Fresh Air - Best Of: Mahershala Ali / Writer Yiyun Li

Episode Date: October 17, 2026

In his new film, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Oscar-winning actor Mahershala Ali plays a devout Muslim father and hit man whose life is upended when he suddenly has to care for his children on his own. The role brings together a lot of what has shaped Ali as an actor, including an attraction to characters who live in morally complicated places. “That’s why I think someone like myself signs up to do a part like this,” he tells Tonya Mosley. “Because it isn’t simple. It isn’t easy. It’s a little nasty. It’s a little gray. But it just makes for great drama.” Also, we hear from writer Yiyun Li. She won a Pulitzer for her memoir about the suicides of her two teenage sons. In her new novel, she escapes the present and writes about two piano prodigies. “I’ve written everything I’ve known about life into this novel,” Li tells Terry Gross. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe to our YouTube channel Check out the Fresh Air ArchivesSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

From W.HY.Y. Y. Y. Y. In Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley in Los Angeles. Today, Mahershala Ali. In his new film, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Ali plays a devout Muslim father and professional killer, whose life is upended when he suddenly has to care for his children on his own. The role brings together a lot of what has shaped Ali as an actor, including an attraction to characters who live in morally complicated places. That's why I think. I think someone like myself signs up to do a part like this because it isn't, it isn't simple, it isn't easy.

It's a little nasty. It's a little gray. But it just makes for great drama. Also, we hear from writer E. Yun Li. She won a Pulitzer for her memoir about the suicides of her two teenage sons. In her new novel, she escapes the present and writes about two piano prodigies who marry. He wants a muse. She wants equality.

but it's about more than that. I have written everything I've known about life into this novel. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. A hitman drives across Houston with his newborn in the backseat, searching for breast milk. His wife has just died, and nothing in his line of work has prepared him

to keep their three children safe without her. That's Lateef, the man at the center of Mahershala Ali's new film, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother. The character he plays is a devout Muslim, a devoted father, and a contract killer. And this film is hard to categorize. It's an action thriller, a family drama, and a meditation on faith set in a world movies rarely show, Black Muslim Life in America. And the title comes from an Islamic teaching about the singular place of mothers. It's the kind of role Ali is especially good at.

men who look composed while something much more complicated is happening underneath. In True Detective, he played a man whose life and memory unfold across decades. In the 2021 film Swan Song, he played a dying man who arranges to be secretly replaced by a clone of himself. And in Moonlight and Green Book, that same restraint helped him win two Oscars. And Mahershal Ali, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. Well, you know, I have never seen a character quite like this one, the one that you play in this movie, because Latif, I mean, he knows how to kill people. He's an assassin. What he does not know is how to take care of his own kids. And we have not seen that play out in the same movie. What interested you about that contradiction? I think exactly that, the contradiction or the breadth of that character's responsibilities.

you know, as an actor, you were searching for your new mountain to climb and someone to climb it with you, Basam Tark in this case. The director, yes. And writer. And writer, yes. And so just upon reading it, I was just blown away by just all that came along with trying to fill the shoes of this character and bring him to life, which was, yes, being a contract killer, which was inherently already interesting, him being a Muslim, which is rare for me to see

and to meet on the page, and especially with such dimensionality. And then also a father of three, and specifically the infant that we're really dealing with in this case. And so all these elements sort of stitched together just jumped out to me on the page. And so it was kind of like I couldn't say no to it. And you know, the thing about Lateef,

his faith doesn't make him righteous. If anything, it kind of gives him this standard that he keeps failing to meet throughout the film. And I want to play a scene where we learned that Lateef had promised to stop working as a hit man. And it's a promise that he has not kept. and he's talking to his imam, played by Giancarlo Esposito, who has just found all of this out. Let's listen.

I didn't see you with prayers today. I got a little strike of time. I taught you better than this. He sat right here with Cadeja, promising that you were done, being a dead man. That man murdered his mom in sheer and cold blood. The feds did nothing. The Rasul met his enemies with mercy. Violence was the last result.

