About this episode

Jennie Ma shares her family's harrowing history during World War II and her journey of identity and love.

There's a story Jennie Ma didn't know about her own family history until she was an adult. During World War II, her grandmother was one of several women lined up on their knees on a rooftop in Hong Kong, soldiers aiming guns at them, seconds from execution. She was pregnant. For reasons no one ever explained, the soldiers were called away. That unborn child grew up to build a small empire and raise five children, including Jennie. It's the kind of story that reframes everything that comes after it. Jennie grew up Chinese and Filipina, raised between both cultures and never fully claimed by either. She spent years feeling like she didn't belong anywhere, until she found her footing, oddly, in the one place built entirely out of people who didn't belong anywhere either: New York City. But the heart of this conversation isn't geography. It's what happens to a person who watched a man lose his entire family in a fire at six years old, who lost her own father to cancer just as she was old enough to finally know him, and who made a quiet, conscious decision because of it: to never let herself love that completely again. This is a story about inheritance, the kind you don't choose and…

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