Redefined is hosted by me, Zainab Salbi, and brought to you by FindCenter, a search engine for your soul. Part library, part temple, FindCenter presents a world of wisdom, organized. Check it out today at www.findcenter.com, and please subscribe to Redefined for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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What’s most important about life? What is the essence of life? Is it what we do? How much we earn? How many social media followers we have? Or is it, do we live our lives in kindness to ourselves and to others? Do we live our lives in love to ourselves and to others? In nearly losing my life, I was confronted with these questions and it led me to the conversations that make up Redefined, about how we draw our inner maps and the pursuit of meaningful personal change.

My guest this time is acclaimed journalist, television host, and author Lisa Ling. Lisa’s deep, original reporting on shows like CNN’s This Is Life and her new HBO Max show, Take Out, invite viewers to understand perspectives, beliefs, and stories, unlike their own. The stories Lisa presents on Take Out are critical for this moment in America, as Asian American communities are experiencing hate crimes, discrimination, and cruelty at alarming rates. We talk about what it means to fight back against bigotry and bias, by teaching empathy and diverse history to the next generation. Lisa also discusses the significance of stopping generational trauma and shares her own experience dealing with fear, recalling lessons learned while her sister Laura was in captivity in North Korea. This conversation is rich with timely perspective and critical personal and cultural analysis from one of my favorite journalists working today. Please join me.

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I actually just recently saw Take Out, which I do love a lot. And I thought that I’m the only person who would say that I was most touched by your own story, and putting your own story out there and sharing with us your family and your family narrative. And I’m curious because as journalist, you’re trained not to share your story. You’re always behind the camera during the questions, getting other people’s stories, but never yours. What ignited you to put your own story forwards after decades of being in the public eyes?

Well, Zainab, first of all, it’s so great to be with you. We are old friends. You took me to the Congo as part of Women for Women to witness and interact with women who had just experienced such unspeakable horrors. And it was really a life-changing experience. And so I will always be grateful to you for opening my eyes about the situation there. And you’ve always just been such an incredible leader out there and advocate for women. So it’s so great to be on this podcast with you and to hear what you’ve been going through over the last couple of years. And so, thank you.

Oh, I am the one who’s thank you, Lisa. We did share beautiful and painful experiences. That is for the longest time for me, it was hard to even convey to other people. And so I’m grateful to be a witness with you and over the time. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Great.

Yeah.

Well, as far as Take Out, which is a show on HBO Max, that is an exploration of buried Asian American histories and culture through the lens of food. It’s a show that I never even dreamed I would be able to do because throughout my life, as an Asian American, I’ve sort of navigated my existence completely unaware of the history and contributions of Asian Americans in this country. I never learned a single thing, or an Asian American story, or Asian American individual who had done anything or achieved anything in my history textbooks as a kid. It wasn’t until much later after I graduated from high school that I started to dig deep into the roles that Asian Americans have played in the evolution of this country and to so many of the incredible advancements and also the severe levels of discrimination that Asian Americans have faced.

And so in the last couple of years in the wake of COVID, I think we all know that Asians all over the world have been scapegoated and blamed for bringing a virus to our shores, that we obviously had nothing to do with. And I think it’s been a real reckoning for so many in the Asian American community, and we’ve realized that our stories haven’t been told in our history books. That there isn’t a reference for our inclusion in our education system. Every character that’s been portrayed in the media has been a peripheral character or one that has been the source of derision. And so I think that this realization has been in the Asian American community, but also the mainstream community.

And so when we pitch this idea of telling these stories, HBO Max greenlit it right away, because I think they, and so many media or organizations, have realized that they’ve done a pretty poor job of telling diverse stories. And this isn’t just Asian Americans, in particular. Someone in our series, Nobuko Miyamoto, who’s a longtime Japanese American activist, she said, “We know every white person’s story. We know the stories of their issues with drug addiction or when they fail in school. We know their stories better than we know our own stories.” It is true. And so the past couple of years have been, I think, an awakening for so many that we need to be able to tell our stories, and also tell our stories to kids during a time when empathy is developed. They need to learn diverse histories in school, because when you overlook a population, it becomes easy to dehumanize a significant number of people. And I think that is what has happened over the last couple of years in the wake of COVID.

