Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/podlingual.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, regret letting language into the group chat.
In this episode we hear from two of my favourite podcasters, Lory Martinez and James Kim, whose shows Mija and Moonface are autobiographical fiction, told in multiple languages. I was really interested in how they use different languages to tell their stories, and how they navigate it when it’s a language they don’t speak themselves.
This conversation was originally part of a little series of talks I did with podcasters for Scripps College; if you find the Scripps College feed on your pod app, you can hear all three of the talks, there’s another with audio artists Phoebe Unter and Ariel Mejia, and one with me talking about the future of language; and there’s the full version of this one, where we cover additional topics including how to record sexy audio, not something I’ve had occasion to try yet in my podcasting career.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this, and warning: there are a couple of swears. On with the show.
LORY MARTINEZ: Hi, I'm Lory Martinez. I'm the founder of Studio Ochenta, and it's a multilingual podcast company based in Paris. We specialise in producing podcasts in English, French, and Spanish, and now many other languages. We're up to 15 now with all the projects that we have ongoing. And we do anything from translation, and a lot of adaptation, culturally, working with bilingual producers around the world to raise voices across cultures. So that's kind of our motto.
And the clip that you're about to hear is a clip from Mija podcast, which is our first multilingual fiction. It was produced in three languages for the first season, all at once, so English, French, and Spanish. And this is from the English version, and it's a scene where Mija, the main character, is talking about how she kind of rejected her Hispanic culture as a young girl growing up in a bicultural household. She's the daughter of immigrants and she kind of had questions about her identity, and so this scene is all about the kind of presence of Latin culture in her life and how she rejected it and then later came to accept it.
Clip from Mija season 1 episode 1
MIJA: Picture a landfill. And, on top of one of its many hills, is a little radio. It's made of yellow plastic and it's all worn out. The tuning dial has fallen off from years of use. In its heyday, it was perched over the bathroom vanity in our apartment, and it was perpetually tuned into New York City's Latin stations.
You see, Tatika wanted it to be like a shower radio that she saw on TV. Except she hooked it up to the light switch, which meant that it would play music whenever you switched on the light in the bathroom. It was on all the time. Spanish music, guiding me through every stage of my life.
From the loss of my front baby teeth, to getting ready for my first communion, to the moment I looked in the mirror after I'd had my first kiss. This was the soundtrack to my world... and, blended as it was, I couldn't just share it with my friends who came over to hang out. So I disconnected it whenever they came over, half out of shame and half out of a need to be normal. Sometimes I made Tatika feel so bad about it, she would cry. And after one of our more heated debates, she threw it out. And she never replaced it. "Deje asi," she would say. I only realised how special it had been to have that source of language and love until much, much later.
JAMES KIM: Hi, my name is James Kim. I'm an independent producer in Los Angeles, worked at Spotify as my last job, and mainly did documentary podcasts over there. And I released my first ever fiction show, Moonface, last year, and that was really about my life. It's semiautobiographical. It's about two people who are trying to communicate with each other, but they don't speak the same language, and I really didn't want there to be any narration.
I wanted to kind of see if I can really kind of... I don't know, have two people speaking two different languages and the listener doesn't feel lost. I wanted the listener to really feel like they're in the space of the main character, and so it's all being told through that perspective of the main character who can speak English but not Korean. So any Korean dialogue that the main character hears, it's totally untranslated, and I wanted that experience for everybody to be in the character's shoes, and understand how it's like for somebody that you love to talk to you, but you can't understand a word that they're saying.
Clip from Moonface episode 1, a scene between the main character Paul and his mom Gina:
PAUL: Mom? Why are you still up?
GINA: 어디 갔었어?
PAUL: I was just out with Shayla and Danny, I told you.
GINA: Paul. It's 4am.
PAUL: Why are you still up, mom?
GINA: 집에 없으면 어떻게 자러 갈 수 있니?!
PAUL: You don't need me to be home for you to sleep. I'm 27, I'm an adult now.
GINA: 어디 갔었어냐고!
