you know, some miracle would arrive.
And oftentimes a miracle did somehow arrive, and we all
endured through our illnesses and survived. Lee's father was one
(12:18):
of almost two and a half million South Vietnamese soldiers
who were captured and then forced into backbreaking and often
dangerous labor sweeping mine fields, digging wells and trains, cutting
down trees. He served a ten year sentence. He rarely
spoke of his time in the camps, with the exception
of the story of the turtle. Could you talk a
(12:43):
little bit more about your father's both his temper and
his strictness. It was difficult for me. I remember one
time I was going home from somewhere and I was
walking with my father, and he went into the store
and bought me a possible which was such a surprise
for me because at the time we were so poor
(13:04):
that asking for treats, asking for snacks, which most of
the time just out of the question, and the fact
that he just went to the store and bought me
a popsicle, I was so so happy and excited. No
skipping um and I looked up at my father. I
remember a moment of such deep love for this man
who gave me this popsicle, and he remember him looking
(13:25):
at me and considering me, and then just out of nowhere,
smacking me. He says, don't look at me like that.
And I was so shocked. I didn't I didn't know
what had happened. My possicle fell out of my hand.
And that moment was not a rare one. And it
wasn't just me, you know, my my three older brothers,
we also sort of suffered through these tempests of my father's. Yeah,
(13:49):
it was really it was tough. It was tough to
to navigate such a difficult relationship while at the same
time loving him and fear him. You know that it
was difficult to reconcile those two emotions. And there it
seems like there was also an understanding that he had
(14:13):
really been through something and that the ten years that
he spent as a pow were at the root cause
of his rage and his tyrannical behavior, That there was
a reason for this that was embedded into the family
culture as well. Yeah, I think this is something that
(14:36):
would be uncovered as time went on, you know, because
when I was a child, I didn't. I sort of
just accepted it. I accepted his outbursts. But as I
grew older, I began to question it. And I remember
an episode in which he was yelling at my mother,
and I thought, why, why is he doing that? At
the time, I was split between my loyalty towards my father,
(15:00):
my life. He towards my mother, and that's when I
started to think, that's not okay. You know, he can't
treat my mother that way. And out of that questioning,
I started to think about his past, which he he
doesn't really talk about much, you know, I would only
see it through snippets of conversation, or once in a while,
(15:20):
when he was in the mood, he would just offer
up like a glimpse of what his past was like.
Or other times, whenever he would beat us, my mother
would say, you know, stop that crying, don't be mad.
One day, you'll understand. Sometimes she would explain a little bit,
but nothing too in depth, perhaps because she didn't think
(15:41):
that we would be able to understand at such young ages.
But definitely when I got older, I wasn't quite able
to forgive him yet, but understanding where he was coming
from that he was this prisoner of war and that
re education camps really dealt a blow to his is
psyche and just traumatized him in such a horrendous way
(16:06):
that you know, he's still to this day has nightmares
about it. And those nightmares were a part of your
childhood hearing him, you know, having nightmares, right, yes, absolutely,
I would, you know, wake up in the middle of
the night, you know, this man is this screaming and
my mother is struggling to hold him down and to
wake him up. Sometimes you would walk in his sleep
(16:26):
and run from one corner of the house to the other,
telling her we have to go. You have to grab
the children there after us, and she's saying, what hoo
are you talking about? Calmed down? You know, and so yeah,
she she really had to be strong for us as
well in terms of getting him to calm down while
trying to shield us from what he was going through.
(16:48):
And that was that was hard. You know, as children,
we didn't we didn't let on that we knew what
was going on, probably because we were really just afraid
to see our father like this. But we knew that
come morning time everything would be okay again. We'll be
right back when we starts school. She has very little
(17:24):
grasp of the English language, unlike her brothers, who went
straight into the school system when they emigrated. She's been
home with her mother for a couple of years, speaking
Vietnamese and listening to her mother's stories. So Lee is
placed at first in English as a second language. She's
socially awkward, kind of doesn't know how to be. She
(17:47):
hasn't learned any social cues, so she's a bit of
a loner and academically challenged. But it isn't until the
third grade that a teacher notices that Lee is having
trouble seeing blackboard, and she sends Lee home with a
note to her parents letting them know that Lee needs eyeglasses. Yeah,
(18:07):
in the third grade, you know, they had like kids
line up to take the Snell and I chart, which
you know everyone knows is the one with the big
E on it. And I got a letter then to
him that said, hey, your daughter has a stigmatism and
she might need glasses. And my father just completely freaked out.