He killed a holy man. Jail would have been a mercy. These men ain't got no code. They lawless. Sometimes you've got to take things into your own hands. And money had nothing to do with it. That is my guest today in his latest film, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother. You know what struck me listening to that is that he,

He's trying to make sense of something his faith tells him not to do. And you've said one of the first things you ask about a character is where he stands with God. Where do you land particularly with Lateef? I believe that Lateef is a man that I think discovers that he is struggling with his belief, his faith, and his relationship with God. I think he's in shock by his new responsibilities. He's in shock from the loss of his wife and partner and mother of his children. And I don't think he has the larger understanding of how to mourn and being sort of gracious with himself.

And I don't think he has the capacity to be patient, especially with this ticking clock of a child. needing to be fed immediately and not having the source of that of that food essentially not having his partner to love this child and to feed and take care of this child and so suddenly that responsibility all that falls on to him and he actually feels truly overwhelmed and so in the moment he's just angry I think he's angry about it all and it opens up I don't want to say opportunity per se but it It leaves him really questioning and challenging God and wanting God to make sense of all this or to even take it back, correct this mistake. Why do you need to know where a character stands with God before you can understand?

Well, I think it's more of being aware that it's my responsibility to sort of breathe life into these characters. and I feel strongly that we are spirits having a physical experience. And I think it's just helpful for me to sort of locate how much I think a character is in conversation with his creator. So it's just a place in which I can begin to ask questions that I think have real resonance for me as an actor as you begin to stitch together choices over the course of a journey or story.

Latif is trying to figure out how to take care of his kids, but over time, we begin to see the ways that they're taking care of him too. Absolutely. It's an interesting dynamic to be in as a parent because I don't think we think about that, you know, that even in the soft ways

that we probably can't articulate the ways that our children are doing that for us. Did making this film change anything about the way you understood that relationship between parent and child? You know, I think perhaps it's made me aware that kids are also protectors, that they do it in their own ways.

Like, for instance, like my child, who's nine years old, sometimes experiences things and you have to find out the hard way that she's experienced something and I think in large part is because she's trying to protect you from knowing that she's experienced something difficult.

So you would almost imagine that in the way in which when your kids are younger and they fall down at the park and then they just look at you and see how you react and depending on how you react, they just run to you like, oh, I've hurt myself, right? Well, that begins to shift at a certain point where when they're not in front of you, if they experience something like that could be terrible, they may not tell you because

they're processing it. And I've recently experienced that with my daughter this summer and I got so upset, like, sort of at her because she didn't let me know that she was, going through something, that's something that happened to her. Like, I had to hear it from, like, the camp counselor, you know, kind of thing. Oh, yeah. It's the worst feeling in the world to feel, kind of, when your children are older, and they started to tell you all the things they didn't tell you about that you didn't know about.

Did you and Basam, the director, talk about these things? Because what's so interesting about this script, too, in particular, or this story, is a lot of this kind of happened. For Basam, he was searching for breast. milk in the same way as this character when his wife needed it. She had an infection, yeah. Yeah, and she could not provide. She could not provide for their child.

I'm always so fascinated by the conversations fathers might have about these types of things. Did you guys? Yeah, we talked so much, but then there became a point where we were just, we were kind of thrust into it, and we were like living. it together. And from moment to moment, scene to scene, you start discovering things that are like written and also just and not written that end up revealing things about character. You start dialing in little moments.

There's a moment in which towards the end of the film in the third act, there's a moment where Lateef fixes Fatia's hair and I think Basam just came up

with this idea and wanted me to, in this moment where I'm going to take off and you're not sure if we're ever going to see each other

again but just sort of as like a gentle fathering act to see him like yeah

to stop and take a moment and just fix his daughter hair, as they're saying goodbye. You're just sort of open to part of what filmmakers need to do is create a sacred space. And there's so many things that can come up in that space where the film can finish being written in the moments that you're shooting it.

That they're never finished, you know, in that way. If you're just joining us, my guest is Academy Award winning actor Mahershala Ali. His new film is Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This title, it comes from an Islamic teaching in which a man asks the prophet Muhammad, who deserves the best of him? And three times the answer is, your mother.

