Inheriting: Leah & Japanese American Incarceration

This episode explores the long-term psychological impact of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II on subsequent generations.

1. Historical traumas like the Japanese American incarceration have lasting impacts on mental health across generations.
2. Epigenetics may explain how trauma can affect descendants long after the initial event.
3. Personal stories, like that of Leah Bash, highlight the human aspects of historical events.
4. Awareness and discussion of mental health issues can alter perceptions and lead to a deeper understanding of behavioral patterns.
5. Addressing mental health openly can change family dynamics and personal healing processes.

1: Introduction to 'Inheriting'

Emily Kwong introduces the podcast series focusing on the impact of historical events on family generations. Emily Kwong: "Each episode focuses on how one moment in the past rippled through the generations."

2: Leah's Story

Leah Bash shares vivid memories of her father, contrasting his usual stern demeanor with rare playful moments. Leah Bash: "He started shooting the darts at them through the doorway, and he thought he was so clever."

3: The Deep Impact of Incarceration

The episode delves into how the trauma experienced by Leah's father during his infancy in incarceration camps affected his later life and mental health. Leah Bash: "Fear of tomorrow, fear of what might happen."

4: Understanding Through Epigenetics

Discussion on how epigenetics provides a scientific framework for understanding how trauma can be inherited. Emily Kwong: "A traumatic event... can alter our genes with chemical marks."

5: Family Dynamics and Mental Health

Leah reflects on how her father's untreated mental health issues shaped her family's dynamics and her own mental health. Leah Bash: "Poor guy... we had been treating him like he was the problem."

1. Educate yourself about family history: Understanding your family's past can provide insights into current behaviors and health.
2. Seek mental health resources: Early intervention can prevent the worsening of symptoms and aid in managing inherited traumas.
3. Foster open communication: Discussing mental health openly in families can reduce stigma and foster support.
4. Consider genetic counseling: For families with a history of trauma, genetic counseling may offer insights and coping strategies.
5. Support trauma-informed care initiatives: Advocating for and supporting policies that recognize the long-term effects of trauma can lead to better community health outcomes.

Hey, Short Wavers! Today, we're sharing a portion of Inheriting, an 8-part limited series hosted by Emily Kwong about Asian American and Pacific Islander family history. In this excerpt, we follow the story of Leah Bash.

Leah is an avid runner, a dog mom, a wife – and there's a part of her family's history she can't stop thinking about. Both sides of her family were incarcerated during WWII, alongside 125,000 other Japanese Americans. After Leah learns about her father's struggles with panic attacks and is herself diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she starts to wonder: Could those experiences at camp have far-reaching consequences decades later?

People

Leah Bash, Tony Anaba

Companies

Anaba Auto Parts

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

NPR Sponsor
This message comes from NPR sponsor Greenlight. Want to teach your kids financial literacy with greenlight, kids and teens use a debit card of their own. While parents can keep an eye on kids spending and savings in the app. Get your first month free@greenlight.com. nPR.

Emily Kwong
You're listening to short wave from NPR.

Regina Barber
Hey there, short wavers. Regina Barber here, and I'm sliding into your feed with a special episode from my co host, Emily Kwong from her new show, inheriting. What's up, Em?

Emily Kwong
Hey, Gina. Yeah. I'm really excited to share inheriting with you all.

Regina Barber
Yes. I mean, I've been listening to inheriting, like, nonstop ever since it came out. And this is an Asian American and Pacific Islander History podcast you hosted and reported for the NPR network. And I'm really proud of you because I'm asian. And I know you wanted to have a show that focused on history from the point of view of our families.

Emily Kwong
Yeah, I wanted a show for descendants like us, Gina, you know.

Regina Barber
Yeah.

Emily Kwong
Who have questions about their family history. So each episode of inheriting focuses on how one moment in the past rippled through the generations of a family and how it shaped their relationships, their life decisions, their health, their mental health, all kinds of things like that.

Regina Barber
Let's talk about mental health, right? Because I've been crying almost every other episode I listen to.

Emily Kwong
Dude, I cried the whole time making this show.

Regina Barber
I can understand.

Emily Kwong
You can understand? Yeah. History is very emotional, and I think part of what inspired me to do this project is as a science journalist, I've just been really curious about how the past gets stored in our brains, in our bodies. You know, science is really revealing how our environment can affect our genes.

Regina Barber
Since working on this podcast, I've learned that that's like the field of epigenetics, right?

Emily Kwong
Yeah. So epigenetics is showing us that a traumatic event or a period of stress can alter our genes with chemical marks that can signal to the body whether a gene should be red or not. And that explains how it's possible for descendants of trauma victims to be affected by the trauma, too, but generations later.

