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GUEST BIO
Travis Giuse Nguyen (he/él) is an interpreter and translator born and raised in Southeast Texas. The son of a Vietnamese fisherman in the U.S. and the long-time resident of two minority-majority cities (Port Arthur and Houston), syncretism is the defining attribute of Travis’s lived experience. In his free time, Travis practices self-care by playing boleros on his trusty ukulele, singing, sewing, and caring for his plants..
DEFINITIONS
- ASL: American sign language
- Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese are languages originating from Southern China.
- Neurotypical/allistic people do not have autistic or other neurologically atypical patterns of thought or behavior. People who have ADHD, ASD are neurodivergent.
MENTIONED
- Ocean Vuong’s “Night Sky With Exit Wounds” (*)
- Protactile
(*) This is an affiliate link. Purchasing through this link would mean that a small portion of your purchase will go to supporting the podcast, at no extra cost to you. Less money for Bezos 🙂
TAKEAWAYS
- We naturally internalize traumatic experiences, and they shape how we view the world and interact with it, whether we are cognizant of it or not.
- When multi-lingual people get dementia, they will lose the last language they learned first.
- As people who hear, we have access to a lot of auditory information that we glean in passing everywhere we go because people around us communicate in a language we can understand. That is not a privilege that deaf people have, because very few people around them use sign language.
- Even if you don’t know sign language, don’t be intimidated to interact with deaf people.
- Many of us do not speak our cultural language because our parents were wrongly told that teaching us anything other than English would prevent us from becoming fluent in English.
- Getting to know people who have different lived experiences can help you see your blindspots.
- Discussing politics/religion only leads to arguments if we don’t know how to talk about them.
- Self-determination is a myth. While we do have choices, our views, our taste, our personality is inevitably shaped by the people and media that surround us.
- Pulling yourself by your bootstrap is also a myth. No one can claim to be entirely self-made. No one can be part of society without using resources that they didn’t create themselves.
CONTACT
Instagram | TikTok | Web | LinkedIn | Twitter
Host: Lazou
Episode Sponsor:
Additional Music Links:
- Nuances Podcast – curated Spotify | Apple Music playlists with past guests, hosts & more Asian diaspora artists.
- “Au Soleil” by 23rd Hour
Video with captions
Transcript
Lazou: Welcome to the Nuances Podcast, where we go beyond first impressions with the Asian diaspora. I’m your host, Lazu. I’m a new American who grew up in the only place the dodo bird ever lived, which is Mauritius. On this podcast, we explore our cultures and how they affect everything from our political views to our religion, to our career choices and more.
We have a great conversation with Travis today, but before we get into that, I’d like to define a few terms. ASL is American Sign Language. Hakka, Hokkien, and Cantonese are languages that originated from Southern China.
Neurotypical people, also known as allistic people, are people who do not have an atypical pattern of thought or behavior. So people who have autism or adhd, for example, are not neurotypical. They are neurodivergent. Also mentioned in this episode is author Ocean Vuong. If you’d like to know more about this author and poet, you can go to nuancespod.com, go to the notes, find this episode, and you’ll find all the links there.
As always, if you enjoy this show, be sure to follow. Send it to your friends, anything you can do to support us is greatly appreciated. Now onto our conversation with Travis.
Growing up in TX
Lazou: Our guest today is Travis Giuse Nguyen. He’s an interpreter and translator born and raised in southeast Texas, the son of a Vietnamese fisherman in the US and the longtime resident of two minority majority cities: Port Arthur & Houston. Syncretism is the defining attribute of Travis’s lived experience. In his free time, Travis practices self-care by playing boleros on his trusty ukulele, singing, sewing, and caring for his plants. Travis, welcome to the show and thank you so much for being here.
Travis: Hi, Lazou. It’s very good to be here.
Lazou: let’s start with. You know, your background. Tell us a little bit about your, history and, your family’s lived experience in Texas.
Travis: Sure. I am a Texan, born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, which is about a 15 minute drive from the Texas, Louisiana border. I grew up there with my older brother and younger sister and my two parents as well. So my dad was, was, a fisherman and that meant he was out at sea most of the year when the season was open. And we grew up in Port Arthur a small Texas city. It’s called a city. It feels more like a small town But it’s interesting in many different aspects, especially because it’s such a minority majority town slash city in Texas.
Lazou: Yes. So what was the demographic like in Port
Travis: Arthur?
if I had to break it down in terms of statistics, 40% identifies as black or African-American. I wanna say when I was living there, it was 2% Asian . It’s probably something like 5% at this point. And then the majority of the population that is left is Hispanic or Latino? Of all races
Lazou: So you grew up in a rather diverse community.
what was that like growing up there
Travis: One thing that really resonates with me is that I never felt like I had to speak for my community, As a person who’s lived all over the US and who travels around the world, I run into people friends and colleagues of mine who, tell me their stories about growing up in small towns in which maybe they were the only, person of color or, Asian-American, and I’ve never quite had that experience until I left for college. I never felt like what I did, reflected of, the other Asian-American, I guess boy down the street, Sure there were some folks that confused Asian folks in general. But I just never felt like I had to represent my entire race or my entire ethnicity.
That was one thing that really struck me.
Lazou: Right.
Travis: Another thing is the majority of my teachers were African-American or black. Something that a lot of people never experienced until maybe college or maybe even ever. You know, I’ve had black teachers, specifically black women who were my teachers since pre-K moving forward. And so I think that shaped my understanding of race. Of course, me not being a black person, I can’t ever have that experience. But I think being in proximity to that all the time while growing up has really shaped my perspective of being a person of color in America.
Lazou: Yeah, for sure.
We talked briefly about your dad being a fisherman, and you said he would be out months at a time, so he must have been on one of those bigger boats that would go quite a ways out
Travis: Into the Gulf of Mexico. So basically, there’s an open season. The season usually starts in March and ends, I believe in November. So eight or nine months of the year it’s open. So what he would do is he would come back to port, he would buy diesel to run the boat. Oil gas, salt was used in order to preserve the fish, cuz you know, you’re out for a month. And also to get groceries as well, and deck hands. People who work under a ship, they’re usually like contractors right? Who work for a temporary amount of time. And so he would go out to the boat, do his fishing, and then come back. And when he would come back, he would sell whatever shrimp he caught. And then come home and only be home for maybe about two or three days and then repeat the process.