(18:29):
I had no idea what was happening. He took the note,
ripped it up, and told me never to speak of
it again. And he was cursing at me, and I
didn't want to do the wrong thing. To me. It
was a homework assignment that I had to do, you know.
So I was like, oh, my goodness, but I need
to sign. I don't know what to do. So I
tried again to ask him, and he smacked me, and
(18:51):
I was just so furious. He told me that the
government was after me and how could I be so
stupid as to give in to the government wanting to
take away my eye sight? Because he thought that eyeglasses
were a government conspiracy and if I ever wore glasses,
my sight would worsen, and it was just deployed by
the government to get me to be dependent on eyeglasses. Um,
(19:15):
so the more my eyes I would worsen, I would
have to buy more glasses. And he explained the whole
thing and so and that was the end of the discussion,
and I thought, Okay, I guess he has a point.
You know. I mean, I was eight, So you proceed
through elementary school and middle school and you need glasses
(19:36):
and you don't have them, And what's that like, Like,
what was your experience actually of the world around you
that you could see or that you couldn't see. What
was it actually like sort of being you during those years.
It's so funny because I don't even remember the moment
in which I realized that I needed glasses. It was
such a gradual process. Even during the snow and chart
(19:58):
I thought, Oh, I can't see those letters, but they're
so far away. Why would I need to see those letters?
You know? I just remember, Yeah, around the fifth grade
is when I'm walking in the street and I realized
I can't even see the street signs anymore. And it
felt like just my perception of the world was just
(20:20):
getting narrower and narrower, and it felt like I was
looking at the world to this foggy window. But no
matter how much I tried to rub this window, it
just wouldn't unfuged. And so it was hard. But I
think my father was very successful in sort of convincing
(20:41):
me that, no, this is how everybody's eyes work, and
you know, you're it'll be fine. You also had an
older brother who had eyesight that wasn't excellent, and it
had managed to excel academically even with his poor eyesight,
and even with no glasses, so you should be able
to do the same thing, right exactly. Yeah, my brother
(21:02):
Long I think he also had the same note sent
home in the third grade. I don't know if he
went through the same exact experience in terms of my
father ripping up his note, but I don't even know
if he even gave the note to my father. But
he was able to do well in school because his
prescription just wasn't as high as mine, and so even
if he sat at the back of the class whom
(21:24):
he was still able to see the board, whereas my
vision just deteriorated as the years went on, and the
more that I wasn't able to see, the more headaches
I got and the more stressed I became. And so
for my father it was so clear it was just, well,
you're a girl. That's why you're not doing well in school.
(21:47):
That it was as easy as that. For him, it
was just a simple matter of gender differences in terms
of intelligence. He felt like, well, boys are just smarter
than girls, and then that's why my brother was able
to do well. And he said, you know, it's okay,
you don't have to do well if you you don't
get it. I mean, he just chalked it up to
(22:08):
a lack of intelligence as opposed to just seeing that
his daughter needed glasses dearly. When Lee's in the eighth grade,
she takes the standardized test that will determine where she'll
go to high school. The best public high school in
New York City is the Bronx High School of Science.
This is one of those tests where you fill in
(22:29):
little bubbles, but Lee runs out of time. Her inability
to see has greatly affected her ability to master advanced math,
so she quickly and randomly fills in the remaining bubbles
just to be clear. This is a test that many
more privileged students spend years preparing for with hired tutors
(22:50):
and special courses, but perhaps the Goddess of Compassion is
looking out for her. Lee is admitted to Bronx Science.
At this point, her parents sweatshop labor has come to
an end, and Lee's mother takes a course to learn
how to be a manicurist. She teaches Lee as well,
the two of them practicing on orange peels and fake nails.
