YouSaid · the spoken record

Leana Wen

lines on the record
58
first
2021-08-26
most recent
2021-08-26
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Right, my parents spent all their money on applying for a visa, buying plane tickets. And so by the time that we got to the US, we had $40. And that was it. We had no clothing. I mean, we came from southern China to this really cold place in the mountains of Utah in December. I remember going to school wearing five pairs of pants and six sweaters, and we didn't have heat. We dried our clothes. We didn't have a laundry machine when we washed our clothing by hand and dried them outside. I were wringing it and then they were full of icicles. So the clothing actually broke. And so that's how cold it was. But we were again really lucky because we did have neighbors who and members of the church who took us in. I mean, I didn't know any English when I arrived. No one made fun of me. And in fact, they taught me English. I went to Sunday school and Sunday school was an opportunity to also.”

    2021-08-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 457 — Dr. Leana Wen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Right, which is maybe not exactly where one might end up actually, I don't know that I put this in the book, but my mother had gotten into two colleges. She got into Utah State in Logan, Utah. She also got into University of Illinois in Chicago. She went to her mentor, these are obviously pre-Gogle or Altavista or whatever it is, right? And she went to her mentor and said, where should I go? And the mentor said, oh, Utah. That's.”

    2021-08-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 457 — Dr. Leana Wen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I had so much resentment for my mother growing up, and that's something that I didn't quite come to terms with until, frankly, until I started writing this book, and then I felt so guilty and so ashamed of it because why was my mother absent so when I was growing up in China, my mother was in college. And at that time in China, the students were not really supposed to have children. My mother was much older than the other kids because of the timing of when colleges were opening up, she had to live on campus. And so she couldn't see me for that reason. And then when we moved to the US, my mother came first. We ended up living in this little town in Logan, Utah.”

    2021-08-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 457 — Dr. Leana Wen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Me something else that I don't think I quite understood until much later was how much my mother also struggled and in particular the types of sacrifices that she made. My mother was younger at the time of the cultural revolution and formal schooling was stopped at the point that she was in fifth grade. And so the last year of school that she went to was the fifth grade. And then when the revolution ended, everyone had the opportunity to apply for college, which she did. And she was able to test into college with no more than a fifth grade formal education because she studied on her own by candlelight with books that her mother smuggled to her. I mean, these were the kinds of incredible stories that I wish that I had a chance to really talk to my mother about and for reasons that we could get into later in the podcast. I wasn't able to.”

    2021-08-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 457 — Dr. Leana Wen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And it's not something that I really heard about growing up. I wanted to understand more about my grandparents and their stories. But there was this paranoia and still is in that generation of Chinese people. And they would always say, well, don't talk about that because somebody's listening. And I don't know that anyone was actually listening, but they just really did not want to talk about this. And so I had to piece it together in writing lifelines. I knew from an early age that my parents aimed to leave China. And that's because my father was also a political dissident. He was in an out of jail for various political activities. We knew that his future in China would be very limited. My mother was”

    2021-08-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 457 — Dr. Leana Wen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “You talk about public health. And so it actually was really hard for me to write the initial part of my book, my story, and the story of my upbringing because there were a lot of details that I had blocked out. I mean, my immigration story, of course, I knew I knew that my parents and I came to the US just before I turned eight. But there was a lot of my upbringing, including in China and in the early years of our immigrating to the US that I never talked about before and also didn't really think about. I think I had just blocked it out of my mind. Growing up, I knew that my grandparents and my parents suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution, as did their entire generations. There were all these things.”

    2021-08-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 457 — Dr. Leana Wen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, David, I actually did not mean to write about my story at all for lifelines. And Lifelines was also not the original title of the book. The original title was Doctor for the City. I had intended to write a book on the work that we did in Baltimore. I was very proud of having led the health department and I wanted to show, for example, about how we were able to save more than 3,000 lives because of our work around opioid overdose. I wanted to talk about be more for healthy babies and how we reduced infant mortality in our city by 38% in seven years. But when I wrote those chapters for my publisher, my publisher basically said to me, this is really boring. This is like feeding people vegetables and making them eat it because they should be eating it. And my publisher said, you have to write about your own story and get people to really care about you and why we're listening to.”

    2021-08-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 457 — Dr. Leana Wen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You very much great to see you, David. I have admired you and your leadership and work for so long, and love your podcast, and so am thrilled to be on with you.”

    2021-08-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 457 — Dr. Leana Wen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source