Why We Tell Stories: Deepening Connection w/ Jitesh Jaggi

0:04 Hey everyone, so welcome to the Among Me Chronicles podcast. I am your host, Randy Kim, and today I am joined with a good friend, Jitesh Shaghi. Who is Jitesh? Jitesh is an immigrant storyteller, educator, and oral historian from India. He is a five-time Moth Story Slam winner. His stories were recently played on NPR's The Moth Radio Hour and on WGN TV's Daytime Chicago Show. As a storytelling coach, he has taught workshops for the World Health Organization and the University of Chicago, among others. Gitesh's one-man show, Suitcase Stories, played at the Steppenwolf Theater and Second City. Gitesh was a keynote speaker at the International Educators Conference, NAFSA, and a panelist at the American Writers Program.

0:49 As an oral historian, he collects the stories of the South Asian diaspora living in Illinois since the 50s and often weaves his own personal tales with those of his immigrant ancestors in his performances. He will share these stories as part of the Illinois Road Scholar for this year into next year. And I knew J. Tosh like several years ago because I was also in the storytelling scene in Chicago, maybe like several years back. And I think you were just coming into Chicago at the time and we were crossing paths. You know, during that period. And, you know, I've seen you taking your storytelling to new heights. And, you know, you've been performing nationally. You've been engaged not only as a storyteller, but also as a coach, as someone who's teaching others about what it means to be an engaged storyteller.

1:34 So thank you so much for coming on to my show, Jesus. How are you feeling right now? I'm feeling great, Randy. Such a pleasure. I was very excited when you reached out. So, yeah, I'm really excited to get to talking with you. Yeah, so I want to ask you, like, what early events in your life make you realize that you had a knack for storytelling? Yeah, that's a good question to start us off. I think storytelling, I explain to people, even when I'm teaching to them, like, storytelling is a storytelling with capital S and storytelling with regular spelling. And the regular storytelling, I think...

2:17 I was doing it as a child with my parents. I was telling them stories. I could just never be. I was also very talkative, very mischievous kind of little boy. And I would kind of like weave stories in my head a lot. And some of them would be like, you know, obviously true stories, but some of them would be like fantastical stories. I never wrote them, but I did kind of like Entertain my mother, so to speak, with them. And it had all the elements of like humor and they were like physical elements because I would act it out. And I remember feeling so good about having a one person audience all to myself.

2:59 My mother was very generous with her time to me. And I think I realized like, ooh, like if I keep getting better at this, she will sit through these longer and longer. And then I saw like my cousins were being entertained by it. And also I want to add that my grandparents and others around me growing up in India, we are such a communal culture that it's such a collective culture that Telling each other stories was just our way of being. It was therapy, it was entertainment, it was all of it combined in one. So I took, I borrowed elements from that. And when I came here to America eight years ago, and I stumbled across capital S storytelling, which is storytelling as is performed on stage, I realized that I had been training, I had been under training for many, many years.

3:54 You know, my family, my ancestors, my people. And here I was kind of like practicing it finally. And did your like answer or did your grandparents or family members tell stories? Were you listening to their stories? And how did you feel about the way they told stories to you growing up and learning about their roots and learning about their own upbringing? Were they very open about their own experiences? Because I know for a lot of Asian parents, it can be a very Difficult topic to bring up, you know, for others. And I'm curious about maybe in your situation if storytelling has been very prevalent among your family circle. That's a very astute observation about kind of Asian family dynamics.

4:36 My grandparents, especially even my parents, my uncles, aunts, they would tell two types of stories. One was the mythological lore, our religion, our entire mythos, it was passed on orally. So there is a very strong story. Oral tradition in India. And they would pass on these stories. And these were like fables. These were, you know, stories that have a moral meaning attached to it or a value attached to it. And it was a way for them to break the monotony of you should do this, you should not do this. They knew that they would have a better chance of Getting our attention and hooking us in if they kind of delivered these moral values through these stories.

5:26 So all these mythological tales about ten headed gods and all of that fascinating mythological lore was passed on through stories. So that was one. And the other part was also stories about everyday people. So they would they wouldn't just say, I will say it was a way of gossiping. It was like them kind of like communicating what was happening within the community with each other, including the kids who was who just died recently, whose sister's child just got married to whom. So these was these like elaborate web of people and stories and connections that could only be told with the narrative.

6:12 So these two type of stories were being told. However, I want to acknowledge what you also mentioned, which was a lot of important stories, very, very real historical stories were being omitted that I had to learn by myself. Stories of immigration, stories of just painful stories of what happened in the family, painful stories of I grew up in a refugee camp and I'd Did not know that because they would hide that. They didn't want us to, they had their own reasons, but there were a lot of stories coming back to the point about immigrant families and Asian families specifically, that not being thing that was explicitly out there.

7:02 That was painful to not know and to have to find out, but you know, that did send me on my own storytelling journey. Yeah, I think it's a very important observation that you're bringing up because like oftentimes when our history, especially where you're coming from in India or from myself in this case, but in Southeast Asia, how often our stories are told from a very white researcher lens and how that omits a lot of the trauma and a lot of the violence that our people have experienced too under colonization. And I think See how important it is more than ever to really lift a lot of the history, but also the people who have been doing the brave resistance work, because we do forget that, because oftentimes we're seeing as, well, why didn't we stand up to our oppressors?

7:50 And no, there's actually been people that actually were trying to fight against it. They were just disappeared and omitted from history altogether. And I think that's very important to really understand Yeah, 100%. I mean, India was colonized by the British for 200 years. Language, our way of life was drastically changed. And the way history was handed down to us was through the lens of the British Empire, through the Raj, what was called.

8:32 And that so many things get omitted. So many facts get brushed over because they were not conducive to the present day Britain, right? Great Britain. And Those are some of the things that you find out through movies, through talking to other people, through reading books. And reading books wasn't a big cultural thing when I grew up. I grew up and as an adult, I had to do my own research. And you're right, that is what made me today an oral historian. I wanted to capture oral history specifically. It does not favor the quote-unquote victor. It favors the everyday people. And I think... Somewhere in me, I knew that I wanted to give voice to everyday people to be able to narrate their own history at least the way we never got a chance or my people never got a chance before.

