Episode 512
with Michelle Zauner, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Moorea Masa
In honor of Mother's Day, host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello share some thoughtful mom-centric conversations: musician Michelle Zauner, a.k.a. Japanese Breakfast, discusses her memoir Crying in H Mart, in which she reconnects with her late mother and their Korean heritage through a love of food; Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes (In the Heights) reflects on how her mother's use of language informed her writing career; and singer-songwriter Moorea Masa performs her soulful single "Honey," a tribute to her complex relationship with the woman who raised her.
Michelle Zauner
Singer & Author
Michelle Zauner is best known as a singer and guitarist who creates dreamy, shoegaze-inspired indie pop under the name Japanese Breakfast. She has won acclaim from major music outlets around the world for her albums Psychopomp (2016), Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017), and Jubilee (2021). Zauner’s viral 2018 essay in The New Yorker led to her memoir, Crying in H Mart, published in 2021. The book, a New York Times bestseller, follows Zauner’s experiences growing up Korean-American, losing her mother to cancer, and forging her own identity. It is now being adapted into a film from Orion Pictures, for which Japanese Breakfast will provide the soundtrack. Zauner lives in Brooklyn with her husband and bandmate Peter Bradley. Instagram · Listen
Quiara Alegría Hudes
Playwright, Producer, & Author
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a playwright, producer, and author from West Philly. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her play Water By the Spoonful and wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical In the Heights; she also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of In the Heights. Her plays and musicals have been produced around the world, and her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, and American Theater Magazine. In opposition to the carceral state, Hudes co-founded Emancipated Stories, a platform where people behind bars can share one page of their life story with the world. Her critically-acclaimed memoir, My Broken Language, was released in April 2021. Website • Instagram
Moorea Masa
Singer, Songwriter, & Guitarist
Moorea Masa is a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. She was raised in Portland by an Italian immigrant father and an African-American mother. Masa has shared stages with k.d. lang, Allen Stone, Rachael Price, and Big Wild, among others, and has supported artists including Corrine Bailey Rae, Emily King, and Lawrence. As part of Moorea Masa & The Mood, she released the full-length LP Shine a Light in 2018, and in 2021 she released Heart in the Wild: Side A, the first half of a forthcoming LP. The album is an exquisite and heart-wrenching journey through Masa’s relationship with her estranged mother, a queer Black woman suffering from debilitating mental illness. Throughout the release process, Moorea Masa & The Mood have been collaborating with mental health organizations supporting BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folx. Listen • Instagram
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Luke Burbank: Hey Elena.
Elena Passarello: How's it going, Luke? My brother from another mother. [Laughs]
Luke Burbank: That's right. Are you ready for a little Station Location Identification Examination?
Elena Passarello: Amamama.
Luke Burbank: [Laughs] OK, I'm going to tell you about a place where Live Wire is on the radio. You try to guess where I'm talking about. Don Celso Baca built and named this city after both his mother, Rosa and Saint Rosa of Lima.
Elena Passarello: Mm hmm.
Luke Burbank: Now I'm gonna I'm going to throw a little like a freelance kind of hint in here.
Elena Passarello: Mm hmm.
Luke Burbank: There's two well-known cities in America with this name. This is the one that's on Route 66.
Elena Passarello: Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
Luke Burbank: [Bell rings.] Wow. I didn't even have to tell you that it's the scuba diving capital of the southwest.
Elena Passarello: What?!
Luke Burbank: Because there's an artesian well called the blue hole that you can apparently scuba diving in— you're exactly right, Elena—Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where we're on the radio on KANR. Shout out to everyone listening down there in New Mexico.
Elena Passarello: Oh wow, that scuba diving thing would have thrown me off, I think.
Luke Burbank: Oh, well, maybe it's better than you to get to that hint. All right. Ready to do our little radio show?
Elena Passarello: Let's do it.
Luke Burbank: All right. Take it away
Elena Passarello: [Music begins.] From PRX. It's Live Wire. This week, musician and writer Michelle Zauner.
Michelle Zauner: One major point of contention between my mom and I was that I had this creative energy, and I had this real desire to become a rock musician.
Elena Passarello: And playwright, Quiara Alegría Hudes.
Quiara Alegría Hudes: I was confused when my mom was telling me about times she had spoken to spirits. And then I went to get Dad's take on this and he was like, "God don't exist, kid"
Elena Passarello: With music from Moorea Masa. I'm your announcer Elena Passarello. And now, the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank!
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much, Elena Passarello. Thank you everyone tuning in all across the country. Special shout out to all the moms listening this week as we are celebrating Mother's Day this episode, we're going to be hearing from the LiveWire listeners a little bit later about important lessons that their mothers taught them over the years. That was the, the listener question for this week. We've got some great interviews as well that we're going to get to. Remember, speaking of great interviews, Elena, how, I don't know was it like a couple of mother's days ago, we had our actual moms on the show?
Elena Passarello: Oh yeah. Mother's Day 2020. Karen and Susie.
Luke Burbank: Honestly, I worry about bringing my mom on the radio because she is radio gold. [Elena laughs] Like, I kind of work pretty hard at this and try to think of a few entertaining things to say and do my research and get ready. And all of that pales in comparison to my mom just talking off the top of her head any time you put a microphone or telephone anywhere near her.
Elena Passarello: She's just got that raw presence.
Luke Burbank: She does! She's just a natural athlete when it comes to radio broadcasts, and your mom was pretty great too. Your mom has that charming kind of Southern vibe to her.