Lazou: Wow.
Travis: Yeah
Trauma responses in the Vietnamese diasporaa
Lazou: One of the things you mentioned in your pre-interview was that you’d like to talk about the Vietnamese refugees that came after the fall of Saigon.
Do you have any particular stories you’d like to share?
Travis: I didn’t realize how powerful representation was until I was in grad school. An Asian American friend of mine, we were talking one day and he mentioned something about Ocean Vuong he said, oh, have you read, "Night Skies With Exit Wounds". I’m like, no, what’s that? And so he lent me his copy. I was working in the call center at this time. So whenever I had some off time when I wasn’t taking a call, I would just have the book by my side, open it up and I read it. I read spread this one entry that I guess shook me. And I guess that’s what started my interest in trauma in the Vietnamese-American community, but also trauma in refugee communities in general. And so the story goes like this. Ocean is talking about his father. He and his father are on the beach somewhere and a dolphin washes up on the shore. And his father, for some reason something happens, he runs, he, he darts towards the dolphin and he tries to resuscitate it somehow. And in the process of resuscitating it, there are tears that are screaming down his father’s face. It’s very emotional for him. I don’t remember Ocean’s response, but I got the sense that maybe he thought it was a little too… his father’s response didn’t match what was happening. And it wasn’t until that moment that like everything had clicked for me. Being a person who’s Vietnamese-American and who has grown up in the Vietnamese-American community, in general, collectively, we just never talk about mental health.
We never talk about the war. I think a lot of people honestly try to stuff down those feelings, bottle down their feelings in any way that they can. And so as a result, I think people from my generation, we have an idea that the war happened and that it’s affected people, for example, like our parents, but we don’t quite have the details of how exactly is it affecting our parents. Or, people who have gone through the war, people who have escaped, sought asylum. so when when I read that entry, it clicked. This is like what happened that one time in Houston. To give you some information, it was several years ago at this point, maybe even a decade ago, there was a woman who was driving on one of the highways and her car breaks down and for some reason she’s unconscious at this point, right? There’s a man, a Vietnamese American man who’s driving on the highway, and he sees that there’s something off with a car and the hood, the engine catches on fire. And so this man stops his car in the middle of the highway, gets out, runs to the car, and uses some sort of tool to basically break open the window to take this woman out of the car. He runs while she’s in his arms and the car then explodes. I remember watching that. I was sitting in the living room of my parents’ house and I remember thinking this feels, and I didn’t have the language at the time, I was a high school student, but it felt familiar. It felt felt very familiar to the experiences that I had witnessed in the Vietnamese-American community, not personally, but things that people would talk about. And so when I read that entry, you know, as maybe a 24 year old in grad school, it made me think it’s trauma. By then I had some semblance of language to talk about what exactly was happening in my community. It’s trauma. The people in my community have gone through these terrible life events and it’s left them with a lot of different feelings that they’ve processed in different ways. And in this particular incident, Ocean’s father, I would assume, has some sort of regret, some sort of emotion that’s tied to maybe not being able to save a person. And so that somehow he’s transferred that emotion to this dolphin, right? and It’s the same thing for the man who saved this woman from her car that stalled on the highway and eventually exploded in Houston. And that was where my journey started. Figuring out like, what are the different trauma responses that the, Vietnamese-American refugee community has? That we, as people who’ve grown up in this community, have just taken for granted, oh, these are just how my parents are, this is just their personality type. and TikTok has helped me a lot with this, there was someone that said that trauma decontextualized from a community looks like a personality trait. all of this has basically culminated into me thinking like it’s trauma, it’s generational trauma. The things that my parents have gone through, it somehow affected their, the worldview, their lens, right? And that in turn colors their interactions with people, how they rear their children, and then it’s intergenerational at this point. That was, I guess the one that I really wanted to mention, about in in refugee populations.
Lazou: in the case of the man who rescued the woman from her car, his stopping his car and going to rescue her was a trauma response, you think?
Travis: you could say that. Yes. I think there’s a lot of different things that we have gone through in our own lives that, having empathy or sympathy for a person who’s going through a similar situation, we don’t want them to go through the same thing. And so as a result, we try to ensure somehow that person doesn’t go through.
And I don’t wanna speak for, all people, but it’s something in general that I’ve seen you know. So I work as an interpreter, which means I work with a lot of different people and I find people who are in helping or caring professions, such as nursing or social work, a lot of them come from broken backgrounds, so to speak. Maybe they didn’t have a very good relationship with their family, a broken family dynamic or something like that. And so when they come out into the world, for some reason a lot of folks have this belief, or this I guess feeling or determination that like, I do not want the same for other people, so I am going to do something to ensure that people don’t have to face the same things that I face. And everyone does it differently. Some people go into caring professions. Some people try to develop hearts of stone. Much more stoic approach to the world. But all these are basically trauma responses to things that we faced in the past. And so in regards to the man who ran to the woman to save her from the burning car? it pretty much is a trauma response. It’s something that’s happened to him in the past. Oftentimes in the Vietnamese American community, there are certain maybe behaviors that kind of seem out of place, but the Vietnamese American community in general understands that it’s a trauma response, even if they don’t really have language to call it trauma. For example remember one time my family and I, we had just gotten out of church. Family is Roman Catholic, by the way. We just got out of church and usually one of our traditions is we go to a Vietnamese restaurant to eat. And so we go to our usual spot.
But for some reason, this particular Sunday, there was a line that went out of the door. My dad became visibly distraught. He was panicking. He was walking back and forth. He was shouting at people like, and he was cursing, and speaking Vietnamese saying " this effing restaurant, why can’t they be faster? Why do we all have to wait in line". And I didn’t understand it at that specific moment, but I realized that it was a trauma response from my dad, who was in the Philippines for a short time for a few months in one of the refugee camps. And so in the refugee camps, you basically form a line to get food, whatever they would give you.