9:29 As a storyteller, what do you feel you receive in return when you share your stories in front an audience and what does storytelling bring to you? Oh, so much, so much. You know, I now on a day-to-day basis almost find myself making a case for storytelling to others. I have become this person who almost like proselytizes people like, hey, this is this wonderful thing that you should do more in your work life, in your study life, in your everyday life. So I'm constantly telling people what the benefits might be and some of them are very They're just understood benefits.

10:13 Some of them are proven by research. And we can talk about all those benefits. And I also stand to gain from those. Like I have gotten like job offers because I told a good story. I have been included in a friend circle because I told somebody a good story. And these things make me look more believable, more trustworthy, more persuasive. But the most important thing The first thing that storytelling gives me is this ability to process what happened to me. This ability to process my own life, my own kind of I look at my own stories now, my own experiences in life through this convex of narrative.

11:06 I look back and now it's easier for me to face some of the things from my past because I'm able to To process it through the medium of a story and also share it with people. Because stories, if they're just written and their laptop is shut, it's not a story. It is a very dormant, hardly of much use vehicle. And only when you start to share with people in that live environment is when it comes alive. And that has... Help me to finish that processing, the whole process of making sense of my life, of what happened to me.

11:47 I think that's like the primary. Yeah, no, I really appreciate this part because I think of how storytelling deepens my connections with people. Like the idea of being believed and also being able to tap into something that actually resonates with certain people, whether it's in your community or with outsiders. And also, in a way, disrupting a harmful narrative that people had thought of, you know, this situation or this current event, or giving more light to something that we would hear on the news, but actually giving a human voice to it, you know. And I think that really changes, I don't want to say it completely changes hearts and minds, but it does help to intercept a harmful narrative that have been ongoing for a very long time.

12:32 And I also know that you've been a break dancer for a number of years. I don't know if you're still practicing like professionally, but I wonder about what that means to you in terms of storytelling, because there is a performance element to it. And I know that that's something that you've talked about, you know, time and time again. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yes. So I was, when I was in India, in Mumbai, I think around 2008, somewhere between 2006, 2007, 2008, I started, I was introduced to hip hop as a culture because we just got internet and all of a sudden so many things were being just blasted at us from America.

13:18 You know, we had the Indian version of MTV and rap and this and that. And I was like, oh my God. And people got to pick and choose what they could relate to. For me, hip hop became the thing that I just like grasped onto very naturally, like immediately on instinct. And breakdancing or b-boying, as it's correctly called, or breaking, specifically really appealed to me because I'd always wanted to be a dancer, but I grew up poor and my neighborhood didn't have dance classes. There were no studios. And breaking never asked much of you.

13:59 It never asked me to book a studio. It never asked me to have a certain social credibility. It was like, If you can move to whatever extent you can, there are moves for you as long as you can work hard and earn a skill and then also be original. So I think it really appealed to me that the entry barrier was so low and also it looked so fun and so cool. So I started practicing then, became a B-boy. Long story short, when I came here, I think I started practicing. It was such an important part of my growing up, my adolescence and my young adulthood that I just couldn't not exclude from my storytelling practice.

14:41 So two ways I did that. One was telling stories about being a B-boy. Those stories are always crowd favorites, are always beloved. I really enjoy telling them. People enjoy receiving them because it's so weird and unique and It has some specificities to it because it feels like I'm building a world before I tell the story. So people know what was it like growing up in Mumbai in the early 2000s? What was it like learning this foreign art form that was being like sent to you in bits and pieces? So that was one, telling stories about it. But a few years ago when I wrote my solo show, there were times during the show when I was talking about my life When certain stories just became very difficult to talk about.

15:32 And it also became very difficult technically also. Like how do I convey this emotion that I was feeling when I came here in words? Words were not enough. So what I did was I created this whole show that kind of seamlessly goes from telling stories using your words to Telling stories using movements. I wasn't dancing per se. I mean, I kind of was, but the point was to convey the emotion of the previous story and the progression of that story through movement. And I would do that and I would switch seamlessly again from movement to stories and people got it.

16:14 People got the part that I tried to recreate through movement and I'm still thinking about it. And I was like, oh, there's something there. And it's all only because of my breakdancing past. And also, I wonder about what brought you to America? What brought you to Chicago? What was the genesis or the development that led you to coming to the US? I fell in love. I met somebody in Mumbai who lived in Chicago. She's my ex now, Whitney, but you know, she's still a lovely dear friend. We almost treat each other like family.

16:55 But yeah, like we met 10 years ago, 2016. We started talking 2014. And at first, it was so funny that Because I didn't have any teachers, breakdancing teachers growing up when I was doing it, I was like, okay, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm going to teach others, which also I didn't know sent me on this path of being an educator. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna teach kids how to do this. And I taught at this nonprofit and this nonprofit catered to some of the most marginalized people even in India.

17:36 And these are people who, Belong to a certain caste. These are people who are maybe Muslims who are still a minority in India. And there were not many resources that were available to them. So I tried to contribute to that through whatever I knew. And what I knew was I knew to speak a little bit English. So I would teach them English and I would teach them dance. And... I saw a picture that my ex then, she posted on Facebook, a mutual friend was tagged in that picture, and I literally went, I shit you not, I've told this story to so many people, I immediately, my brain went, Ooh, white people in Mumbai, they are here for a tour, perhaps.

18:27 I should kind of like invite them to my nonprofit. And if they like it, maybe they would like to spread the word. Maybe they like to make a contribution, financial contribution. These kids can use that. And I reached out to very professionally. So we maintained a professional relationship for two years. And then slowly she got to know me a little bit. I was a poet. I am a poet as well. So she was interested in poetry. She was interested in what I was doing. We got to talking and we realized we have more in common. And I had never met anybody. I mean, I had met people in America as in like dancers would come to do workshops. I wasn't friends with anybody like that. And that friendship turned to relationship. She was supposed to come to India, but that didn't work.