(23:13):
Her mom works at a series of nail salons until
she ends up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, at a salon she
eventually buys. Lee's parents dream of being business owners in
America comes true. So now Lee's in ninth grade, attending
Bronx Science and working part time in her parents salon,
where she often witnesses clients being rude berating her mother
(23:37):
for her limited English. Lee swallows her anger and keeps
her head down. At school, she keeps her head down
for a different reason. She doesn't want anyone to notice
how much she's struggling. It's a lot to endure. So
now you're at Bronx High School Science, and you know,
(23:57):
one of the things that strikes me in your story, Lee,
is the the appearance from time to time, at really
important times of angels, you know, of of just people
who I mean, it's the thing I found most moving
really about your story is that there were these people,
(24:18):
these adults who responded to you, who saw something in you,
who went above and beyond, and there was this kind
of ongoing compassionate intervention even as there was so much
else that was so incredibly difficult. And one of the
(24:39):
first of those was this very kind professor when you're
in ninth grade who offers to get you a pair
of glasses. Yeah. Yeah, this is in the ninth grade,
and I hadn't had the courage to really tell anybody
yet that I was really suffering and couldn't see. I
just kept asking to choose if I could sit in
(25:00):
the front of the classroom. I did tell him that
I couldn't see, but that I was waiting for medicaid.
You know, I was waiting to get a pair of glasses.
And obviously that was alive because I knew that I
could have gotten glasses at any point except that my
parents would disown me. And you know, I told one
student who had attended the middle school with me, and
he also got into Brock Science. And when he heard,
(25:23):
he was just so shocked and he said, this stuck's ridiculously.
You need to tell somebody. And I said, no, no no, no, please,
don't tell anybody. I'm going to get in trouble. Thank goodness.
He did not listen to me, and he told an
eighth grade teacher. And this eighth grade teacher was actually
not even a teacher of mine. He just headed the
chess club, which I was a part of in the
(25:45):
eighth grade. And so, you know, one day I get
a message and email from Mr de Chanct. He's a teacher,
and he says highly. I heard from Michael that you're
you're not doing so well, and I would really love
to help you out. And so we meet in my
neighborhood in Ridgewood and he says, you know, I need
(26:05):
you to be able to see. You really need to
be able to see to do well in school, to
have a good and bright future. And he says, this
will be our little secret. Don't tell anybody, don't tell
your parents, and and just keep these glasses in your
locker at school. What's the worst that can happen? Nothing,
You know, as long as you don't tell anybody, you'll
be able to see, and you'll be able to get
(26:26):
better grades. And it was just such an incredibly compassionate
and kind gesture. And also, you know, putting on glasses
for the first time and being able to see and realizing, oh,
my goodness, this is how I'm supposed to see the world.
Is this how everybody sees the world? You know? I
looked at a tree right outside of the glasses place
(26:47):
and saw the veins on the leaves and it was
so shocking. But at the same time, as much as
I wanted to be able to see as a guilt
was so overwhelming too, because I thought, oh my god,
I betrayed my parents. They're gonna just only they're going
to find out somehow. Even if they don't find out,
I'm doing something wrong, I'm doing something that they don't
(27:11):
want me to do. So I took off the glasses
right away. You know, I tried to use the glasses
as little as possible during school, and before I knew it,
I started not to be able to see again. You
know that the board started becoming blurry, and I just
didn't understand what was going on. I thought, oh, oh
my god, wait, why is my vision plummeting again? And
(27:33):
then I sort of recalled my father's words, saying that
the government was after me and that glasses are designed
to keep you dependent on them, and second you put
them on, your eyesight was going to deteriorate. And that's
that's exactly what was happening to me. And so I
confide it in a friend and she said, oh, yeah,
(27:54):
that's normal, that's just that's just your body growing and
everybody's eyes change, especially those with my opia. She said,
one year, I had to get my glasses changed three times.
So yeah, that's all you need. You just need to
get a different pair of glasses with a higher prescription.
S right exactly, yeah, you know. To her it was
(28:15):
a very simple matter. But to me, I thought, oh God, um,
should I reach out to mister chunk It. And then
again that sense of guilt, that sense of having let
somebody down. Not only did I let my parents down,
but I let mister chunk It down, because all you
wanted was for me to do well in school. And
now my vision was slummitting again, and my grades were
(28:35):
also slummitting, and there it just seemed to be an
endless cycle, and I thought, oh God, maybe I'm cursed,
which is interesting. It sort of goes back to this
theme of mismaking or meaning making. You know, every time
something good happens, I think, oh it's an angel. Every
time something that happens, I think, oh, I'm just cursed.
(28:55):
Or Buddhism, there's this idea of reincarnation and if you
had done something bad in a past life, then you
would be reincarnated in this life with a lot of trouble,
or you would have to suffer more in this life.