Elena Passarello: Oh, yes, and she also loves being called charming. So somewhere in South Carolina right now, that sound is coming out of the radio. You calling her charming and she's like, That's right, Luke Burbank. She's agreeing with you right now.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, I see you, Karen. You are charming. You're charming as all heck. We do need to get to some of these interviews that we've got dialed up for the show this week, which means we're not going to do our typical Best News segment at the top of the program. But if you would like to catch some of the best news that happened this week, we have a podcast over there in the Live Wire podcast feed that you can listen to, so head on over there for that. [Music plays] In the meantime, let's welcome our first guest over to the show. She's probably best known for her music, which she performs as Japanese Breakfast, but she also knows a lot about food. And unfortunately, a lot about grief, as she writes about in her amazing memoir Crying in H Mart, which talks about her mother's passing and also the connection that they made over food. Let's take a listen to this. It's our conversation with Michelle Zauner recorded in April of last year.
Luke Burbank: Michelle Zauner, welcome to the show.
Michelle Zauner: Thank you for having me.
Luke Burbank: This book is incredible. We're also really big fans of your music. I want to start at the beginning, though, of this memoir. What is H Mart and why do you love it so much?
Michelle Zauner: H Mart is a grocery chain now. It's a Korean grocery chain, and I found myself going there a lot after my mom, who is Korean, passed away. And it was a real like key to my grieving process, I guess. You know, I lived as a caretaker for six months in Eugene during my mom's illness and for a long time, I could only really remember these really traumatic experiences of like watching her health deteriorate and going to H Mart for the first time. It was like uncovering a lot of that sort of trauma. And I would see a can of like sweet beans, and I'd have this memory of my childhood, of when my mom and I would eat like this Korean snow cone together, with red bean and different types of fruit. And then I would see like ppeongtwigi which are like these styrofoam type of like corn—they're like rice cakes, kind of, and I ate them a lot as a kid and so it like helped me excavate a lot of, like, really beautiful memories that I had of my mom before she was sick. And I became just so comforted by going there and going there once, once a week. I still go there pretty much once a week.
Elena Passarello: What was your approach, or maybe when in the process did you know that food was going to be such an important part of the memoir?
Michelle Zauner: From the beginning, really. The first essay I wrote was largely about Maangchi, who is this Korean YouTube vlogger who has really kind of demystified the Korean cooking process to a lot of English speakers. She's very famous. She has like five million YouTube subscribers. And she's such a... She's been so generous with her, her time and knowledge. And yeah, you know, I just thought it was a really sweet story because after my mom passed away, I just was naturally drawn to learning how to cook Korean food for a variety of reasons that are in the book, in part because I, I felt like my culture needed protecting in a way that I had always felt like innately Korean because my mom was Korean. And then when she passed away, it felt like this thing I had to really work to preserve. And yeah, there's a variety of things that happen in the book. But but I found myself turning to this woman and cooking with this woman, and I just thought it was a really sweet story that like, it's kind of like a Korean Julie and Julia where like this woman I had, like, never met had come to mean so much to me and had anchored me through this really difficult time in my life. And you know, that sort of was the step towards, like why I even ended up in H Mart, you know, once a week to begin with was because in order to make these recipes, I had to go get the ingredients and then I found myself in this grocery store that brought back so many wonderful memories that I had kind of forgotten about. And so I always knew that that was going to be the sort of major thematic vehicle in this book.
Luke Burbank: Do you find writing something like this, a memoir, and writing your music, do they kind of come from the same place in your brain and your heart? Or are they really different kind of creative experiences?
Michelle Zauner: They're similar in the way that I feel like, you know, you're taking from the same pool of memory and sort of taking a magnifying glass to the ordinary and discovering meaning and depth and what's extraordinary about that moment. I think that it's basically leaning into your sensitivities as a person for both of those things. Writing a book felt a lot longer and harder, and there are a lot more words, and that was the main difference, I think.
Luke Burbank: You grew up mostly in Oregon, and your mom is originally, was from Korea. Your dad is a white guy from the U.S. What was that like? What was that like, generally speaking, in your childhood to kind of grow up in that environment.
Michelle Zauner: It was delightful in some ways. I think that as a as a child, I really felt like I had the best of both worlds. That was something that made me feel very special. Obviously, like Eugene is not rich with too much diversity in its population. So when I became a teenager, I started to, I guess, just feel a little bit uncomfortable being mixed race. You know, obviously like Eugene is like a pretty like outward-facing liberal town. So I wouldn't say that I encountered like a tremendous amount of, you know, aggressive racism. But you know, when you're a teenager, any small difference in your person and character like feels, you know, just like a scab, like anything that marks you as different. And so I think in my adolescence, I sort of shirked that part of my identity for a long time. And then it wasn't until my mom got sick that I found myself sort of chasing after something I had pushed away in a sense. Little things really like, you know, my mom's name is Chongmi and my middle name is Chongmi, and when I was younger, I used to pretend I didn't have a middle name because Michelle Zauner sounds so white-passing, and I just did, I just never wanted anyone to assume anything about me because I was Asian. I wanted to be like this neutral body that could just like, prove itself on entry or something like that. And you know, I was embarrassed that people would mispronounce it like Chow Mein, so I just would do little things like that to kind of like distance myself from that part of myself I think.
