552: Need To Know Basis

Ira Glass

Josh likes to go birdwatching at this park in Chicago right by the lake. And generally, he's the youngest person there-- like, by far. He's in his 20s.

Ira Glass

That afternoon, he walked around with two old men. And when Josh knelt down to get a better look at a bird, one of the men remarked, I remember when I could do that. You know, kneel down?

Ira Glass

So it was a refreshing change one day last fall when Josh got to the park and a college kid came up to him-- like 18, 19 years old. And they started talking about birds, what Josh had seen that day.

Ira Glass

And this kid is also super knowledgeable, not in a show-offy way. He just knew tons about birds. So it was fun to talk to him. And they decided to walk around the park together. And they head down this path into the trees. So it's like dense, with trees around them on both sides. And the path itself is really narrow, just like two or three feet wide.

Ira Glass

And then the kid sets down his backpack on the ground. And he opens the front flap. And Josh assumes he's going to take out some photos or something to compare to this bird. But the kid pulls out two little white bags-- or maybe they're envelopes-- reaches inside them--

Ira Glass

The kid apologizes for the smell. Says he found them dead on the ground the day before. They weren't taxidermied or anything, and they were starting to deteriorate. And after placing them on the ground, the college kid looks at the sizes of the two birds and says to Josh, oh, you're right. Like a fox sparrow is bigger than a song sparrow.

And then he carefully puts the two birds back into their white envelopes and into the knapsack. And Josh acts like this is the most normal thing in the world when, in fact, he told me this is totally weird. This is not something birders ever do. He has found out since it is actually illegal to have any migratory birds, dead or alive.

And then they spend four or five hours together that day. And Josh says nothing about it-- asks nothing, never brings it up.

Ira Glass

For instance, maybe the kid would think it was intrusive or rude for him to ask. Or maybe the kid was doing something shady.

Ira Glass

I did talk to the college student. He told me at the time, he didn't know that keeping birds was illegal. But now that he does, he's gotten rid of all of his dead birds. And he asked me not to use his name here on the radio.

He says in all, he picked up maybe 15 or 20 birds. At some point he realized he could just find them near certain buildings with big windows. They would fly into the windows and die. And he didn't see the harm. He had no idea that Josh still wonders about this today.

Ira Glass

So all pretty innocent. But Josh didn't know that. In fact, Josh still thinks that he did the right thing not to bring it up with him.

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. A little information can change everything, make something that seems totally menacing totally benign. And the problem is it is not always clear when to disclose that information. In fact, it might not even occur to you to disclose it.

If you're in the other side, you might not feel like it's your right to ask-- like Josh with this kid. He felt like he didn't know him well enough to pry. Well, today we have stories where people's lives change in amazing, dramatic ways because they decided to disclose or not to disclose certain facts about themselves. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Full Disclosure. You know, most of us, we basically just keep stuff to ourselves. Right? We withhold information. We do not say everything. You run into an acquaintance on the street, and they ask you, how are you? You generally do not tell them how you are, really. Adult life means we provide information on a need-to-know basis.

Your mom asks you on the phone about something you think that the two of you are just going to fight about. Sometimes you dodge, right? You do not talk about things that you don't want to talk about.

But what would it be like to not live like that? Well, Michael Leviton knows.

Ira Glass

Michael's in his 30s, and he was raised by parents who encouraged him and his siblings to tell everything, the whole truth, all the time, believing that it hurts relationships when we avoid awkward truths, that we all should just man up and talk things through. We should work things out.

And being honest also means being true to who you are, right? Which, obviously, anybody wants for their kids. But hearing how far his family went with this, it makes you really understand how incredibly strange your daily life would be if you were to never withhold the truth. Like, for a long time, Michael believed that if somebody asked him a question-- I mean, like, any question at all-- he had to answer it honestly.

Ira Glass

That's true. His brother Josh does the same thing. More on that later. Let's stay with Michael for now.

Ira Glass

For a long time, if Michael decided that he didn't want to hang out with somebody anymore, he would just, you know, come out and say it-- let's not be friends. When he would go and hear musician buddies of his perform, they would ask him afterwards, how'd you like the show? He would do the thing that nobody ever does. He would actually tell them, you know, the arrangements could have been better. You shouldn't play with this band. That first number should be in double time.

