SPEAKER 1: You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.
REGINA BARBER: Hey there, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here. And I'm sliding into your feed with a special episode from my co-host Emily Kwong from her new show Inheriting. What's up, Em?
EMILY KWONG: Hey, Gina. Yeah, I'm really excited to share Inheriting with you all.
BARBER: Yes, I mean, I've been listening to Inheriting, like, nonstop ever since it came out. And this is an Asian-American and Pacific Islander history podcast you hosted and reported for the NPR network. And I'm really proud of you because I'm Asian, and I know you wanted to have a show that focused on history from the point of view of our families.
KWONG: Yeah, I wanted a show for descendants like us, Gina, you know, who have questions about their family history. So each episode of Inheriting focuses on how one moment in the past rippled through the generations of a family and how it shaped their relationships, their life decisions, their health, their mental health, all kinds of things like that.
BARBER: Let's talk about mental health, right, because I've been crying almost every other episode I listen to.
KWONG: Dude, I cried, like, the whole time making this show.
BARBER: I can understand.
KWONG: You can understand. Yeah, history is very emotional. And I think part of what inspired me to do this project is as a science journalist, I've just been really curious about how the past gets stored in our brains and in our bodies. You know, science is really revealing how our environment can affect our genes.
BARBER: Since working on this podcast, I've learned that that's like the field of epigenetics, right?
KWONG: Yeah, so epigenetics is showing us that a traumatic event or a period of stress can alter our genes with chemical marks that can signal to the body, whether a gene should be read or not. And that explains how it's possible for descendants of trauma victims to be affected by the trauma, too, but generations later.
BARBER: Wow, wow, yeah, and you explore this idea, like, most directly in episode 5. And we're going to play the start of this episode today.
KWONG: This is an excerpt of the sweeping saga that is Inheriting, covering nearly 100 years of Asian-American history. You'll hear a small piece of that right after the break.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
BARBER: All right, Em, you and I are going to listen to part of Inheriting. This is the latest episode, and it's about Japanese-American incarceration and the ripple effect it had on a family generations later.
KWONG: That is right. Here it is.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
KWONG: I've been talking to Leah Bash for almost a year now. She tells a lot of stories about her dad. But the one that really lights her up is from a family party when her nephews were playing with Nerf guns.
LEAH BASH: And they didn't know that Grandpa had a Nerf gun, too. He was in a different room, but he could shoot at them through the little doorway that was open. So he started shooting the darts at him through the doorway. And he thought he was so clever because they had no idea they were coming from that direction. And when he would get really happy like that, he'd have this big smile, and this big chuckle. And he had these big round cheeks. Those are the best memories I have of him.
KWONG: Was he, um, always that playful?
BASH: No, not always, which is what-- you know, and sometimes people are totally opposite of what they normally are, is when you're like, oh, wow, that's really memorable [LAUGHS] because no, that's not how we usually was.
KWONG: Day to day, Tony [? Anaba ?] was under a personal storm cloud, weighed down by work stress. He ran the family business at Napa Auto Parts in Riverside, California. At one point, he ran a snowboard shop in Big Bear. And Leah still loves snowboarding and cars because of him. But growing up, all three kids had to walk on eggshells around him. Their dad could be mean, explosive. When he got home, it was never--
BASH: Hey, how's it going? How was your day? More like, hi, when's dinner?
KWONG: Just his moods ruled the house. Like, no one could be happy if their dad wasn't happy.
BASH: When he would get mad, he would tell us that nobody ever thought about him. And we were like, are you kidding? All we do is think about you.
KWONG: Selfish, mad, that was the family's story about him. He also had a lot of fear.
BASH: Fear of tomorrow, fear of what might happen. So he didn't want my mom to not be by his side in case something happened medically, in case something happened physically. What if he fell down? What if he had an asthma attack?
KWONG: So Leah became super sensitive to what her dad wanted and afraid of any negative emotions because her dad were so tumultuous. She's still kind of like this.
BASH: If things aren't like 100% happy, I get kind of, like, uneasy and anxious, like, OK, how do we-- how do we get this happy again? How do we make happy?
KWONG: But from her dad's Nerf gun hideout, Leah saw a flash of someone else, someone relaxed and playful, a side of her dad she didn't get to see too much. Leah remembers when she realized her dad needed help. When he was in his 70s, Tony developed high blood pressure and diabetes, went on dialysis. And one day while he was sitting up in bed, he confessed to Leah that he couldn't sleep.
BASH: He started talking about panicking or waking up in the middle of the night panicking that it happened to him, like, nightly. And on top of his asthma, which already gives him anxiety because he's worried he's not going to be able to breathe, and it sounded to me, like, he was having panic attacks.
