Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I was so excited the first time I saw another Chinese person on the street that I opened my mouth to exclaim nha. The only thing that stopped me was Mama's morning about talking to random people. Don't talk to anyone, she said, we can't trust anyone, no one. What about police officers, Mama, no one, especially police officers. If you see a uniform, turn around and walk the opposite way. Why, Mama, it's dangerous. We're not allowed here. Don't trust anyone. Always walk the other way when you see the police. Change in. Baba's voice guided me wherever I went. If anyone asked you for documents, say you don't know, Say that your Baba has them, Say that you were born here, that you've always lived in America. This was not China, and I could no longer get by on the color of my skin and my gap tooth smile. I was no longer normal. I was never to forget that that's Chian. Julie Wong, author, speaker, and litigator, reading passages from her debut memoir Beautiful Country. She and Julie's is a story of extraordinary triumph. Triumph made all the brighter for having been forged from profound hardship, secrecy, and shame. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood before the age of seven. When I think about that time, it's all just love and happiness and singing and belonging. I never questioned if I was safe, if I fit in, if I needed to worry about where my next meal was going to come from. It was a time I like to think of as true childhood. And where were you I was in China. I was surrounded by my extended family. UM. I was born in North China in a town called Shadrong, just to three hours outside of Beijing, and that's where many of my mother's family lived, and my dad's family lived not too far away. So before age seven, my life was very stable and I'm just surrounded by loved once. And how old were you when um, your father who you called Baba, left China for America. I was five years old at the time. I had no idea, and I don't think any of us really had a sense that he was leaving for very long. At first, he was leaving to attend school, and we thought it would just be maybe a year nine months, but he ended up being gone for two years. Describe both Bamba and your mother, who you call Mama before the age of seven back in China, they were extremely playful. My earliest memory was of them tossing me in a blanket, throwing me up and down as I shrieked and laughed, and that was really them. They found the creative ways to play with me. My mother made absolutely everything a game. I never fussed when taking a bath or doing any of the things that kids didn't like to do. I never fussed eating vegetables because she just told me it was a game. When when she cooked, she made the carrot peel dance. It was all a play, and life was just full of joy. My father, in particular, loved dancing, so he would go to the dance hall regularly and I would accompany him, and my feet would be on his bigger feet and he would move me around the room. We developed such a ritual with dance that he came up with my very special song that was just for me that he made up and the words were all gibberish. But throughout the days of my childhood in China, we would dance to that at home pretty much every day. And you were an only child, yes, due to the Chinese government's family planning policy. Unfortunately, I was an only child. I really wanted disibling, but that was not in the cards. When Jan Julie is seven, she and her mother fly to the United States to meet up with her father. It's not only a different country, it's a different universe altogether. Everything was new and quite bizarre. From the minute we went to the airport, we started seeing people with different color skin, different color eyes. I was living in a part of China where everyone looked the same. We were all homogeneous, and I fit in. And all of a sudden, I'm learning it's possible to have blue eyes and green eyes and blonde hair. And my world just felt like it was turned upside down. And then when we got out of the airport and my father was there, I saw how old and wan he looked. It looked like he had aged decades in the span of two years. Um And all of a sudden, I saw this kind of pallor and weariness fall upon both my parents, who once were so joyful and full of play and love and dance, they didn't really do that anymore. All around us were people who looked nothing like me, and they would say words to me that I didn't understand and I would later know to be ethnic slurs. They would pull their eyes back at me on the street and mock who we were. We were really we settled in then Park Slope general area of Brooklyn and the nineties, so it's very different in character than it is now, and we were pretty much the only Asians in the neighborhood. And of course at that point, I had no idea what being quote unquote Asian was. I just thought I was regular, and I had to learn to reckon with race and our new environment. And then of course there was this messaging for my parents that I was not to tell people that I had immigrated, that I was to pretend that I was born here. This is really where Changelie's family secret begins. And as family's secrets go, it's a particularly unique and potent one because it's the family's secret. They all share it, they're all in the know, and they're all keeping it. This secret also extends beyond Chian and Julie's immediate family and back into the layered histories of her parents, particularly her father's childhood and young adulthood. So when my father was four years old was when China's Cultural Revolution began. During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Now