If somebody told Michael about a TV show that they liked, or really if they expressed any opinion at all on any subject-- like they told him they loved chocolate-- he could not help himself from offering his own opinion, forcefully. He hates chocolate.

Ira Glass

You know, which in a way is so idealistic. Think about for a second all the people pleasers who will say anything in a conversation just to kind of get by, all the folks who spend years in therapy getting the courage to tell people what they really think.

Speaking for myself, I feel like I don't even know what I think half the time or what I believe. And I have lots of conversations where I know what I believe, and I don't say it because I don't want to have conflict. I want to avoid conflict. And I think that lots of us are like that.

Not Michael. His parents taught him, be stronger than that.

Ira Glass

This is Michael's dad, Mark. Everybody says that he was brutally honest when his kids were growing up. He made his living in the music business. And all of his life he has also worked, appropriately enough, as a professional critic. Michael's mom is a therapist who will tell you straight out--

Ira Glass

But Michael's dad told me he looks back on his kids' childhoods with a lot of regret for just how harshly he would tell everybody the truth all the time, as he saw it, and especially for how frank he was about things with his own kids.

Ira Glass

Michael had told me about this. There were a few stories of parental over-sharing. But the one that I think captured just how disturbingly far this could go sometimes happened while his parents were splitting up. His parents divorced when he and his siblings were teenagers.

And every year back then, the family would go to a place I was really surprised to hear exists at all-- family therapy camp, where counseling sessions were done in public throughout the day in front of other people. And so they're at this camp, and their parents are having troubles. And in front of other families and therapists and also in front of their own children-- aged 13, 16, and 19-- Michael's parents hashed out their issues.

Ira Glass

Just to be clear, at the time, Michael agreed with this.

Ira Glass

So these three children grow up like this. And they head out into the world as adults. And they had to confront the fact that these are not the rules that the rest of us are playing under. And the dad says that he knows that he trained them to live in a world that does not exist, a world where people are way more frank with each other than we really are.

Ira Glass

Three siblings are now in their 20s and 30s. And being honest has meant different things to each of them. For Michael's sister Miriam, it's been the easiest. She said she knows that she is not somebody that anybody would ever tell a secret to. And there are times she can't help herself from saying the truth.

Ira Glass

But it's manageable, she says. No bad consequences. Michael's brother Josh is also still a believer, which is remarkable considering the one big life-changing way that this level of honesty has affected him. He trained for seven years to work in law enforcement, to be one of those experts who analyzes crime scenes and figures out what kind of gun was used and the bullet trajectories and all that stuff. He has a master's degree in forensic ballistics.

But he doesn't have a job doing this because when he's asked about his drug use in job interviews, he always admits that in 1997, when he was 14 years old, he tried mushrooms one time.

Ira Glass

Michael, meanwhile, seems to have had a much harder time than either of his siblings when it comes to honesty. By the time he was in his late 20s, Michael had noticed that acting exactly the way that he thought a principled person should be acting, he was constantly getting in all these awful clashes with people-- like, all the time. And it was confusing. And he didn't like it.

And the part of his life where it was especially vexing was dating. Over and over, he would meet somebody he really liked, go out on a date, and then they'd never want to see him again. And he had no idea what he did.

Ira Glass

Even when he had dates that for a while seemed to be going OK, he would blurt out something honest, out of habit, and ruin them.

Ira Glass

And at some point it occurred to Michael that honesty was coming in the way of noticing other people's feelings. And maybe he needed to change that. And so finally, at 29-- that's five years ago-- he decided he'd had enough, and he started experimenting on his dates with how he acted. Now, these were not complicated experiments by any means. He'd simply have something honest that would occur to him that he wanted to say, and he would not say it.

Ira Glass

On that list-- you don't have to give an opinion. You don't have to say things out loud. Just because they're true is not helpful. You can choose not to answer a question. Don't fully explain. Make it quick. Say you'll tell them later. End the conversation first. Don't try to impress.