Only after that comes your father. What did that teaching mean to you before this film? I'm someone who grew up like really adoring my father. He died when I was 20. And I think in some ways, and my father lived in New York and I was growing up in California. And I think my mother was so present in a way that I think I got to take her for granted on a certain love.

level. And we also had our own moment in time where we weren't as close as I think either of us would have liked to have been. And I think once I had converted to Islam and I started delving more into the teachings and learning more about the faith and how it impacts all aspects of your life, two of the teachings that really stood out to me was that, Heaven was at the feet of your mother and the Islamic teaching that our film opens with in terms of like your mother being that you should hold your mother dearest to you. And so it was just really just emphasized how much, at least for a believer or a Muslim or whatnot, it emphasizes how much God values the mother and values women in our faith. and it challenges you to really reflect on on why and what it is that that women must sacrifice

and how much of themselves must they give in order to to raise you or in order just to even just bring you into the world and so you're supposed to hold your mother dear in your heart and have a lot of respect for women in general and of course that doesn't always play out you know culturally or you know or whatnot but but the teaching

is that you are to like who you value most in this world are the beings, the people, the women that brought you into this world. That's really interesting now being a man, being able to reflect and see that maybe I took my mother for granted because she was there. This relationship with your dad, kind of this absence makes the heart grow fonder. Because he was a dancer. He lived in New York.

I can imagine just, you. your childhood brain imagining his life across the country. Yeah. Well, you know, and also like one of my earliest memories is my father won a dance contest on Soul Train of all things when I was a little kid. So, and he won a car on TV. So to be on TV back then, it's like one of my earliest memories and him coming home with a brand new car and $2,500 that he wins. in 70s, and he ends up moving to New York, and, you know, I'm growing up and visiting him in the summer, and I'm backstage or on tour with him for Dreamgirls and meeting all these wonderful

people, some of which are still working in the business to this day. And, you know, I've just exposed to certain things that I didn't know how to go back to Hayward, California, where I was growing up and tell anybody about those things. And a lot of times there's kids who didn't even, like, believe me when I would share certain things. Or like I'm watching a music video or watching a commercial and my dad or a really close friend of his is on the commercial or on TV or doing an episode or something or on a show. So there's this compartmentalized thing that I was experiencing that no one else around me like totally got. So I think all that sort of added to and when he was with me, he was like really present. He was awesome. We had a great time.

But then I would go back and experience the day-to-day mundane of just growing up and having to do homework and getting in trouble if I acted up in class or all the things that you deal with growing up as a kid. Like those are the things that, you know, my mom is like dealing more so with on a day-to-day basis. And so all that contributed to, I think, my childhood and my experiences with my mom being. like colored a certain way. And my parents were also really young when I was born. Like they were teenagers. They were teenagers.

Yeah, you watch them grow up essentially. Yeah. They raised you. And I'm curious the kind of dancing your dad did. So soul train dancing, dream girl dancing. What was his specialty? Well, you went to dance theater Harlem. But he also like, you know,

he studied ballet and tap and jazz and all of it, you know. And then by the early 80s, he was like understudying and dream. Dream Girls and then eventually playing the James Thunder early role on the road for the national tour and by the time he passed away, really trying to transition into legitimate acting, you know, out of trying to get out of the musical theater dance kind of world and always really considering himself an actor, which when he started to like say that, like, oh, I'm an actor, I was like, huh, I didn't, and I don't know anything about acting at this time because it's not

as much as I was coming in and out, it wasn't my world. I was, if anything, I was more on the athletic sort of pathway. Because at that time, you were in college playing basketball still? He passed away going into my junior year. So it was kind of like halfway through that college basketball journey that he passed away. But I did just start getting into like theater sort of like accidentally. Like right before he passed away, I did a play. And I remember him saying, you know, that I had the bug or whatever.

He saw you. Did he see you in that play? No, he didn't see me in it, but it was just more me, like, just talking about what I was doing. What he did see me do was I was writing a lot of poetry back then. And those poems started to essentially act as like monologues because it was like early in that slam poetry sort of era. So I would share those with him and friends of his and whatnot, which they all kind of loved. And so that was a bit of a transition into acting. because I was basically performing my own writing, and I got a lot of encouragement around that.

