In 2015, my grandmother took 200 barbituate-based sleeping pills and left us a suicide note. She eventually recovered, but it was the last straw for me. I couldn’t stay in a family where this was the kind of thing that happened but wasn’t talked about. I became estranged from my family for years. During this time, I started Beyond Asian to ask bigger questions that I couldn’t answer by myself. - Why do Asian immigrant families all seem to suffer from such deep trauma? - What is buried in our collective history that nobody talks about? - How can I allow myself to be Asian, when so many of the painful things in my life are associated with that? *

Beyond Asian is a storytelling interview show that frames shared cultural history and collective intersections with the West, and how these are only the starting points for the way diverse Asian people have taken their lives in vastly different directions. The podcast is trauma-informed, and use narrative as a sensemaking tool. We strive to see things in a historically-aware and compassionate way, while being clear to name the problematic aspects of Asian culture and how they may be exacerbated in the West. We offer nuance to alleviate hyperpolarization, to deepen contextual understanding, and to increase our collective capacity for holding cultural paradoxes. *

Each episode begins by exploring the guests’ family history and how they came to be in the West. We talk about formative experiences at the intersection points between Asian and Western culture that produced an understanding that this kind of uniqueness was undesirable. We aim to go far beyond identity politics, and toward enrichment, deepening, and nuance. Our journeys may have started by being Asian, but they are so much more than that. We delve into the fullness of the guest’s entire life, spanning topics like sex-positive education, polyamory, mental health challenges, trauma integration, coming out, life after divorce, repairing family relationships, and more.

Our vision is that people who have struggled to know who they are and where they belong can be a part of the conversation to self-determine the meaning of their lives in a world of complexity.

Our mission is to be a resource for other Third Culture people, especially but not exclusively Asian, to hear themselves represented in an empowering and diverse way, and to offer narratives and tools to help them along their journey to self-acceptance and understanding. The host of the show is me - the person who found my grandmother after she’d taken the pills and who waited and wondered by her side for 10 days in the ICU while she was comatose and intubated, while my parents scrambled to find a way to cover up what had happened to our extended family, and to the Chinese community. This show is not only a creative endeavour - it is the meaning-making project of my life. I will continue making this show with or without a grant, because this is my service to my community - to people like me who need this resource. Beyond Asian offers an invitation to both the opportunity and the responsibility to access our built-in capacity for healing through collective meaning-making. We stand for the repair of things that have been ruptured. We believe that telling our stories together is the beginning of this repair.