A quick warning.
There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you.
Can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org okay, so we're going to try something different today, something we have never tried on our show.
And I got the idea for this from a conversation that I had with Jiayoung fan.
Jae Young did a story for our show a little while back, and she's not somebody who's normally on the radio.
She's a magazine writer.
And so when time came for her to record her script, she sat in the studio with one of our producers, Diane Wu, who had her read.
And, you know, it's a weird thing to sound like relaxed and natural while reading words off a page in a totally soundproof room, hearing your voice on headphones.
And Diane did with Ja Young what we always do.
She'd tell her, you know, like, go back and do that sentence a little looser or, you know, underline this word or whatever.
And that just hit something in Jai Yang in this way that doesn't usually happen.
Having a fellow Asian American who looks exactly like me coached me through that process.
Hearing exactly how much more American she sounded than me, it made me think anew about my voice and the way I speak English.
Okay, I have a bunch of things to say to that.
First of all, this idea that you and Diane look exactly the same, that's racist.
You do not.
Fair point.
Fair point.
And then it's interesting to me that you perceived it as Ja Young has thought a lot about the way that she speaks English and the way that others do, going back to when she was seven years old and she came to the United States from China.