You're getting up on stage, you're performing poetry, and eventually you become Prince Ali. Who was Prince Ali, and what did that persona give you? I think there was several iterations. I think I eventually landed on Prince Ali. But, you know, honestly, the first time I was ever rapping and on stage, I was 12 years old, I was in, I was in, I was in Toronto, Canada.

And my father, my father was doing Dreamgirls there in 86. And myself and a friend named Sean, and our fathers were in the show. And I remember we both got like $5 a day because they were like in Tech Week. And so they were like putting the show together and about to open. And so we would go while our dads were rehearsing. We were kind of like latchkey kids on the road. And so we would go off to the arcade and, you know, play games for half the day. Like I could go for a while back then.

He and I were both like had an open love for hip hop at that time. We both loved run DMC and LL Cool J. And one day Sean was like, well, you know, I beatboxing. And he started like, you know, beatboxing and making the beat with his mouth. And I was like, well, I rap. And I had written my little rhyme. And I had it memorized. And so we're in the elevator with our fathers one day.

And we're going up to our rooms, and Sean just breaks out beatboxing. And then I start rapping. And then their jaws, like, drop. Next to you know, a week later, for opening night of the show, we're on stage. There's like 2,000 people in this club that they were able to get us in. But we had to sit in some section where they weren't serving alcohol or whatever. But we ended up performing. We got shirts made.

They said D.T on them, double-threat. And, like, he's beatboxing on stage and I'm rapping and we, like, we tore it down. Like, it was an experience I would never forget. Mahershallah Ali, it's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you. Thank you. Award-winning actor Mahershullah Ali. His new film is called Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother. Terry has our next interview. Here she is.

The words grief or the grieving process are not one. words writer Ian Lee chooses to describe her own feelings. To her, those words make it sound that at some point you emerge from grief. She prefers to use the word abyss, which is where she expects to be for the remainder of her life. That doesn't mean she's incapable of laughter or even joy, but she expects to return to that abyss. Her teenage sons both died by suicide six years apart, Vincent at age 16 and 2017 and James at age 19 in 2024. She wrote an eloquent memoir about that published last year titled Things in Nature Merely Grow. It won a Pulitzer Prize. That's among the many honors she's received for her fiction and nonfiction, including the Penn Faulkner Award, the Penn Hemingway

Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. Her new novel, Music Against the Night is set in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It's about two music prodigies, Adelaide, who's known as Peshiret, and John. He wants to be the next Mozart and become rich and famous. She wants to find her place in the music world and be recognized for her talent, in spite of how music is a place largely for men. Women can be wives, muses, or mistresses. John and Adelaide are brought together by music and drawn apart because of their musical aspirations. I. Eun Lee grew up in China, served a year in the Chinese military, came to America to study immunology, and left her PhD program to become a writer. She's a professor

in the creative writing program at Princeton University. I want to let you know in advance that our interview will include a discussion about suicide. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or you're facing mental health struggles, you can call or text 988 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline. That's 988. Ian Lee, welcome to Fresh Air. And before we start the interview, I just want to say, I'm really sorry about your sons. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Of all the novels you could have written, after your older son's death and your younger son's death, why did you write this one? What was it you need?

My impression is you wanted to get out of the now and go to another time and another place. The story in this new novel, it's set in Paris, in India, in Russia, not in the U.S., not even in this century. Yes. Well, I would say I started a number, novel. And I was in the middle of the novel when James died. But you're right. This is a novel

far from my usual interests or concerns. And the reason I think I went back to history is I would like to live again through history, through historical figures, through my characters living in the late 18th and early 19th century. Some of the concerns, confusions, and just thoughts and feelings I have experienced in my life and other people have experience in their lives. So you're right, I'm going away from this now, but I'm making the past into a new now for myself and possibly for my readers. Are these characters based on real people? Yes. So John Fute was Irish virtuoso who spent most of his adult life in Russia. He invented the nocturn form,

which was taken over by Chopin, and Chopin made that form popular. But John Field was the first one to write nocturns, and he was considered the grandfather of Russian music. And Adelaide was his wife, and again a historical figure, but we did not know much about her. But was she a prodigy like she has in your book? One supposed so, because she had an interesting story. She was an orphan born and raised in Pondy Cherry, French India. And when she appeared in history, she was a teenager in Moscow, and she was extremely talented. She wanted to become a virtualist as John Field was.