called upon the people of China to unify in the name of communism, but really also kind of attack and penalize in part the educated, the landlords, those who had education and had some semblance of power as compared to Chairman Now. It led to ten years, a full decade of bloodshed. A lot of people were tortured, were publicly beaten, were imprisoned, disappeared overnight. Because China has a strong history of censorship, there is no real data on how many people died, but it could be, you know, five hundred thousand, it could be millions. Historians really just can't ascertain. So my father was four years old when this began, and his first memory was that of two scholars who hung from a tree, dead, and at their feet was written in blood, the character for wrongly accused because they had been publicly persecuted for their scholarly thinking, and probably critical thought, and then at age seven, my father then recalls the Red Guards who acted at the behested Chairman Mount in terms of the cultural revolution, ransacking his home and dragging his mother out to be publicly beaten. And this was because his brother had written a paper criticizing Chairman Now, asking the people of China to think about why, in the name of communism we were killing each other and reporting on each other and who it really served. My uncle loved reading banned books. He hated being told what not to read and what not to think, and so he presented examples in history of dictatorships and controlling re dreams that used the same tactic. He didn't sign his name to it, but neighbor saw him post it up. And at that time, in that environment, you were encouraged to report anyone around you who may be thought of as a quote unquote counter revolutionary or traitor to the country. So my uncle, who was just eighteen, was imprisoned for decades, tortured, star and because of that, my father went through his entire schooling with the tarnished being a counter revolutionary, of being a traitor. So in China it's the Red perchief that you were around your neck. It's like the honor role he was just it was impossible for him to get ahead in school, and teachers would have him stand at the front of the class and have his classmates list all of the things that were wrong with him and his family and his brother. So it really informed the man that he became. And unfortunately, of course, I did not have much of this information until later in my adulthood, but it definitely informed how he interacted with Chinese government, the American government, how he educated me, and how he taught me to think about the world's both for better and for worse. Chanel. These father's upbringing only intensifies his focus on keeping his family safe, which means keeping their undocumented status a secret. Their insular lives, compounded with the fact that Chian Julie does not yet speak English, means that her early education comes from watching television. The TV is always on in their house. She's also learning self protective behaviors adaptations. She's always counting, whether it's the number of steps or number of tiles or whatever, harboring a superstition that if she counts exactly the right number, she'll be safe. She'll keep everyone safe. Part of keeping everyone safe involves arranging her face into a mask to keep her true feelings hidden. One place chian Julie wears this mask is at the sweatshop, where she works with her mother for pennies soon after they arrive in America. The sweatshop is full of surprises for young chian Julie, not only the harsh conditions and low pay, but also the hierarchy among swachshop workers, a hierarchy that has her mom and her at the bottom. I remember walking into that room. I had never in my short life realized that a room like that existed. It was the middle of summer, was August. There was no air conditioning. There wasn't really even that many fans. There were a few ceiling fans. There was no ventilation. It was just rose and rows and rows of people slumped over sewing machines. And where people sat, I came to learn had meaning. So people who sat in the front tended to do the more high paying work. Attaching buttons to clothing was required more skills, So I believe it was either ten cents a button or ten cents per article clothing, probably more likely article clothing. And my mother and I being brand new, and of course my mother there being a math professor, not a seamstress or anything of that kind, we were at the right back row, so we made the least. My mother made three cents per article of clothing, attaching labels to the you know, the back of a shirt or dress, and I made one cent per art of clothing, snipping thread, loose thread off every piece that she finished. And we came to learn also that by virtue of the fact that we spoke Mandarin, we were viewed as lower ranking because more of the earlier Chinese immigrants to America. We're from Guangdong and Southern China and spoke Cantonese. So whether or not you could speak Cantonese became an emblem of status where we were from. In North China. There are similar prejudices against South China. Um it's kind of similar to the parallels between North Northern States and Southern States. We thought Mandarin was the dialect of the intellectual, and anyone who didn't speak it was not educated, and so there was a real sense of divide, and I remember my mother remarking saying, even here, even among our people, we still don't belong. We don't have a home anymore, and it was incredibly heartbreaking. So you carry that with you when you start grade school and you speak Mandarin and the other Chinese children don't and put you down for not being able to speak Cantonese, and you pretty