How has discrimination impacted your family and, eventually, you? I mean, I read in your book as well, as of course you share in your story, your parental grandparents were highly educated, sophisticated Chinese who came to America, aspiring for professional jobs, and were rejected and denied constantly and cornered basically into opening restaurants. And actually there’s a history of, I happen to encounter a book about the history of why there are Chinese restaurants and laundries and pedicures and manicures salons that are dominated by Asian communities. And it came from that same history of discrimination. Now, I’m curious about what have they told you about discrimination and how to handle it? And if they haven’t, what have you learned about recent discrimination and how to handle it?

Well, you’re right, Zainab. My grandparents immigrated to America in the late 1940s. Both of them were highly educated. My grandfather had . . . And he was educated in the states in the early 1930s. He had an undergraduate degree from NYU and an MBA from the University of Colorado. My grandmother had a graduate degree in music from Cambridge in England. They didn’t even know how to cook when they moved to this country and had aspirations of working in the professional world, but my grandfather couldn’t get hired to work in finance because he was Chinese. So they ended up doing odd jobs. They lived in a converted chicken coop with their two kids, and eventually scraped up enough money to open a Chinese restaurant in a place that had never had a Chinese restaurant.

And they hired these cooks. My grandmother worked in the kitchen and one day a cook didn’t show up, so she had to cook, and that became the pathway like for so many Asian immigrants to some semblance of the American dream. And you’re right, Zainab, somehow Chinese food, in particular, an appetite developed for it, despite how much discrimination Chinese people were dealing with and experiencing in the early twentieth century. And so my grandparents kind of rode those coattails and developed a cuisine that appealed to their non-Chinese clientele. And my grandmother was always emphatic about not teaching me how to cook because for her, the restaurant was solely a means for survival, and she wanted better for me. But this story is the story of so many immigrants in this country, that food somehow has been this cultural unifier, but that it’s in some ways even transcended so much of the discrimination that minority communities have experienced.

Mm-hmm [affirmative]. And I ask that because as someone who is discriminated against or in my history of arriving from Iraq, whoo! [laughs] and a Muslim and immigrant and a woman. In the early part of discriminations when I first came to America, I would get angry, because it’s insulting. Discrimination, it’s you’re really dehumanizing the other, you’re telling them they are less than what they see themselves, right? Or they are different than what they see. And so at the beginning, I used to be very angry whenever I face discrimination. And then I got an advice from a friend, another immigrant friend, and he said, “Don’t get angry.” He said, “When you get angry, you’ll sort of go into it and you become what they want you to become. So do not become angry. You’ve got to find another way to deal with that.” And I did. I did.

It’s just it took me a long time, so aging helps, but being conscious about this, but I did—and eventually whenever now I feel discriminated, I just took another attitude about how do I handle it so it doesn’t hurt me, it doesn’t impact me, and maybe even in a way that it can lead to something better. How do you handle discrimination, if you have faced it? And what do you tell your kids rather? You have adorable kids. I love seeing them on TV. It’s beautiful. What do you tell them about how to handle such discrimination?

Well, look, Zainab, I think that it becomes animalistic, right? When someone comes at you and uses really hurtful terminology or racist language and hurls it in your direction, it’s normal to react, but that does ultimately hurt us, right? It is allowing the perpetrator to achieve a victory in many ways. And so what I have just tried to do is speak out against it, but also to try and raise awareness, which is why this idea of really promoting diverse history, particularly for young people. Again, when they’re in this critical stage of brain development, at a time when empathy is really . . . you’re able to develop it, now is the time. And so this whole debate about “critical race theory” or what kind of history to teach in school to me is just ludicrous. It’s absolutely ludicrous because of the concern that it’s going to make some people feel bad.