But she was 20 years ahead of Clara Schumann and women. were not encouraged to go on stage. She became an important music teacher in Russia. I think it's interesting that you chose two people who are involved with music, not words. Because you live deep in the world of words, both as a reader and a writer. But music can have lyrics, but classical music, you know, piano music doesn't, you know, piano music doesn't require words. Was that a choice that you made intentionally to write about people who aren't obsessed with language in the way that you are? Yes. In fact, I think I've had the feeling both times

after my children's death that words often fall short. And falling short doesn't mean not succeeding. Falling short doesn't mean failing. But when I started a new project, I would like a subject that words naturally for short. So music is that choice. You took piano lessons in preparation for the book. Do you still play? I do. I cannot really claim I play.

I'm still practicing. I'm a young pianist on the piano. I have been taking piano lesson for two and a half years. I auditioned with my teacher, with a book proposal rather than any skill on the piano. Because you'd never played before? No, I've never had any musical background. But I feel that if I wanted to write about two prodigies on the keyboard,

I should at least know a few things. So you write in the book that Adelaide teaches her ward how to play piano, and she says, it did not matter if the girl had talent or not. In fact, she turned out to be no more than a mediocre pianist. but piano was a good way for her to learn how to count, mark, and endure time. Did you take piano lessons in part for research, but in part to learn how to endure time after your son's death? Yes, I began my piano lesson at the end of 2023, purely to get to know how to play the piano. And James died in February 24, so two months into my piano lesson.

He died, and it occurred to me that piano or music is a good way for me to count time, because music is about time. It's about counting the measure, counting the rhythm. And also music is about to be engaged with something else. You can sit in your sadness all day long and doing nothing or crying. Or like me, I could just sit there and just play the same drill again and again. As a way to know I was in a way staying in touch with the world. Ion Lee speaking with Terry Gross.

Her new novel is called Music Against the Night. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir is called Things in Nature Merely Grow. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Ian Lee. Her new novel is called Music Against the Night. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir is called Things in Nature Merely Grow, and it's about the suicide of her teenage sons.

Part of our conversation is about suicide. So if you're having suicidal thoughts or mental health crisis, there is someone you can talk with at the suicide and crisis lifeline. Just call or text 988. That's 988. You've brought several themes that you've experienced in your life into the new novel. And one of them is about prodigies. Like your younger son was a prodigy, his gift was intelligence and who has come. like reading and researching and learning. Give us some examples of how, like, brilliant he was at a super young age.

Right. You know, both my children could be called prodigies, but James, my younger son, our younger son, especially, was extraordinarily odd and brilliant. So I remember when he was three and Vincent was seven or Vincent was six. And Vincent asked James, do you know how babies get born? And James gave his bigger brother a sort of lecture on how human beings reproduce. And of course, we were all shocked. And then he ended the lecture saying, you can find that information on page 76 of the encyclopedia of human body. And that's the kind of thing I think it was both lovely and odd.

What was it like being the parent of a prodigy being so much smarter than most adults in a lot of ways? In terms of his span of knowledge, I wouldn't say he had the wisdom of having lived many years, but he had like the facts at his disposal, facts that like most adults don't even know. They know about the facts of life. But he knew like scientific facts and physics and just like all kinds of things.

So what responsibilities or what awe did that bring for you as a mother? I think it brought awe and bafflement. I would say we were greatly baffled. And also I remember he was five or six. he said, Mommy, you will never see the world. I see it full of doubts and squiggly lines. And that, again, was a strange perception of the world,

as you say, we adults did not have access to. I have no idea what he meant by that, whether that was like literal. And if it was, that's kind of disturbing. I don't know either. I did not know either. And, I mean, you did ask, what is the responsibility or the difficulty of bringing up a child very brilliant.

