For this assignment, I looked at The Moth, as their advertisement as basically “a TED Talk, but for the messy, imperfect, and poignant” was something that even someone like I (who doesn’t really ever listen to podcasts) could find interesting. I decided on the “AAPI Voices” podcast, which centers around people of Asian American and Pacific Islander origins.
The first story was about Helen Langley Wyss and her experience at a Korean spa called a jimjilbang. She was talking about how her time there helped her recover feelings of confidence in her body that had been lost over the years through bullying, toxic boyfriends, and seeing unrealistic standards through magazines. Over the course of her trip, she kept seeing other women around her age that she described as looking “nothing like those cosmopolitan magazines”, and yet she found them beautiful, and eventually started being a bit more comfortable in her own skin again.
The second story was from Hari Sanghvi, who talks about his insecurities with his naturally high, nasally voice that made him feel like “less of a man”. This continued through his dating career and even his work at a crisis center, with many thinking that he was a kid, a woman, or was gay. One day, however, he was hooked up to a call from a 15-year old girl who revealed that she had recently come out as gay and, for a lack of better words, not received very kindly by her family and was considering suicide. Hari confided with the girl that he also knew what it was like to be ridiculed for a part of themselves that felt out of their control, and by the end of the call, the girl said that she felt his voice was nice and comforting, which alongside the fact that he potentially saved a life, made Hari feel much more comfortable with this “unmanly” voice.
The final and longest story was about Wendy Suzuki, who was a neuroscientist with a particular focus on memory. She talked about how she first wanted to be a Broadway star, but was encouraged by her very serious family to go into the field of science, and eventually decided on neuroscience from a professor in college. She focused on the mechanisms of how memory works and became an expert in the field, but when her father started developing memory problems, she felt guilty that there wasn’t anything she could do to help him. This was until she eventually decided that since they had never actually done so as a family before, she was gonna start to say “I love you” at the end of her calls, and what surprised her is that despite her dad’s developing dementia, despite the fact that they had never done so before in their lives, he remembered her asking to do that and said it first every single time.
These stories were very heartwarming, and if I wasn’t sitting in a public cafe typing this down right now, I would probably be a bit emotional about them myself. And I feel that a large part of that can be attributed to not only the speakers themselves, but the atmosphere they decided to embody in the podcast. They kept in any kind of stutters, any trips over words, the applause or laughter of the audience, and made it feel very personal and deep. There was no music or sound effects, only light layering of voices when transitioning between storytime and intermittent disucssion, and it really felt like they wanted it to feel a lot more engaged with the story itself as opposed to having distracting stimuli.
Leave a Reply