And so I thought, oh God, I must have been
a horrible, horrible person in the past life. I never
reached out to missitor Chunket again. I was so ashamed
(29:17):
of myself and little, my, little, my grades just I
went from being an A student to just barely a
see student. Any number of stories we've told on this
podcast have had to do with the failure of adults
to intervene when a child is at risk, whether parents
or teachers or heads of institutions. But then there are angels,
(29:42):
adults who see what needs doing and by becoming involved,
can change the trajectory of a life. Mrs Walsh, Lee's
high school guidance counselor, is one of those grown ups.
At one point, she even calls child Services to intervene
a situation Lee and immediately diffuses by downplaying the severity
(30:02):
of her situation. She doesn't want anyone going after her parents.
But throughout Mrs Walsh is an unwavering source of support
and make sure these teachers know why she's having a
hard time in the classroom. So during this time, it's
my senior year and I have to apply for colleges,
(30:24):
and Mrs Walsh, she just went above and beyond. She
spoke to all of my teachers and told them what
I had been going through in. My teachers were really
kind and understanding, and so they didn't give me such
terrible grades. Are really generous with their grading, and she
wrote a really extensive letter of recommendation. She asked other
(30:46):
teachers to write letters of recommendation. And I think my
grades from my freshman year, when I sort of had
the glasses and when I was trying really really hard
and I wasn't sort of bogged down with depression. I
was able to get by freshman year, was able to
balance out my grades towards the end of my four years,
(31:07):
and that's how I was able to get into the
mcaulay Honors College at Hunter. We'll be back in a
moment with more family secrets. Things finally seem to be
(31:31):
going rightfully. She's been accepted in this big deal, prestigious
honors college. She's regularly seeing a therapist, a silver lining
from the incident with child services, and her brother offers
her a life changing present. Before you begin the McCauley
Honors program at Hunter, You're oldest brother, who had just
(31:54):
finished college himself, gives you a gift. Yes, it was
a graduation gift. And I had asked my parents to
go to my graduation and they said, oh, we can't
miss work, which I understood at the time, and so
my oldest brother and my youngest older brother, Tin and
Long they both agreed to go. And afterwards, my oldest
(32:17):
brother said, hey, I want to take you somewhere. It's
a surprise. And when he takes me to contact or
lends the shop that sells contacts and he buys me
a box of contact so that my parents would never
be able to find out, it was a life changer.
You know, this is a way for me to see
always and without my parents knowing that being helped in
(32:42):
some way, or without my father thinking that the government
was after me. So I start the Macaulay Honors College
fully armed. You know, I was finally able to see
and it's a fresh start. I can leave the path behind.
I'm seeing the psychiatrist and I just feel like the
tides are finally turning. Maybe I'm not cursed after all.
(33:04):
You know, this is I'm going to make it work.
You're living away from your parents for the first time.
You have a full scholarship, you have a stipend, you
have a dorm room, you have a laptop. You're all set.
Macaulay is one of these. This such an amazing program
in that if you're accepted then it's a full ride
and you get all of these perks. It really was
(33:26):
a chance for me to start over and to see
the world too. At that point, I had never even
been to a dinner. I'd never really been to restaurants
because my my family was too poor, and even going
over to other people's houses was such a rare occurrence
for me that now that I was living in a
dorm room and with other students and seeing like, oh,
(33:48):
this is what life is supposed to be, like, this
is how other people live, and it was really such
a great experience for me. It's such an eye opener
and so speak no pun intended, you know. I was
very ambitious. I took six courses my first semester, and
more than anything else, I wanted to prove to myself
and to my parents that I did belong in such
(34:11):
a prestigious program. My brother Long was also accepted two
years before, and he was doing very well, so I
also wanted to prove to him, like, hey, your little
sister can can make it here too. And so for
the first semester I had an a average I had
a four point oh, which was incredible. I felt like, okay,
I did it finally, but that all sort of backfired
(34:36):
on me somehow, And you know, the mind works in
such such funny ways. And after receiving that a, that
four point, now I thought, okay, I set this bar.
I cannot go below this are at any cost. So
for my second semester, again, six courses and all really
(34:57):
difficult somewhere, even senior level courses that I had applied to.