PAUL: Nowhere! 엄마, 미안.
GINA: Ack, you smell. Go to bed.
JAMES KIM: Kind of similar to Lory, I wanted to tell a story that I kind of knew. I really didn't have any interest in doing fiction.
HZ: Well, you fucked that up.
JAMES KIM: Yeah.
LORY MARTINEZ: It's crazy, me too. I also didn't want to do that.
JAMES KIM: Really?
LORY MARTINEZ: I wanted to do a documentary at first, and then I just fell into the fiction, because I all of the research I was doing was like... The storytelling was just so far-fetched that I ended up deciding to take all these fables that my family was giving me and turn it into a fiction, and go and turn it up a notch. But I definitely understand what you're saying. Fiction is not something that I would normally have done for this.
JAMES KIM: Yeah.
LORY MARTINEZ: But I felt like it made it more accessible, and let me go further into the mystical kind of things and the things that they were telling me, and kind of lean into it more.
JAMES KIM: Yeah. Do you remember when you kind of decided to do fiction instead? Was there like, "I'm going to interview my family"? Did you have that phase, and then you went, "OK, I'm going to do fiction"?
LORY MARTINEZ: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I interviewed all my family members. I got a wealth of stories. I recorded so much tape. I recorded my grandma in Columbia, I recorded my parents in New York, and then I sat down to write everything and it just wasn't working as a documentary. And if I made it as a documentary, it felt like it's too specific to make. It's too personal. And so when I started writing and it was like, well, what if I use this narrative voice to guide things? And what if I kind of took myself out of it and made it into someone else that could be pretty much this universal Latina girl from whatever culture? I mean, this is specifically New York, Columbia, because I knew that culture, but in writing it, I couldn't make it a documentary. It just didn't work. And so it's all about the process, too; but I'm sure you had a similar experience where you're just kind of like, "OK, yeah, no one's going to believe this. This is not going to work."
JAMES KIM: Yeah, no, I did, I had the same thing. Well, because it started off... Man, if I really go back, it was 2012, my first ever internship in public radio. The host at the time, John Rabe, had like a weekend show in Los Angeles that was similar, like This American Life. For whatever reason we're talking, and then we start talking about family, and then I mentioned how I can't really speak to my family or my parents because we don't speak the same language. And then like a couple of months later he circled back, and he's like, "I think you should do a piece about this." And I felt so uncomfortable. I ended up doing it.
I talked to my family, or my parents. I actually had one of my friends who spoke better Korean than me translate the conversation, which is really awkward, because we're getting very personal about a lot of things, and they were criticising me hard because they're Korean, and it was really hilarious. But it wasn't until a few years later where a friend of mine at KPCC, his name is Judd Kim, he was going to be submitting to NPR Story Labs, and he actually is the one who had this wild idea of, like, "Why don't we submit a fiction show idea to NPR?" And I think he wanted to do like a detective story, and I was like, "Dude, like, NPR is not going to take this story because they're not going to do fiction. They only do documentaries, stuff like that. If they're going to do fiction, you have to base it on like real life in some sort of capacity, or make it This American Life, but make it fiction." And that is honestly how the idea was born, where then we started talking about ideas and then ultimately came back to me, and it's like, "Well, why don't we just fictionalise that story that you did in 2012?" And it worked because, similar to what you're saying, Lory, I couldn't bring myself to make a podcast about my life that was a documentary. I also hate talking about myself, which is funny that we're doing this talk. So I was just kind of like, "OK, whatever, if I can do fiction and I fictionalise everything, then I feel like I'm more comfortable going into more personal stories without revealing whether or not it's true or not," which I kind of like.
LORY MARTINEZ: Yeah.
JAMES KIM: Stepping into the fiction space, at least when I was trying to make something, there was sci-fi, horror, murder mysteries, but there wasn't a lot of, like, slice-of-life indie kind of fiction shows that are just...
LORY MARTINEZ: Yeah, like realistic fiction, yeah.
JAMES KIM: Yeah.
HZ: I was still half expecting that the twist at the end of Moonface would be that it all took place in space.