Well, we should all feel bad about things that are done to other people purely because of their skin color. We should collectively feel bad, and we have to acknowledge it so that we’re able to move on and do better. And it’s incredible that the books that are available right now for kids . . . I wish these books were available when I was growing up. I mean, the reason why we’re in this situation that we’re in, where we are so divided, where race and discrimination is such a big part of our daily lives is because I think our generation wasn’t exposed to diverse history. So we need to do better with our own kids. And when we do talk about issues of racism and discrimination with my kids, I try hard to teach them that hurt people, hurt people. And that there are people who will always stoke these fears of people who are considered “other.” And that as long as we are living and breathing, that we need to stand up for people.

And it’s really interesting because these are lessons that we’ve been teaching my kids, they’ve been learning about in school. And one day, this was about six months ago, my daughter, who’s eight years old, she was called “ching chong” in her school. And her best friend, without missing a beat, said, “I will not be a bystander to this.” And she went and told the teacher. This is what we need to be teaching our kids, so they will refuse to just be a bystander. I mean, it was such an example of incredible parenting and teaching. I was so proud at that moment, but those are the kinds of things, because it’s the younger generation that’s going to inherit all of this bullshit. And that’s what it is. It’s bullshit. This discrimination based on skin color, not being able to see one another eye to eye, and it’s really going to take our kids, exposing our kids to these diverse histories and stories that I think is going to get us over that edge.

That’s such a beautiful story. I actually believe that. I mean, just to add, is that when we avoid acknowledging injustices in front of us, we invariably legitimize it. We legitimize that and allow for the corruption of our own values, because—

We’re complicit in it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So this is a gorgeous story of this kid standing for your daughter. This is fantastic. You mentioned about the time of divide that we are in, and people are like, eh, we cannot teach this and you cannot teach that. And when I look at all the stories that you have been telling in your career, it’s uniquely empathetic, and uniquely listening to the others. What can you teach everyone about the act of listening, right? The listening to the other so you may convey or understand—and understand—their story in a way that is true to themselves and how they see it and how they narrate it?

Well, I do believe we all fall victim to judgment. And over the last couple of years, we’ve been so much more isolated than we ever have been. And we’re communicating and following the people who espouse our values on social media and that’s riling us up. We’ve become this really riled up culture, and these social media algorithms are just pushing us further and further apart. And it really sort of goes against what we need to be doing right now, which is really engaging. And for me, I try hard to maintain a non-judgmental position when I’m interacting with people, when I’m immersed among people, who have different beliefs than I do, but it’s always hard. It’s always hard. But if you don’t engage, you’ll exist in this bubble. And that’s incredibly dangerous.

It’s so vital for us to understand how people who think differently than we do, why they do so. It’s so important. We cannot continue to exist in these bubbles where we are only associating with people who espouse the same beliefs as we do, because we are headed down a dark path, and the only way to ameliorate that or address it is if we start having conversations with one another. And some of those conversations are going to be hard because ultimately, as cliché as this sounds, I do believe we all want the same things. We really do. We all want to be safe. We all want to be able to provide for our families. We all want to have good health. We all want to have security. And we just may have different paths to how to get there, but it’s so important that we hear that from each other.

For me, it’s just been selfishly, whenever I am exposed to people who espouse different values or think differently, I just become enlightened. And so in some ways, it’s sort of like, I hope people will come along with me on this journey, because the learning experience for me is always so beneficial. And I will never think about this population the same way, because I actually was able to walk among them.

And that’s the secret, in my opinion. I mean, like, go out of your comfort zone, which in your case, particularly, you have been since you were eighteen years old. The trip to Afghanistan, was that your first trip when you were eighteen years old?

I was twenty-one.

Twenty-one. But go out of your comfort zone, and it really reminds me of the poet, David Whyte, and one of my favorite poem by him, he says, “take the first step, not the second, not the third, the step underneath your feet, the one you do not want to take.” And so rather than talk about the . . . I mean, this poem can take the discussion so many different ways, but for today, rather than thinking theoretically about these other people and analyze, go and meet them. That’s the first step, the one you do to not want to take. Go into that discomfort of encountering the other and engaging in conversations you may not like, but you’ll learn something from it.

