You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey there.
Andy Tagle here in for Marielle Saguera.
I'm a reporter on this show, but that's only one part of my identity.
I'm also a woman, a daughter, a partner, a Filipino American, a french fry enthusiast, and more recently, a San Diegan.
All this to say, there are so many elements that inform who we are and how we think and how we show up in the world, and none of these identity makers exists in a vacuum.
We're all just a great big combination of intersections.
So today, at the intersection of Mental Health Awareness Month and Asian American Pacific Islander Month, we're talking to psychologist Jenny T.
Wang.
She says it's important to expand your lens in order to understand the forces shaping your health and your identity.
For many children of immigrants, or even immigrants themselves, part of what shaped their mental health was the context in which they were trying to build lives in.
Jenny is the author of permission to come Home, reclaiming mental health as Asian Americans.
And while no one person's experience will be exactly the same as the next, she says a lot of Asian Americans can face similar burdens.
For many immigrants who came to this country, my parents included, there were certain barriers.
There were things that were kind of threatening to their environment or to their lives, and that could be racism, that could be not speaking the language, that could be a lot of different things that made them feel as though they didn't belong.
And so that starts to shape mental health and the narratives in which they might have internalized.
Another through line of the asian american experience, the impulse to ask for permission.
First, this idea that we need to ask our parents or ask our communities to make certain decisions or to live certain lives or pursue certain careers.
Instead, Jenny says it's time to practice some agency.
And so this idea of permission, I almost wanted us to reclaim a little bit and consider this idea of permission, claiming this idea that I can give myself permission to go into these spaces of my life where traditionally it may have not been valued, something that was not discussed in our culture or even encouraged.