quickly are singled out. One of the things that so striking to me about your story is the sort of spectacular teachers that you had and then the absolute disaster teachers that you had um And you know, you're singled out and put in a special classroom for students who don't speak English and students who have special needs. Yes, and there's no way that you can communicate to the very tired teacher who is in charge of that classroom that you do know how to read, and you do know how to think, and that you don't belong there. So what does she do to feel like she belongs? Just as she absorbed the English language and American culture from watching television, she now reads every book she can. Clifford, the Big Red Dog becomes her guide. Soon she and Julie begs her father to get her back into the right classroom where she can satiate her hunger for knowledge. Meanwhile, another hunger persists, actual real hunger. I never knew hunger in China. I mean, if you look at my photos from China, I'm always holding something that I'm eating, usually a popsicle. I was very pledged in China because of how educated my my parents were, and when we arrived here, I quickly realized that food was going to be a problem. One of the early memories I share was my father bringing in one slice of pizza for all three of us for dinner. And I didn't know what pizza was, so I was fine with just having a bike because the cheese was brand new to me. But as I started observing my parents and how stressed they were shopping and how frugal they became, I realized that my hunger was a burden on them instead of you know, in China, when I said I'm hungry, my mother would immediately get me something. She started saying, well, you know, just just hang onto that. That's how you know you're becoming stronger. When you feel the cold sweat is when you know you're you're really getting strong. And I could see the pain in her eyes when she said that. So I started keeping that secret to myself. If I was hungry. There was nothing I knew my parents could do. I might as well have kept that to myself and lessen their burden. I don't think I was thinking of it that consciously as a kid. I just you know, children soak up the emotional energy of those around them, and especially their parents, and I could feel their stress around food and around our weekly budget, which was only twenty dollars. So I started going to school hungry every day. I told my mother that there was a free public school breakfast, which there was, and there was a free public school lunch. Of course those are never that nutritional, and I never got there early enough for the breakfast because I lived in Brooklyn and went to school in Chinatown, Manhattan, and we worked late at the sweatshop, and it was this constant battle between sleep and hunger. And once I started going to school later, I didn't want to then switch the times because that my mother would be tipped off that something was off. So I for all of my elementary school years, I just went to school without breakfast, and I remember the entire morning just being me staring at the clock, feeling my stomach turning over itself. That gnawing sensation, the cold sweat, and telling myself to just hang on a little bit longer, you'll make it to lunch, and then you'll get that food. But by the time I made it to that free lunch, I was shaking everywhere. I gulped everything down without really chewing it, and my stomach never felt quite satisfied. The rest of the afternoon just felt like my stomach was now wrestling with these giant pockets of air and these little kits of food with no real ability to process at all. So this was a bodily trauma that stayed with me for I mean, I still have I still have trouble not over buying foot I can't throw out any piece of food, And when I was able to finally eat four meals, I immediately felt like I had to throw up because my stomach was not used to being full anymore, and that I struggled with throughout high school. It wasn't It was a very different kind of eating disorder than the ones you typically seen in teenage girls, where I wanted to eat, but my stomach was saying, we're not used to this anymore, or maybe even don't get used to this. Yeah, absolutely, so after the sweatshop, there's this very harrowing and brief period of time where your mother goes to work in a sushi processing factory and and you go with her, and it makes the sweatshop look like a day at the beach. You're right, that's a that's an interesting analogy because I think of the sweatshop as being very hot and then the sushi press the same plant as being freezing cold, in part because of the seasons in which we went there. But yes, my first day going with my mother, she had been working there for a while. I went into the warehouse door and I saw that she was putting on these thick rubber boots and blue plastic cape. And the minute the door had opened, I felt this giant gust of freezing hair come out. And then as we passed through the ante chamber and into the main area, I noticed that there's water on the floor and it is freezing. My My skin immediately prickles. And because my mother had to process salmon and keep it in top shape, it had to be processed and freezing water with ice cubes around her. The factory was not very well equipped or it was kind of old, so the basins had leaks in them, and it would just be leaking water through the cracks into our boots all around us for the twelve or fourteen hours that we worked, and it was impossible, impossible to get warm in that room. I remember coming home, having an hour canoe getting home where it was also cold, but warmer, and just the veins all over my arms, all over my