Ira Glass

One year his New Year's resolutions, typed out, were, quote, "tell no one about my problems. Listen to how others feel instead of telling them how I feel. Pretend more and people please. Remember to make others feel like I find them smart and cool. Act like I agree."

On the same page-- quote, "my list of things that I am not allowed to talk about-- ideological commentary, unnecessary brutal truths, triggering questions and unwanted inquiries. Avoid asking people what they mean when they use certain words." Or there's this one--

Ira Glass

What was kind of inspiring talking to Michael is that although he seemed like somebody who'd dropped into our world without a clue about how the rest of us behave, he then made a study of why he was failing. And he came to conclusions on his own. And he made up this to-do list. And then, like a scientist in a science fiction film who brews up a miracle elixir in the lab and then decides that he should be one to try it first, Michael has put his theories into action.

And it's working. He's had girlfriends. Last November, he married one of those girlfriends. And so these days, when he's being, like, super-honest in some inappropriate situation, his wife will say to him, wow. That was an interesting way to handle that. Or wow, we're doing that now?

He says he still has a way to go with all this stuff. But what he's concluded after this lifelong experiment in honesty is that honesty is not enough. You have to read people for signs that they do not need or do not want to hear the entire truth. And in fact, the whole idea of a world where everybody is honest all the time?

Ira Glass

In the real world, Michael says, people have all kinds of feelings swirling around in their heads and insecurities and struggles. What they say may or may not be what they believe. And he says, that's great. That's normal. It's chaos.

Coming up-- lying your way through college. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different stories on that theme. Today's program-- "Need to Know Basis," stories of people withholding information in a way that has life-changing consequences. We have arrived at act two of our program.

Act Two, Total Eclipse of the Son. That's son, S-O-N. Stay with me. That's going to make sense later. So the United States has a surprisingly high college dropout rate, particularly at community colleges, where only a third of all first-time students have their two-year degree by the end of three years.

Community colleges, by the way, are a huge number of students. Almost half of all American college students are in community college. We've done a bunch of stories about college dropouts on our show, most recently a couple weeks ago. Apparently, the first year is the key make-or-break time for whether or not somebody's going to drop out.

Zoe Chace spent last fall on the campus of a community college in the South Bronx, Hostos Community College, reporting on what kids need to not drop out.

Zoe Chace

I was looking for that one student in the one and three, the kid who succeeds. As soon as I saw Demetrius at the freshman orientation, I thought, oh, there he is-- the success. Front row, always raising his hand, volunteering for the skits. And when I talked to him, he assured me. I had found the right person.

Zoe Chace

I thought if I spent time with him, I could see what he's doing right. He looks like the one in three. Because Demetrius has two things that are really hard to come by-- extremely high expectations for himself and complete confidence that he will meet or surpass those expectations.

Zoe Chace

Doesn't matter what it is. Demetrius is always about to be a star. From the back, Demetrius is a grown man-- tall and broad-shouldered in a leather coat. From the front, he's still a teenager-- round, freckly baby face, 18 years old. His plan is to get his associates, transfer to a four-year school, major in video game design, and then become one of the best video game designers the world has ever seen.

Demetrius tells me he has not always done the work to match his high expectations. In high school, he says he did not always do his work. But this year, he's serious.

Zoe Chace

So I started following Demetrius around, talking with him. I went to his classes, the computer lab, met his girlfriend. He's in love. One day, after months of this, at the end of the semester, we went to a meeting at the school with someone called a success coach.

Zoe Chace

Regardless of your GPA, every incoming freshman at Hostos is assigned a success coach, someone to keep them on target. It's different from an adviser in that the success coach is more of a full-time catcher in the rye, someone who tracks their progress through the school year and, if they're falling behind to figure out why and try to fix it; someone to help them pick their classes each semester so they graduate on time, which is why we are here right now.

Zoe Chace

Straight A's all semester, as promised. So we sit down with Ray Cartagena, Demetrius's coach. He's in Navy Reserves, huge arms, tattoos. He makes Demetrius look little. How you doing? Straight A's. What do I need to fulfill my requirements? They lean over the computer together and look at his schedule.