KWONG: And they were happening every night. Leah had never heard this before.
BASH: He said, well, what do-- what do you do? Like, what can I do about it? I think I just said, you've got to take deep breaths and you've got to try to calm yourself down, and that kind of thing.
KWONG: OK. And how did he respond to that?
BASH: I think he just said something about it's really hard. And I said, yeah, I know it's really hard.
KWONG: Leah knew what to say because she had panic attacks, too. A therapist had diagnosed her with an anxiety disorder a few months earlier. The possibility her dad had one, too, made him seem way less scary.
BASH: Poor guy, because we had been treating him for years, like he was the problem, like he was grumpy all the time, or he was a mean person or selfish, when really he was suffering, and we didn't get it.
KWONG: Leah remembers feeling a painful kind of kinship. She wondered how their family would have been different if Tony had access to mental health care. Her words jerk me back to when I was 17. My mom was sitting at the end of my bed as I was trying to explain to her how I truly couldn't get up, how it felt like all the marrow had disappeared from my bones. My mind was stumbling between numbness and suicidal thoughts. My depression meant I was skipping so much school that the administrators were worried I didn't have enough credits to graduate, even though I had just gotten into Columbia University. Mom took me to therapy, supported me in getting on medication. At one point, she got me this small purple teddy bear that she called "study bear" to keep me company. She didn't say anything about her own mental health. I didn't know she struggled, and I wouldn't even know to ask until years later. For Leah, the idea that her father might be struggling with his mental health brought a new kind of clarity. If they both had anxiety disorder, it had to come from somewhere. She thought about her father's entire life and had what felt like an epiphany. Maybe part of this had to do with his early childhood and what happened the month before Tony was born.
BASH: February 19, 1942, and that's the day when the Executive Order was signed.
KWONG: Executive Order 9066 instructed all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast to be removed from their homes during World War II.
BASH: My dad was born in March of '42, so he was very, very, very small baby when they went to camp.
KWONG: The government moved Japanese-Americans inland.
SPEAKER 2: From the White House today came the most drastic action yet taken against possible fifth column activity, sabotage and spying on the Pacific Coast.
KWONG: The government called incarceration a military necessity to prevent people from spying for Japan, even though 2/3 of those people were American citizens. And both sides of Leah's family, her mom's and her dad's, were sent to camp. That's over two dozen relatives locked behind barbed wire for over three years.
BASH: I want to know what anyone else knows or thinks about this idea about camp affecting our mental health. I want to know if other people share those opinions or have proof of them if they have diagnoses that stem from that.
KWONG: Last year, Leah got in touch with our show, wanting our help in interviewing her dad's side of the family. She knows more about what happened to them. But all her life, no one talked about mental health, certainly not in the same breath as camp. And that was true of a lot of Japanese-American families after the war. The experience of camp was so humiliating and the pressure to avoid drawing negative attention so great that most maintained a conspiracy of silence after the war. It's a reaction observed in trauma group survivors around the world. Starting in the 1970s, social workers finally began looking into the physical and mental toll of camp. Among those who had been incarcerated, they found many displayed symptoms of detachment and avoidance, both of which are associated with post-traumatic stress and clear evidence of poor health. In one doctoral dissertation from 1997, a researcher found that former incarcerees had twice the risk of cardiovascular disease and a 30% increase in the odds of premature death. When I read this, it stopped me in my tracks. If that is the toll of camp on the people who were there, what did it do to their children and grandchildren? To Leah? The connection between intergenerational trauma and mental health is so complicated. It's driven by so many factors-- genetic, behavioral, environmental. But still, Leah wants to be able to answer this question for herself.
[END PLAYBACK]
BARBER: Em, I just love this series. I'm so excited to hear the rest of this.
KWONG: Gina, thank you so much.
BARBER: You're doing an amazing job. And for listeners, to hear the full episode and the rest of the series, go to the Inheriting feed.
KWONG: Inheriting is available in all the usual places podcasts are found. We'll also link to the show's website in our show notes laist.com/inheriting. It includes a digital resource guide and lesson plans from the Asian-American education project. This episode was produced by Anjuli Sastry Krbechek, who is the senior producer and co-creator of Inheriting. The piece was sound, designed by James Chow. Minju Park is also a producer on the show. Inheriting senior editor is Sara Sarasohn. It was adapted for Short Wave by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and me. Inheriting is a production of LAist Studios and distributed by the NPR network. I could not have made this show without the support and the encouragement of the entire team at Short Wave, so I just want to thank them from the bottom of my heart for your support, and to you listeners for listening. I'm Emily Kwong.
BARBER: I'm Regina Barber.
KWONG: And we are back on Monday with more Short Wave from NPR.
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