Luke Burbank: I felt reading this book like, I really got an interesting view into your mom's personality, and one of the ways that it really comes out is in like her food preferences. Would you mind reading a little bit where you talk about, you know, the stuff that your mom liked to eat and the way that she would order her food wherever she might have been?
Michelle Zauner: Yeah. [Reads from book] What I never seem to forget is what my mother ate. She was a woman of many "usuals." Half a patty melt on rye with a side of steak fries to share at the Terrace Cafe after a day of shopping. An unsweetened iced tea with half a packet of Splenda, which she would insist she'd never use on anything else. Minestrone she'd order "steamy hot," not "steaming hot," with extra broth from the Olive Garden. On special occasions, half a dozen oysters on the half shell with champagne mignonette and "steamy hot" French onion soup from Jake's in Portland. She was maybe the only person in the world who'd request "steamy hot" fries from a McDonald's drive-through in earnest. Jjamppong, spicy seafood noodle soup with extra vegetables from Cafe Seoul, which she always called Seoul Cafe, transposing the syntax of her native tongue. She liked slated peanuts with light beer. She drank two glasses of chardonnay almost every day but would get sick if she had a third. She ate spicy pickled peppers with pizza. At Mexican restaurants she ordered finely chopped jalapeños on the side. She ordered dressings on the side. She hated cilantro, avocado, and bell peppers. She was allergic to celery. She rarely ate sweets, with the exception of the occasional pint of strawberry Häagen-Dazs, a bag of tangerine jelly beans, one or two See's chocolate truffles around Christmastime, and a blueberry cheesecake on her birthday. She rarely snacked or took breakfast. She had a salty hand.
Luke Burbank: [Music plays] That was Michelle Zauner reading from her memoir, Crying in H Mart. This right here is Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are celebrating Mother's Day this week on the show. We got to take a real quick break, but don't go anywhere because we'll have much more with Michelle coming back in a minute. [Music ends]
Luke Burbank: Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX, I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are celebrating Mother's Day on the show this week and listening back to an interview from last year with Michelle Zauner, the musician who performs as Japanese Breakfast. We were talking to her about her book Crying in H Mart. Take a listen to this.
Luke Burbank: You know, one of the things you also mentioned about your mom was that she did a lot of kooky things like trying to make you grow taller or like, pinch your nose when you were a kid and be, I think what we might describe in this day and age as, like, pretty critical about certain things. When did you start to reconcile this obvious deep love between the two of you with also this kind of, you know, some of the things that she was doing to try to make you the best version of yourself, I think you write.
Michelle Zauner: I mean, I think a lot of mothers and daughters have this really complicated relationship. One thing I've quoted a lot, and I'm not entirely sure what episode it's from, but in The Sopranos, Tony says something to Carmela where he says, like, you know, her and Meadow, their daughter, are fighting, and he says oh, mothers and their daughters, you know, don't worry, Carm, she'll return to you. I think in a lot of ways that's some, something that a lot of, you know, teenage girls and their moms go through and, you know, my mom, one major point of contention between my mom and I was that I had this creative energy and I had this real desire to become, I wanted to become a rock musician. And, you know, as an immigrant parent who had, you know, major cultural differences from me, that was something that my mom felt was really her duty to protect me from. It was something that she felt I did not understand the real financial risk of, and also the amount of rejection I was I was bound to face with that sort of lifestyle. So my mom really felt like it was her duty to protect me from that. And of course, I just hated her for it because I had discovered this passion that I had and this thing that I loved and I felt like she was really in the way of it. And it wasn't until I went to college and sort of entered my early twenties that, you know, when we had a really meaningful phone call where she said to me, I realize I just I just never met someone like you. And that was like such an intense moment for me, because that's not something that you really expect to hear from your parent who's supposed to know you best. And I think that that was sort of her way of saying like, I think I get it now. You know, this weird thing I thought you would grow out of is not maybe a weird thing that you're going to grow out of.
Elena Passarello: [laughs]
Luke Burbank: And maybe her realizing, too, that you're your own person and not just like an extension of her and her kind of way of being in the world.
Michelle Zauner: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it was also a real cultural difference, like that wasn't something that she knew how to deal with, you know, and it felt really like something that she, that she should protect me from.
Luke Burbank: This is the Live Wire House Party from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We're talking to Michelle Zauner about her new memoir, Crying in H Mart. She also plays music as Japanese Breakfast. It's interesting to note, I guess, that the first album you released while playing as Japanese Breakfast was after your mom passed away. And I know you've described that album as being very much related to your mom's passing. What do you think she would have made of the fact that that's the album that really put you on the map for a lot of people musically?
Michelle Zauner: I have no idea. I mean, I think that she would be thrilled. You know, I mean, my mom unfortunately never got to see me experience any sort of success as an artist. And you know, there have been so many times mentally that I've been like, I told you so. But you know, it's a really strange, serendipitous thing. My life became very charmed after she passed away, you know, and it feel, I'm not a religious person or a particularly spiritual person, but it does feel like my mom has looked out for me in a way, because I've, I've only had great luck and success as an artist since she passed away and and made this very personal art about that experience. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm sure she would be, she would be thrilled. I recently did, like, a photoshoot for Harper's Bazaar, where they put me in a Chanel suit, and my mom, like, my mom, like most Korean women, was like obsessed with Chanel. And they were like, Yeah, just tilt a little bit. Show us your tattoos. Like, we like the juxtaposition of the the luxury with like, you know, something harder. And I was like, God, if my mom could only hear you say that because, like my mom hated my tattoos and would have just been so delighted to see me like that, you know?