At that point, I just thought I was really hard
on myself. I was really ambitious, and I joined several
different clubs, I had two different jobs. I just wanted
to prove it, proved to everyone that I could do it,
(35:17):
and I just shut down at some point, I think
the first difficult assignment I had, or the first even
a minus I received, I couldn't handle it, and so
I stopped going to classes. I started getting nightmares about,
you know, betraying my parents or like my my eyesight
worsening or being blind. Even Lee starts buckling under the
(35:42):
pressure to do all the things she feels she has
to be perfect, otherwise she's a complete failure. Faced with
the impossibility of perfection, she finds herself falling apart. I
would stop eating, I stopped waking up on time. I
just stopped showing up to classes. During that time, you know,
(36:05):
friends started to get concerned. I told Dr Hayes, my
psychiatrist at the time, I said, I think I'm not
doing well, and he said, well, you know, it's okay,
You're you're going to get through this. You've got a
four point of from the first semester. We can just
get you a medical withdrawal. It seems like you're really depressed,
and you've been depressed all this time. It's it's okay,
(36:25):
you've got high functioning depressions, but you're going to get
through this, and there are ways to get around the
grade situation. When he spoke to me, I assumed that
he would just write me a medical note to get
me excuse my classes, because that's sort of what he
told me. But that's not what happens. What happens next
(36:46):
is something that Lee or anyone who newly could never
have seemed coming. A few days later, I received a
knock on my door in the dorms, and you know,
to security guards with the direct or of the dorms
behind them, and they said, are you Lee Tran And
I said yes, and they said, we have reason to
(37:06):
believe that you're a danger to yourself, so grab all
your things. Don't take too much because it will be
confiscated anyway, but just grab essentials and we're going to
escort you to the Mount Sinai psyche Ward. And I
was so shocked, totally taken off guard, but I just
(37:27):
followed them. And I was in that psyche ward for
about I think a week or two weeks and just
feeling so incredibly alone. The doctors and the nurses and
therapists and they all kept asking me, are you suicidal?
How are you feeling? And I don't know. I didn't
(37:48):
understand why they were asking me that, because the thought
never really crossed my mind up until at point, up
until they sort of kept asking me, weren't they also
telling you that they were trying to reach Dr Hazen,
that they couldn't reach him. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
Even on the first day that I was there, they said, hey,
(38:08):
we don't quite know why you're here, you know. I
told him I was very depressed and that I wasn't
doing well in my classes, and they said, yeah, that's
not okay, that's I guess that's a good reason. But
we were going to have to talk to your psychiatrists.
But there's a problem. We can't really reach him. So
unless we're able to reach him, that's when we can
provide a proper diagnosis and proper treatment plan and then
(38:31):
send you on your way. And so day after day
they would come into my room and say, we can't
reach him. We can't we don't know where he is.
So you're just going to have to be patient. And
I think at that point I felt really abandoned. I
didn't understand what was going on, and I didn't feel
like there was anybody I could really reach out to.
My friends all saw me getting escorted out of the dorms,
(38:54):
and that was such a humiliating experience. I couldn't tell
my parents. My parents didn't know where I was. I
could tell my brothers, and at that point I had
such little contact with my family that even if I
had disappeared for two weeks, they didn't matter. They never
found out. I can't underscore enough what a profound failure
(39:20):
this was on the part of the psychiatrist Dr Hayes.
It turns out that doctor Hayes wasn't reachable because doctor
Hayes had gone on vacation. He was very green as
a psychiatrist. Lee was his first patient and he thought
that a good place to deposit her while he enjoyed
his time off would be involuntary committal to a psych word.
(39:46):
I mean, that's really extraordinary betrayal. Yes, we had discussed
it in his office that he would find a way
to get me this medical withdrawal, But I had no
idea that I would result in a two weeks stay
at the psych board and to to not even have
contact with him to figure out, Okay, what do I
(40:07):
do while I'm here? What do I tell the psychiatrists
in charge? I just felt so alone. I felt like
he really did betray me. And then even after I
was released, I made one more appointment to see him,
and you know, he acknowledged that maybe he shouldn't have
gone on vacation. He said I was allowed to be
(40:28):
mad at him. Um, yeah, I thought mad. I mean,
is that even enough? Is that word even enough to
describe what I'm feeling right now? And I think maybe
that's when you know, the wall that I had built
up over the years to separate myself from my emotions,
(40:51):
like the negative emotions mostly, but even the positive emotions.