mother's arms, still so visible. My mother would go to the kitchen that we shared with our roommates and boil water just to feel her hands again, because again she her fingers were in ice water this whole time, and um, I mean they had gloves available, but to prepare the fish properly, you kind of had to use their hands. And if you didn't prepare the fish properly and you damage some fish, and your pay was dogged. So she just didn't want to risk that. And so this day her hands don't look the same. I still see her veins, and every time I do, I think of, I'm just sent back to that environment where she, I don't know, risk her bodily health for a meal on a table. We'll be right back. She and Julie's childhood in America is proving to be beyond challenging and without any of the childlike magic she'd once known back in China. But then something happens Christmas. This is the first time she feels like she understands how this country, America, could be a beautiful country. The first time I saw Fifth Avenue during the holidays, I thought, Oh, here's the America that I heard about back then in China. There were really two depictions of America. One was of homeless people on the street, hungry and begging and fighting over food, and the other was of roads paved with gold, where no one was hungry and everyone had everything they absolutely wanted. And it was unclear to all of us through what the government censored to us which one was the truth. And our reality unfortunately fell closer to the former. But when I saw Fifth Avenue, I thought, here's the one that I had been promised that my uncle was excited for me to experience. It does, in fact exists, I'm just not privy to it all the time. When I was standing outside of it must have been Sacks or one of those department stores with the lights dancing and the figurines in the window display, I realized how easily people could fall in love with this country, that magic for change. Julie is also soon found in the library, where she spends as much time as she possibly can. She lives and breathes books. They are her friends, her windows into possibility. She also makes positive connections outside her family for the first time, with her third grade teacher, Ms Pong, and with Elaine, her new best friend. Finally, she has a sleepover at Elaine's house, which should be a highlight, but instead, Changuli is plagued by a terrible homesickness. This fear of separation made so much sense because you had drilled in you, um from the time that you arrived in America, this feeling of don't trust anyone. You know, we're only safe with our own kind. Tell them you were born here and that you've always lived here, and the idea that it could all vanish at any moment. And you get through the night, but you've called, and you've said to your parents, please come get me or let me come home, and and the next morning they do meet you and take you home. Yep, I mean, I think one important bit that jumped up at me looking back was that my father had boarded a plane and then just disappeared for two years. So their presence felt very conditional to me. From that point on, I remember being very clingy and having a lot of separation anxiety towards my mother, even when we were in China after my father left. Whenever she try to get a visa to the US, and she had to try many times and get rejected. Many times. She had to go to Beijing, which might I had to stay home with my grandpa parents, and I would cry thinking that I would never see her again. So this whole idea of people can just disappear and your whole life as you know it can change in a second, was very much drilled into me by the immigrant experience, you know. Then we boarded that planet. I never saw my grandparents and my uncles or my aunt again. And then there was the elements, as you mentioned earlier, of superstition. I thought that if I did everything right, then I could minimize the harm that my parents were exposed to. And I thought that if I stayed with them and watched them, that that would ensure that they stayed safe. And there's really no rhyme or reason to thinking that. It was just when you're a child, and you have zero control or power over what's happening. You grasp onto what little you can, like getting to that street signed before the light changes, are watching your parents like a hawk. So all of these superstitions just became embedded in me, and they became this kind of talisman that I held onto to feel like I was doing what I could to keep us safe while having very little power at all. I was so struck by that, the feeling as a child of somehow intuiting that your parents are vulnerable. It's a very particular feeling one I know as well that most children don't experience. Most children experience their parents as invulnerable in a long and innocent childhood. But you had the experience of almost feeling like you could navigate the world for them, especially with regards to my mother, because I spoke. I learned English much faster than she did, because she was in her thirties and it just takes you longer. And so I was able to navigate American society much easier and trying inslate to her and explained to her how social morays worked. And I feel incredibly feel and felt incredibly protective toward her. I think as you say, Danny, once you see your parents as vulnerable, it's very hard to reverse that. And the earlier it happens, the more steeped in that child it is that it is their job and their responsibility to keep that parents safe, as opposed to the other way around. And I want to say too that I believe. And I looking back, I see my mother trying to hide that from me. When we first went to the sweatshop. She