JAMES KIM: I did tell someone about the title and they assumed that i was a space story, which is kind of great. Missed opportunity.
HZ: I suppose technically the Earth is in space, so...
JAMES KIM: Oh, that's true. Wow, that's very true.
HZ: When you're writing, though, about your real lives and family experiences, do you feel like you have to protect some of those family members? Or do you get people who are like, "How dare you say this about me?” when it's not even about them?
LORY MARTINEZ: I had a lot of trouble with that, because the character of the mom is based on my mom, and the character of the dad is based on my dad. And obviously I changed some details, the bigger, arching details; but there's some things that I kept the same because, storywise, it makes it more interesting. Like, my dad really is a cabbie in New York, and that works storywise, because a lot of immigrants are cabbies. Sometimes there are people who are listening, and my family are like, "Why didn't you write about me?" Or, "Why didn't you put something else?" Or, "Why didn't you make me more interesting?" Or things like that, and it's like, this is not you; this is a version of you. So the aesthetic distance that I took as a creator, they needed to understand as well. But then, in the end, they were all super proud of it. It was the first time that someone really told their stories, in a sense of not just their own personal stories but also their stories as the generation that came over in the 1980s and 1990s, because in Colombia there was a really big diaspora from 1985 to 2005, there were two million people that left because of the war on drugs and because they were seeking opportunities and all of these things. So there's all of these adults, like the grown-ups of that generation, they came over, they didn't speak any English, and then they had kids who speak English perfectly. And so they never get to tell their stories. And so the fact that I said it in English - and not only in English, I said it in Spanish so they could understand it, and also the gringos could in English, and even the Frenchies, you know - and just seeing that the story itself was popular in other countries was like, "Whoa, people care about us, they care about our culture and what happens to us." It was really rewarding for them to see themselves in that. So I think that even though there are, you know, the tiny details like, "Oh, you could have made me more handsome..."
HZ: It's audio!
LORY MARTINEZ: Like, the word ‘mija’ means so much in our culture, so the fact that people in France now know what that word means, it's crazy to them. So that's nice. It's very rewarding, like even language-wise, to just say, "OK, I brought over Latin culture, like Latin American culture, over to France."
JAMES KIM: That's awesome. I haven't told my family at all that I've made this podcast, so my parents have no idea that it exists.
HZ: Well done.
JAMES KIM: Thank you. I'm not going to. There's no way. Especially since there's scenes in sex clubs, and talking about poppers. My parents would freak out if they would listen to the show. Lory, what you're saying, though, it is cool that you get to introduce a lot of people... Like, for instance, like there's a word "han" in the podcast, and it's supposed to mean kind of this deep emotional pain and anger and sorrow and just a lot of hurt, and there are terms in Korean that we've got to talk about in the show that now a lot more people get to understand and know what it's about.
LORY MARTINEZ: Because it's a bilingual podcast, did you ever consider making an entirely Korean? Podcasting's pretty big in Korea, and so is audio drama. I wonder if that's something that ever crossed your mind when you were doing it?
JAMES KIM: Yeah, it actually did. There was a moment where I really want to flush out the mom character more, and in order to do that, and to have her speak naturally and not interact in a world in which she doesn't really quite... English is not her forte, obviously, so I actually did sketch a lot of scenes where it was more through the mom's perspective, and I do eventually want to explore that more. And if I were to kind of switch the podcast, it would actually be told through the mom's perspective if I were to do Korean. Because that way it still mimics the experience.
LORY MARTINEZ: And the reverse.
JAMES KIM: And the reverse, exactly. So that's kind of what I wanted to do.
LORY MARTINEZ: Super interesting.
HZ: What compelled you to start doing a show in three languages, initially, Lory?