19:09 I had a whole lot of visa troubles, but ultimately what worked for us was I came in here to join her. And we had a really, really fulfilling relationship for six years here. Two years we dated long distance, six years here, about eight years. So we knew each other for a decade. We parted ways in 2024, I want to say, you know, which was wherever life takes you. But it also made me confront this whole thing about, well, I'm here in America for this person. So if this person is not in my life, what am I here for? So that sent me into this whole spiral of Am I American?

19:51 Am I Indian? Am I Indian American? What is my identity now? For the first time as a grown adult, this identity is in flux and storytelling helped me. I started writing stories about my identity and performing them gave me that, like I was saying earlier, it helped me process what was happening in my life. And the answer came, very resonating answer came that, yes, I may have come here for this one person, But during that process, I made a community. I became a part of this so many communities and I feel like I belong here and people have made me feel welcome, especially in Chicago. And I applied for my citizenship and today I'm a citizen.

20:33 So, yeah, it's a long journey. Congratulations on that. And, you know, like you came into the U.S. like at the tail end of Obama's second term and also You know, you spent most of it during the Trump administration. And I know that when you had your divorce, Trump became president again, which I hate to remind people of that. But like, I wonder about how much of that really impacted you because you talked about where your own identity is. It's like, am I Indian American? Am I, you know, Indian specifically or what? Does it all mean, do I consider myself Asian American? So it's like, it's a whole different dynamic that you have to kind of wrestle with as someone who has to, you know, come into the US and trying to really adapt and trying to find out where community And I wonder about how that whole period was like for you trying to navigate and survive in this community, which feels very dystopian right now with everything that's been going on with the ICE raids and with the anti-immigration sentiments that have been happening nationwide and even globally.

21:46 Such an important question, but also such a multifaceted question. I'll try to answer everything. One was, you know, I fell in love with this person, this American girl, when Obama was the president. And it's like, it was all like, everybody's rejoicing, like the world is healing. That's how we all felt. And I wasn't that aware of US politics. People in America forget that other people have their own lives and their own politics to take care of. And I think American essentialism makes everyone feel like, oh, they must be worried about the same things. No, we barely knew. We knew Clinton because he came to India once and everybody was like, who's this handsome man?

22:26 Same for Obama, except he's black. So he's like, oh my God. So that is happening. A black man could be the topmost position in America. So those were fascinating and we could always feel ripple effects of whatever happens in America, but we were not preoccupied by it. So I didn't know how much Trump's first presidency, the first term was going to impact my own life directly. Because when I started applying for visas to come here, that was 2016. And that was when he just came in power. And that was how my visa battles lasted two full years.

23:11 2016 to 2018, two full years. Thrice my visa was rejected. And I want to like, especially shout out To folks here who don't understand this, that when people from Asia, from Africa, when they apply for visas, please know that they're not just, and it gets rejected, they're not just mourning the whole crushing of their dream. They are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. I applied for three, three visas got rejected. Each visa costed me like, I forgot how about like $700. And also I had to, Book hotels and flights, all of that that I didn't know that it would get rejected.

23:55 So none of that was refundable. I kept losing so much money that I didn't have. And sure, the biggest crushing news becomes the heartbreak that I won't get to see the person I love. America wasn't the point. The point was to be with somebody I loved. And to keep getting rejected was so insulting for nothing. Because very explicitly, this is not an assumption, very explicitly, the visa agent would tell me over and over, we have no reason to believe that you will go visit your person that you claim is your lover and you will come back. You are basically going to stay back and you're going to look for employment and you will overstay your visa.

24:38 I've been to France. I've been to Hong Kong. I've been to so many other countries. Everything was right there on my passport. None of it mattered because America was special. So that lasted two years long. And finally, I made it here. And then another battle to get the green card, another battle to get the citizenship. All of this was easier for me because my partner, my ex-partner, she was an American citizen. But had I chosen a different route like H-1B, Which I wasn't. That should tell you a lot. All my work was in India. I didn't care to work in America or study in America.

25:21 All I cared about was to be with my person who happened to be in America. But I ended up paying the price personally also. Yeah, and I think that that's These stories are so important because I often hear from people, well, why didn't they do it, especially from my own community, but like, well, why didn't they do it our way? Or why didn't they do it easy? And I also like, to be honest with you, and I have had this conversation ad nauseum, and it's like, Immigrants are treated very differently, especially with every presidential administration. And also the last immigration reform was in 1986. So you're talking about 40 years here.

26:01 Very, very obsolete now. And it's not accounting for the different waves of immigration that have happened since then and what to account for. And it's also, it's not very easy. It's very costly. You're trying to hopefully get your employer to Bánh Bites, Bánh Bites.

26:46 I was curious about your thoughts about the Chicago storytelling scene. What did you experience stepping into this platform? Yeah, I kind of stumbled into storytelling. I didn't know there was a scene. I didn't know storytelling was a thing. The person I came here for, she was a lover of storytelling. She would listen to The Moth on NPR. I remember we would have these long-distance Chats, phone conversations. And when it was Saturday morning here or Sunday morning, I forgot, I would always be like, who else is in your apartment?

27:27 Who am I hearing talk? And she's like, no, no, no, this is storytelling. People get on stage and they share their personal stories. And I was like, that's fascinating. So I came here and kind of like, so she was my introduction to it. And then I realized, wait, I really like it. I was already a spoken word artist. I was a poet. But I hadn't fully invested myself in it. But storytelling really captured me. And then I did realize that there was a scene as well. There were so many events. And almost every night of the week, there were two to three storytelling events. And then the pandemic happened, and they all went away. And over years, I'm kind of sad to say that there was a robust storytelling scene when I came in.

28:14 Kind of bare bones, at least in comparison. I really appreciate the events that are still going on and the promoters who are still, you know, doing it out of pocket for the most part. But it's kind of, it's a skeleton compared to what it was. It's just a shadow of what it used to be. Why do you think that is? Yeah. Why do you think it's been kind of like, you know, scaling back? I have so many answers here and I'll be frank on all these points. Simple one being, there are two reasons.