tried to pretend it was a game, that she was fine. She tried to not cry in front of me. But there was only so much she could do. I mean, we had no resources, we had no friends or family around. There was no one for her to talk to except me. Really, and she's only human. And I say this because I know she regret doing that. She still to the state, regrets that. She says she wishes she could give me my childhood back. But she did the absolute best she could. I do not falter for one bit how much she shared with me. You become her lifeline in many ways, and she does share a lot with you. And at around this time, she decides that she's going to go to City College to study computer science, and she's going to find a way to get a foothold in this country the way that she had had in China. That you know that she was going to become a professional. Yep. While Angel's mom is trying to find her professional foothold, she and Julie continues to voraciously read and watch television, and her own future professional goals begin to form. The kids around her want to be astronauts, pilots, movie stars when they grow up. But she and Julie she's decided she's going to be a lawyer. She reads the biographies of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and their good Marshall. She's inspired, and she forms a plan, a plan towards safety, a plan toward never being hungry, a plan toward helping herself and her family move forward in the direction of truth and away from secrecy. I watched a lot of TV, as you mentioned, and I've read a lot of books, and everywhere I looked, lawyers were very well off. They knew what was going on. They were usually in charge and incredibly bossy, which was what I was in China. Very much wanted to get to that position. Um, And once you've known poverty and hunger, your primary goal before you can think of anyone else, and I think anyone else and anything else. And I think this is probably universally true, is that you need to sure that you will never be there again. And with the way that lawyers were portrayed, I was like, Oh, this is a guaranteed way to be safe, to have money to it, so my parents are never hungry. I'm never hungry in my future children are never hungry. And then on top of that, reading books about RBG and their good Marshal, I realized lawyers know what's going on. They know the law. It's kind of the opposite of being undocumented. They know exactly how to navigate the system, and they can make it easier to do so for themselves, their family and people who are like them who they want to help. And so it just made perfect sense to me. And I had already loved reading and writing so much. While it would have been cool and probably lucrative to be an astronaut, I didn't have any of the skills, and I don't know how to do that. Reading and writing I could do, and so I just single mindedly excited on that. And I think it was very similar to what my mother did. She said, I'm I know math. She had been on the cutting edge of computer science in China back in the late eighties and early nineties. One of my earliest memories of her is her sitting in front of a giant computer that took up the entire room, typing code into a black screen. I must have been in a stroller or something, but I was kind of from afar watching her. It was her dream and it was what she knew to do, and it was also lucrative she could provide for her family. So I think we were very similar in that respect of being extremely practical and knowing what we were good at. When fourth grade rolls around, she and Julie has a number of powerful experiences in quick succession. First, she gets a cat named Marilyn, who has an imperfect face. As an only child, she A Julie loves this cat, who is her companion, her sibling, her true best friend, all rolled into one furry, flawed creature. But her parents don't exactly share this love from Maryland. They believe the cat's imperfections will bring bad luck. During this time, she and Julie's mother becomes increasingly unwell. She and Julie is also experiencing some bad luck at school, where her new teacher, Mr. Kane, is strict and unkind. When she and Julie turns in near perfect papers, he doesn't believe she's written them and accuses her of plagiarizing. She isn't, of course, so she starts to make errors on purpose, just so he'll leave her alone. These self protective lies lead to other kinds of lies. She and Julie becomes what she calls a habitual liar. She starts telling her friends tall tales, contradictory stories about where she comes from and who she is. I think the message of having to lie about the fact that I immigrated, the fact that English was my second language, the fact that I was undocumented, embedded in me a deep shame that went to the core of who I was. If I couldn't tell people I was born in China, which was at that point very central to my identity and my life, it must have been to my childhood mind that pretty much everything about me was worth being ashamed about, and everything about me should be kept secret. And what if I just created a different identity kind of as an escape, just as I escaped into fiction. Most of the time, I could create this whole new life for myself and that would be worthy of esteem, and that would get my friends attention, and that I wouldn't have to be ashamed about. So there was a lot of me that just longed for that regular American childhood, whatever that means, right. I think that was the reason that I was so obsessed with the Babysitters Club and Sweet Belly High, because those people represented to me regular Americans who were acceptable and didn't need to have all of these secrets and hide all of these things about