And so him waiting in line for food, with a bunch of other Vietnamese people, reminded him of that particular time. And for him, rage, I think that’s his response, his trauma response. It’s just unfettered rage, screaming people, picking fights, fistfights. and so growing up with that as a kid who has no context, you know that the war happened, that bad things happened to Vietnamese people, but you don’t understand how that trauma sits with people and how it manifests when they’re reminded of things in relation to the war or being a refugee.
I don’t know if that made sense?
Lazou: Yeah, that makes sense.
Translator/interpreter
Lazou: Now you are a translator. You’re fluent in four languages, right?
Travis: At
Lazou: least.
when did your interest in languages develop? What made you decide to become an interpreter?
Travis: To start that answer, I should say. A translator is a person that works, between written texts. So for example, if a book is in language A and you translate it to language that’s translation. Interpretation is usually between language A and language B, but those languages are either spoken or signed.
I grew up speaking a lot of different languages I think a strong reason for that is because I was exposed to a lot of languages growing up. My mother speaks five languages. Her father, my ah kung, and her mother, my ah po, spoke six or so languages.
And the reason for that being as, our people have been consistently displaced from time and time again. So a short history recap, my mother’s grandparents were from Southern China. And around that time a lot was happening, there was famine. so as a result, family moved from southern China to Vietnam in maybe I wanna say 1920s. I don’t have an exact date. And they basically migrated with a bunch of other people as well. People who were Cantonese, who people who were Hakka, Hokkien, they all relocated many different places, including Vietnam. So that’s where my mom’s side of the family ended up. So she growing up spoke Cantonese because that was the family language. But the Chinese school that she attended, Mandarin was the language of instruction. She spoke Vietnamese because she lived in Vietnam, right? that was her story with my grandfather. He also spoke French because Vietnam was a French colony up until 1954. he also spoke Hakka and a lot of different other Chinese dialects because he was surrounded. He was in the Chinese community. So as a result, I always had language around me, and not to mention that I was in southeast Texas, so there’s a huge Hispanic and Latino population, so I was surrounded by Spanish.
And so I just always had language around me. And growing up I wouldn’t say that I spoke all those languages from a young age. I only spoke English for a long time. and Then eventually I started speaking them, but I could understand the languages that were being spoken around me. and by the time I was 17 or 18, towards the end of high school, it was around that time when there was a lot of pressure for me to think about what do I wanna do with my life? What career do I wanna pursue? And knew that I loved languages. I just didn’t think that it was something that you could live off of. I eventually pursued a degree in engineering and completed that, but that didn’t really feed my soul, so to speak. Luckily at the same time I was doing a dual degree in linguistics. I will say that degree has carried on, language or linguistics, has been an integral part of my life even today.
Lazou: Yeah. My family was also part of Southern China. They were Hakka.
So they moved to Mauritius. I think in the thirties. I’m also not sure about the exact dates. It’s fascinating. I can relate to understanding but not being able to speak.
Learning vietnamese
Lazou: So how did that happen for you? when did you start actively trying to speak in those languages and really learn them?
Travis: My mom didn’t want any of us kids to speak any other language except English. In the US there was this huge push in the nineties not to teach your kids anything other than English and even medical professionals were saying this. That if you spoke to your kids in multiple languages, let’s say that you are from a Spanish speaking household. By you speaking English and Spanish to your children, your children are going to get confused and as a result, they’re never going to acquire English or Spanish fully.
They’re not gonna sound like fluent English speakers. And of course, this scared a lot of people who spoke a non-English language in the home. And a lot of people who face discrimination, linguistic discrimination, because they didn’t speak English fluently, did all they could in order to provide their kids with the best chance for success in the United States. A lot of people gave their kids only English names, only spoke to them in English. And of course, now we know that’s absolutely not true.
You can speak to your kids in three, four different languages and if they have, the resources and the appropriate environment, they can pick all of those up.
Kids are like sponges. Unfortunately that train of thought has really left its mark, on, for example, my generation, the generations before and after. And it, just to get on my soapbox, it goes to show you something innocuous can cause such systemic effects.
Lazou: Yeah, when did you start learning those languages and speaking them?
Travis: The kids in the neighborhood spoke Spanish, but I didn’t start learning how to write it, for example, until I was seven because my elementary school one of the requirements was that you had to take Spanish classes.
Vietnamese I could always understand passively, I could hear it, I could understand it, the lower registers I should say, like washing the dishes or keeping the house clean or stuff like that. But I didn’t start speaking it until maybe about 13. And the reason for that was that my mom realized that some point, us kids are not gonna be able to communicate with one another. the one huge concern that she had was that she saw people who eventually had, dementia or Alzheimer’s. You know, you can find this in the literature, what happens is if you grow up with a language, and then and then let’s say later in life in your twenties, you learn, English, you move to the West, you learn English. What happens is that the newest information, once you get something like Alzheimer’s or dementia, starts to fade away first. So it is like a stack right? So her concern was that, were she to go through the same process, she would forget English first, and then suddenly we would not be able to communicate with my mother. And so I took it upon myself to learn language. Being 13, I was like, " that’s scary. I need to do something". So I went ahead and I, you know, learned the language. It was, it took a long time just to get comfortable with speaking it, a few years. And even to this day, I wouldn’t say my Vietnamese is fluent. There are still grammar mistakes that I make, but 13 is when I started speaking that language.
Lazou: that’s a very interesting point. We actually had an episode last season about dementia, but we didn’t really talk about the language aspect of it. That’s a very good point. That that would be the first thing that you would lose.
Yeah
A day in the life of an interpreter
Lazou: Give us an idea of what it’s like to be an interpreter. Like what’s your average day like? I’m sure it varies a lot, what’s that like?