Zoe Chace

Then something happens I totally didn't expect. In the middle of registering Demetrius for his college courses, we call his dad.

Zoe Chace

Demetrius's dad seems to take an usual amount of interest in the minutiae of his son's schedule. No three classes on one day, one class on another day because then you have too much time on your hands.

Zoe Chace

I have a history with him. And too much time on your hands, he says, can lead to issues.

Zoe Chace

This is weird. Demetrius is acing his classes. His professors really like him. He spends a lot of time in the computer lab. And he wants to join student government. Why is his dad all over him? He's in college. If they can't find a better schedule for him, his dad promises, this semester around, I will find a way to occupy his time.

Zoe Chace

Demetrius seems a little embarrassed when we walk out. His bravado has kind of drained away. So I ask about his dad. What's the deal? We sit on a park bench. Demetrius stares straight ahead.

Zoe Chace

The story about the once is about to spill out. And this story, it tells you a lot about why the graduation rate at community colleges is one in three, how even someone as confident as Demetrius could become a dropout instead of the one who makes it.

The once is theatrical. It's an elaborate mistake. And it's not a story about this year. It's a story about last year. Because when I met Demetrius, I did not know this is actually his second freshman year, his second time around as a freshman in college.

The first time he went to college, it wasn't the South Bronx. In fact, it couldn't feel more different at Finger Lakes Community College. Woods, wineries, lakes, five hours north of New York City. His mom dropped him off.

Zoe Chace

Demetrius also noticed it's way easier to get girlfriends in college than in high school. But the big difference between college and high school-- nobody is there to make you go to class. Nobody is collecting your homework. Nobody's making sure you're keeping up with the reading.

Zoe Chace

He says nobody seemed to notice. He got letters from the school. He ignored them. His grades were dropping. And then late into the semester, a relative died that he was close to, and he had to go back to the city for the funeral. He came back to campus but never went back to class. He felt terrible, totally depressed.

Zoe Chace

Demetrius let everything slide. The checks he was getting from the government to cover his housing, he spent those. He only paid the rent once. He says he was confused about when he was supposed to pay what. By the end of the semester, there was nothing left. He owed a couple thousand dollars.

He saw his family for Christmas break. He could've confessed everything. He could have gotten help. But he didn't do any of that.

Zoe Chace

And after Christmas vacation, that's when he got into some real magical thinking. He kicked up his deception to a whole new level. He was like, the circumstances of my life are on a need to know basis, and nobody needs to know. He thought he could turn things around all by himself and secretly handled this entire episode.

Here was his plan-- get a full-time job at the Taco Bell, earn enough money to pay back the money he owed for his housing, never tell anyone what happened, and quietly re-enroll next semester.

Zoe Chace

So thousands of dollars in debt, college dropout, 300 miles away from his family-- this was Demetrius's life. He copied a friend's transcript into Microsoft Word, changed the name to his, and texted it to his dad like, see how great I'm doing in school?

Three months passed like this. And it might have continued for longer. Except then, that April, deep into Demetrius's would-be second semester, his dad decided to surprise him at school.

Zoe Chace

Please meet the man from the speakerphone, the father of Demetrius Wilson, Demetrius Wilson, Sr. He is a big guy, a sanitation worker for New York City. He is incredibly friendly, loves to talk. So back in April, Demetrius the dad shows up at the school with his younger son, Elijah. It was Elijah's spring break. Their plan was to have a little vacation, drive around the wineries after saying hi to Demetrius, Jr.

Zoe Chace

Demetrius stuck to the policy-- admit nothing.

Zoe Chace

And he says, oh, I would be in class except it was canceled. His dad looks at him.

Zoe Chace

Running jokes, it's slang-- like running a con game.

Zoe Chace

So now, they're watching each other, saying nothing, waiting it out. Next day, Demetrius's dad makes a move. Hey, I want to go to one of your classes. Let's go to one of your classes together.

Zoe Chace

The receptionist looks up Demetrius's name on the computer and goes quiet.

Zoe Chace

Demetrius marches his son out to the car, shuts him inside, and takes a walk. And his thoughts are going 100 miles an hour. He kind of wants to knock his son out and drive away. But of course, that's not what he's going to do.