And I think the decision, some people would say, well, you really have to train him to be the next Einstein. But we did not want him to be the next Einstein. We wanted him to be a normal, happy boy living in an ordinary life. You said that you thought your older son was kind of a prodigy, too. What was his gift? He was a brilliant painter and we still had all his paintings around the house. He was an oboist. And when he wanted to learn the obo, the obo teacher said he was a bit young because he was eight when he wanted to learn the oboe.

But he was certain because he was like everybody else was started on the piano. and he could articulate that piano was not his instrument. He wanted to play the oboe. But mostly he wrote beautiful poetry. He was a great poet, and he was a great reader. So, I mean, I wouldn't call him an outlier as James was, but he was brilliant and fun and interesting. Did you teach your sons to read before they were in school?

I did not It's interesting I think I did not teach them they pick up reading by themselves and I respected their quiet reading time especially James

James started reading when he was two so I certainly did not teach him and he just picked it up Winston started reading early we I think you know this stereotypical idea of an Asian American parent or Asian parent being the tiger parent,

Tiger Mom. I think I was the opposite of Tiger Mom. I was sort of free-range chicken mom. So I raised them as free-range chickens. I'm trying to understand how a two-year-old can teach himself to read. I know. I mean, it's mind-boggling because his preschool teacher said, I worried at the time, I worried about his potty training, you know, diaper training. And so I always talk with the teacher about potty training, and she was quite relaxed.

She said, come on, you know, how many kids could read in their diapers. You shouldn't worry about it. Well, your sons were opposite in one way in the sense that your older son was. very emotional, deeply experiencing highs and lows. And your younger son, withheld emotion. And, you know, I don't know what he experienced, but he apparently didn't express it. Yes. And I think, again, that, you know, having two children, having had two children, sort of quite opposite in many ways, as a parent, I could have only say a lot of things were given to them and they were born that way. And so, yes, I think Vincent was extremely artistic and emotional and joyful and sorrowful and also articulate of, he could articulate all his feelings. And James, as you said, did not want to talk. And we could

only just bring them up as who they were in the way. So you started your novel, correct me if I'm wrong here, you started your novel when your older son had already died, and then you completed it after your younger son died as well. I want to talk with you about how that changed your life, but first I want to hear how it changed your novel on what you wanted to say. Yes, when I started novel, Vincent already died, but James was alive. And three quarters into the first draft, James died. You know, earlier we talked about playing the piano as a way of marking time.

The day after James died, my best friend said, I suppose you're going to take a break from writing. But knowing you, I know you won't do that. and my answer to her was, you're right, I cannot take a break, because writing is a way for me to mark time. So I finished the first draft before I started to think about writing a memoir because I wanted to get my thoughts through in a novel first before I turn to nonfiction. Many things in your novel made me think of your life, even though it's set in another. century in other places. And this is an example of one of those sentences.

All people die, not all have the patience to wait until old age. Yes. You're right. I think the novel, though it was about two musicians in another time, I would say I have written everything I've known about life into this novel. And I've known many people, old and young, and I knew two people who did not wait until old age to die. So I think all those thoughts and experiences came into the novel. If you're comfortable talking about this, you attempted to end your life before your sons

died. Can I ask what you are enduring during that period? Yes. I think it's just a profound depression. And really, sometimes I think people have all sort of thoughts about or against people who have chosen suicide. And people who have chosen or attempted suicide are often called selfish. But my experience is oftentimes people in great pain, whether it's great mental pain or great physical pain. And sometimes people in deep depression cannot tell the difference between mental pain and physical pain because everything is together is a great kind of suffering. I think it's not that people who experience that kind of suicidal urge. It's not that they want to die or they want to use this to hurt other people.

It feels, at least in my experience, it felt as though that was the only way to stop. the suffering. But I also knew how that death would affect my children and my husband, how other people would be hurt. Except I think there was always that fear that if you would go on living as this miserable mother, wouldn't that be even worse for your children? So there was that thought when I was in deep depression was I consider myself entirely incapable of being a good mother to them. Were you not a good mother at the time? No, I suppose if you look from the outside, I was a good mother.