28:54 One, the bigger reason is that storytelling is not sexy per se in the culture. In American culture, it does not hold in the American imagination the same spot as stand-up comedy does, as theater does. Theater also has fallen off Relative to its glorious past, but the way stand-up comedy is, it's not the same, right? There are no storytelling superstars, there's no So that's the main, like overall reason that, It's hard for a scene that is punk in its essence to sustain itself for a long time at the same rate.

29:55 That being said, I will say storytelling is the scene itself is kind of plagued with its own problems. Number one being the barrier to entry, to access. You know, somebody like me, you know, just came into this country, have no work visa. How am I expected to pay $20 for a chance to tell my story? And then if that is, so those are the storytelling competitions. So there's barely anything in return for me, but I'm supposed to pay every time I want to tell a story. These are open mics. And then there are the other side, the curated lineups, which I've been so lucky to be a part of so many of those.

30:42 It's you have to know somebody. It's because somebody saw me performing somewhere. But what if they did not? So, you know, like it's like you have to know the barrier to entry is enormous as opposed to like if you wanted to do improv, if you wanted to do stand up, you can walk down the street and you can find an A stand up open mic free of cost and you'll find a full community of a diverse community and storytelling community unfortunately is not too diverse and unfortunately is not the most welcoming to first time tellers. Yeah, you know, I'm glad that you lifted this part of the narrative and what the Chicago storytelling scene looked like, because as someone who had done storytelling in the past, I'd say now 10 years ago, you know, I think I just walked into it by luck, just by pure luck.

31:34 I think it was, you know, Jeremy Owens' You're Being Ridiculous show, if I remember. And there were a bunch of storytellers that I knew previously. The lineup was very strong and actually I would meet my, who would then be my mentor. And I think when she was also going into storytelling, you know, I was very curious about that world because I felt like now I'm more confident about what I had to say. I was becoming very unapologetically queer. I was becoming more in touch with my own Asian American identity. So I had a lot of things to say and When I was going into these storytelling scenes, and I'm going to be very careful how I say this, but it was very white.

32:14 And I think one of the things that really was difficult was, and I didn't get this until much later on, I was like, why do I feel like I want to get away after an event? Why am I hesitating to do these photo ops, you know, these group photo ops? Because I think over time I realized how people would come up to me, mostly white audiences, and the way they receive my stories, because most of my stories have been very intense. I would talk about my father's genocide survival stories, or I would talk about Challenges with my own queer identity or, you know, being a caregiver to my mom after her stroke. And then, like, I often would be the only person of color, you know, being in that lineup.

32:56 And then the other white tellers would tell, like, entertaining stories about their breakups or how this wannabe comedian stand-up, which I'll be honest with you, didn't make me laugh. I was kind of like, God, I had to sit through this. And... And Chicago is a very diverse city. It's very black and brown in the city. But in the storytelling scene, it felt like I was living in Naperville. I felt like I was living in Wilmette or somewhere in Lake County. It just did not fit the way our city is. And I felt it was very limiting. And I've been very critical about that. I think this is something that led me to just...

33:38 Exit most of it together because I'm like, yeah, I'm not feeling this. I'm not seeing people that really need to tell these stories because I know that when I was working with my former mentor, we were trying to create those spaces. I know you were in one of our shows and there was a... There was so much value. There was a lot of excitement seeing an Asian-American, Asian diaspora storytelling show because that wasn't done before. And the thing was that a lot of these storytelling producers were never tapping into the Black communities or Latino communities or the Asian communities. And I think that is a shame. It shouldn't have to be gate-capped, but that was the situation that I ran into.

34:21 Sorry for my little rant there, but that was kind of like the scope of what I saw, you know? And I wonder how do you just navigate, you know, the tokenization and having to set these stories that just wasn't connecting. And when you're telling the stories that are very personal and traumatic. And I think that there is this feeling that we're performing trauma in front of white audiences. And that's something that never sat well with me. Like, I don't want people to come back and say, I'm so sorry to hear about what happened. And I'm like... Just stop it. It just didn't sit well with me. So I think that, yeah, there was a period of time where I'm like, yeah, I can't deal with this. There was this one time I told a story and it was very, I didn't believe, I couldn't believe myself that I wrote that story and I performed it.

35:12 It was very personal and it was very vulnerable. It was about, it had like so many layers to it because I grew up in a, In a Hindu household, and that story involved eating meat, came from a vegetarian background, things like that. And I was telling this story about confronting my own past, my own people, and my own culture's rigidity about certain things. And that's my story to tell. And I told that story, and I told that story just mostly for myself, for allowing myself To have that courage to say like, oh, I have been defiant and this is where I want to be.

35:54 And defiant of my own culture, where I come from, because I was still very new to America. And I remember this lady came up to me after the show. People were usually coming and saying like, you know, that was great, congratulations, blah, blah. And she walked up to me without hesitation and she was like, you know, I'm glad you spoke up about that. I know what you should do next. Your next story should be about the caste system in India. And she said that and she walked away. And I felt so small. I felt so patronized. I felt like I was this vehicle talk about the ills of my background and like have this dirty laundry out for view of these people.

36:40 And I was having a very Dave Chappelle kind of moment. And I was like, Oh my God. Is this what they think I'm doing? Do they think that I'm telling these stories so they know how shitty some of the things are in my part of the world? They should know that I'm telling these stories because I am wrestling with it. Not because you need to hear what's happening in my part of the world. This is my lived experience. And as I wrestle with it, I'm making sense of it. I'm putting it in an artistic form and presenting it. And it does something for me and others who might relate to standing up against your own culture's rigidity.

37:27 It's not for you to tell me, oh, check mark. I know this about like what exists in your part of the world. What about this other stuff? It just felt very like it cheapened the whole experience. So that's what comes to mind when you say that. And the answer to how I do this is just, I know, and I know people such as yourself who have been forced out in a way. And you're not out of the storytelling scene. You are very much welcome. And tomorrow you can be like, I want to tell a story. You'll be welcome back in, at least by people like me. But seeing what you just shared, I want to use that as an example. This is what happens.