Elena Passarello: Oh, that's amazing. [Laughs]
Luke Burbank: How has it been for you, Michelle, doing press for this book? And and just kind of, I mean, you've written about it and you've made albums about it, and you've thought about it a lot and yet, talking about your mom to people you don't really know must be a different way of kind of re-experiencing her. How's it been for you?
Michelle Zauner: You know, I'm pretty used to talking about this experience. I think that I'm a natural. I'm the type of artist that is a bit of an open book, and I feel like that's the sort of strength in my work is that I, I feel pretty capable of putting it all out there and being really vulnerable. So I'm pretty used to talking about it. I mean, it is, some of the sections in the book are certainly very difficult to read still. And, you know, but but other than that, talking about it with people is it's it's kind of a delight. Sometimes, you know, I feel like I've really captured her character and spirit in some ways, and it's a whole book is a real love letter to, you know, our relationship.
Luke Burbank: Is there anything that you feel like you understand about grief and loss now as we interview you that you wouldn't have known, you know, before your mom got sick?
Michelle Zauner: Yeah, actually, there's a line in, you know, there's a lot of sort of borrowed lines from Japanese Breakfast songs that made their way into Crying in H Mart that, sort of, the real heads will recognize as the Easter eggs, but
Luke Burbank: Only the real heads know.
Michelle Zauner: Only the real heads know. There's a new song that just came out called, called Posing in Bondage that I released, and there's a line in that song that says "when the world divides into two people, those who have felt pain and those who have yet to." And that line also makes an appearance in the book and is a little bit more thought out. But you know, one thing that grief really opened up to me is I feel like other people who have experienced loss are more readily able to connect with you, knowing that you've endured the same kind of feeling. And one of the heartbreaking parts of my story is that I felt like things were just starting to get really great again between my mother and I. And I had this very limited few years where, you know, we had sort of like drifted apart in my adolescence and then come back together and start to really appreciate each other as like peers, as adults, and be able to confide in each other. And I'm very sad that I didn't get to have longer with with my mother in that way.
Luke Burbank: Mm-Hmm. A more, I guess, sort of prosaic question. If somebody finds themselves in an H Mart, what is the one thing they have to make sure that they taste or make sure they pick up from like an ingredient section? I know this is maybe an impossible question to answer because there's like eight billion things there, but like what's what's something people should not miss if they find themselves at an H Mart, in your opinion?
Michelle Zauner: I mean, I guess like any good Korean, I'd have to say kimchi, you know, I mean, they have a great selection [laughter] of kimchi there, but you know, something like less basic, I guess is, um, I'm a big fan of—it's not even Korean, but—kewpie mayonnaise. I highly recommend everyone invest in a tube of kewpie mayonnaise. It's a Japanese mayonnaise, and it tastes so much better than than regular mayonnaise.
Luke Burbank: What do you attribute that to? Is it, is it just...
Michelle Zauner: I think it has MSG in it
Elena Passarello: Yeah. [laughs]
Luke Burbank: So Kewpie mayonnaise and then, and obviously some kimchi because it sounds like they have some, some really good stuff there. Well, we hope to see you in Portland when that sort of stuff is happening. Maybe we'll see you at Jake's eating a steamy hot bowl of French onion soup.
Michelle Zauner: Definitely.
Luke Burbank: [Music plays] Michele Zauner, her new memoir is Crying in H Mart. And also you can hear her music that she plays as Japanese Breakfast. Michelle, thanks so much for coming on the Livewire House Party.
Michelle Zauner: Thank you so much for having me.
Luke Burbank: That was Michelle Zauner recorded last year. Her amazing book, Crying in H Mart, is available now. Livewire is brought to you by Alaska Airlines, providing the same familiar care their guests have come to expect and inviting you to mask up and get back out there. Learn more at Alaska Air dot com. This is Live Wire, of course each week on the show, we like to ask listeners a question because we're celebrating Mother's Day this week, we asked: What's the most important thing your mother ever taught you? Elena has been collecting up some of those responses. What are you seeing?
Elena Passarello: Well, I mean, I think every child wants their mother to give them this piece of advice. It comes from Angela, whose mother said: "Don't have children. Stick with pets." [Laughs].
Luke Burbank: Wow.
Elena Passarello: It's rare, though, because you know, most moms, the kind of trope is, Grandma—when are you going make me a grandma kind of questions. But Angela's mom was like, When are you going to make me a grandmother of a dog? I guess.
Luke Burbank: I had a friend and her mom started wearing a world's best grandma T-shirt, and my friend pointed out to her mom that she didn't have any kids. [Elena laughs] And her mom was like, Yeah, I'm just letting you know,.
Elena Passarello: Just prepping. Just like, it's like, the, manifesting.
Luke Burbank: That's right. Manifesting via T-shirt. Wow, that's some real, that's some real honesty from that mother. But you gotta, you've sort of got to respect that.
Elena Passarello: Mm hmm.
Luke Burbank: OK. What's another piece of advice that someone got from their mom that stuck with them?
Elena Passarello: How about this one from Jennifer? The advice Jennifer received? A woman always knows the right time to leave. I feel like that's like an etiquette thing, like a party thing, which is, you know, don't overstay your welcome. Also, if you're the last person to leave, you have to help clean up. So maybe that's also part of the advice. I hope that it doesn't extend to like, you know, leaving a relationship or something.