Travis: I, can only say one thing with certainty: no one day is the same. I feel like I’m in every space. Most of my work is in medical interpretation, which means I go to the hospitals and I interpret everything. So any medical procedure, any condition I’ve probably interpreted for that situation. I also do a lot of work with people who are getting social services. I do a lot of mental health, so I am sometimes in psychiatric wards, I’m interpreting between patients and for example, the psychiatrist and the nurses. And I’m starting to pick up a lot more legal work, which means I am interpreting between people who are getting counsel, sometimes it’s pro bono lawyers who are working with a client who is seeking asylum in the United States.
And so I have to interpret between the different parties. So it’s never the same. And that’s something that I really enjoy. I love learning and I love helping people, and I think that’s just a great meshing of the two. Being in a different space almost every day and the skills that I have to be able to make the world a better place.
Lazou: How many languages are you interpreting in.
Travis: Lemme think. English, of course, Spanish, American Sign language. There’s a form of American sign language. It’s its own language, but it’s called pro tactile. It’s a language that’s used with deaf blind people, so people who are deaf and blind, where it’s like signing, but it’s in the hands. Even then, it’s still a lot different than visual ASL. I do some Portuguese, but it’s not a language that I do much of. So English, Vietnamese, Spanish American sign language. Those are my top four.
Lazou: That’s awesome.
Mm-hmm.
Deaf/deaf-blind communities
Lazou: So speaking of ASL, what are some additional hurdles that you feel your clients in the deaf and deafblind communities face? It’s already hard for somebody who needs interpretation to navigate the world. But I’m sure that’s even harder for people who are deaf or deaf and blind.
Travis: One thing that really sticks out for me is that for deaf people who live in a majority hearing society incidental learning is not something that comes very easily to them. And it’s not because of them themselves, it’s because of the language that they’re able to access. For example I think a lot of us who are hearing can remember a time when we were little, where we were basically around a bunch of different adults speaking a language that we understood and talking about maybe different things that we didn’t understand, but that we were able to garner like, oh, okay I know this, but not that. And eventually, being able to put the pieces together. And it’s through that socialization, with that incidental learning. Cuz it’s not like we’re being sat down and being taught, " This is what, X, Y, and Z is". We just pick it up from being in a space where we can access language
like
Lazou: like by osmosis.
Travis: right.
Passively, whereas with a lot of deaf people, that incidental learning doesn’t happen because the statistic is that 90% of deaf people are born to hearing parents, parents who hear, and the majority of hearing parents do not learn American sign language. Not only that, but the environment in which they’re in, most people do not sign.
And so people may be speaking. But they’re not able to get that incidental learning about anything. Think about when you overhear someone like, "oh wow, I went to this new restaurant recently. Yeah, it’s on X Street and Y Avenue and they have really good tacos".
They weren’t directly talking to us, but we were able to glean that information just by overhearing it. That doesn’t really happen for the deaf kids or deaf people that I mentioned in that specific context. And so as a result there’s a lot of things that we take for granted that we know, that may not be evident for a person who’s never had a chance to learn that incidentally or not.
Low hanging fruit
Lazou: Yeah. So are there systemic changes that you feel could be low hanging fruit that could make life easier for those communities that we could implement?
Travis: Some things that folks can do: always include captions. I think that’s a very low hanging fruit. Have captions. If you have images online just have an image description. I think interacting with people of different abilities doesn’t have to be scary, right? Looking back, I always encounter hearing people who are afraid of interacting with people who are blind or people who are deaf, or both deaf and blind. Because they maybe don’t know sign language. But deaf people have accustomed to interacting with hearing people because the majority of people in the world are hearing so they’re comfortable with texting or, taking out a piece of paper and writing back and forth. Whereas I see oftentimes, not all, but many hearing people just don’t even wanna try. The moment they find out a person is deaf, " I don’t even wanna bother". Imagine how that must feel for the deaf person.
Lazou: Yeah.
Travis: And think that applies to people regardless of their intersectional identity, that regardless if a person is of a different ability, different sort of identity, that doesn’t mean like I give up.
I’m not gonna try. Because the world is so diverse. People are of all different axes of identity and I think the world is a lot richer for that.
Lazou: for sure.
Sexism
Lazou: So having worked with a lot of people from all types of backgrounds, you have experienced a lot more diversity than I would say the average American. What are some things that you would not have learned otherwise and that maybe you’d wanna share with people?
Travis: There’s one story that sticks out, but it’s not necessarily in terms of ethnicity or race. It actually has to do with gender.
Lazou: Go for it.
Travis: ahead. Okay. So when I was in grad school I remember this one time I was talking to a friend and this friend happens to be a a white woman from the Pacific Northwest. And we were just talking about getting lunch. We all get together in the grad student lounge, and I’m the only male there. Right. And so it’s mostly white women, a couple of women of color, and we’re all just talking and it’s towards the end of the semester and a lot of folks are about to graduate.
One huge concern after graduating is, where are we gonna work? Who’s going to take us, where do we apply? I stayed quiet cause I’ve learned over time to not take up too much space. I realized as a male, maybe it’s my voice, but folks will listen when I speak, whereas they may not do the same for a woman.
But they were talking about the interview process and how they were concerned with how they dressed for an interview. One person was saying like, "yeah, there’s this one skirt that I like. It’s floral" and some of the gals had jumped in and said, "oh yeah, that’s something you really wanna avoid for an interview". And bear in mind that a lot of them were applying for software positions. And I didn’t realize this until I asked what exactly, you know, and they were very kind and, told me, "Travis, when we go into a round of interviews for a software position, we have to be really cognizant of how we dress. We have to try to wear something that looks more gender neutral just so they don’t judge us based on like the makeup that we wear or the clothes that we wear. Because if they think negatively of that, that is a detriment to us getting even considered being hired. And when I heard that, I thought I’ve never had to think about that.
Yes, I’ve had to think about like a nice tie and a shirt, but I’ve never thought specifically if what I’m wearing is too masculine and too feminine. An if I run into a potential interviewer who will think less of me because of the way that I choose to dress based on my gender. so that was an eye opening moment for like, I’ve never had to think about this.
Lazou: Yeah.