Yeah. Because once you do that, once you are exposed, it’s like what Oprah always said, right? Like, once you know, you can’t pretend that you don’t. And it may not be a thousand people, it could just be one person who sees something or becomes aware of something and becomes motivated to act. I mean, I’m thinking about the woman, her name escapes me right now, but after we came back, Zainab, from the Congo and delivered the report about what women there are dealing with, she started this organization. I think her name was also Lisa. And then she—

Oh, Lisa. Yes.

Got it. And she went to the Congo and started advocating for the women there. And I think she ended up raising an extraordinary amount of money.

Yes.

I mean, those stories are incredible. I mean, she’s sitting home watching her favorite daytime talk show and something strikes her chord. She’s able to see the anguish in those Congolese women’s eyes. Right?

It’s a beautiful story.

The pain in their voices. And that motivates her from the comfort of her own home in suburbia to want to start advocating for these women. And for me, if I can do that, just like inspire people to want to know more and possibly even do more, man, that is something that I feel so proud of. Again, it doesn’t have to be a thousand people, it could just be one.

Yeah. Yeah. And you should. And you should. I mean, Lisa was a stock photographer from Seattle, Washington. And so the show, indeed, on what’s happening to Congolese women and the mass rape and all the atrocities, unfortunately, Lisa, they still are facing. And a stock photographer, she like, which is about perfection of stories and pictures. And she goes, drop everything, goes to Congo, and end up actually helping thousands and thousands of women and raising millions of dollars for them. And now she is a whole new career in women’s rights, and trying to pass a treaty where the whole world sign—a no violence treaty, where there is like a true implementation against violence against women. Anyway. So it’s just a beautiful story. Thank you for bringing it up. Yes, indeed.

Gosh, I have so many things, but I want to take back to another step you have made in your life, I believe. As I read, this has really came from my reading of actually your book, which I love, with your sister. And you talk about your decision to reconcile with your mother or to go deeper. And this just to frame it, as I understand in your book that your parents were divorced when you were a child, your father and paternal grandmother are the ones who really were your full-time parental guidance there, and your mom saw you and came to visit. And it seems that you’ve never doubted anybody’s love, which is really beautiful, but still there was a distance. And here’s another uncomfortable conversation, right? That’s why I’m bringing it up, because sometimes it could be with the other of a different culture, sometimes it could be with our own family, our friends who have done something and hurt us, or if we felt distance, and we’re just going to make that first step to . . .

I’m curious, what made you decide that I am going to make that step to understand my mother better and to get to hear her better? I mean, that’s the hardest thing people do, usually. It’s easier to have a conversation with your neighbor, maybe sometimes.

Yeah. I think when a child feels abandoned by a parent, that is the most powerful bond in humanity, right? That relationship that a child has with one’s mother. And so when a child feels abandoned by that person, it leaves you with just so much confusion and emptiness, and I think really an inability to understand your place and your role. And when you don’t have that model of womanhood or motherhood in your life, it just becomes really hard to figure out how you’re supposed to become a responsible, good woman. And so, because I had those questions swirling in my mind for so many years, I finally got myself into therapy when I got a job and I had insurance, although I ended up paying cash, because I found it to be just so helpful, that fortunately I had a job, I was able to pay for therapy. But my therapist started asking me questions about my mom, and I had no idea how to answer them. I didn’t know a thing about my mom. All I knew is I harbored this—I loved her deeply, deeply. Oh, Zainab, when she would come to visit me, she would sing to me at night and I would try to stay awake as a kid because I knew that when I woke up, she’d be gone. And so I tried so hard.

And so when the therapist was asking me, I was like, God, I have no idea. Maybe I should start asking my mom about her life. And so I did, and it compelled me to take her back to Taiwan, the country that she came from, to kind of just explore her roots a little bit. And when I did that, Zainab, wow, it was such a hard trip because my mom, with me asking these kinds of questions and kind of taking her back into her world, I sort of relived with her this darkness that she escaped, which was her life in Taiwan. And I learned about her father who was in the Taiwanese underground. He owned brothels and had multiple wives and didn’t spend a single day with her.