LORY MARTINEZ: When I wanted to kind of create the first show for my studio, I wanted it to have a lot to do with telling part of my own story. So, just like James, I did this kind of autobiographical thing, where I kind of wanted to create this girl named Mija that had an experience that I felt like I was seeing everywhere. Not just in the US, but also in here in France, the idea of a daughter of immigrants who is having these questions about her identity. And though it's a really big part of the discourse in the US right now, and even when I was growing up in New York, it's not as much in the discourse in France. And also I think in Latin America, there's less of an understanding of what it's like to be American, but also Latinx and Latina, in America. So I wanted to be able to have everyone who could be touched by this story understand every part of it. And so I wrote it mainly in Spanish and English at first, and then, I'm in France, so French was natural. And it did well in all three languages, so then the second season was like, "Well, let's do this in Chinese too."
Clip from Mija season 2 episode 1.
LORY MARTINEZ: Another girl who is a daughter of immigrants. Because I think the question of translating was like, "This is something that can be a universal story." The idea of not knowing really much about your own culture and kind of trying to figure out who you are is something that everyone goes through, so the translation was creating more of an accessibility, and almost like sneaky activism in a way, to kind of show that even through this fiction podcast that you think is entertainment it also is the story of so many immigrants around the world. So there's also kind of this message that I really wanted to put forward for people in different countries to kind of understand, "OK, so, your neighbour, they might be having this experience and you don't know about it," and you'll sympathise.
JAMES KIM: That's incredible. And because you also had to cast again and do the performances again.
LORY MARTINEZ: So hard. I guess for Season One, it was easier because I spoke all three languages, and I had an indie budget for it, so I was like, "I'll host it and just be the voice, and who cares if I have an accent, whatever."
HZ: Everyone has an accent.
JAMES KIM: That's true.
LORY MARTINEZ: So it felt authentic in that first season, so for me it wasn't as difficult, but the translation was really hard culturally because certain things didn't translate well. But I think what made it good, and I guess simpler, was because it was a single voice. Mija's always the guiding voice, and then the sound design basically helps make it adaptable. The second season was something completely different. We worked with a French writer, so this time I had a bigger budget because my company grew and so I was able to invest more in it. So I worked with a French writer on her Franco-Chinese immigrant experience, right? So her parents came over from China and Vietnam, and so that was also exploring Asian culture as well, and so I had to learn about that culture because obviously it's not my experience, and we had to write different versions for each language. This Mija is Franco-Chinese. How did the French talk about this? How did the French talk about immigration? It's not the same as Americans.
So there are questions that we have to include in the script, in the French version, that we didn't in the English version or the Spanish version. Like, for example, in Episode Seven, we had such trouble with this because the writer herself, she really wanted to include someone who would be outside of the culture, so her white stepfather, who is not Asian. And for her it was like, "This is the French guy in the story. We need to have a French guy in the story, or somebody who is like an outsider from this, because if you do a story that is just Asians, Asians, Asians, no Frenchie is going to listen to it." And I was like, "Wow, that's really interesting, because if you're looking at it from the American perspective, we always centre white voices, so that question doesn't get posed. But in the reverse in France, it does." And then, interestingly enough, the same question we asked ourselves when we were doing the Chinese version with writers in Shanghai, who had to change certain details entirely, storywise entirely, because, you know, the question of a Chinese immigrant, you don't think about it like that because you're like, "OK, who leaves the mainland? Are they successful? Do they want to be successful? I mean, what is what is the culture that they're bringing? You know, how are they promoting China?" So I think there was also that authenticity because they were all like Franco-Asian, or Franco-Chinese, people working on it, so they also had the same experience of like, "Oh, I'm so proud to be able to share this."
HZ: The first season, you're voicing it and you're producing it, so you're all over it. How is it to relinquish control because it's a language that you don't speak?
LORY MARTINEZ: Giving it up almost entirely for the Chinese version was really hard because, line by line, we wrote this like a poem. If you look at the transcripts for Mija, it's written in this very staccato kind of text. There's not that many long sentences. It's very poetic in the way that we describe things. Each line is meant to be part of a picture, and at the end you see the whole frame. When I was working with our translator, who was also a voice actress, she would explain each line to me and she'd say, "OK, so this is why we'll use this expression." Mija is a very emotional podcast; people listen and they cry, and so all of those feelings needed to translate. And so that process was like... As much as I don't speak Chinese, I felt like it was clear. And listeners in China loved it, because they felt like we really paid attention to those details. And I think, relinquishing to the point where I don't understand things, also still trying to understand them, is also part of what makes that kind of thing important and I guess successful, because I wanted to make sure that it kind of evoked all of the same emotions.