themselves, and I so badly wanted that. So that was kind of my way of making it up for myself. And I think it also normalized the secret keeping around being undocumented, because if I was lying about whether my dad was a cop or not, then maybe lying about being documented is not so bad. Of course, again, none of this was happening consciously. I think as a kid, I was just feeling a lot and going through a lot, and that's how I tried to escape at all. But looking through an adult lens, it just makes sense why I was doing that. Yeah, it really does. And it also occurs to me that you were very good at it. The lying and you know, like when you would get caught in one lie. You know, my father is a cop, and then later my father is white, um, and and it's a CEO of a company, and I'm half white, and your friends would be like, wait a minute, I thought, and you played this game with them like gotcha. I just wanted to see if you're paying attention, which would have made you actually probably a little more confident about being able to lie about being undocumented and feel a little safer. That's true. That's true because any time that they called me out on some discrepancy in terms of my immigration status, I could be like, gotcha was a test and you passed right. Um. It was a way of reclaiming power in the way that superstitions did for me in that little world where I felt like I had so little to hold onto. Well, Chian Julie is escaping into these fictions. The hard facts of our family's life intrude. Her mother is getting sicker and sicker, often retreating in pain. One day, she's rushed to the e er. The doctors need to do surgery to determine the root cause of her pain, but it takes quite some time before this can happen while other patients with more resources are prioritized on the queue. As the family waits terrified for the results of Mamma's surgery, she a Julie is feeling destabilized. Literally around that time, I started bumping into everything. And it may have been that I was growing and I was not fling my arms in the right position, or you know, as you're going through spurts of if that happens. But I think more likely it was that I was so stressed out that I just was not fully in control for my body, and to the same extent, because I was so distracted, so I started hitting things. And then when I was alone on the playground, as I say, I tripped on nothing. There was nothing in my way. I just tripped and fell and twisted my right hand, which was my dominant hand, so I could not really hold a pencil. I couldn't squeeze toothpaste. There were a million and one things in the day that I could not do. But I also saw how incredibly stressed out my dad was. He was racing from work to the hospital and making sure I was taken care of, and she just did not have enough hours in the day. Much less any sort of financial resources to get me to also see a doctor, because he was also saying, we don't know how we're going to pay for your mother's care. She has now been the hospital for how many days? That's very expensive. It was a number that I couldn't have even fathoms. It just seemed so fancy to have my mother boarding in a clean hospital bed when we were living in this dingy little room. So the last thing I wanted to do was add to my father's fears and his worries about bills and money and the government coming after us. So I did what I knew to do by that point, which was high banks and lie about things and not make any trouble. The surgery finally happens, and while the news is good, the fear, of course, had been that chi Angelie's mom had cancer. Still it's determined that her gallbladder and a large part of her liver need to be removed. The surgeon takes a very small amount of money for the otherwise expensive surgery, but to the family it's not a small amount. It's their entire life savings. She A Julie's father pays the surgeon in cash at the time. As a child, I really saw him as a saint, an angel, someone who just descended upon us, helped us when we needed it most, and took what little we had to give him. But looking back, also thinking about how deeply appreciate Shave my father was, how much he thanked him, and the doctor acting kind of cold. I'm not sure he was aware of the family that he was helping out. I'm not sure he even took the time to understand what was going on there. He was just doing his job and doing it well at that, but it wasn't really thinking about the humanity behind the surgery. I can't fully trust my memory as a child's because everyone was so much bigger than me and has so much more power. But seeing kind of that hurt in my father's eyes when he handed over our life savings and the doctor just grabbed it with one hand and walked away, that introduces an element of an adult lens that I think there was something else bigger going on. After Angele's mother finally comes home from the hospital, the fault lines in the family deepen, her parents vulnerability intensifies. Her father gets rid of Marilyn the cat without telling Changjuli. This is an enormous loss for her, but she stays quiet about it. She feels like a burden on her stressed Baba and on her Mama, who is still recovering. She and Julie is carrying the weight of everything her parents are handling. So when she learns about a school in Manhattan for gifted kids, the New York City LAB School for Collaborative Studies, she really wants to apply, but she doesn't tell her parents. They have too much on their plate, she thinks, and so without any support from her parents or her teacher, she applies in secret and she's accepted. I think that to balance my approach of not making any trouble, was this inherent rebellious streak, maybe a