Luke Burbank: Are you a lingerer at things?
Elena Passarello: I have a hard time getting out the door. I'm one of those people who says that I'm going to leave and then 45 minutes later, I'm still there.
Luke Burbank: I, depending on if I've had a couple drinks or not, have become famous among my friend group for, just, as it's known, you know, the the Irish Goodbye or the French Exit. I feel like every nationality has some version of this where they're just like, what happened to Luke? He was just here, which actually, I feel like is kind of nice because, look, then you don't have to like, take up everybody's time saying goodbye and kind of drag it all out. Like, I'm fine—I just want people to know if you're ever at a get together that I have thrown and you're ready to go home, I will not be offended if you just kind of subtly and quietly make your way out into the night. That's fine with me.
Elena Passarello: Oh, that reminds me of our executive producer Laura Hadden's little baby, just had her third birthday,.
Luke Burbank: Josie.
Elena Passarello: And I believe it was Josie's first public party and a certain percentage of the way in she just told everyone that she'd like them to go home [laughter] so she wants to leave her own party.
Luke Burbank: I've had that experience before.
Elena Passarello: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: All right. One more piece of sage advice that somebody got from their mom.
Elena Passarello: I like this one from Herman. It's "dessert is the most important meal of the day."
Luke Burbank: I have been really leaning into my dessert tendencies...
Elena Passarello: Oh yeah?
Luke Burbank: ...of late. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what it is about—I made it through a lot of the pandemic kind of eschewing a lot of sweets around the house, but something, I don't know, I just got really into, like, I've got cookies and little like donuts and things, and it's like my little ritual now, like at night, I get done watching my Netflix and then I go and I, I have to only have one light on in my place. I don't know why that's part of it. I have this one little corner light and then I sit and I have my little cookie and my milk, and it's like, very nice end to my day.
Elena Passarello: That's very cute. I imagine you in like railroad track matching pajamas when you're doing it.
Luke Burbank: Uh huh! That's exactly, I have a candle and the little, like, candle stick and one of those sleeping hats on?
Elena Passarello: Stocking caps.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, it's real old school the way that I do it.
Elena Passarello: I have a friend named Inara who's, comes from a Latvian family, and she says that Latvian women always say "We eat cake for breakfast because life is hard."
Luke Burbank: I think that's a decent philosophy for life.
Elena Passarello: I mean, it's a good excuse to eat cake for breakfast, so.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, well, think about, most—a lot of the breakfast foods that we're eating are just like, we've decided pancakes are breakfast, or waffles are breakfast.
Elena Passarello: Yeah. That's just cake.
Luke Burbank: But like, we've just, without saying what we're doing, we're just eating dessert for breakfast.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, it's like when the USDA or whatever told all the school lunch people that pizza was a vegetable.
Luke Burbank: Because of the tomatoes.
Elena Passarello: It's like that magical thinking, I guess, is going to see us through.
Luke Burbank: I may have some vegetables for dinner tonight, a.k.a. some pizza, Elena. All right. Thanks to everyone who sent in a response to our listener question. [Music plays] You're listening to Live Wire here from PRX. We are talking about Mother's Day this week on the show. And our next guest has a really incredible resumé and also a really incredible lived experience to go with that resumé, Quiara Alegría Hudes co-wrote the Broadway musical In the Heights, along with Lin-Manuel Miranda, NBD, and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her play Water by the Spoonful. Now she is the author of an incredible new memoir, My Broken Language, about growing up with her large Puerto Rican family in Philadelphia and how her mother's use of the English language really helped inspire her own writing career. Let's take a listen to our conversation with Quiara Alegría Hudes recorded last year and just a heads up before we get into it, in reading from her book, Quiara uses a racial term that could be offensive to some people.
Luke Burbank: Quiara, welcome to Livewire!
Elena Passarello: Woohoo!
Quiara Alegría Hudes: Thank you. Woo woot!
Luke Burbank: This book starts with you as a kid and you're actually leaving Philadelphia to go live on a farm with your parents. And I was all, sort of like, anticipating that it was going to be a story about how much you hated living on the farm because it was like so different than, like, Philadelphia. And actually, it sounds like you kind of liked it out there, like you, you, you were pretty at home in nature, in the woods.
Quiara Alegría Hudes: I loved it. I mean, it's funny because I have very consciously thought about the book as my experiencing, straddling and bridging multiple and often conflicting realities, like speaking English and Spanish at home, having my parents' interfaith relationship. But I never thought of it also as like being a city kid and a country kid, that both of those things are very true in my heart.
Luke Burbank: Then your parents eventually end up splitting up, and then you go, you leave the farm and then you go back to Philadelphia, where you're mostly surrounded by your mom's side of the family. And it's a big part of this book, I think, is, you trying to sort of reconcile your identity a little bit as a person who's, has Puerto Rican heritage and also Jewish heritage? When did that start to be something in your mind that you recognized you had to kind of figure out for yourself?
Quiara Alegría Hudes: Everything was pretty seamless until my parents separated and then once they lived in different, you know, my mom is a brown Boricua woman. My dad is a white Jewish man. And their pairing seemed perfectly natural to me because it was my reality until they separated. And then all of a sudden they lived in very different, and contrasting, segregated neighborhoods. And these two components of my identity were really infrastructurally separated in my life. And so that's when I became conscious of, you know, there's a problem here. I don't kind of fully align with myself.