Travis: Yeah. And so that’s just something that’s always resonated with me. and I was 25 at time, I think, if I didn’t know that by then, what are all these things that I don’t know about just because I don’t have that lived experience.
Lazou: Yeah.
Travis: Yeah.
Lazou: Having graduated from a computer science program as well I can totally relate to that. I think I was not even aware of the sexism that was in the computer science department until I did a workshop that was for women in computer science. They were both current students and graduates who had been working in the industry for a couple years, and hearing the stories from all these women, I was like, oh my God.
I had no idea that what I was experiencing was actually sexism. I didn’t even know that was a systemic thing. I just thought that’s just these people’s personalities. And then after that workshop I’m like, wow, my best friends are really sexist. And it was like a mind b lowing moment. I was like, okay I gotta rethink everything now.
Racism
Travis: Exactly, and for me, in terms of race, a long story short, I went to go interpret at a elementary school. And there was this one woman who was I didn’t really think much of it. I honestly, and I, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, but I thought maybe she had an intellectual disability just because of the way that she was treating me. And I thought oh, okay, nevermind.
This is what happened. I walk into the principal’s office, right? And I ask her, oh, hi.
Excuse me, I’m the interpreter for, the parent teacher something. Where’s the room? And she started making these sort of sounds. It wasn’t intelligible to me. And I thought maybe she’s non-verbal, maybe something like that. But it turns out she could speak. She was just for some reason putting on this sort of performance, not being helpful. There was a lady a teacher who was making copies for her class. And a couple of hours later, towards the end of my assignment, she mentions to me, "I’m so sorry for how that woman treated you."
" What do you mean, how she treated me?"
" That woman? Like how she interacted with you at the office."
And I then mention like, "oh, I thought she just had a a learning disability". But yeah, she didn’t actually talk like that. She was just being racist and I didn’t think that, when you interact with a person, I don’t immediately think that’s racist.
Right. And I, I, really do give people too many chances, I think. I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Cause maybe it’s not racism. Maybe they just had a really bad day. And then when someone comes to you and they tell you like, "we’ve worked together, she doesn’t speak like that. She was just being mean to you."
And I realized, oh, okay. So it’s interesting to see that it’s not until an outsider, an observer tells you or tells you their experience, that you connect the dots and realize oh, it was this or that.
Lazou: Yeah. A lot of times we don’t even realize it, and probably a lot of times they don’t even realize what they’re doing. I think a lot of my friends who, looking back, I think, wow, they were really sexist. I don’t think they they intentionally wanted to be sexist.
I think that’s just how they were brought up and I would hope that they have changed. Now. I don’t know. I’ve moved since then. I don’t know.
Travis: Fingers
Lazou: fingers crossed.
Americans wanting to leave the country
Lazou: Yeah. So right now, things are a little weird in America, I think everywhere. And whenever things get tough or, things seem to be taking a downturn, people will say things like, I’m moving to Canada, or, I wanna get get of this country.
Not realizing that A, it’s not trivial to move to Canada and b not everybody has the privilege to be able to afford doing that. But also it’s just a very reductive way of thinking in terms of the immigrant experience. Like obviously these people have not gone through immigration. So having worked with people who have risked everything to come to this country, how do you respond to this?
Travis: That’s a really good question. don’t think I’ve ever responded to someone who said that. I’ve always taken it to be a sort of joke. Like, oh I’m running away from home because I have to eat green beans or something. But I think it mirrors a lot of the different phenomena that we’ve seen in the world, right? For example, a lot of people who live in Katy, which is a city that’s west of Houston, but still in the Houston Metropolis. A lot of the people there are from Columbia and Venezuela. And all the things that are happening over there, people are fleeing because they cannot make a living. There’s no way to support their families. So they come to places like Houston to make their homes. I think when things happen, people want to flee. I think that’s a very natural response. When the Haitian president was assassinated, that led to a lot of Haitians fleeing towards other countries, Mexico, to go into the US for example. People are afraid. I think it’s a very, not even human, but like a very animistic response to want to run away from danger. I sympathize I guess is what I’m trying to say.
Lazou: Yeah.
Travis: It is reductive. Reductive. I understand what you mean by reductive.
I think the conditions that have led to we are in right now it was. a culmination of a lot of different things. I dunno if I can speak to them, but,
Lazou: Yeah, I think the way to me that it feels reductive, having gone through the immigration process and I technically immigrated from Canada. So it’s not even the hardest country to immigrate from. But it was a very lengthy process. It took almost 10 years for me to finally become a citizen.
And that’s considered short in terms of the amount of time that it takes. And, I’ve looked at what it would take for a US citizen to move to Canada, and it’s not trivial either. So I think when I hear that, to me it sounds like, I liked my quiet, life in the US and I don’t have that anymore.
So I’m gonna go take it somewhere else. I’m entitled to go wherever I want to have the life that I want. It comes off as really entitled to me not really understanding that. First of all, immigration is not trivial. And also, yes, this country is not perfect, but there are so many people who have risked so much and given up so much to be here and you are just slapping them in the face, I feel like.
I don’t know. Do you feel like that’s uh, reasonable?
Travis: That’s a very reasonable um, yes, that’s very reasonable.
Dooms scrolling is one thing that a lot of people like myself partake in.
You know. You hear the bad news that’s happening all over the country, all over the world. And so it’s like climate change. All these different things. And so when you’re always getting this information, it can feel hopeless very easily.
Lazou: yeah.
Travis: yeah.
And so so for some people, it’s that fight flight freeze’s response, right? I think a lot of the people who are saying that are maybe joking, but they are saying it because it is for them, their flight response, to leave danger. There are folks who are willing to be part of the change, who are speaking out, trying to be part of legislation, changing things for the better because we have the skills, right? In the sense that, we work in a particular sector of society where we’ve culminated the skills over time to be able to advocate, to be able to legislate, to be able to speak out about these different things. And I think that’s not something that everyone knows how to do, right? In American society in general, we’re taught, don’t talk about politics, don’t talk about religion, don’t talk about these certain different things because it only leads to arguments. And I honestly believe that the only reason that it leads to arguments is because we don’t know how to talk about them. We don’t know how to talk about them because they’re considered taboo in our society.
