Self Evident: Asian America's Stories

Carol Kwang Park was 12 years old, working as a cashier at her family’s gas station in Compton, California, when the 1992 LA Uprising forever changed her life. Her mom was at the gas station that da…

Our friend Tracey Nguyen Mang, host of the Vietnamese Boat People Podcast, goes behind the scenes with Lisa Phu in this conversation — about how to document the lives of our parents, when that proc…

Boen’s mom thinks he’s brainwashed by the New York Times. Boen thinks his mom is brainwashed by the Chinese Communist Party. But when Boen starts listening more deeply to his mom’s stories of grow…

The LahPai family’s arrival to Virginia from Myanmar was highly anticipated: the local resettlement agency prepped their home; the local religious community was ready to provide support; the family’s…

Today, we're sharing some work by our friends at Immigrantly, a weekly podcast that features deeply personal conversations about race, identity, and the immigrant experience. This episode features a …

Just before I gave birth to my daughter Acacia, I turned 36. And on my birthday my mom sent me a birthday card that was full of heartfelt words — more than she’d ever written to me before. On the las…

At the moment my mom steps onto a small fishing boat off the coast of Cambodia, headed for a refugee camp in Thailand under cover of night, she becomes the head of our family. It takes her less than …

Reunited with my cousin Lynn, my mom becomes a gold dealer to support her growing family — and realizes that the charmed childhood she had in Cambodia is nowhere to be found for her own kids. She rec…

As the genocidal regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge takes hold of Cambodia, my mom and dad run for their lives — separated from my cousin, Lynn, who is then faced with keeping her siblings alive i…

When I became a parent, my mom flew across the country to help me take care of my firstborn child. And opened up to share a story I’d never fully heard, about her firstborn child — the sister I’ve ne…

Lisa Phu grew up telling a story about how her family left Cambodia as refugees, to start a new life in the United States — but for the longest time, she’d never heard this story firsthand, from her …

When you get into a taxi, you usually know where you’re coming from, where you’re going, and what you’ll do when you get there. But what about your taxi driver – someone whose work is in constant mot…

When Augustine Tang’s father passed away, Augustine decided to inherit his taxi medallion – the license that had allowed his father to drive a yellow taxi cab in New York City for decades. But the me…

Amidst the ongoing crush of anti-Asian violence in America, Producer James turns to a personal source of restoration: ska music (yes, that ska music).

When he was a teenager, the do-it-yourself ska s…

The Covid-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of caregiving work — and the ways that this work is overlooked, under-resourced, or placed as a burden on families without a sense of fairness or …

Details at https://selfevidentshow.com/participate

Thanks!

- Cathy and the team

For so many Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Spam is a beloved classic food, showing up in everything from musubi to fried rice. But behind that nostalgia is a history of war and colonization, …

Community Producer Rochelle Kwan (a.k.a. YiuYiu in her DJ life) gathers the DJs who joined her in curating our first annual mixtape — to chat about how we can use music to reconnect our diaspora comm…