38:07 People like us then become Further marginalized and you are swept away from the scene and it becomes a snake eating its own tail. It becomes a very self-congratulating circle jerk. And it's like, no, I am very much here to stay. And yeah, people, I will educate people. And sometimes I'll have to take these like, Whatever you want to call them, these weird remarks. But I have a larger purpose here that I have found. And that's a very personal purpose. Sure, I have made it my career, but that's not where it started. It started because it allowed me, a boy who had no access to therapy growing up, to look at the things that were not compartmentalized in my head because I had nowhere to put them.

38:57 And storytelling gave me this medium to finally compartmentalize them, make sense of it, you know, neatly package it for my own self and share it with others. I'd be damned if anybody like, you know, causes me to run away from that just because of their poor behavior. Yeah, no, I think, you know, getting back to what you mentioned about this lady who made the comment that you should do about the caste system, the thing that I really get troubled by, especially with, White audience members I'm going to be very upfront about, older audience members that I've seen, is that there is this assumption that they could try to relate to you in any kind of weird way. It's very unsettling, but I think what Always bothered me about hearing the unsolicited advice or the prescriptive way of doing things, even though that's not something I was even asking for.

39:47 I'm like, look, I'm there just to tell a story. I'm there because this is what my creativity and my conscience is telling me. What I will say to that is that It should not be a responsibility to talk about our entire community. One person's voice does not make the entire goddamn country. You're not representing the entire country of India. I'm not representing the entire country of Cambodia or Vietnam. I think it's very unfair because I wouldn't place this white person who lives in Naperville and be like, okay, tell us everything about India. You know, freaking Britain, you know, or, Germany, you know, tell me about your ancestors. So we're not, exactly.

40:28 So I, I find it so reductive and it's so like, It's something that I've always got very annoyed with. So usually I tend to like, if I'm usually at a show, if I end up having a beer show, like I try to kind of like either talk to my friends or be like, yep, I'm going to take the beeline, I'm going to get the hell out of here and not talk to anyone before I start saying something that's going to get me in trouble. Oh yeah. So yeah. You have to feel that. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, I think that, yeah, I don't like, I don't think it should be our responsibility to tell those stories. And I think that's what's very important for storytellers is that we are not this monolithic story here, that we all have very, very, very different layers.

41:10 We're just only telling one little strand of it. And I think that's a very important point that you're also making here. Like, what does it mean when you're telling stories to people in your community or with other like-minded folks who have a lot of commonality with you in terms of your identity or experiences? Yeah, that's something that I've recently gotten to experience. I'm so glad you talked about that. You know, as I started to expand my storytelling practice and the storytelling scene was becoming a little bit Of suffocating because it was the same old, same old. And it's like, okay, the lineups are becoming the same.

41:51 Stories are becoming the same. Like, let me like see what's else out there and who else wants to hear stories. And one of the audiences I was so happy to find was people from South Asia. South Asian people, known storytellers in general, I got to be part of my community and bring storytelling to them. And they hear these stories. First of all, the art itself, they're like, oh, wait, so you could do that. So that's the thing. So people can go up on stage and share a slice of your life and present it in an artistic way that is very personal and true to them. That is fantastic.

42:31 And also, most importantly, the things that I have lived through are being Spoken as if that's normal. You know what I mean? That really does something to a person. The first few times I started performing in South Asian spaces, oh my God, and especially stories that have elements of food or family. Oh my God, people eat it up. No pun intended. They're like, oh my God, I can't believe you talked about that. I can't believe you went through that too. Like I had the exact same experience. I also tried to recreate a recipe from my mom here and I messed it up or blah, blah.

43:13 That was my story. And it's such, it's so cute. I love it, but I know it is healing. It is making people feel seen. Yeah. What a gift. What a beautiful gift. I never got to have that gift when I was telling stories for so many years. So I was like, let me give it. I still don't have I still don't come across many South Asian storytellers sharing something that would be like very relatable to me. But when I do these in South Asian spaces, I get a very different kind of reaction of very like people are sometimes crying in the audience because I touched on a nerve. That they had forgotten about because nobody talks about that part of immigrating here.

43:57 And it is just so profound and so beautiful and so incredibly necessary. That is one. I will also say when I did my solo show and the lights went up and you would see the weirdest smattering collective of people, there are There are your middle-aged white people from Oak Brook. There are your black trans folks who are in this poetry scene because I kind of like straddle a lot of these little communities. And when I got them together, it was so interesting because after every show, what I do, I do this thing called Story Circle where I will then invite people to tell me stories now.

44:38 I told them, told you a bunch of stories. And that probably reminded you of a bunch of things. It's so interesting, somebody would tell me like, oh, your journey of immigrating, I haven't had that experience. But some parts of it, the way you were saying it, it reminded me of moving from a town in small town, Iowa, to the city of Chicago. And that's just as welcome, because The point of the story is not what's happening in the story. The point of the story is what the story is about, the underlying themes of longing and grievances of hope. Everybody feels that way. So, you know, I'm having a lot of specific relatability with South Asian audiences, but also like a more broader from everyday people.

45:26 Yeah. What do you think is the key to telling a good story? Oh. That's the million dollar question, isn't it, Randy? It's the key. So I don't think, I don't believe there is one key per se. There are many, many things. I am a researcher. I study this beautiful art of storytelling. I've been trying to keep abreast of all the, you know, scientific literature as well, because storytelling, as you know, is becoming this new buzzword in business and everywhere, right? All these industries. Some of this is a little bit like vulture-like.

46:07 Some of them is just like taking like, oh, our AI app is storytelling. Yeah, I mean, I cannot tell you like sometimes when I would apply for grant writing position, like, oh, we need a storyteller. And I'm like, Define what storytelling looks like, because I've had my I've had very interesting conversations with other executive directors on it. And like, do you really understand storytelling? So it ends up becoming a very interesting conversation, especially for those that actually have not told stories publicly. Some of them are weird and some of them are like funny, like last week. Like 15 people are tagging me for this job opening that I didn't ever ask for.