But it’s sort of like school. You don’t start off as a first grader thinking I’m going to take differential equations right? Everything culminative, you learn, and then the knowledge that you gain later on builds upon one another. And then eventually you can take things like, calculus or whatnot. But to use that analogy, folks are thinking like, oh, I have to be able to do things as if I am taking calculus for the first time without having any knowledge of math. I think, no, not how you should be looking at it. And a lot of the people who are skilled in calculus in this example, are so because they’ve built up to it, right? So think a lot of Americans need to learn that. And I don’t quite blame them that they don’t have the skills. It’s because I don’t know whether it’s been intentional or not, but like pulling out civics in American society.
A lot of people I meet here in Texas talk about "I’ve done everything, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps", which is not even possible by the way, "and made my way in society or life without the help of anyone else". That’s absolutely not true. How do you think the streets are funded?
It was from collective knowledge of people who worked in science, like technology and all this, culmination of years of knowledge to be able to create this thing that you use to drive and the money that is used to make sure that you have clean drinking water, firefighters who will come to your home to put out a fire.
That didn’t happen overnight. These were not things that were granted to us just because. People had to fight for that. I don’t know if you know this, but firefighters used to be private. They were not a public service. So basically you would pay some sort of fee to get firefighters to come to your house if your house was on fire. And if you didn’t have that, too bad your housewould just burn down. It wasn’t until people realized if my neighbor’s house burned down, there’s a good chance that the house is surrounding my house. That house will burn down as well.
And then it wasn’t until that people were like, let’s make it a collective thing. I’m slowly getting off topic, but the point is that a lot of Americans see themselves in silos. Or oftentimes work in what they perceive to be their best interest, without fully understanding that ,oftentimes if we all work together towards that common goal, we are a lot more effective than if we try to be so individualistic
Lazou: Yeah.
Travis: and that’ll lead us to solutions.
Lazou: Yeah, it’s definitely a topic that has come up a lot, this very individualistic worldview for a lot of Americans where people think that they did everything themselves and that everything should be privatized. And yeah, it doesn’t quite help society at large. Some people get really rich.
Healthcare is a prime example, right? So many countries have universal healthcare, including Canada, including Mauritius, where I grew up, which is a tiny island in the middle of nowhere. They have universal healthcare. Not everything is covered, but most things are. And to me it’s just so insane that the US does not have it.
Travis: If I could speak a little bit about that. Mexico has had universal healthcare since 2013, and living in Texas, a lot of people will go across the border to get things like dental or medication for their diabetes, insulin, stuff like that. And I, I think it’s interesting to see that dynamic, right? A lot of Americans saying "well, we don’t want universal healthcare of any sort", but then we’ll go to countries with universal healthcare and get their medication or get their services there.
Lazou: Yeah definitely double standards there. People have this idea that if it’s private, it’s capitalism and market forces, and you’ll get the best price. It’s absolutely not true. Canada pays a lot less money for the same drugs than we do here, and the hospitals here just charge an insane amount of money for anything.
I did a virtual visit the other day. My bill for the insurance was $1,085 for one virtual visit. And sure, my insurance covered most of it, and I just did the copay. But still, that’s an insane amount of money for a visit.
Travis: As a person that works in in, medical interpreting, it’s definitely a gaming of the system, right? And also as a person who is a a freelancer and who is familiar with invoice practices, it’s the hospital giving your insurance an invoice for a thousand let’s say. And they say, "we can’t pay this. we can’t do this, and that". And then it’s a sort of negotiation between those two parties to a cost that the insurance is willing to pay. And then whatever it is, your, copay or whatever, But basically the point is that the hospital wants to make as much money as possible. And I hate to say it, but in the long run, a hospital is a business, right? They are looking to make a profit. People up in power are looking at the bottom line. And I think unfortunately, that does affect how how people get healthcare, right? Yeah.
Because if you just said, okay, this medication is 30 bucks to the insurance, and the insurance is " okay, great". But if you give them a, say the medication is a thousand and they work it down to 500, you still made, a lot more than $30. And I think that’s just a system that does not benefit the people
Lazou: Yeah.
LGBT+
Lazou: You also mentioned that you are part of the LGBTQ community and some of our previous guests have mentioned that they’ve faced a lot of discrimination or fetishization as Asian people. Has that been your experience as well?
Travis: When I did leave for college, and eventually met people from all around the world, a lot of the federalization that was happening was from older white men. It was, on apps such as Grindr and whatnot, and I never really paid much attention to them. and I don’t know if it was because I grew up with a very strong sense of identity that I felt like I’m not interested in these, but I don’t feel like these are my only options. So it was just something that I never pursued. And I think the only thing that I really wanna say in that aspect is I didn’t realize how really affected people, even the people that they’re attracted to. I’ll speak for myself especially I grew up in a place where I lived in a very diverse area and within that population there aren’t that many white people. So for the longest time, most of the people that I was attracted to happened to be Latinos just cuz of the area I lived in. I had a lot of black friends, but I don’t think I ever saw them as partners. Being from an Asian American family, it was always the talk. I heard the conversation when it came to my sister, it’s "don’t bring a black boy home, the kids are going to be dark", right? And we know what that means in the Asian American community, darker skin means you’re seen as less than, as poor. And so I internalized that even though my parents weren’t talking to me specifically, it’s that incidental learning, right? That you learn like, okay my parents will not approve of this. So I just never saw them. But I also didn’t ever see them as I don’t wanna use objects of desire cuz, people are not objects, but Until I got out in the world more and started like dating black men for example, and realizing oh, they’re just like people too. I think it was. All that incidental learning, everything that you just pick up passively kind of conditions you into believing oh, this is what you’re supposed to like, I think a lot of people have this belief that we are our own people and that we have self-determination, don’t quite understand that self-determination actually is very much influenced by our environment.
Lazou: Yeah, for sure.
