Behind the Yellow Curtain with Jess

Back from a long break, Jess shares a conversation she's still in the middle of: telling her family she's no longer the little girl they remember, without ever meaning to love them less. On changing faster than the people closest to you can follow.

Behind the Yellow Curtain is a podcast featuring honest, bilingual conversations with women navigating cross-cultural lives.

Jess gets into her career this time — what it means to be a Creative Director in advertising, why she still takes job interviews just for practice, and how one LinkedIn post pulled her from New York to Tokyo. On realizing her identity, as someone straddling East and West, is her biggest professional strength.Behind the Yellow Curtain is a podcast featuring honest, bilingual conversations with women navigating cross-cultural lives.

The loneliest night of her life, years of code-switching, and the microaggressions she didn't have words for yet — Jess on losing pieces of herself just to belong, and slowly finding her way back.

Behind the Yellow Curtain is a podcast featuring honest, bilingual conversations with women navigating cross-cultural lives.

Jess talks about childhood trauma and how she found her way to heal through fiction: movies, books, Disney and Pixar stories, and especially anime and manga, including one series that became a turning point for how she understood her own emotions. She gets into why fictional stories can reach parts of us that reality can't, and how the coping habits built in childhood quietly shape who you become. Personal, unfiltered, and a little feral.

Welcome back to Behind the Yellow Curtain.

Jess talks about what it means to be a cultural nomad: feeling like an outsider to her own culture since childhood, finding belonging in fiction before she had words for it, and the loneliness of moving first to the States and then to Japan. She gets into the idea of becoming your own culture, being your own home, and why no two cultural nomads share the same journey. Personal, unfiltered, and a little feral. Welcome back to Behind the Yellow Curtain.

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Jess talks about life as a "cultural nomad" in Japan: the discomfort of answering "where are you from," and the assumptions that come with looking one way and acting another. From tattoos read as intimidating to being told her honesty was "so American," she gets into how she's stopped letting other people's snap judgments define her identity. Personal, unfiltered, and a little feral.

Welcome back to Behind the Yellow Curtain.

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Jess is back solo, talking love from being happily single to how growing up across cultures reshaped the way she sees relationships. She dives into a friend's very Japanese, no-surprise marriage proposal, a young love story that reminded her what fearlessness feels like, and why cultural nomads see the world in shades of gray. Personal, unfiltered, and a little feral — welcome back Behind the Yellow Curtain.

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Jess speaks her mother tongue so why did returning to it make her feel like an imposter?

Season 3 opens as a solo mini-series. Host Jess steps away from the guest format to unpack her own story: a work trigger that made her question the "sense of self" after feeling foreign in her own root culture for the first time. Culture clashes, soft identities, and the strange magic of never quite belonging unfiltered, and sometimes accidentally profound.

Behind the Yellow Curtain for anyone from everywhere, making life work somewhere new.

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Queer in Tokyo: Belonging, Boxes & Becoming

Welcome back to Behind the Yellow Curtain!

In this episode, host Jess sits down with Luna Oliver, a multifaceted artist, magazine editor, and trans woman who was born in Mexico and grew up in Montreal before settling in Japan in 2015. Known for her drag persona Andromeda, Luna has dedicated her life to questioning gender and championing queer visibility.

Despite a lifelong, inner certainty about her identity—a knowledge she possessed even as a three-year-old—Luna spent her twenties confused and struggling to find validation within society and local queer spaces in Japan. The constant pressure to fit into specific "boxes," particularly within Tokyo's gay community, created a deep sense of alienation and the fear that embracing her femininity would make her undesirable. Paradoxically, the moment she embraced the unambiguous label of "trans woman" and prioritized her own happiness, she found a sense of clarity and belonging in Japan.

"You should be enjoying your life; it's a one-time thing." Luna's powerful journey from fighting to find her place to realizing that self-acceptance is a fluid path, not a destination, will make you question what validation you truly need and where you are willing to build your own roots.

🎬 Credits

Creative Director & Host: Jessica Lin

Producer: Mutsumi Gustavich (Mt.MELVIL)

Production Manager & Editor: Ayumi Watanabe 

Designer: Lucy

Behind the Yellow Curtain is a podcast featuring honest, bilingual conversations with people navigating cross-cultural lives.

New episodes drop every Tuesday at 8 AM (JST)—subscribe and stay with us for more.

Queer in Tokyo: Belonging, Boxes & Becoming

Welcome back to Behind the Yellow Curtain!

In this episode, host Jess sits down with Luna Oliver, a multifaceted artist, magazine editor, and trans woman who was born in Mexico and grew up in Montreal before settling in Japan in 2015. Known for her drag persona Andromeda, Luna has dedicated her life to questioning gender and championing queer visibility.

Despite a lifelong, inner certainty about her identity—a knowledge she possessed even as a three-year-old—Luna spent her twenties confused and struggling to find validation within society and local queer spaces in Japan. The constant pressure to fit into specific "boxes," particularly within Tokyo's gay community, created a deep sense of alienation and the fear that embracing her femininity would make her undesirable. Paradoxically, the moment she embraced the unambiguous label of "trans woman" and prioritized her own happiness, she found a sense of clarity and belonging in Japan.

"You should be enjoying your life; it's a one-time thing." Luna's powerful journey from fighting to find her place to realizing that self-acceptance is a fluid path, not a destination, will make you question what validation you truly need and where you are willing to build your own roots.

🎬 Credits

Creative Director & Host: Jessica Lin

Producer: Mutsumi Gustavich (Mt.MELVIL)

Production Manager & Editor: Ayumi Watanabe 

Designer: Lucy

Behind the Yellow Curtain is a podcast featuring honest, bilingual conversations with people navigating cross-cultural lives.

New episodes drop every Tuesday at 8 AM (JST)—subscribe and stay with us for more.

📍 Language: English — Japanese subtitles available by turning on CC