46:50 And I was like, cool. And the job opening says, I kid you not, we are looking for a storyteller and these are the pay, these are the hours. And I'm like, hmm. And I click on it and I was like, they were looking for a receptionist to welcome people. And I'm like, Give me a break now. Come on now. Just call it what it is. People in marketing are now hiring as storytellers. Just say you're looking for a copywriter, a copy editor, a marketing person. Anyway, but so I'm trying to like, so it's very confounding to keep track of all of that. But I'm trying to like think about this. I'm trying to read about this.

47:31 I'm trying to research this. I'm trying to like really Share with people because storytelling is a hard thing to do. A good story is a good story, a story that really moves you. And so much so that you change your perspective about something. It shakes up your belief system. That is how powerful a good story is. So it's hard to kind of like boil it down to a thing. Right now, my main fascination is with how People are trying to, when they're trying to write a good story and they're trying to like have their story relate to as many people as they can, they try to water down their own stories by making it very kind of like easy to attach yourself to.

48:23 It becomes a very like lowest common denominator thing where people are using references that many, many more people will understand. And in my storytelling practice, I try to teach people how you are supposed to do the stark opposite of that. The more specific your story is to your surroundings where you grew up, the more specific it is to your personality, the more detailed it is. And that detail that can't be recreated from an internet search that you only lived, The more it represents a very unique kind of confluence of where you grew up, what your upbringing was, the more it's relatable, the more it invites people in.

49:14 I was listening to songs by like Tupac and relating to it in India. Didn't even know what Compton was, where it was on the map, couldn't point it for you. But somehow I would listen to these songs. I'd be like, I know exactly what this guy is talking about. And here's the thing, Tupac wasn't trying to water down his lyrics to appeal to a boy in Mumbai, India in 2020 or whatever, whenever I got to hear those songs. He was trying to be as specific to his own lived experience and portray them in his songs. Somehow. This kid across the world in a different timeline was like, I know exactly what he's talking about.

49:56 Stories are the same. Be as specific as you can to your upbringing, to your surrounding, to your life and the way you uniquely process your emotions. And all these unique details, they start to plot in a listener's mind and it creates this beautiful little Mold for somebody to step into and start to relive your life. Nobody wants to live a life they have lived already. What's the point of listening to a story? The point of listening to a story, one of the points of listening to a story is so you can inhabit, so you can embody somebody else's experience for 10 minutes and live vicariously through them.

50:41 You're not going to give them if you try to mimic their experiences. You're going to give them that if you give them something so specific that only you can talk about. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it actually does. And, you know, the other day I was asked to, you know, be on a virtual panel and like one of the organizers and was talking about, you know, we need you to tell like you're wrong. Be raw as you can, tell your stories in your fullness and whatever. And I think as someone who's been on panels, and I know you've experienced doing this, I'm like, one of the things I've always... What I try to be very cognizant of is that even though some of the stories that I do tell have trauma, there's context of trauma involved in it, but also for me, I don't want to just stay in it.

51:34 I also know that there's joy, there's abundance, and there's some introspection in those stories. And this is something that I also have to wrestle with because telling stories can be very triggering. Sometimes there are times when When I was working on, you know, the story about grief and I couldn't rehearse until like maybe a week before the festival because I'm like, the weather's nice outside. I'm in a good mood. Why do I want to relive these traumas? And so I think like... And one of the things is that there was a person that was telling every detail of trauma. And I also think to myself, what does that do to the audience?

52:15 But what does that do to the person telling them? And I think that's something I've been trying to be very sensitive about, especially if I feel like I'm hosting a space or a podcasting space in terms of what they can share. But I think one of the things that a friend told me is that We do not have to get into the depths of our trauma to think that we deserve healing. Healing is our rights. We shouldn't have to prove it to anyone. But yeah, I think that there is a line between how much can you share without it really mentally hurting you.

52:55 Yeah. I'm so glad, Randy, you brought this up because I really wanted to talk about this. Storytelling is ultimately, it's an artistic practice. It's an art form. And sure, for my own self, right? I just talk about how it helps me process my emotions and my life experiences. And I think Everybody is so welcome to use that and use that as a tool almost.

53:39 I will say, what you said kind of reminded me of, one is that I'm with you, the whole, they call it like trauma porn now. I'm like, oh my God, it's so horrifying. Anyway, I will say, There is a difference between and event spaces and event producers really, really should be cognizant of this. I don't think it does the storyteller or the story listener or the event producer much good if the space is only made for somebody to basically do the equivalent of reading your journal diary entry.

54:25 It can be your story. And again, I'm trying to be cautious in how I say this because I don't want to make anybody feel like, oh, if something terrible happened to your life and you want to share it, please, my God, don't let me stop it. I welcome you, in fact. But let's also not forget storytelling is an art form like theater is, right? Like poetry is. And it's on the performer, it's on the storyteller to also make sure that they have to some extent processed the event before sharing it with the public, which also gives us this opportunity, this delightful opportunity to make it so artistic.

55:12 So I'll give you an example. I tell stories, these are personal stories and these are Often political stories, and these are often stories where that involves a lot of painful life experiences, either in mine, in my family's, in the world I inhabit. And I try to weave all these together. But anybody who's heard me, they know I use... Humor as a tool, like you were talking about like joy, right? Humor becomes that pillow I get to grab onto while I'm sharing something really traumatic.

55:55 And it makes the telling of the story easy for me. It takes the receiving of the story easier for people. And I think that's a responsibility of mine, of the event promoter, of the people to make sure that we are processing our truths and also treating storytelling and giving it the respect of an art form. So even if that means... I'm sorry if I'm going this on a tangent, but I teach people when I teach storytelling that stories in storytelling are true. And this is controversial maybe to some. They are true in the way a documentary is true. They are not factual.