So she never had a model for parenthood. And her mother was so depressed about the whole thing, that just was not a present mother at all. So just like all this baggage that I don’t need to get into because I think you get it, right? But it made me understand generational trauma, that my mother had inherited this generational trauma that went so far back and I was on the receiving end of that. And if I was ever going to be able to operate in the world, I had to do my best in everything that I could to try and end that cycle. And it’s taken years. And I still am haunted by some of the things that I’ve learned about in my family, but it has given me an opportunity to see my mother so differently and almost embrace her almost as a child. It sounds so strange, but it was just pretty recently, I had a psychedelic experience. [laughs]

Wow. Cool, cool.

Yeah. In which I went back to my mother’s childhood and I felt what she went through and how she was feeling as a six-, seven-, eight-year-old child. And after I came back from the experience, I went to her house and I held her like a child, and I told her, “Mommy, it’s going to be okay. I’ll take care of you.” And this is a woman who has never been told, “I’ll take care of you” in her life. She’s just been this survivor, who’s just been on her own from childhood, just like clawing her way to figure out how to survive. And for me to actually say to her, “It’s okay, I’ll take care of you,” it was the first time that anyone in her life, in her seventy years of life has ever said, “I’ll take care of you.” Imagine living that way.

And her story again is the story of so many. And until, I think, we take the time to address head-on, the things that our parents have gone through, the generational trauma that they have inherited, it will continue to be perpetuated onto our own children. And so it’s in our interest to try and figure out what the roots of that trauma is. And I watch in horror what’s happening in Ukraine right now, and these children who are growing up . . . And Zainab, you know this, as an Iraqi American, you’ve experienced so much yourself. You can heal from those wounds, but you can never forget those wounds. And then until you have an opportunity to make an active effort to heal those wounds, they will continue to fester and affect every aspect of your life moving forward.

And so my prayer for those kids and those people who are experiencing what they’re experiencing in Ukraine is that they will one day be able to find healing, find forgiveness, because what they’re seeing and experiencing right now is going to haunt them, if they can live through it, for the rest of their lives. And I think it’s incumbent upon all of us as part humanity to not only act, but help these people through this trauma and move forward.

I mean, first of all, you address so many issues—I’m full of tears actually, and it’s beautiful. Again, what I’m taking from you is that really the courageous step forward and empathy. I mean, you just address another layer of empathy on the very personal with our own parents, and I associate really, because I did a lot of therapy and so much more to get to see my mother’s story from a different perspective. And instead of, oh my God, I was betrayed by my mother, I was like, oh my God, she was trying to save me, literally. And it just switched the story, and it made it a different connection. But I also love how you brought it up to Ukraine, because there’s so much fear right now, and fear in Ukraine, fear in the world, so much fear. And you had a very unique experience with fear. I mean, very unique experience with your sister’s detention and arrest, and the worry about not seeing her while she was taken in North Korea when she was reporting.

And you document the story in your book, Somewhere Inside, which is truly beautiful. How or rather, what has that experience taught you about dealing with fear that you can share with the world today?

I mean, that was certainly a harrowing experience for my family, one of the most in our lives, because we were dealing with perhaps the most unpredictable actor on earth in the most isolated country on earth, a place that the foremost experts about North Korean culture, history, and politics don’t really know much about. And so those five months that she was in captivity, I mean, I knew she was alive because we were communicating through an intermediary country—in the Swedish embassy—and she was able to get a couple of calls out to me, but I didn’t know if she was hurt. I didn’t know if she was being tortured. I just had no idea. I truly didn’t know if I would ever see her again, because she was sentenced to twelve years hard labor in a prison camp.

In North Korea.

In North Korea. In North Korea. And let’s just say that I spoke and got more connected to the higher power than I ever had been. And I still maintain that relationship to a higher power. I’m not a religious person anymore, or I’m not a religious person at all, but there was a lot of praying that was happening and just hoping for the goodness in humanity to prevail, hoping for mercy, hoping for a human reaction to the pain and anguish that our family was experiencing. And again, to bring it back to Ukraine, my only hope for the people of Ukraine is that Vladimir Putin has a heart somewhere inside of him and sees the anguish that he is perpetrating in this country, and seeing the global reaction to this. Who wants to be the pariah of the earth? Which is what he is right now. Because ultimately, I really want to know, what is it in Putin’s life that has allowed him to be able to tolerate this kind of human suffering? What did he go through?