I cooked, I picked them up from school, I drove them to all sorts of activities. But I felt helpless. I think that helplessness, that kind of despair, knowing even as a mother, you could not get rid of that despair. And that made me feel perhaps I wasn't a good mother. Let's talk about growing up in China. Because you didn't move to the U.S. until you went to, was it college or grad school? After college, grad school, yes. He was grad school that brought you here to Iowa.

So did your parents grow up during the Cultural Revolution? Their youth were, I mean, no, they were already adults during the Cultural Revolution. So they were both born in the 1940s. So how did that change their lives? They were lucky enough. I think they were already in their 30s. And the other thing is my father used to be a nuclear physicist. So he worked for the nuclear weapon industry.

Oh, he did. Oh. Yes. So we were protected by his status. So in a way, we live in this compound. You were protected by the weapon. We were protected by the weapon. A perfect way to put it.

Yes. Yes. So we live on this compound. Everybody's father was either a nuclear physics. or a mass meditation. And so in a way, we were sort of sheltered by this special situation. That's so weird that you felt sheltered because your father was working on nuclear weapons. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, I was terrified about the possibility of nuclear war because it would come pretty close with Russia.

So were you afraid of the bomb? Never. For some reason, this is so interesting because I don't think I was afraid of that. Or maybe I should put it this way. I think when I was growing up, there were many more concrete harms done to children. So the nuclear weapons were really too far away from our lives. You spent a year in the Army, the People's Liberation Army. Were women drafted? It was a special situation. It was not, we were not drafted. We were going to enter college. And this was right after 1989 Tianman Square massacre.

So students who went to my university, which is Peking University, because Peking University was quite active during the pro-democratic. movement, the students entering the university would be sent to the military, to the army for a year of training. Mostly, it's sort of a brainwashing experience. How were you brainwashed? We just learned, I mean, we went there in 1991, which was quite a striking time because Soviet Union just stopped being Soviet Union. So we would just be reading a lot of politics and world affairs all from the communist point of view. It didn't work. And also, it wasn't easy to brainwash me. I would say that. Yeah, I get that impression. It wouldn't

have been easy. So what role were you expected to play as a woman in the Army? We did a lot of just physical training, you know, formation training and shooting. and I was, it turned out I was a very good shop shooter, which was so surprising because I was a peaceful, peaceful, peaceful, or I was, I hate it, I hated everything about weapons, but I was quite good at that. The other thing I was quite good at, which was also, I did not take any pleasure or I did not feel proud of. I was a good propaganda. writer. Oh, you're a good writer. What was the propaganda life? Because your writing is so honest and with the perfect word to describe everything.

Yes, but I was in the army and I remember my squad leader always assigned me. We have weekly assignment to write some sort of propagandas, sort of army propagandas. And I always got that assignment. And so I sort of protested and I said, it's not fair. It's always me writing this. You have to assign someone else. And my squad leader said, now you could do this where you could go cleaning the pigs die or cleaning the toilet. Which would you like to do? Of course, I wrote propagandas because I hated cleaning toilets. We've talked a lot about tragedy during this interview. What gives you the most pleasure now? Ah, yes. Gardening, I'm an amateur gardener, but I love gardening. So gardening gives me a lot of joy. And, you know, taking a walk with my husband. We call it our daily constitutional. And then just talking with my friends in writing. You know, I do want to make a point, you know, I have experience. many sad things in life. But I always want to make a distinction, I am sad, but I'm not unhappy.

And sometimes I think people forget sadness and unhappiness are two different things. What's the difference? I think sadness, oftentimes people are afraid of sadness as though it's something dark or heavy. No, sadness is just part of a life. I think sadness is just an inevitable. part of life. And I'm fine living with my sadness. And sadness does not mean you're sad all the time

where you cannot find joy, where you cannot tell a joke. But unhappiness, I think oftentimes there's this discontentment and there's this eagerness to change for another life. And that kind of unhappiness is not healthy, I suppose. Ian Lee, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. what you had to say. Thank you so much for having me.

E. Unley's new novel is called Music Against the Night. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir is called Things in Nature Merely Grow. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Freshier's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.