HZ: I was wondering, James, with the Korean that you use, and writing Korean for the main character versus the mom, are you using slightly different versions of Korean? Because one is someone who was born in the States and the other was someone who grew up in Korea.
JAMES KIM: Yeah, it was really easy to distinguish, simply because I based all of the Korean for the main character off of my knowledge. I'm like, "If I know how to say it, then I'll just put it in there." But it's a mix, and certain words or phrases are in Korean, but majority is an English for the main character, and then we try to switch that for the mom - but I also didn't really know how to speak it, truth be told. So I needed several translators, and several passes. And what I also realised with translation as well is that people can interpret things in very wildly different ways. And I remember, specifically, it was in the last episode where the mom is telling her story, there's a lot of Korean dialogue happening that goes completely untranslated, and I'm trying to remember the exact phrase... The mom in the flashback, she's a kid and she wants to study music in college, and the dad basically goes like, "If you study music in college, you will be poor and you'll live on the streets; do you want that?" And that's kind of like the idea that I wanted to come across. And when I was talking to the translator we came up with the phrase and it just, even for me, just reading it was like, "This feels very clunky." And then I remember we had the other translator, which was the mom character, Esther Moon. So she translated these lines, and we got some coffee and she was going over every single line telling me what that means, but when we got to that line it was something ridiculous where it's like, "You know this says, 'You're going to live off the street because you're a prostitute and you're going to suck dick'?" and like, something wild. And I was like, "Wait, what?" But it's really difficult to get that translation right, because I feel like there's multiple takes on what is actually correct.
HZ: And did the word "mija" work in all of the languages in which you're making the show?
LORY MARTINEZ: So in French you can't say it. They say "mee-jah". It's not the right word. They can't phonetically pronounce the "J"-sound, so... Whatever. But they know what it means. In China, we had to change the name completely, so the show's called "Mija Podcast/Nunu". So "nunu" is Shanghai slang for "girl", like "my girl"; our translator basically explained to us that it kind of evokes the comic book like hero, like "heroine". I was like, "OK, that is a good translation of it," but only because in the Chinese audience they didn't understand it's a narrative fiction show, and there weren't any other narrative fiction shows there. So it was more of like, "OK, we have to change the name entirely, but also kind of keep the identity of the show and give them something that they'll understand."
HZ: You put a lot of your personal lives into your shows. Was that cathartic in any way? And what did it leave you with to make more shows now that you have expressed those things?
LORY MARTINEZ: The end of Mija broke me. I cried for three days, and it felt like breaking up with someone. It was like such a pain. So deep. I talk to my mom every day, but obviously I'm not seeing her, I'm only seeing her like twice a year; my dad is the same, my brother is in California, everybody is all over the place. And the show, even though it's by proxy, obviously just the characters, but I felt so close to them. So close, like they were in my room, they were in my words, they were in my everything. And when it was over, it just felt like I was all alone again. And I had a really hard time with thinking if I could continue the show, or if there was even a point. If it had done what it needed to do to help me get out of my nostalgia, and kind of put something out into the world that helped me kind of figure out how to explain my identity and hopefully helped others do that, too. Because that was the goal of Mija. And can this end here, right? And then I talk to this creator here, she was an indie podcast producer, Melanie Hong, and she said, "You know, I have a similar story to Mija, but I think it would be interesting to tell another story from another immigrant's perspective. Why don't you use Mija to kind of create this platform for other daughters of immigrants?" And so it opened up horizons for me, not only as a creator and a storyteller, but also as a business opportunity. And then, now, thinking forward to Mija season 3 is crazy because it's going to be in another language that I don't speak. But it's also exciting because I get to tell another story, I get to help another person find themselves through the storytelling. It can be translated. They can be expanded to other audiences, and people can no longer see the world as being just like Anglo-American, Anglophone. It can be stories from Columbia, stories from from China, stories from Korea. And that's super exciting. So my vision for what's going to happen in the future is, you know, we're going to see more storytellers like that, being empowered by podcasting like that.