Luke Burbank: Right, you write that in the book. I think you, you say that, you know, speaking English as your first language when your mom's side of the family, a lot of them spoke Spanish as, kind of, their first language. I think you write "my words and my world did not align," which you said perhaps made me a lost soul?
Quiara Alegría Hudes: Yes. Yes. And I, I think that as I became a teenager and I really discovered a love and passion for literature, my skills with the English language only got better and better, and the better I got at it, the more conscious I became that English really lacked the vocabulary to describe certain parts of myself, to describe my reality and some of my truths. And so I had this language problem. What, what to do? You know, how, what language do I use to be most me? And by the end of the book, I discover that, when I become a writer.
Luke Burbank: I was wondering if you might be able to read a little bit from, from the new memoir. In particular, the chapter called Mom's Accent.
Quiara Alegría Hudes: OK, so at this point, I'm in high school when I'm writing this. "My non-Latino friends always had a comment when mom answered after she handed me the phone, they'd be like, 'her accent is decent.' 'I don't hear it,' I'd say. They'd be like, 'Stop playing. Yes, you do.' Old friends found comfort in her vowel-rich 'hello?' New friends just got confused. If mom answered, they'd be like, 'Yo, are you a jungle fever, baby? I thought you was white, but your mom sounds pure Spanish Harlem.' Mom's cadences were invisible to me, with a few exceptions. When mom said 'obnoxious,' it rhymed with 'precocious.' Precocious, obnoxious. When Mom said 'Home Depot,' it rhymed with 'teapot.' Teapot, Home Depot. When mom said 'realm,' it rhymed with 'stay calm.' Stay calm, realm. I corrected her in the car. I corrected her in the living room. No cash register or playground was too public to fix her blunder. Sometimes it was embarrassment, which I pretended was charity. Others, it was the know-it-all cockiness of youth and, still others, to tease a mystical giantess. Her numinous ass needed reminders that I was down here in the plebeian realm. She never once said, 'F*** you child, stop colonizing my ass.' But she never changed her pronunciation, either. We went to Home Depot a lot, so she was definitely asserting her right of mispronunciation. I wonder what it's like to grow up in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, learning English in first grade, starting with songs like 'Pollito, Chicken'; to bring your Papi his coffee on the farm, your Papi who doesn't speak a lick of English, made by your Mami, who speaks even less; to leave Arecibo at 11, come to Los Bronx as autumn breezes take hold; to have girl gangs mocking your spic accent and hurling rocks at your head; to wait until the janitor is done mopping and the floors are dry and he turns off the lights and is like, 'Out kid. I'm locking up,' and still the gang is there with the rocks; to have a Philly guidance counselor deny you a college conversation because, I mean, let's be real, and anyway, there was no money for college, and anyway, your parents didn't make it past second grade, so simmer down; to advocate for immigrant moms who can't afford cereal or prenatal care; to be honored by the National Organization of Women for getting those immigrant moms cereal and prenatal care; to be hired by state Senator Hardy Williams and while drafting his legislation to write in back door deals so your Boricua brethren aren't left with crumbs; to do all that of a high school education and a hunger for books; and then, to have your love child from a white hippie correct your pronunciation when she's six years old, then when she's nine, then when she's seventeen and should know better, as if the words I write are my language and not hers: the woman who taught me English, the woman who gifted it to me, and now I drink $10 prosecco and pay my Riverview mortgage and take vacations off the English language she nursery rhymed in my ear before I had words at all. I eat my words. I eat my corrections, como una come-mierda. Mom, if you ever read this book, and make it this far without disowning me, I ask you one favor: break this English language today and tomorrow and the day after and bestow it new life with each breaking. Endow your fullness upon this cracked colonial tongue. You language genius. This is your English. You earned it. I am only a guest here.
Luke Burbank: Quiara Alegria Hudes reading from her book My Broken Language. So, that was kind of talking about your mother's relationship with English. But beyond that, your mom also had a relationship with what is sometimes known as Santería.
Quiara Alegría Hudes: Yes.
Luke Burbank: But I guess it's, it's Lucumí? Is that the specific version of spiritual practice that your mother follows?
Quiara Alegría Hudes: Well, there's a few names for it. So it was popularly known in my adolescence as Santería. There were a bunch of horror flicks that referred to it and kind of degraded the philosophy and the faith. But so, so I use that word kind of cautiously. Lucumí is another word for this path. Ifá is another word for this path. For the the Yoruban-based Afro-Caribbean faith.
Luke Burbank: What was that like for you to be a kid whose mom was a, was a practitioner of this? I mean, there's a story from the book where you have a turtle living in your bathtub. I thought that, again, I never knew where this book was going to go. [Laughter] I thought this was going to be the story of you and the turtle falling in love. And that's not how it ends for the turtle.
Quiara Alegría Hudes: It sounds like the story of my life, never knowing which way it's going to go. I, my mother has a spiritual gift, which I never totally understood because I don't share that gift. My gifts are different. So I have seen her do lots of natural healing. She was a gifted herbalist, and as her studies in this particular path to become a priest deepened and intensified, I saw more and more, I saw, I saw her be possessed, experience spirit possession, and I also witnessed animal sacrifices, which were part of the practice. And, as a child, it was pretty scary and confusing, even though some of the nights I witnessed these things, I had had a cheese steak for lunch, which apparently was not upsetting to me at all. You know, so, and I understood these contradictions a little bit. These were ceremonial practices that were misunderstood, by myself included, to be blessings. And then after these practices, you know, when the turtle I had befriended or the chicken who was in the backyard or the goat who was in the basement, after they were sacrificed, they were cooked, and we ate them as meals. You know, but somehow the honesty of that act was still terrifying to me. Life and death is, is confusing and terrifying to us all, and it took study and perspective to understand and appreciate, OK, well, yeah, those deaths scared me, but they also nurtured me. I ate that goat stew. It was delicious.