drop of dissident blood in me, where I believe I made the decid vision in my head to go forward with applying to LAB because Mr Kane at one point said that school is not for you. You can't get in, and if you, even if you did, you're not going to fit in. And I at this point was so sick of this man telling me what I couldn't do. It was my small act of rebellion to apply nevertheless, and when I got in, and even in the when I first broached the application the idea, my father was staunchly resistant. He did not want anyone taking a very close look at our family, and any sort of application would of course invite that. He knew that there was going to be an interview. He just did not want to risk it. He said, why not just go to your school in Brooklyn. It's just as good, and now you actually speak English, so you have nothing to worry about. But I got it into my head because Mr Kane said I couldn't go there, that if I went there, things will be different and I would be able to change my life and turn our whole families the situation around. In fact, Mr Kane said that you know those those are for wealthy kids or some rich kids there, and my dad's at the same It was when Mr Kane said that it was the white, wealthy kids who went to schools like Lab that I made up my mind to attend there because I believe that going to that school would somehow turn my life all around and turn around the situation for my entire family. You're right, this is a quote from your book. Maybe I could create everything I wanted for myself, for the three of us, and this was the first step. Yeah, we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Before chi and Julie can actually take this first step, her mother is rushed back to the hospital in the weeks before chi Angelie's graduation from fifth grade. She's not recovering smoothly from her surgery, and the doctors diagnose her with pancreatitis. She's released just in time to attend her daughter's graduation. At the ceremony, ch Angelie searches for her parents in the sea of faces as she and her classmates sing the graduation songs. One is Bette Midler's wind Beneath My Wings. Midway through the song, a certain lyric pierces Chiang Julie that lyric is a beautiful smile to hide the pain. I felt like everything was hanging by string. I thought that my mother was going to die, that she had given all of herself, of her body to me to keep me on or shelter under a roof with a bed. I felt like I owed her absolutely everything, and I felt that all three of us were trapped in the situation. Graduation as supposed to be an exciting time of new beginnings. And yes, I was going to lab and I was hopeful that that would change things, But it also felt so dangerous and treacherous. It felt like any wrong step for any of us would be the last of me. As my father said to me every now and then, as I repeated to myself and the armor that I had put on, the lies and pretending to be impervious and bossing my friends around and being mean, that was the beautiful style and iteration of that um to hide so much of the pain. And when those lyrics came on, I don't know, I just felt like something in me cracked open, and everything I was trying to hide all those years, so much, so much emotion. I just could not contain it anymore. And most of all, you know, the wind beneath my wings, which is my mother, my best friend, and the closest person to me in the entire Western hemisphere. I didn't know if she was going to be healthy, if she was going to live, if what was going to be happening to our little family, So everything just felt so precarious. Finally, at the lab school, Chang Julie is where she belongs. Both academically and socially, but things at home are increasingly complicated. Things are very tense between her parents. Her mom does recover physically and graduates from City College with a degree in computer science, and her dad, her dad buys a car, which is sort of like saying her dad buys a private jet. It's insane, astounding, and he doesn't discuss it with chian Julie's mother. He just goes and does it. During a fight at the dinner table, he reaches across and slaps his wife and something shifts. Shortly after that terrible moment, chian Julie's mother shows up at the lab school one day and simply says, we're going to Canada and her father isn't coming. He didn't want to go. He was afraid to go. Um, he didn't believe in the plan to go. He didn't think it was safe. She said, she figured out a way, and you're going. And you know, you describe so beautifully the way that that is both this very exciting and hopeful thing and also a huge loss. You're leaving again, you're leaving everything that you know again, and you're leaving your father and in an entire world leaving to Canada was terrifying to me because the last time I had left a country it had not worked out so well, and I had no idea what would be happening in Canada. My biggest fear was that it was going to be worse. But my mother was so incredibly hopeful and excited, and she had, for the first time and a long time, done something without even telling me about it. She planned on it for months without really talking to me, and that suggested to me like she was a little bit more of her old self in China, where she had hope and agency and was the mother that I leaned on for safety. So it gave me a sense that things might be better, but it also felt like we were leaving in defeat. And it's really quite a coincidence that happened to be reading from the Mix of Files at the time, because there's a famous line from that book that says, it's one thing to be running towards something, and another thing entirely to be running away from something. And