I think that's when that wall began to crumble, because
I felt so incredibly upset and I just never went
back to see him, and he never inquired after me
after that either. You know, it's interesting what you're saying
(41:12):
to about feeling some of those more difficult feelings. And
it strikes me that you grew up never being allowed
to be angry, Like there was no room for being mad.
There's no room for being angry. That was all your
father's territory. And as a girl, there was no room,
you know. I remember every time I would get angry,
(41:32):
my mother would say, look at yourself. Look at that face.
Is that is that your face? Is this angry face?
And you know, I couldn't even see my face at
the time, but I didn't want to look in such
a way that wasn't me, and so I just would
would fix my face very quickly. And yeah, anger is
just something that I very seriously allowed myself to feel.
(41:55):
And if I did feel it, I didn't have a
word for it. And during my sessions at Dr Hayes,
it was very clear that I was unable to put
a name to what I was feeling oftentimes, and so
you know, we had a lot of sessions in which
there was complete silence because he would say, tell me
(42:16):
about your feelings after I had told him everything which
I thought were my feelings, but it was just facts.
I would just tell him facts about my life and
he said, well, how do you feel about it? And
I just my mind grew a blank. And I think
now the word angry is certainly one of the words
that I would have attributed to what I was feeling
(42:37):
during those sessions. And was it during that time that
you went back home and ended up having an argument
with your parents and actually did crossover into anger exasperation
and you take out your contacts and show them and
there's a shift. Yeah. Well, at this point, you know,
(43:01):
it's my second year at the Honors College, and I'm
just so depressed after this this episode in the psych word,
I really just descend into a spiral of darkness that
I was impossible for me to get out of. So,
you know, my medical draw from the previous semester wasn't
enough for me to to do well in my second
(43:23):
year that hunter, and so part of the Honors program
is that you had to maintain a three point five
g p A in order to stay. And I was
not able to maintain a g p A, and so
I was dismissed from the Honors College and matriculated to
Hunter College. And I lost all of my privileges, all
(43:45):
all those parks, the dorm room, the laptop, the tuition,
I lost it all, and so I had to move
out of the dring. And this is when I realized
that no matter how hard I try, I'm just I'm
not going to going to be able to escape my fate,
which to me at the time was a fate of
(44:06):
working in the nail salon with my mother. So I
take all of my belongings home, and my parents are
there and they see my bags, and there's sort of
this the sense of we told you so, you're a girl.
The fact that you made it this far as already
(44:26):
so shocking to us. My mother says, you know, when
your father first arrived to America, his greatest wish for
you all was to to get past high school. And
that's it. And now you know your brothers are they're
going to be done with college, all of them soon.
And the fact that you at least had one or
two years of college, that's great, you know, but if
(44:50):
you didn't do well, then that was to be expected
because you're a girl. And I was livid just at
that point. I thought, you know, I've lost everything. I've
lost any kind of sense of dignity. I've I've lost
all hope for a better future. And I thought, you
know what, I'm just gonna tell them. I'm just going
(45:11):
to tell them I've been wearing contact all this time
because I thought, you know what, I think part of it,
I wanted to hurt them. Um, that's part of why
I took out my contact. I wanted to show them like, look,
I betrayed you, and I've been doing it all this time,
and it's because you failed me. I really needed to
see and you refused to understand that. And so here,
(45:35):
look at this. What do you make of this now?
And I think doing that was a breakthrough in my
understanding of my father, especially because I expected for him
to punish me, and maybe in a way I wanted
him to punish me because I wanted to punish myself
for being such a failure. But and he did. He
(45:55):
smacked me once, but he kind of just looked afraid.
He looked like he was going to cry. I remember
thinking about that expression and thinking, what is that. Why
did he look like that. I could have sworn he
would beat me or just own me or something, but
he just sort of looked like a frail person who
(46:17):
was scared and paranoid. And the more that I really
examined that expression, the more I realized, Oh, he really
did love me. And seeing the fact that I was
relying on these contacts, even against his wishes, is when
he realized that he had failed me as a father.
(46:38):
And what was this failure Lie saw reflected in her
father's eyes. It was a terror of imperfection, of vulnerability
in an unforgiving existence that allowed no room for it.
If Lee has something wrong with her, if her eyes
don't work, then perhaps she'll be left behind. This is
(47:00):
when the potent cocktail of love and fear can turn
into desperation and secret keeping. When he realized, oh, my goodness,
my child actually really does need glasses. She really can't
see like other people. That's when he realized, oh, my goodness,
I failed to keep my child healthy. I don't know
(47:23):
even to this day, if he realizes sort of the
damage that he like the extent to which she had
damaged me by not allowing me to to wear glasses.