56:35 When you watch a documentary on race horse riding, you're not expecting a minute by minute account of what happens on that racetrack. What you're expecting from the documentary is to distill the essence of why people race horses in the first place. Who are the players involved? And what are the dark elements to it? What are the joyful elements to it? Similarly, in a story, your job is not to give Your journal entry, you know, read out, like, this is what happened in my breakup and fuck my boyfriend. It's like, sure, you know, I welcome you still, but process it a little bit. Maybe at that stage, it's for us. Or therapy session, you know.

57:15 Maybe at that stage, the listener, the audience, the correct audience is a best friend, a parent, a therapist, you know. Process through it, live through it. We always say this adage, stories about wounds, not scars. Let the scars heal a little bit, make sense of it, contextualize your own suffering or trauma, and then tell a story. Because when you do that, and then you look back at it, you're able to find humor in it. You're able to find A glimpse of ray of sunshine in it. You're able to learn yourself. And some event producers also don't agree with me on that. And that's fine.

57:56 But I will continue to raise this to an art form as much as I can. And I will always use humor because it makes it easier for me to do. Yeah, no, I am so glad that you brought this up and I'm really thankful for your perspective on this because as someone who wants to be authentic and telling my stories, but I also know that I have the control, I have the creative control of what I get to tell and how I tell it. And I think that I realized that not everything needs to be shared. Like some of it's like, okay, I'm probably not ready to tell this story. Maybe at another time I might be able to.

58:38 But I love the idea of like, you know, adding humor, adding some level of joy, adding some very thoughtful memories in this because I do think that there are moments in our lives, in our journey that do need to be celebrated, that do need to be acknowledged, not as a way to erase or to disappear all the bad things that have happened to us, but it adds context. It's part of what makes us human and what makes us very connected to where we are today. So I really appreciate this part a lot because this is something that is a very much an ongoing conversation that I try to have when I'm in community spaces or when I run my own podcast and Talk to other colleagues about this because I do get very sensitive about how a person's feeling after telling a story or at least getting a scope of it.

59:27 And it's like, okay, let's see how you're really feeling because stories telling is not necessarily a cure for everything. It's basically can open up wounds that you maybe not be ready to confront. And I myself have been through that. Yeah. Therapeutic, not therapy. Therapy is therapy. Please make sure that you're not like making that the only storytelling, the only, you know, way to process this. I think Brené Brown was talking about how, to your point also, Brené Brown was saying about how like not everybody deserves to know your raw, uncut, traumatic past, right?

1:00:10 Like, We have to be very careful with whom we share these very personal things. Not everybody deserves to hear them. Maybe a best friend, maybe a group that is dedicated to that cause. But also, I hear this from a lot of writing teachers and I kind of agree with them. And this sounds so harsh, but often they will tell people who, for example, want to write a memoir. And okay, what's the memoir about? The memoir is about Say, my grandma suffering from cancer. And that is a good, that gives me some understanding of why you would like to write that book.

1:00:52 But that doesn't give me anything about why somebody else should read that book. So when we read a memoir or a novel, we do expect them to, sure, take a tragedy, take a traumatic event, but do put in Those artistic elements that make it not even if not entertaining, if the word entertaining is triggering for some, then make it digestible. Reflective, understandable, digestible, biteable. So, yeah. Yeah. And also, I know, when it comes to storytelling, how does this impact the relationship? With the people in your life, you know, how do you think this has changed the way you view your own relationships on professional and personal level?

1:01:42 Oh, that's a difficult question. I haven't made full peace with that. I'll be honest, I'm still thinking about this. Or sometimes actually, let me be honest, I try to not think too much about that. Because, you know, I tell stories from, for example, sometimes from my childhood or growing up in India and specifically where I grew up. And some of those conversations, for example, my parents are not ready to have. We still don't talk about that uncle who passed away in the 90s when The AIDS epidemic traveled to Southeast, to South Asia, to India too.

1:02:36 We still don't talk about those things. And I am ready to talk about it. It doesn't mean everybody is. And I have to be very careful about those things. I will say, and this sounds so sneaky, but some of the stories that I tell make me feel glad that, for example, my parents don't necessarily speak English. They understand parts of it. But you know, some of those stories, they are not ready to have those conversations. And that's okay. And some of the stories I have told that involve people, I never use storytelling as a way of, this is not a place to air grievances or to For vengeance or anything.

1:03:21 But I do tell stories sometimes where I come across as this idiot who made these mistakes. And in those stories, great. I'm the person, I'm the party responsible and I can own it fully and I can tell those stories. And I have many stories like that. There are some stories where others are involved. Mm-hmm. And those others might not always be ready to take accountability. And it's not my job to teach everybody, but I am going to tell my truth. My lived experience will live in my stories. But it's a difficult question. I haven't figured out how to.

1:04:01 Maybe I'm still, you know, I'm almost a decade into the game, but like maybe this will come to me later. In a few years, maybe you can educate me about how you manage that. I'm still learning that part because, yeah, because I know when I talk about my late brother, especially what I did in that performance, his twin brother is very, very private. And I think, you know, there's a Stacey King video. He passed away. Rest in peace, Stacey. But like when he did the video tribute to my brothers, you know, my brother, My living brother was very uncomfortable with me sharing because he thought that was very sacred between him and his twin.

1:04:41 And I think for myself, I am a natural storyteller. I feel like this is my way of honoring my grief, but also honoring my late brother. But for him, his is very, very private. I don't like to talk about him to anyone else. So I think this is something that It's a struggle because you do want to tell your story because there is a creative element to it. There's also stubbornness that I have too, but I also want to be very sensitive to who it affects too. Am I doing it in a very consenting way? Am I doing it with the level of care that I deserve? I don't think that there's a right answer for it. I just hope that the decisions that we make when we tell stories Come from a good place and hopefully, hopefully down the road that will, you know, people will see that.