Zoe Chace

This is what he was thinking about-- first of all, Demetrius's dad wasn't around for lots of little Demetrius's childhood. The parents broke up, and he'd see little Demetrius maybe every few weeks or so, sometimes less.

So when his son slacked off in high school, he blamed himself partly for not being there. Now his son's slacking off in college. What do you expect? Also, Demetrius's dad has a college degree. But his first time around, he dropped out, when he tried state college in Norfolk, Virginia. He says he had this problem when he was young where he would come right up to the edge of being successful and then pull back. He knows how his kid must be feeling right now, how hard it can be to push yourself through your doubts.

Zoe Chace

So Demetrius, Sr., comes up with a plan for his son Demetrius. Nothing's going to happen in his life that I don't know about. I need to know everything. He decides to bring little Demetrius back to New York City, enroll him in college in the Bronx, 10 minutes away from his dad's apartment.

Again, Demetrius's dad works for New York Sanitation. And his garage is directly across the street from where Demetrius goes to school.

Zoe Chace

Demetrius is on his dad's couch every night, at school across the street from him every day, on weekends at a job that his dad approves of-- working as a cashier at the FAO Schwarz in midtown. They check in every day, a few times a day.

Zoe Chace

There's a popular idea right now among people studying why kids drop out of college. There's this whole set of skills that students lack-- non-academic skills like organizing their time, knowing who to ask for what. And that lacking those skills is one of the biggest reasons kids fail. And that's something schools are trying to address so they can keep their students.

The way that lots of schools see it is that they have to develop their own Demetrius's dad. They call it an intrusive adviser or an enhanced adviser. Demetrius's new school, Hostos, they're trying this thing. That's what their success coach program is. When Navy Reserve guy Ray calls Demetrius's dad on the phone to figure out his one class on one day issue, that's intrusive advising, which in this case doesn't look so different from parenting.

Of course, parenting can be a thankless job and seems to be when it comes to Demetrius. He doesn't credit his turnaround from dropout to straight A student to his dad holding him accountable. Demetrius mostly gives the credit to himself, to a change in his own frame of mind.

Zoe Chace

His dad doesn't care that Demetrius thinks he did it on its own. In fact, he's happy about that. He prefers that. He wants him to feel empowered and not overthink it. He wants his son to move on and not spend time reflecting on why he got stuck a year ago. That could stagnate his son, whose only focus is supposed to be doing well in school.

I want him to just keep flying, he told me the other day, not so close to the sun that he melts his wings but just keep moving forward. Don't pull back. Stay in motion.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Three, The Favorite. So we close our show today with this example of information provided on a need-to-know basis from one of our producers, Stephanie Foo.

Stephanie Foo

When I was in the seventh grade, I got an assignment to write a one-page essay about my favorite place in the world. I wrote 10 pages, single spaced, about Malaysia.

I moved to America from Malaysia when I was three years old, but the rest of my family still lives there. We went back a lot when I was little. And so I remember crawling under ferns and hibiscus in the yard, catching moths the size of my head, playing hide and seek during monsoon storms.

But in that essay, I didn't write about the main reason why I loved Malaysia. I loved Malaysia most because Malaysia loved me. I was the favorite child, and not even the extra serving of cake kind of favorite-- the kind of favorite where everyone would straight up say at family gatherings, oh, Stephanie's the best. My aunts would tell their children, why can't you be more like her? Then they'd buy me all the toys I wanted. And the person leading this campaign was the matriarch of our family, my dad's aunt. We all called her Auntie.

Every time I walked into a room, Auntie would reach for me and coo, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. She's so well behaved. She's so nice. She saved me all the best pieces of the chicken, taught me mahjong, asked only me to sit on her lap on the big papasan as she taught me songs in Chinese.

The other adults fell in line to say something nice about my eyes, my dimples. I remember I had this cousin who wanted to be an artist when she grew up. She filled up an entire bookshelf with her sketches. I showed up and started doodling, and everyone flocked around me, telling me I had natural talent. My cousin stormed off and didn't talk to me for days.

