This Story Has Not Been Told

For Sam, the topic of body image is a really complicated one; she talks about what it was like growing up in a Hmong family that valued thinness and pale skin—features which Sam did not have. She recalls how her father was ashamed of her and her “chunky” siblings, who were not considered beautiful or desirable. At the same time that Sam received messages about what a Hmong woman looks like, she was taught about how she should behave and there was an emphasis placed on being quiet, meek, and deferential to male authority. Sam’s political views are also very left-leaning, which is different from those of the men who imposed standards of Hmong beauty and behavior on her, and she talks about what it’s like to be constantly shut down by her community when it comes to ideas of racial and gender equality. For Sam, a conversation about her body is linked to the many ways in which her community has taught her to not only police her appearance, but control the way she feels, acts, and stands up for her certain social causes. 

Mary Kimura opens up about identifying as the "chubby Asian girl" and how receiving comments from loved ones has impacted her body image and sense of self-esteem. Mary's story shows how even the people we care about may be unaware of the harm they inflict on our bodies and overall wellbeing. Although Mary has a bubbly and cheerful personality, her story reveals the complex struggles that lie beneath the surface and how deeply our feelings about our bodies run. 

The second part of a series about Asian women and body image. Asian women don't often get to have deep conversations about how they feel about their bodies or what their bodies mean to them. These episodes contain discussions about how our bodies can make us feel more/less Asian, body neutrality/positivity, eating disorders, the messages we receive from our families about size, and how Asian women are learning to find self-love. 

The five women featured in this episode are: 
Saki Shibuya: 3:44-21:04
Kailea Saplan: 21:06-33:35
Anonymous: -33:37-48:50
Ong Vang: 48:52-1:01:03
Sinthia Shabnam: 1:01:05-1:15:22

As a play on the title, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, starring the wonderful Lana Condor, the next couple of episodes are dedicate to all the Asian women out there with a body. Often, we say, "Oh, she's got a body!" as a way of speaking about a woman who meets certain conventional ideas of body size and beauty. I don't think that these are the only women who "have a body." To all the Asian ladies out there, you have a body, it's beautiful, and we need to talk about them more. 

Guests: 
Mary Kimura: 5:50-19:33
Sam Xiong: 19:36-31:05
Su-Hwei Tan: 31:06-46:31
Kat Liu: 46:32-53:49
Linsun Simthong: 53:50-1:07:36

Lewis Raven-Wallace is a journalist who hosts the podcast, “The View from Somewhere” which interrogates the notion of objectivity and examines how it has kept people of color, queer folks, and trans people from having their experiences legitimated. Lewis is also a co-founder of Press On, a southern journalist collective that supports liberation and movement journalism, and we chatted about the changes that journalism needs to undertake to become a truly progressive and equitable institution. For Lewis, this might mean burning media down—but in like a “fuck you, this is the end of everything” kind of way. Instead, he poses the idea of burning down journalism as we know it so that we can create a journalism as we—and by “we,” Lewis means marginalized people and their allies—would like to see it.  

Jennifer Ho is a professor of English at CU-Boulder who back in 2010 started a blog called “No Fucking Pink Ribbons!” that documented her experience with breast cancer. Jennifer shares what it was like having breast cancer and where she’s at now that it’s been 11 years since her diagnosis. Jennifer's blog posts (which were written as Jennifer went through chemo, surgeries, and recovery) are a sharp, vivid, and raw account of what it was like having cancer. However, during our interview, Jennifer seemed to speak about cancer as if were thumbing through an old photo album that we had unearthed. Indeed, Jennifer said that at this point in her life, she can go for days before ever remembering that she’d had cancer. What has stuck with her from this experience is an awareness of the fact that she has finite time on this planet and that she wants to live her life without pulling punches or thinking that she could have or should have done something. Jennifer’s interview offers some hope for anyone who is currently undergoing cancer treatments that this period of your life is finite; when you recover from cancer, the disease is not an unshakeable part of who you have to be.