1:05:31 And I don't think that's an easy question to answer, but that's certainly something I've been thinking about a lot lately because, you know, I do want to do a one person show about grief, loss, mental health, but there's also other people in my life that may feel very strongly about like, okay, I... Don't think that you need to involve this story or that story or even my more humorous stories like, you know, and I know that my verbally like you better not tell this story, you know, and I'm like, but I need to because this is how the absurdity of it happens. So I'm going to have this back and forth, you know, but I don't think that's going to be perfect. I think that having hard conversations with the people in our lives who are used to being very private about it and want to stay private can be a very I think it involves a lot of care and I don't think there's any prescriptive way of saying it.

1:06:21 Yeah. I'll give a hopeful example too, because like I'm so this, this, this is one like kind of like, you know, like a dark area of storytelling for me personally, because I'm still making sense. So I really appreciate your perspective here. And I see that you are also still kind of coming to terms with it. But I do want to like also share a hopeful example in the same, um, You know, line of questioning, which is when I was doing my solo show, I did my solo show while I was still married. And then my marriage ended and I was like, half of the show talks about why I came to America. Half of the show talks about why I continue to stay, chose to stay in America.

1:07:04 The first half, why I came in, cannot be talked about without talking about my partner because she was the reason here. So after our marriage ended, I was like, okay, obviously the show is done. I'm not going to do this again. And props to my partner, my ex-partner, when she was like, hey, you should know that you should do this. The context is I just had received a grant from DK's, the individual artist program, and they gave a small funding to artists to produce a show. And I had this money and I'm like, but I don't want to do this now. And I told her and she's like, You have, basically she gave me her blessings to do this show.

1:07:44 And it was so funny because I was like, okay, I'm going to like, because I had already like preemptively thought that she would not want to be associated with the show anymore. So I was like, I'm going to give you three name options, pick a fictional name. And she was like, dare not. My name is Whitney and you will represent me as is in your show. And it was such a tender, beautiful moment. And I went on stage one last time with the show as it was like really, you know, catching steam. And I told this show and I used her name, her real name. And I told people like, This is the last time I'm doing this show. Not because me and my partner, we are exes now, but because I want to move on.

1:08:31 But I want you to know that she was gracious enough to say, you should do this show. This is a meaningful show. And this is beyond you and me. This story affects others, everyday Americans when they hear it. And, you know, so... I hope for more of such people in my life and your life and other storytellers' life who are understanding and accommodating like that. Yeah. And advice is, what will you tell someone who's looking to tell their story for the first time and doing so, whether it's on TikTok or in person? I will say first things first is that Storytelling lives in the sharing of it.

1:09:19 There is no, I'm going to spend years mastering how to write this beautiful prose. I'm going to spend years practicing in front of my mirror. And one day when I'm ready, I'm going, storytelling, the story becomes a story in the sharing, in the process of it. So you will have to get used to, this I say as a perfectionist, you'll have to get used to just Being not too good, like being like a bumbling mess, perhaps, a babbling idiot, if that's what you look like, if that's how you think you are being perceived, then so be it. But there is no shortcut to that.

1:10:01 The telling of the story isn't the telling of it. That's where it lives. So get out there. And if you don't want to get out there, then social media, you point at TikTok. I'm not very good at that stuff, but I'm learning. But even there, it's in the telling that it becomes alive. That is one. Second is kind of learn from people. Like I teach storytelling, so many others folks teach storytelling, this specific brand of storytelling, because when you say storytelling, It has many different connotations. Some teach like folklore and they call it storytelling and they get to do that because those are stories too. But the stories that we do usually talk about, we are talking about true personal stories.

1:10:44 There are not many teachers, but there are some reach out to them, learn from the best. And also just know that this is how I learned. What I'm doing is I'm borrowing techniques. I'm going to attend theater shows. I'm learning from actors. I'm learning from comedians. I'm learning from people who just are good at sharing their truths. I'm learning from poets. I'm doing those other art forms as well. So I can bring in all of these practices. Into my writing and ultimately into my storytelling. So that's what I would say. It's really, you can have a lot of fun stumbling into it, learning about it, practicing it. It's a lot of fun, but definitely go about trying it and learning it.

1:11:28 Yeah. And as we start to wrap up, anything that you're working on for the rest of this year and where can people follow you? Thank you for asking that. Yes. I was... I tried... All this while to manage like storytelling in a day job and I've been doing okay. But I think I want to take it to the next level now. I want to make storytelling my life and I am really expanding my practice now. You found me at a time. Just as I was standing at that cusp, I'm expanding my practice. I'm doing keynotes, storytelling keynotes. I'm teaching people how to do storytelling by doing workshops.

1:12:10 I'm doing one-on-one workshops that people can reach out to me on my Instagram, my LinkedIn. I am also... Available for storytelling keynotes and storytelling workshops, whether for your organization, your group, your friends, or simply for you. Get in touch with me and I would love to help you. And I think it's such a human thing to do at this particular time in our culture where everything is AI. And if there is more AI in something, the markets are rewarding it more without making sense of it. All of that, while this is prevalent, stories are going to remain a human-centric art form.

1:12:53 Storytelling is going to remain a human-focused art form, regardless of how good a story, an AI can make up. A lived experience, there is no... Replacement for that. So I hope all your listeners are able to reach out to a human being who tells stories. And if it's not me, reach out to Randy, reach out to other people. But if you choose to, I'm also available. And I thank you for putting my name up there. Yeah, no, thank you so much for being on my show and just really sharing so much of your wisdom, your experiences. And also as someone who has been, you know, storytelling every now and then, it's It helps to be seen and it helps to feel seen, but also because I really do value the art of storytelling and what it does in terms of community building, in terms of innovation.

1:13:47 Creativity is where the real fight happens. You need to have the creativity. You need to be able to hold these kinds of spaces because for stories to be seen, It's also history that's being made. And it's also how we think about how the future we want to create, the imagination that we have for the world that we want to live in. And so that's something I really think about. And I really am so thankful for your graciousness. I hope people get to follow your work, get to consult you, because I think that is very valuable in everyday practices and the relationships that we build with the people in our lives. Yeah.

1:14:28 Much love to you. Oh my God. Thank you so much, Randy. I appreciate all the work you're doing and also for chopping it up with me. It helped me kind of make sense a lot of things. Life is a story. So thank you again, Randy.