That’s a very good question. Yeah.

And these are the kinds of questions that drive me. My hope at the time was that the dear leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Un, just had a humanity about him, that he would, again, hear the anguish in our voices. And I can only hope that people like Putin, and these, like, megalomaniacal figures can reconcile that human tragedy that they’re perpetrating upon people. Again, I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to continue to tell the stories and stand up, not be bystanders, like my daughter’s best friend declared. We cannot be bystanders to abuse and bullying and human tragedy.

It’s so beautiful. It’s unique also that you’re saying, I would want to know what’s Putin’s trauma that led him to be who he is. And you know I knew Saddam Hussein, and there’s one thing to cover Saddam Hussein as a dictator, which he was, but then also to see an insight to him as the bullied child, which he was, and the abused child. He was beaten up as a child and had to run away to get school. And it doesn’t justify, but it explains their action and their aggression and sort of it lead to another lens into seeing the whole picture.

I recently heard your sister, Laura, actually speak about one of the most important lessons that she had experienced in that, and this is how I heard it, so I may not have captured completely, but she said kindness. She said it was a small acts of kindness. And I don’t know why I’m getting emotional about it to be just saying it, whether it is a guard smiling to her, or whether it is a small act of kindness from her interrogator that made all the difference for her. You were experiencing differently in America with your family. All of you moved in, your father, your mother, your husband, her husband, everyone, as I see it, as I read in the book, moved in one house. What would that experience, what had it actually taught you about the most important thing about life?

Yeah, you’re bringing me back, Zainab, to my sister talking about those small acts of kindness. I mean, there she was inside the most isolated country on earth, imprisoned and sentenced to twelve years hard labor. And for her, it was those little gestures when her guard would give her an extra piece of bread or when the lawyer, the lawyer that she was assigned to her, the lawyer would ask her questions about her family. Those little things that just allow you to have hope in humanity, it doesn’t take a lot. And it also, I think, really underscores how we don’t really need a lot. We are a culture that just wants to consume. We just want, want, want, want, want. But it really doesn’t take a lot to feel contentment.

Use a child, as an example. You could buy this child unlimited numbers of toys, but all that child really wants or is satisfied with is like a cardboard box or just the littlest thing. And I think that for all of us, it’s so important to just take that moment and just think about what we have and what we really, really need. Like, at the end of the day, what we need versus like what we already have and what we can do. Those small acts of kindness that might have an impact on someone else, it doesn’t take a lot. But those little gestures, when a waiter is really nice and asks you about your day, or just like those little examples, I think, are lessons that we can all learn from.

It’s so beautiful. And I told you, I call it in my new life, when kindness was the most important thing for me, as I realized, the more I learned to do kindness to myself and to others, the more I was being received with kindness. It was just some magical experiences I would experience all the time. People do an incredible act of kindness, like, wow! But it’s a perpetual cycle, I’m learning that it is. We just keep on, we do it, it’s done to us, it’s done for us. Beautiful, beautiful story.

And last but not least, in that ordeal that you talk about, and you talk a lot about your driven, career-women who, when you built your career, you were just very driven, and you talk about a lot of Barbara Walters having an impact on you that you have to pay attention to your family, family, family. And so I feel like it’s beautiful. I met you before you were married, even actually, and I was so happy to see you and then to see your family. I was really overjoyed to see that. And I remember in reading in the book, Laura, your sister, saying, “I promise that there was a balance that I’m not going to be so career-oriented, that I will lose perspective over my health and all of that.” And the question I have is ultimately, how did you learn to balance between your career and your well-being? And it’s something that we all struggle with. What’s that balancing act?