Travis: And also to speak in that regard, I never really found white men attractive. I guess I never had that exposure growing up. My parents didn’t let me watch cable tv. We just didn’t have cable tv. We didn’t really have the money for it, so I just watched PBS, and a lot of it’s just cartoons, like we’re watching anime.
So I never really watched a lot of shows that had actual people in it. They were all these cartoons until I got into college and whatnot. And I think that. Was really interesting for me because then I never saw people from the lens of media, of Hollywood, so to speak.
We know that camera angles and music can really influence what you think about a particular person or a particular thing, right? Like when we watch shows featuring Asian food, if the music sounds like, kinda weird sounding, we’re taught subconsciously to think oh, Asian food is weird. I didn’t realize that was the mold until I remember watching something on TikTok and it was a Chinese creator from China, I think. they had created a video where they overlaid it with a country song. And I thought, this doesn’t make sense.
They’re cooking Chinese food, but then they’re playing like, I don’t know, like Tim McGraw in the background what is this? then that made me think about what is the typical music that I hear when I see Asian food? It’s that sort of music. It just goes to tell you representation is really important. And I also am, I guess maybe sad for the collective community of color, that a lot of them are subjected to this programming, whether they think it’s programming or not. Based off of the media that they consume.
That in turn affects how you interact with other people. How people of color interact with white people, but also how white people interact with people of color. And even your sexual desires. Who you’re attracted to, who you see yourself in a relationship with, are all influenced by your environment , including your media.
Lazou: yeah. I mean even myself, as an adult, I’ve started to realize just how much conditioning I’ve had as a little girl. All the shows that I saw, they were always white people. I never saw anyone who looked like me.
And internally I learned that I don’t matter. That people like me, nobody cares what we think. And now as an adult, I’m like, no, wait. That doesn’t make any sense. But unlearning that it’s a journey. Even though rationally in your head, you know that, okay, that doesn’t make any sense.
It’s not as easy to get that out of your reasoning, like your brain is already wired. It takes conscious effort to take that out. If you’re comfortable sharing and if you’re not, that’s fine. What has your experience been like with your family in terms of being part of the L G B T community?
Was that difficult for them? Or were they very open?
Travis: I think it’s been a mixed response. I’ll speak more about my siblings first. So I came out to my sister first, my younger sister, back when I was an undergrad. And I think she was very excited. A little confused, but she had the spirit. She would say things like, "oh, let’s go, get our nails done", or something like that.
And I knew she just wanted to make me feel included, but there were certain things she said that made me think I’m not the stereotypical gay best friend. And I think she’s grown out of it. My brother is interesting. So my brother is definitely on the spectrum. Unfortunately, that intersects with a lot of different things in our lives, including the fact that a lot of Asian families will try to hide particular family member when they are perceived as disabled or autistic in this case. And so my parents always lived treating him as if he were, a normal person. They always treated him as a person who didn’t need accommodations to be able to function in our society, which is a specific type of neurotypical. And so that meant when teachers would ask my parents, or my mom specifically, cuz my dad was out working as a fisherman. Whenever my mom was called in, they would always explain that Ricky is falling behind academically and he needs additional support. And her reasoning was " no, I don’t want him to have any sort of additional support", maybe I’m not wording it correctly, but she didn’t want there to be some label that was put on him as just a, a differently abled person, as an autistic person, because she saw how society treated people like that, And so she did not want the same thing for her oldest son. So she denied and denied and, you know, she would go to the school and make a fuss about always having him pulled up. and unfortunately that led to him being, 18 in undergrad, not having the skills for university. So because he’s always been treated like that from my parents, he’s pulled away a lot because they don’t understand. They just treat him like he’s stupid, I think. he’s pulled away. And so as a result, I didn’t have much of a relationship with him growing up, but I’m really working on changing that. He figured it out. It was right before I moved away to Seattle for grad school. He came over to my ex’s place. So Hussein. So Hussein and I had been living together for about three years at that point. And my brother Ricky and my dad came to Hussein’s house without knowing that Hussein and I had been together for almost four years at that point. And so we’re moving all my stuff out of the house into my dad’s truck. And so Ricky is there and he sees me and Hussein interacting in a certain type of way, he doesn’t say anything. Right before we step out of the front door he goes up to Hussein and he says, " thank you for taking care of my brother". And then, we all get into the truck and we drive to Houston. And it struck me because I had never told him, or I told him in passing. But I don’t know that was just a very touching moment for me. For him to to acknowledge that I was in a same sex relationship, to not pass judgment, unlike my parents . And I thought that was just beautiful. So my brother knows, and he accepts it. He’s never talked about it. He doesn’t really talk a lot, but I think he definitely accepts, which is great. I Love it.
Lazou: That’s sweet.
Travis: My parents are a little different. My mom does not like the idea of me being gay. I came out to her when I came home for the summer during grad school. I was in the car, we were driving somewhere and I remember being in tears as I told her I’m gay. And she had a quiet pause and she then said to me "you telling me that you’re gay…" I don’t remember how exactly she put it, but the analogy she used was, "it was as if I took a piece of fabric, painstakingly cut it, sewed it together, and then you took a pair of scissors and cut through the shirt", is what she said. And so she was saying that I was basically the shirt that she had spent, all this time making. And by me coming out as gay, I effectively ruined the shirt.
Lazou: Ouch.
Travis: yeah, that stuck with me. That stuck with me for years. And it was, it was very hard. I I think when I left for undergrad at 18, there was a lot that I hid from my mom because I knew that my parents were just, they would not accept me being gay. And that meant, anyone who I was dating, like the places I would go to I could not tell them about any of this. And I think I mean it drove a chasm. It drove something, between our relationship for many years. And at that point, it was eight years I left for college. And I came out to my mom and she told me that, So she’s gotten better, I think.
I think she still thinks that homosexuality is something of the heart, right? Like you can feel things for, people of the same sex or the same gender, but you still have to, marry a woman and have kids. I think it’s a mix between recognizing that people do have same sex attractions, but you still have some sort of piety to your ancestors to continue the lineage it still sticks with her.