Regina Barber
Wow. Wow. Yeah. And you explore this idea like, most directly in episode five. And we're gonna play the start of this episode today.

Emily Kwong
This is an excerpt of the sweeping saga that is inheriting, covering nearly 100 years of asian american history.

You'll hear a small piece of that right after the break.

UPS Store
Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from the UPS store, open this Wednesday. Come into your local store today. Most locations are independently owned products services, pricing and hours of operation may vary. See center for details. The UPS store be unstoppable support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from the UPS store. They know being a small business owner means holiday time is often still go time, still get those orders shipped time, and still re up on stamps and supplies time. That's why this Wednesday, while others close up shop, the UPS store will be open and happy to help you keep being unstoppable. Come into your local store. Today, most locations are independently owned. Products, services, pricing and hours of operation may vary. See center for details. The UPS store be unstoppable.

Noom
This message comes from NPR sponsor Noom Noom's first ever cookbook, the Noom Kitchen, helps you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. Check out the Noom kitchen for 100 healthy and delicious recipes to promote better living. Available to buy now wherever books are sold.

Regina Barber
All right, em, you and I are going to listen to part of inheriting. This is the latest episode, and it's about japanese american incarceration and the ripple effect it had on a family generations later.

Emily Kwong
That is right. Here it is. I've been talking to Leah Bash for almost a year now. She tells a lot of stories about her dad, but the one that really lights her up is from a family party when her nephews were playing with nerf guns.

Leah Bash
And they didn't know that grandpa had a Nerf gun, too. He was in a different room, but he could shoot at them through the little doorway that was open. So he started shooting the darts at him through the doorway, and he thought he was so clever because they had no idea they were coming from that direction. And when he would get really happy like that, he'd have this big smile and this big chuckle and he had these big round cheeks.

Those are the best memories I have of him.

Emily Kwong
Was he always that playful?

Leah Bash
No, not always. Which is what, you know, and sometimes people are totally opposite of what they normally are, is when you're like, oh, wow, that's really memorable because, no, that's not how he usually was.

Emily Kwong
Day to day, Tony Anaba was under a personal storm cloud, weighed down by work stress.

He ran the family business, Anaba auto parts in Riverside, California. At one point, he ran a snowboard shop in Big Bear, and Leah still loves snowboarding and cars because of him. But growing up, all three kids had to walk on eggshells around him. Their dad could be mean, explosive. When he got home, it was never.

Leah Bash
Hi, how's it going? How was your day?

More like, hi, when's dinner.

Emily Kwong
Just his moods ruled the house.

Like, no one could be happy if their dad wasn't happy.

Leah Bash
When he would get mad, he would tell us that nobody ever thought about him. And we were like, are you kidding? All we do is think about you.

Emily Kwong
Selfish, mad. That was the family story about him.

He also had a lot of fear.

Leah Bash
Fear of tomorrow, fear of what might happen. So he didn't want my mom to not be by his side in case something happened medically, in case something happened physically. What if he fell down? What if he had an asthma attack?

Emily Kwong
So Leah became super sensitive to what her dad wanted and afraid of any negative emotions because her dads were so tumultuous.

She's still kind of like this.

Leah Bash
If things aren't, like, 100% happy, I get kind of like, uneasy and anxious. Like, okay, how do we get this happy again? How do we make happy?

Emily Kwong
But from her dad's nerf gun hideout, Leah saw a flash of someone else. Someone relaxed and playful. A side of her dad she didn't get to see too much.

Leah remembers when she realized her dad needed help.

When he was in his seventies, Tony developed high blood pressure and diabetes, went on dialysis. And one day, while he was sitting up in bed, he confessed to Leah that he couldn't sleep.

Leah Bash
He started talking about panicking or waking up in the middle of the night panicking, that it happened to him, like nightly.

And on top of his asthma, which already gives him anxiety because he's worried he's not gonna be able to breathe.

And it sounded to me like he.

Emily Kwong
Was having panic attacks and they were happening every night.

Leah had never heard this before.

Leah Bash
He said, well, what do we, what do you do? Like, what can I do about it?

I think I just said, you gotta take deep breaths and you gotta try to calm yourself down and that kind of thing.

Emily Kwong
Okay, and how do you respond to that?

Leah Bash
I think he just said something about, it's really hard. And I said, yeah, I know it's really hard.

Emily Kwong
Leah knew what to say because she had panic attacks too.

A therapist had diagnosed her with an anxiety disorder a few months earlier.

The possibility her dad had one too made him seem way less scary.

Leah Bash
Poor guy.

Because we had been treating him for years like he was the problem, like he was grumpy all the time, or he was a mean person or selfish, when really he was suffering. And we didn't get it.

Emily Kwong
Leah remembers feeling a painful kind of kinship. She wondered how their family would have been different if Tony had access to mental health care.