Luke Burbank: Mm-hmm.
Quiara Alegría Hudes: You know?
Luke Burbank: Yeah, you talk in the book about how, because your, your father, your, your biological father, was a, you know, Asimov reader and a person who was, you know, not given to, sort of, religious thought. Your dad doesn't come off great all the time in this book. Were you concerned about putting that out there? I mean, this is now out for the whole world to read.
Quiara Alegría Hudes: I adore my dad and, you know, we have had a long history of ups and downs, and we have been honest with each other about this. My intention was not to hurt him, but it was to look at, you know, my cultural experience being from a mixed house. But he also bought me my first typewriter. He made me my first writing desk that I wrote this book on, and it's a beautiful, he's an artisan, he's a woodworker, and it's a beautiful desk, and so I think he has given me a great act of generosity, saying, It's OK, you can write your life. You know, he's strong enough to take it. So yeah, I was confused when my mom was telling me about times she had spoken to spirits, and then I went to get Dad's take on this and he was like, God don't exist, kid. You know, I'm like, OK, so one of my parents is right, and one of them is wrong. Which one is it? You know, I had to discover that answer on my own.
Elena Passarello: I couldn't help but thinking about, like, you have another language, which is the language of playwriting. Right? I love Water by the Spoonful. And that must have been some kind of re-education to start to have to work with narrative, to make a book, right? Rather than using the parameters of playwriting. Did you have like a strategy, or a...
Quiara Alegría Hudes: My strategy as a writer has always been eavesdropping, so, I think that this was born when the little kid left West Philly and moved to the horse farm. I would go to the woods by myself and I'd eavesdrop on the frogs, I'd follow my ears to find where the birds were, you know, and so, my mom would tell me stories, I'd eaves—and I'd eavesdrop on some of her conversations on the phone with her sisters, and then at a certain point in my writing life, I just start writing down what I'm hearing. I mean, God bless my family members. You know, I don't think they were aware of this fact, you know, but, and then I walk around New York City as an adult, after the book ends, also still eavesdropping, always eavesdropping, always writing down the way—I love the way humans speak, there is no more beautiful instrument to me than the human conversational voice. So for the book, the only difference is I have to eavesdrop on what's going in, going on inside myself. I had always been listening externally, really in love with the way other people speak and things that I thought were just kind of vague emotions in my mind when I really paid attention and listened? I discovered a lot more specificity and dynamism than I had originally realized.
Luke Burbank: We are talking to Quiara Alegría Hudes about her new memoir, My Broken Language. That's a book that you wrote, but then you also wrote the book for In the Heights. For people that don't really know, like play terminology, what does that actually mean? You wrote the book for In the Heights.
Quiara Alegría Hudes: OK, this makes me want to pull my hair out. It is the most confusing thing. It's like meant to make people not understand. Why it's not called the script of a musical, I'll never understand. What it means is, it's the script of a musical. So, it's, it's also the story. So, with Lin-Manuel, I wrote the story of In the Heights and the script, and he wrote the music and the lyrics.
Luke Burbank: Did you have a sense when you were working on, I mean, a lot of people now, of course, associate Lin-Manuel with Hamilton. But In the Heights was a huge hit, you know, all on its own, and you won a Tony for it, and, I mean, did you have a sense when you guys were creating that that this was something really special, that was going to really be well-received?
Quiara Alegría Hudes: You know, in order to write a piece, in order to write this book, My Broken Language, in order to write In the Heights, I have to know why a piece is special to me. And that's a conversation I have to have with myself every day. Why is this special? Why does this matter? And I have to just proceed with faith that if it's special to me, it matters to me. Someone else might feel that way, too. When I start to think too far outside of my experience, and wonder what's a reader going to think?, I get in trouble and I just start getting nervous. The writing's not as good.
Luke Burbank: Is that, you think, the key to your writing or at least why, why you're such a talented playwright and writer is because of just having a really authentic voice that you really kind of stick to?
Quiara Alegría Hudes: You know, this notion of the authentic voice is one that I, I find a little bit perplexing because, I think, as I discuss in My Broken Language, I always felt like, how could I have one authentic voice? There's like 50 warring selves and truths that are housed within me. And so I think my authentic voice is more symphonic. You know, there's, there's a lot of voices in there, and so I'm trying to listen close and not choose one, but actually let those contradictions be present.
Luke Burbank: Your mother appears in this book frequently. Has she had a chance to read it?
Quiara Alegría Hudes: It turned out that I had already written about some of her experiences in the faith early on. And I was nervous to write about those because they really were shamed and maligned in my adolescence. There was a reason why she kept things quiet because she wanted to proceed with her faith without, you know, outside critique. I was like, What is she going to think of me writing these things? So I, of course, I showed her an early draft, and this was one of the amazing parts of the process for me. Then she called me and told me more family history, told me more and more. So I learned so much more family history from her reading early drafts. And, you know, really, at the end of the day, I could say, Well, mom, it's your fault because you're the one who told me to be a writer. And, I think she was, she felt, now is the time, you know, we don't need those old silences anymore. Tell, tell the truth. Tell who we are.