Carl Riden tells her story of being diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer at the start of 2020. Carl shares the practical considerations of having cancer that we don’t normally talk about, as well as the emotional toll of having such a serious illness. At the heart of Carl’s story is how cancer emphasized some of the most excruciating and difficult parts of her life. Carl describes herself as a big person, physically and personality-wise. But, she also talks about feeling as if she has always been alone; she essentially raised herself and never had children of her own. At the time of her diagnosis, Carl was also going through a separation with her partner and she says that one of the most painful images that ran through her mind was returning to an empty home to deal with her illness by herself. During our interview, Carl recalled certain memories like spending time in trees as a young girl reading books; taking long walks on her own listening to podcasts, and she said that the freedom and independence of her life was in some ways exhausting. At this current point, Carl is thankfully cancer-free and is now considering how she wants to live her life in a way that gives back to her community, but also provides her with a sense of satisfaction and happiness. This is a bittersweet idea for Carl, because it comes with the notion that she has to make herself happy rather than fostering these feelings with a partner or loved ones. 

Kailea Saplan shares her experiences playing roller derby in a league in Madison, Wisconsin. For Kailea, a self-described unathletic theater kid, participating in roller derby has built up her confidence and provided her with a community. As she describes, she plays with women and non-binary folks of all shapes and sizes, and players bond with each other over the intensity of the sport. However, while Kailea has found community in Madison’s roller derby league, her story is also about how our sense of belonging is on a spectrum. Kailea is bi-racial (Filipino and White) and from Hawaii—her roller derby name, Hawaii K-O is an homage to her heritage—and has to grapple with the Whiteness and Midwestern-ness of Wisconsin roller derby. These issues have become even more apparent over the last year as the country at large reckoned with its history of racism following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Kailea reveals how spaces that are comforting and supportive can simultaneously be isolating. This is a complicated topic--in fact, we did two interviews: Kailea asked to come back and clarify some of her comments, particularly about race and her bi-racial identity as a roller derby player, and you’ll hear both parts in this episode. 

As a continuation of the Now Times, a series where I look at how people’s lives have been affected by the pandemic, and specifically how palliative care has been shaped by the pandemic, I interviewed Dr. Khaliah Johnson, a palliative care pediatrician.  Dr. Johnson talks about how the simultaneous challenges brought by COVID and racial tensions of this past year, particularly with police brutality and racialized violence, have shaped her work and the experiences of her patients. Over the last year, Dr. Johnson has realized that her patients and their families--who are already dealing with terminal illness--come in with a baseline level of suffering . For patients of color or those hit particularly hard by the pandemic, our social issues complicate their experiences in palliative care and Dr. Johnson has become more attuned to these nuances. She explains that this past year has reminded her that she and other healthcare providers must exercise their “moral imaginations” to truly understand and appreciate what patients are going through . This moral imagination helps Dr. Johnson walk alongside her patients in the hardest moments of their lives, helping families and children to realize that palliative care is not about pure suffering but that it gives and supports life, in all its permutations. 

As a continuation of the Now Times, a series about people’s experiences during the pandemic, I spoke to Dr. Kim Curseen, a palliative care geriatrician who works in Atlanta, Georgia. All throughout the pandemic, death and illness have been a topic on people’s minds. We have also heard many media stories about the challenges facing doctors and nurses during the pandemic. However, I wanted to get a sense of how palliative care physicians—doctors who had already been dealing with the questions and complexities of death and end-of-life care before COVID-19 hit—were affected by the pandemic. Dr. Curseen talks about how the pandemic has shaped her work and how the pandemic (prior to my expectations of what she would say) has made healthcare workers and patients more connected than they were before as people have had to adapt to the uncertainties and problems of the last year. Dr. Curseen talked about how COVID has made her and her patients meet over Zoom while in their homes instead of in a clinic or her office, and it’s given both parties intimate looks into one another’s lives. This interview offers us a look at what we might take for granted—whether in our healthcare system or beyond it—and start to wonder if we could recalibrate or rework these systems for the better. Something that hasn’t changed in Dr. Curseen’s work though, is the fundamental nature of palliative care, which, as she says, is that “We stand there with you, through your suffering.”

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