Zainab, this is a question I’ve been thinking about a lot, because I always have been a very ambitious person and I’ve been very lucky I’ve gotten to a place in my career where the things that I’m doing, I’m deeply passionate about. I’m so lucky that I’ve been able to get to this place, but I have been thinking so much about—to what end? And in raising children and putting pressure on them to make sure that they get their homework done and study and do extra studies and so on. And this whole idea, this culture of like matriculation that we have adopted in this country and around the world, particularly in Asia—I cannot help, but just think to what end? I think that for so long, I’ve been thinking a lot. I am just rereading Sapiens. Have you read that? A History of Humankind.

I love it.

Oh my God, it’s such an important book, that human beings, we have destroyed, in so many cases, so many other species of living things, and what are we doing to one another? And what are we doing to our planet and our world? I’ve also been doing a lot of studying of Indigenous wisdom and how there was reciprocity. When Indigenous people would take from the land, they would always give back, and they never took more than they needed. We live the opposite of that. We live the opposite of that. And all we want to do is take, take, take, take, take, take, take, consume, consume, consume. And it’s like, I’m really want wanting to try. This is going to be a constant effort because it goes against how we’ve been raised, but to try to not take so much and to try and give more back, not only to humanity, but to our planet, to our world.

I mean, I just think those are lessons that I would really like to bestow and bequeath upon my own kids and people who watch the work that I do. And so, yes, success and work is so important, but those messages are messages that I would like to try and convey more in the work that I do, because that ultimately is what is fulfilling, and that is to what end for me.

Oh, I love you. The values that you stand for really, that’s what I love. I really, really—

My aspiration. It’s my aspiration. I can’t say that I totally live that way, but it’s—

Well, we all try. Yeah.

. . . an aspiration. Yeah.

And to be aware, to be aware and trying. I mean, I really try, and it’s impossible to live that way 100 percent, and the trying is very hard, but it’s worth it, and every time I get better and better. And I have a few very rapid questions as we wrap up. You talk about Sapiens as one of your . . . Well, tell me about your favorite books, let’s say it this way. One of the books that impacts you the most.

I mean, this book that I’m reading right now is blowing my mind. It’s called Braiding Sweetgrass. It’s by Robin Wall Kimmerer. And it’s Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. And it’s dense. It’s very dense, but the writing is exquisite, and it’s just learning, again, about this reciprocity that Indigenous just people had practiced for a millennia, and the life in the plant world, in the animal world, right? These other species of living things that are alive and are communicating, and that have predated humanity, frankly. They’re calling out to us right now. They’re calling out to people like me and saying like, you cannot be a bystander anymore. This is the way you were raised and have been acculturated, but we’re telling you right now that you need to be part of the change because otherwise humanity, and not just humanity, but the planet, is not going to survive.

So true. So true. Movies that you often go to, to inspire, to be inspired?

Gosh, there aren’t go-to movies that I go to regularly. I mean, I love The Joy Luck Club. I just watched that again not too long ago, because it was the first time that I felt seen. I couldn’t believe I was watching these stories of Asian Americans who were normal and beautiful and filled with depth and not just roles that were caricatures. So that’s a precious, precious movie for me.

And last but not least, I promise, a piece of poetry or poets you go to?

I mean, I love Ocean Vuong. He wrote this gorgeous book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. He’s just a powerful and important voice. There is a quote that I cite regularly, which is, “We can’t know ourselves until we know what we’ve done to each other,” which I think is particularly timely right now as we’re watching human beings invade other human beings and destroy their livelihoods. So he’s someone whose work really resonates with me.

[closing piano music]

That was Lisa Ling. Check out her new show, Take Out, which is available on HBO Max, and season nine of This Is Life premiers on CNN this fall. For full transcripts of this episode, please visit www.findcenter.com. Do remember to subscribe to this podcast. It is free and made available by FindCenter. Redefined is produced by me, Zainab Salbi, along with Rob Corso, Casey Kahn, and Howie Kahn at FreeTime Media. Our music is by John Palmer. Special thanks to Francis Poon, Neal Goldman, Caroline Pincus, and Sherra Johnston. See you next week when I’ll be joined by former US Marine and Senate candidate, Amy McGrath.