And so I’m like, okay. She’s gotten better about it though. We had a a screaming match a couple of weeks ago where I literally told her either you accept me as who I am I am out of your life. I think for her that was the catalyst for reexamining her belief systems, and I think it’s gotten a lot better since then.
But we’ll see. Time will tell.
And my dad’s an interesting character. He’s always been aggressively homophobic. So my dad, being a boat owner, he has sometimes spoken out about his deck hands who are gay. I’ll leave it at that,
Lazou: Yeah, that must be hard.
Travis: Yeah.
Lazou: I think it takes time. It’s like that conditioning we were talking about earlier, right? People have been conditioned to believe certain things and even when they know that rationally it’s not correct, it takes time to internalize that and be able to express it the right way.
I feel like a lot of our parents have a lot of anti-blackness, a lot of anti L G B T sentiment very anti anything that’s not considered the norm. And I think that’s partly the pressure to assimilate, right? But
Travis: oh, that’s an interesting topic, and I think it requires, Ooh I think my context is little bit different. So my parents in many ways, yes they have assimilated in certain ways, but it’s a different type of assimilation. Long story short, my parents were born literally after the war with France for independence.
I will say that in general, Vietnamese Americans or Vietnamese people in general do not necessarily have huge love for Europeans.
Lazou: Understandably so.
Travis: collectively, right? Because they were the colonizers for such a long time. And so when they were, rid of the French in Vietnamese, we have a lot of things about French that are just not very nice. But it’s interesting, I think my parents do understand the context of America, cuz they did, when they came here, they went to like, ESL classes. They had teachers and professors who taught them about the history of the US even if they don’t talk about it much nowadays. But my mom understands America was owned by native Americans or indigenous people. In Vietnamese, I think indigenous person is mỹ đỏ, which literally translates to red Americans. So in the Vietnamese language, the word for American is mỹ. And then you just tack on a color after that to represent someone’s race. So mỹ trắng is a white American mỹ đen is a Black American and mỹ đỏ is an indigenous person. That would be white, black and red, in that order. So my mom she knows the history. She doesn’t wanna speak up about this information I think because she’s, in some way, afraid of the ramifications. Because, my mom she’s approaching 70 at this point. She was born in the fifties. We didn’t have the equality Act until 1965 here in the us and so she’s lived a life in the us. You know, she spent 40 plus years of her life in the US seeing things, right. Unspeakable things. And so I think she acknowledges the history, but she feels that she can’t do anything about it because of what may happen.
Lazou: Yeah. So I would like to wrap this up with our final section, which is our rapid fire questions. So these are five one word or one phrase answers. You don’t have to explain, but you can if you want to.
Ready?
Travis: Ready?
Lazou: What’s an Asian food that you should like, but don’t
Travis: Bitter melon,
Lazou: I agree. What’s an Asian food that you’ll never get tired of?
Travis: feet.
Lazou: What is your favorite piece or song to perform?
Travis: Oh, Ooh, that’s hard. Um,
Lazou: What’s your favorite sewing project that you’ve done?
Travis: Favorite sewing project that I’ve done. A quilt.
Lazou: And lastly, what is your favorite plant at the moment?
Travis: Black velvet.
Lazou: Awesome. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today. Really appreciate it.
Travis: It It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Lazou: Here are our takeaways for today’s episode.
Number one, we naturally internalize traumatic experiences and they shape how we view the world and interact with it, whether we are cognizant of it or not. Number two, when multilingual people get dementia, they will lose the last language that they learned first. This can make communication hard if their loved ones don’t understand their mother tongue.
Number three, as people who hear, we have access to auditory information that we glean in passing everywhere we go, because people around us are speaking in a language that we understand. That is not a privilege that deaf people have because very few people are signing out in everyday life.
Number four, deaf people want to engage and are used to texting or writing on a piece of paper to interact with hearing people. So, even if you don’t know sign language, don’t be intimidated to interact with deaf people.
Number five. Many of us do not speak our cultural language because our parents were told that teaching us anything other than English would hurt our chances of becoming fully fluent in English. It’s completely false, but it has resulted in many of us being unable to speak our parents or grandparents’ language.
Number six. The more you get to know people who have a different life experience, the more you realize how much you can still learn. It never occurred to Travis that women have to worry about their interview outfits until his female colleagues explained it.
Number seven. Instead of avoiding difficult subjects like religion or politics, it would be more helpful to learn how to talk about them in productive ways because it’s a skill that can be learned. If you’re interested in learning how to talk about those things, join our discord. Send me a message at nuancespod.com and I’ll be happy to invite you.
Number eight, self-determination is a myth. While we do have choices, our views, our tastes, our personality is inevitably shaped by the people and media we interact with around us. And finally, pulling yourself by your bootstrap is also a myth. No one can claim to be entirely self-made because no one can be part of a society without using resources that they did not create themselves.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Nuances Podcast. If you enjoyed it, you know what to do. Share it with people who would enjoy it as well. If you’d like to support the podcast, there are many ways to do so at nuancespod.com/support.
Next week, Scott Okamoto joins us for a conversation. He’s a Japanese American ex evangelical author and former English professor. I found Scott on Instagram when he was promoting his book, and in our conversation it was fascinating to hear how his dad, who was born right as his family was being moved to this Japanese incarceration camp, is a super patriotic, proud American veteran. But we mostly focus on Scott’s book about working at that evangelical university as an atheist. There are horror stories, but also some very hopeful anecdotes of how he was able to connect to students by creating a nonjudgmental safe space where they could explore their beliefs and their thought processes, and even sometimes change them for the better.
As some of you may already know, when I’m not making a podcast, I’m making music. I write, perform, produce, mix songs. And before we go today, I wanted to share one of those songs with you. Since we are in the summer, everybody’s feeling hot, I thought this song would be a great one to share right now. The song is called "Au Soleil" by my duo, 23rd Hour with my husband, and it was featured on CBS’s show "True Lies", which debuted in March this year.
You can find the song on all streaming platforms. I have the links in the show notes if you want to check that out. I hope you’re staying cool and hydrated. I’m your host LAZOU, and I hope you’ll join me next week for another nuanced conversation.
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