Luke Burbank: Well, it's a, it's an amazing book. It's My Broken Language, which is Quiara Alegría Hudes's new memoir. It is out now. Thank you so much for coming on the Live Wire House Party and telling us about it. [Music plays]
Quiara Alegría Hudes: So fun. Thanks for inviting me to the party.
Luke Burbank: That was Quiara Alegría Hudes here on Live Wire. We recorded that last year. Her book My Broken Language is out now. This is Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are celebrating Mother's Day this week with some past conversations about the moms that we love. We gotta take a quick break, but don't go anywhere because when we come back, we'll hear a song from the very soulful Moorea Masa. So stay with us.
Luke Burbank: Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank. Right over there is my friend Elena Passarello. We're celebrating Mother's Day this week on the show, and our musical guest wrote a song for her mother as a way to try to process their estranged relationship. Moorea Masa is originally from, from right here in Portland, Oregon, but she's toured all over the world playing music. She's been on Jimmy Kimmel Live. She's done an NPR Tiny Desk concert backing up Allen Stone, another friend of Live Wire. We caught up with Moorea back in 2020, when she was down in Los Angeles with her bandmates. They were in a studio and were nice enough to talk to us and play a song. So check this out, it's Moorea Masa, recorded back in 2020 right here on Live Wire.
Luke Burbank: Moorea Masa, welcome to Live Wire.
Moorea Masa: Hello.
Luke Burbank: Wait, wait, so are we seeing like a group of musicians who have been, essentially, in a musician bubble this whole time?
Moorea Masa: Yeah, these are my friends who live in this, this beautiful studio.
Luke Burbank: Wow.
Moorea Masa: Yeah. This is like one of our first times playing music with people, and it feels really good.
Luke Burbank: So we're going to hear the song Honey, and I know there's a story behind it. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Moorea Masa: So my mother is a Black woman. She was born in Germany, and she grew up, she was an adopt, adopted by an all white family, and she has a lot of mental illness. So much so that in the last couple of years, I've had to completely distance myself from her, and that has been so hard. I think, especially, as your mom, you want to bathe her in honey, you want to love her. And you can't. And so I wrote this song just in that, like, push and pull of wanting to love her, but not being able to and what that's like. And I've been raising money through this song. The first four hundred dollars that I raised through streaming from this song will go to Radical Rest, which is an incredible Portland organization, and they're doing like once a month weeklong events with BIPOC practitioners, black, indigenous, POC—people of color. What we're doing is we're raising money for the BIPOC practitioners to get paid because I think in this time especially, it's so important for BIPOC folks to have therapists and healers that look like them. And so that's what this song is about, and that's kind of what this whole release has been about is just bringing awareness to mental health and wellness, especially in the BIPOC community.
Luke Burbank: Let's, let's take a listen to Moorea Masa, with the song Honey.
Moorea Masa: Here we go. [sings] It don't take much to make me happy / I'm not asking for a lot / I'm just trying to set these boundaries / but you keep running after me when all I need is "sorry" / Truth is, I keep questioning the right thing / retracing every word I said / I cut the line, but now I feel so lonely / Was I too harsh? Was it all in my head? / You still got my energy / And it's taking all of me / not to bathe you in honey / Honey / Whoa honey honey honey yeah / Honey honey honey / Not used feeling safe, I'm comfortable in our chaos / I'm used to doubting a love that feels stable / I've been reaching for you, but you've been missing / And when you show up at my door I know it's cuz you need something / You still got my energy / And it's taking all of me / not to bathe you with honey / Honey / whoa honey, honey, honey, yeah / Honey, honey, honey / Oh I'm caught in between and I've tried everything / Don't want to stay but I can't leave / Shine a light in the dark / Tried to mend every scar but I can't fix your heart / can't change who you are
Moorea Masa: [Spoken] OK, so this is actually the part, if we were doing this live that we would have everybody at home or everybody in the audience sing along. So now just if you're at home, also, if, if y'all want to sing with us, that would be great, I don't know if we can hear it, but, I can see your mouths moving. [Laughs] Here we go.
Moorea Masa: [Singing] Ooh not to bathe you in / Ooh not to bathe you in / Ooh not to bathe you in honey, honey / Ooh not to bathe you in / Ooh not to bathe you in / Ooh not to bathe you in honey, honey / Ooh not to bathe you in / Ooh not to bathe you in / Ooh not to bathe you in honey, honey
Luke Burbank: That was Moorea Mesa right here on Live Wire. Her latest EP is Heart in the Wild. Side A and Side B are available now. [Music plays] And that's going to do it for Side A and Side B of this episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests, Michelle Zauner, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Moorea Masa. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our executive director. Tim Harkins is our development and marketing director. Our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko, and our assistant editor is Tré Hester, A Walker Spring composes our music, and Molly Pettit is our technical director and mixer.
Luke Burbank: Additional funding provided by the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week, we'd like to thank members Zackary Simons of Pittsburgh P.A., Elena's old stomps, and Greg Bates of Portland, Oregon. For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast or check out our Best News podcast. Head on over to Live Wire Radio dot org. I'm Luke Burbank. For Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire crew, thanks for listening, and we will see you next week.
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