I felt very much like we were not running toward Canada, but running away from America, whereas when we left China we were very much running toward America for my father and for that dream of the United States that he had from reading American literature. Eventually, Chan Julie's father does follow them, and together in Canada, they all become citizens. When it's time for college, a Julie returns to America, she goes to Swarthmore, a school that Mr Kane would definitely have told her was beyond her reach. This becomes a pattern. At Swathmore, a professor discourages her from applying to Yale Law, telling her it will never happen. But as she did with Mr. Kane, she Angulie proves this professor wrong as well. She is accepted at Yale Law. She's on track to achieving the goal set for herself back in the third grade. You know, through all of this accomplishment and all of this achievement, you carry with you the feeling that you need to keep this history of yours secret quiet, that you're going to transcend it. But you're going to transcend it not by sharing it, but by hiding it. And then you're in your second clerkship and you're opening the file on yet another immigration appeal because this is the area of law that you're doing, and it's like the damn bursts. Absolutely, I kept everything a secret for so long because I knew that if I didn't, if I turned around and confronted it, it would be ugly for a long time before it got better. It's like sweeping things under the rug for decades. When you finally lift up that rug, it's going to be pretty gross under there. So I wanted to keep it barricaded and hidden and out of sight. And like you say, I happened to clerk on a great court that handled a lot of immigration federal appeals during the Obama administration, when there were a lot of deportations, including of Dreamers. And when I came upon yet another I believe it was like twenty something or fortieth case on the same back pattern that somewhat mirrored my life, I felt like such a complete fraud. I was thinking, who am I to advise the judge on the fate of this person when I myself cannot confront my own truths which are reflected in this record. And I was thinking, if the judge knew, maybe she wouldn't even want me to work on it, because I don't know. Maybe I'm conflicted out. I was then still very young lawyer and didn't understand quite how that worked. So at that juncture of my personal and professional lives crossing, and me realizing that I had made it to that point that little chan thought would get her to safety. She was a lawyer, she was making money, She should be safe, she should know what to do, and realizing I still didn't know what to do and I was still very much that little kid who lied about everything, I just had it. So I walked into my judges office. She's an incredible mentor to me, and I'm sure she had no idea what I was about to say. I sat down, apropos of nothing and just started talking. But she listened. She, like ms palm, held space for me. She listened intently. She didn't speak when I paused, because she knew there was more. She just kept listening. I had never told anyone this whole history, much less someone in such a position of power, someone who could arguably support me if my case came up that way. And when I stopped talking, she didn't have judgment in her eyes, she didn't have blames, she didn't have to discussed none of the things that I expected to be confronted with when I finally aired the truth. She instead had this look of great understanding and empathy, and she said, secrets hold so much power over us, don't they? And she said it in such a way that suggested that she had lived my life. But of course she didn't. I knew that much. And it would take probably a year of me thinking about that sentence and chewing on it and trying to figure out what she was saying for me to realize, Oh, what she's really saying is that all of us have these monumental secrets that to us feel incredibly shameful and burdensome, but are actually, once aired, the key to our liberate sition. It took me a long time to understand that. Of course, she's had other words, reassuring words and kind words for me to not worry and to stand in my truth. That it was great to hear and hard for me to accept at the time. But without her guidance, without her holding space for me in that position of supreme power, I think I would have kept online for many more years. Here's tan Julie reading from the ending of her extraordinary story. I repeat the judge's words. It has become a daily morning practice But this time, after almost a year, I feel the lie slip away through the weave of my mantra. My muscles lose a tightness I did not know they have been carrying, And against the backdrop of my truths, I me, at long last, free to admit I am hired. I'm so very tired of running and hiding. But I have been doing it for so long. I don't know how to stop. I don't know how to do anything else. It is all I am defining myself against illegality while stitching it into my veins. The Judge's words are my blanketness, and in its snug embrace, I rediscover safety I knew once, long long ago. I turned back to the window and see for the first time the little girl cast a glow against the light of the waking sun. And then I try something new. I look that wise little girl in the eyes and reach my hand out for hers. Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Mollys A. Core is the story editor and Dylan fa Again is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer, and you can find us on Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at FAMI Secrets Pod. If you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.