JAMES KIM: I think that, too, and the whole reason that I did Moonface was because I was working at an entertainment show in public radio and I was always the person to interview guests about diversity in Hollywood. And I just kind of was like, "All right, I am a little tired of doing this story." And in order to change it, you just need to open the floodgates and let more people kind of tell their story. In audio fiction, and I'm sure as Lory also kind of knows, just there weren't that many stories being told from multiple perspectives. It was just kind of a very similar perspective.
HZ: White people in space.
JAMES KIM: Yeah, exactly. And I wanted to kind of make stories that I could resonate with.The last time that I ever resonated with something was a graphic novel, Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings. It had queer Asian characters, listening to indie music, and they were dealing with very everyday problems and they weren't being defined by their Asianness, or like, "Oh, you know, in Asia we have to..." or, you know, "When you come to my parents' house, you've got to take off your shoes and then you've got to bow." They were just like, "No, we're just like American kids," and it was really refreshing to hear that story and read that story, and that's kind of influenced me to just be like, "I want to see more of that." I want to create that experience that Adrian Tomine did for me. When I read it, I finally felt like, "Oh my god, this is the first time I feel like I am seen. I don't feel totally fucking crazy that I'm the only one dealing with a lot of these things." And that part was really cathartic, just like getting that story out there and doing it, and... I don't know, I still put in a lot of emotional distance, I'm not going to lie, because... I don't know, I come from a family that we don't get personal or emotional. Maybe it's the language barrier. So we don't really talk about those things.
HZ: Mine don't either.
JAMES KIM: Oh, really? Shit.
LORY MARTINEZ: Latinos are criers, so we can't have that experience. We're like telenovelas all the way.
JAMES KIM: Oh, wow.
HZ: Is there no in between?
LORY MARTINEZ: Yeah, no.
JAMES KIM: Yeah. But yeah, it's real weird. I don't... You know, all we do is just ask about each other's life, in terms of your day, and if you ate, and that's pretty much it. So I still keep an emotional distance of where that story goes to in Moonface, and it's really weird for me to get very personal about family simply because that's not how we were raised. But I do hope that more people make shows like Mija and Moonface, and it does expand the floodgates, because I'm seeing it in film and television; those stories are starting to be told now, and it's really exciting. And then thinking, "Maybe I'll make a personal documentary series," it's like, no, maybe try fiction, and like step into that space and expand that space. It can be really fucking cool.
LORY MARTINEZ: Yeah.
HZ: And also, if it's fiction, you can get away with it with your family. Maybe.
JAMES KIM: You sure can.
LORY MARTINEZ: "I made it up."
The Allusionist is an independent podcast and huge thanks to you for listening and for telling other people about it and helping keep it going by being a patron at patreon.com/allusionist. How lucky am I to get to be part of your lives? VERY LUCKY is the answer.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
libration, noun, astronomy: an apparent or real oscillation of the moon, by which parts near the edge of the disc that are often not visible from the earth sometimes come into view.
Try using ’libration’ in an email today.
You heard from Lory Martinez and James Kim. While you’re in the place you obtain your podcasts, subscribe to James’s show Moonface and Lory’s show Mija - M-I-J-A - the show is available in English, Spanish, French, Mandarin and, soon, Arabic!
Also check out one of Lory’s other podcasts Ochenta Stories, faturing multilingual lockdown stories.
This was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with original music by Martin Austwick from palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Corrina Lesser at Scripps. Hear the whole chats on the Scripps College podcast feed in your pod places and Spotify.
And you’ll find me @allusionistshow on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook; and hear or read every episode of the show, and see the full dictionary entry for the randomly selected words, at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