I was proud to be Auntie's favorite because even though she was under five feet tall with Coke-bottle glasses, she was also a total badass. Auntie grew up destitute with three sisters and a single mother in Japanese-occupied Malaysia. The girls shaved their heads to avoid being harassed by the Japanese soldiers, and they opened a gambling den where they hustled patrons out of money and sold opium.

She had an impassioned opinion about everything. When she hated something, she screwed up her face in disgust and would actually bang her fist on the table, declaring [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. Don't like Nicki Minaj. Why she got blonde, white people hair when she's a black woman?

Not that Auntie had ever met a black woman. She didn't like traveling. She didn't like cheese. Her decisiveness sometimes didn't quite make sense. Like one time when I offered her an apple, she shook her head and said, apple taste just like potato. And I'd rather have potato.

The things she loved seemed just as impassioned and just as arbitrary-- the lottery, which she won over 40 times in her life, this one ditzy girl on the Korean soap operas, and me. I once asked my mom why I got the special treatment I did. She said it was simple. I was the favorite because my dad was the eldest son in the family and I was his firstborn child. This sounded enough like something out of an Amy Tan novel for me to believe it. I left it at that.

But things all started to change when I was 13. Everyone in the family heard about that one day in August when my mom told my dad and me that she was leaving us. They heard about the lawyers, the money, the house. And they heard about what a brat I was after, which I was.

I argued with my teachers, flunked out of a lot of classes. When my dad started dating, he wasn't around much, didn't even come home lots of nights. And I started fighting with him all the time. I set his copy of Parenting Your Out-of-Control Teenager on fire and almost burned the apartment down in the process.

Two years after my mother left, my dad moved out completely, went to his girlfriend's place. I found a roast chicken on the kitchen counter once a week. But basically, he left me in the house on my own. I was 16 and furious.

I knew my family in Malaysia got an earful about my bad behavior. I got a couple of emails from aunts telling me I needed to get it together. And that cousin who loved to draw, she wrote me to say I ought to feel bad for breaking up my parents' marriage. So I stopped emailing my family.

I got up the nerve to visit Malaysia again after I graduated from high school-- not with my dad, though. I brought my boyfriend instead. And things started off normal enough. Auntie cracked jokes about my boyfriend's surprising ability to eat spicy food. She'd call him "the white devil" and cackle.

But everyone seemed a little reserved. I wasn't the golden child anymore. I had a filthy mouth and blue hair. I picked fights about their opinions and their politics. Finally, someone asked me how my dad was. I said I didn't know. I said he was an asshole.

They got defensive. Auntie and the rest of my family asked me why I couldn't be a better daughter. They asked me if the stories they'd heard were true-- the one about the burning books, the one about me chucking my dad's car keys into some bushes.

OK, yes. It was true. I had done all of those things. But then I realized they didn't know that my dad had moved out. They didn't know that most days, it was all I could do to microwave a Hot Pocket for dinner. When I told them, they didn't believe it.

Before they took me to the airport, Auntie grabbed hold of me and hugged me tight to her. And then she whispered in my ear, you are not a good person, OK? You need to become a better person. Then she let go and walked away.

I didn't go back to Malaysia after that. Instead, I grew up. I learned how to land a job, make a paella, buy a car. I learned a few deep breathing exercises. I didn't set anything else on fire.

Finally, a couple years ago, my father called me and told me that Auntie was sick. She was stable, but I should make a point to visit. So I went back with my dad. It felt weird traveling with him because for years, we'd never spent more than a couple hours together.

But when Auntie saw me, she was so excited she almost fell over. She grabbed the edge of the table next to her just in time and cried out, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] You're so pretty. I relaxed.

All was forgiven. Auntie loved me again. She brought me food. She held my hand as we watched TV. I stayed with her a little over a week. I started recording some of my conversations with her. I wanted to remember this.

Auntie told me stories from the gambling den, told me about my grandma flirting with boys for free sodas. And then she started talking about when I was a little kid. And she said this thing that, when she said it, felt like she took a box full of everything I thought I knew about my relationship with her, about my relationship with Malaysia, and dumped it out on the floor.