But then Lee's dad does something so surprising, so extraordinary,
that no one could have seen it coming. Perhaps it's
because time has gone by, Perhaps it's because she's on
(47:46):
the road to academic and therefore future success. Perhaps this
is one of those nods of the turtle. He asks
Lee if she would like to have Lasik surgery. When
he saw an ad for la si surgery and he
started to really develop a relationship with me. He starts
(48:07):
to ask me about my contacts, and this is obviously
after I'm doing a little bit better in my life.
But he says, do these contacts hurt you in any way?
And I say, no, you know, I've been wearing them
all these years, if it's fine, And he's like, well,
have you ever considered lap sick surgery? And I think
(48:31):
I was just so taken aback, like fly on Earth?
Would you even ask about Lasik surgery? Do you know
how expensive that is? He just was so excited about it,
to the point where, you know, he he offered to
pay for it. He said, your mother and I have
some money saves that we can pay for this, and
I think he just wanted to make things right. I
think he wanted to be my father, to to fulfill
(48:53):
that role as my father. Again, you're back in school, right,
You're at Columbia at that point, and you're still an undergraduate.
I'm still an undergraduate because after I had matriculated to
Hunter College, there was a time when I just was
so depressed that I dropped out of college altogether. And yeah,
(49:15):
I spent two years just wandering the streets because I
didn't want to tell my parents that I had dropped
out of college altogether. I feared their viewpoints that was
expected for a girl to not do well. And then
another angel, another mentor, goes above and beyond. Lee runs
into a woman she knew in high school, a legal
advocate who she hasn't seen in years. This woman pushes
(49:39):
and probes, and Lee reluctantly ends up telling her everything
that has happened. And she told me to apply to
all of these different colleges, one of which happened to
be the School of General Studies at Columbia University. And
I laughed and said, there's no way that I can
make it there, but sure, I'll apply, I'll humor you,
and yes, somehow I was accepted to Columbia. And when
(50:04):
I was accepted, the admissions officer who interviewed me told
me that it was on the strength of my essay,
my personal statement, that I was accepted. And that's when
I thought, oh, my gosh, my my story. I guess
was worth telling. Prayer, supplication, blessing, bargaining. As a child,
(50:29):
while Lee knelt before an ever expanding altar and recited
Buddhist scripture she knew by heart, the air thick with incense,
another practice began taking root, a practice all her own.
She constructed a crystal dome of protection in her mind's eye,
one that would keep her and everyone she loved safe
(50:51):
from harm. You know, it occurs to me that you
write about your crystal dome of protection, that as a
child you would have trouble falling asleep or be afraid
of the dark, and create very meticulously this crystal dome
(51:12):
of protection over yourself, and then over every single you know,
one of you and your family, and then even then
over the monsters that you were afraid we're lurking in
corners because you felt sorry for them because they needed
protection too. I was just really struck by that and
(51:32):
that being you know, almost like a child's form of
a kind of prayer or looking for protection or causality. Yeah,
and it's funny because I do that choose this day.
So it's something that hasn't left me, you know. And
when someone in my family or a good friend of
(51:54):
mine goes away in a trip, I was just quickly
create a dome around them so that they can arrive
through the destination safely. I think it it comes from
my wish for us to be protected and all the
stories that my parents told me, and a feeling of powerlessness.
And for me it was it was one way in
(52:15):
which I could feel like I was in control of
my situation, which at the time, you know as a child,
there are all these events happening around you, your destitute.
You know your parents are struggling, and even though you
can't quite grasp what those struggles are because you don't
yet have the language or just wherewithal to understand, you
(52:37):
feel it on a deep level. And I think for
me that came out during these sleepless nights. I felt
that helplessness, and so I would just create these crystal
domes in the hopes that we could all be protected,
including the monsters. Family Secret is a production of I
(53:03):
Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethan Macaluso are the executive producers.
Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you have a
secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and
your story could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our
number is one eight Secret zero. That's secret and then
(53:25):
the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram
at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com, slash Family
Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secret Spot. And if
you want to know about my family's secret that inspired
this podcast, check out my New York Times best selling
memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
(53:51):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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