Her words jerked me back to when I was 17.

My mom was sitting at the end of my bed as I was trying to explain to her how I truly couldn't get up, how it felt like all the marrow had disappeared from my bones. My mind was stumbling between numbness and suicidal thoughts.

My depression meant I was skipping so much school that the administrators were worried I didn't have enough credits to graduate, even though I'd just gotten into Columbia University.

Mom took me to therapy, supported me in getting on medication.

At one point, she got me this small purple teddy bear that she called study bear to keep me company.

She didn't say anything about her own mental health.

I didn't know she struggled, and I wouldn't even know to ask until years later.

For Leah, the idea that her father might be struggling with his mental health brought a new kind of clarity. If they both had anxiety disorder, it had to come from somewhere. She thought about her fathers entire life and had what felt like an epiphany. Maybe part of this had to do with his early childhood and what happened the month before Tony was born.

Leah Bash
February 19, 1942. And that's the day when the executive order was signed.

Emily Kwong
Executive order 9066 instructed all people of japanese ancestry on the west coast to be removed from their homes during World War two.

Leah Bash
My dad was born in March of 42, so he was a very, very, very small baby. When they went to camp, the government.

Emily Kwong
Moved Japanese Americans inland from the White House.

Government Spokesperson
Today came the most drastic action yet taken against possible fifth column activity, sabotage and spying on the Pacific coast.

Emily Kwong
The government called incarceration a military necessity to prevent people from spying for Japan, even though two thirds of those people were american citizens.

And both sides of Leah's family, her mom's and her dads, were sent to camp. That's over two dozen relatives locked behind barbed wire for over three years.

Leah Bash
I want to know what anyone else knows or thinks about this idea about camp affecting our mental health. I want to know if other people share those opinions or have proof of them, if they have diagnoses that stem from that.

Emily Kwong
Last year, Leah got in touch with our show, wanting our help in interviewing her dad's side of the family. She knows more about what happened to them. But all her life, no one talked about mental health, certainly not in the same breath as camp. And that was true of a lot of japanese american families after the war. The experience of camp was so humiliating and the pressure to avoid drawing negative attention so great, that most maintained a conspiracy of silence after the war.

It's a reaction observed in trauma group survivors around the world.

Starting in the 1970s, social workers finally began looking into the physical and mental toll of camp.

Among those who had been incarcerated, they found many displayed symptoms of detachment and avoidance, both of which are associated with post traumatic stress and clear evidence of poorer health. In one doctoral dissertation from 1997, a researcher found the former incarcerees had twice the risk of cardiovascular disease and a 30% increase in the odds of premature death.

When I read this, it stopped me in my tracks. If that is the toll of camp on the people who were there, what did it do to their children and grandchildren? To Leah, the connection between intergenerational trauma and mental health is so complicated. It's driven by so many factors, genetic, behavioral, environmental.

But still, Leah wants to be able to answer this question for herself.

Regina Barber
Em, I just love this series. I'm so excited to hear the rest of this.

Emily Kwong
Gina, thank you so much.

Regina Barber
You're doing an amazing job. And for listeners to hear the full episode and the rest of the series, go to the inheriting feed.

Emily Kwong
Inheriting is available in all the usual Places podcasts are found.

We'll also link to the show's website in our show notes Las.com inheriting. It includes a digital resource guide and lesson plans from the Asian American Education Project.

This episode was produced by Anjuli Sastry Kirbyk, who is the senior producer and co creator of Inheriting. The piece was sound designed by James Chao. Minju park is also a producer on the show. Inheriting senior editor is Sarah Sarason. It was adapted for shortwave by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and me. Inheriting is a production of Las Studios and distributed by the NPR network.

I could not have made this show without the support and the encouragement of the entire team at short wave, so I just want to thank them from the bottom of my heart for your support and to you listeners for listening.

I'm Emily Kwong.

Regina Barber
I'm Regina Barber, and we're back on.

Emily Kwong
Monday with more short Wave from NPR.

UPS Store
This message comes from NPR's sponsor WW Norton and company with the catalyst rna and the quest to unlock life's deepest secrets from Nobel laureate Thomas R. Check. Exploring the most transformative breakthroughs in biology since the discovery of the double helix, available now.

Support for NPR and the following message come from IXL learning. IXL learning uses advanced algorithms to give the right help to each kid, no matter the age or personality. Get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when you sign up today@ixl.com. nPR.

NPR Politics Podcast
It'S a high stakes election year, so it's not enough to just follow along. You need to understand what's happening so you are fully informed come November. Every weekday on the NPR Politics podcast, our political reporters break down important stories and backstories from the campaign trail. Do you understand why it matters to you? Listen to the NPR politics podcast wherever you get your podcasts.