I'll play you some of this. Take note-- Auntie's English wasn't very good. She could only talk in the present tense, even when she was referring to the past. And she didn't have her dentures in at this point. But she started banging her fist on the table, and she said that the reason everyone had been kind to me when I was a kid was because they all knew that I'd suffered a lot. Here's the tape.

Stephanie Foo

And when she said that, something clicked. I knew what she was talking about. She was talking about my mom. When I was a kid, if I lost something or said something wrong or didn't clean a dish properly, my mother would scream, hit me. Sometimes she'd threaten to kill herself. I was never not scared growing up.

That's how I remember it, anyway. My mother remembers it differently. Before I go on, this is from the email she sent to our fact checker.

Quote, "My daughter's stories about me that she has related to you are figments of her imagination or, at best, highly prejudiced memories. If released publicly, I would consider these fabrications and distortions about me as personally very damaging." End quote.

But what my Auntie told me on tape was that basically, everyone was so nice to me not because I was the oldest child of the first-born son and not because my cheeks were chubby but because they saw what my mother was doing to me.

Stephanie Foo

I'm asking Auntie if she saw my mom beat me. And she says everyone saw.

You know that scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where he's in Barnes & Noble and slowly, all off the lights turn off, one by one, leaving him in darkness? As Auntie was talking into my tape recorder, it felt like the opposite, like all the lights were turning on.

I saw my family, saw Auntie popping back up in those memories in a way I'd never imagined before-- with them listening through walls, peering around corners. Suddenly, I remembered this one time in my uncle's house in Malaysia. I wasn't allowed to eat dinner. Instead, my mom told me I had to cross my arms, pull on my earlobes, and do squats in front of my family, who ate their meal in silence.

And then there was a time during a visit when I was six, and I disagreed with my mom about what my homework assignment was. She started beating me with a ruler. I think it was a ruler. It went on for a long time.

At some point, I tried to hide under a table. As she pulled me out by the legs, I started to scream for mercy. I knew that the house was full of family. I wondered why nobody was coming to help me. I thought, they must not be able to hear me. I felt totally alone.

I was not alone. Here's me and Auntie again. I'm speaking in Manglish, Malaysian pidgin English. I never thought this would be on the radio.

Stephanie Foo

She's saying if they said anything, who would suffer? Your father would.

Stephanie Foo

You suffer. If you say don't do that, she'll do more.

Stephanie Foo

She'll beat more.

Stephanie Foo

Not to say it'll stop. You think it's like that? Meaning, your mom didn't stop when we said something. You think it's that simple?

Then Auntie told me this story about how once when I was little I woke up scared in the middle of the night and walked into her room. She woke up and whispered reassurances and ushered me back into bed as quickly and quietly as she could. She was terrified the entire time.

She said she believed if my mom found out that I got up in the middle of the night, she'd hurt me. So Auntie did not dare wake her up or tell her what happened.

All that fawning, those compliments-- Auntie told me they were only in part for me. My family indulged me with that immense display of kindness to show my mom how I deserved to be loved. It didn't work, but I'm still grateful.

Because sure, it was a lie. I wasn't the favorite. But the truth was better than the lie. For years, I thought nobody got it, that nobody was on my side. But they were. Auntie was.

Ira Glass

Stephanie Foo is one of the producers of our program.

[MUSIC - "KEPT IN THE DARK" BY ZACHARY THOMAS DIEDRICH]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Jonathan Menjivar with Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Miki Meek, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Editing help from Joel Lovell, production help from Simon Adler.

Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our office manager. Elna Baker scouts stories for our show. Research help today from Michelle Harris and Christopher Swetala. Music help from Damien Graef and Rob Geddis.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This is our last program with Adrianne Mathiowetz. For eight years, Adrianne has been the one who has been running our website, which means a lot of things, including emailing with thousands and thousands of you. When you right to us, you are usually first emailing with her. And if you have done that over the years, you know that she is lovely and level-headed and smart and just great.

We will miss her. She has always been a part-time photographer and now she's becoming a full-time one. She is available for your freelance gigs, by the way. We wish her the best.

Our website-- thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always, to our program's cofounder, Mr. Torey Matatia. On vacation this year, he tried to go to Disney World but ended up at Sea World.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.