Lancome, where she wrote and edited work for two years, she has been heard and seen on npr and podcast including sesh love. It or leave it. Yo, is this racist . This is love. Star trek the pod directive and more. And her writing has been published in Elle Marie Claire town and country Womens Health and others and her book admissions is out now. Danica roem is part of the Historic Group of elected officials flipped republican seats in the 2017 election. Shes the first out and seeded transgender state legislator in american history. Prior to her political prior to her political career, she was a journalist and now serves as a frequent guest on national media. She and her work have been featured in the usa today people. Gq, the new york times, elle and others, and she was the subject of the glad Award Winning documentary, this is how we win. Her book, burn the page is out now. So i thought we would just start like as most many stories do from the beginning in your lives and maybe in each of you can talk about your kind of Early Childhood and what were your most indelible memories and maybe what how you tapped into some of that for in writing the book. Kendra, you want to start . Oh, boy. Sure. Early childhood. So i grew up in maplewood, new jersey, which if youre from brooklyn, you might know it as the place that your friends are escaping to. Its a small town, kind of like 30 minutes outside of the city. I grew up in a single income home. My my mom was a very traditional stay at home mom. She did not have a job until i was, like 25, 26. And that was when my parents got divorced and my dad was a wall street banker. And so basically, i my book admissions is about the three years that i spent at the task school, which is a boarding school in connecticut. And i was raised essentially knowing that i was going to go there because my dad had graduated from the school in 1974. And it was basically i had been going up to the campus since i was two because he was really involved in Alumni Affairs and he was on the school board for a while. And he had a really positive relationship with it. So i have a lot of memories of just like spending time on this, this campus that was essentially a i usually refer to it as a club for teenagers. Its several many hundreds of acres Rolling Green hills, two ice rinks, just like a really kind of like luxurious place to be educated and to and to spend time in. Or that is how it appears on the outside. So i really grew up like knowing that i was going to go there but was not like fully prepared because of the way i had grown up in this like very upper middle class town. And with parents who themselves were pretty privileged, i was not really prepared for kind of the the stark contrasts in terms of like socioeconomic stuff and also the way race would play out on that campus because i grew up pretty sheltered. I grew up with sort of a lot of respectability politics, like ingrained me by both of my parents. And so, yeah, i just i wasnt per prepared for it. So thats kind of a quick background on, on my childhood. All right. So my name is danica roem. I am grateful. Representative for the city of Manassas Park in the western pennsylvania county, portions of haymarket. Gainesville in my lifelong home, manassas, in the 13th district of virginia, house delegates elected 2017 reelected, 2019 2021, running for state senate next year. And i, like i said, because its lifelong manassas im born and raised Prince William hospital, september 30th, 1984. Cheryl sadly wrote and long story short with it, is my childhood is a series of overcoming a lot of traumatic events and other things and at the same time having, you know, the best italian food on sunday nights of my moms cooking. And if you know anything about italian family argument is communication and i like to make that point pretty clear in my book as well and. You know, the thing is, in my case, my upbringing in any way, even though the way that you would stand is like, hey, look, you live out in the woods and in the burbs, right . You know, like this, you know, this, you know, in a white middle class family. But you know whats going to stand out so much . Its like, well, you know, my dad killed himself when i was three years old. So in my earliest childhood memories is running next door after you got himself on fire. Then i. My grandmother died by the time i was seven over and she had parkinsons and we had lived with her right after he had died. So to immediate family. So i lived with you die by the time i was in second grade and know so the the core nexus is my family, my mother, my sister and me for yall from here, my mothers the bronx specifically from morris park and again, Italian Catholic woman who was born with a chip on his shoulder. So that definitely ingrained in the funny thing is like so im virginia to my core. I mean, you know, my Manassas Battlefield fleece that i wear fleece better than my governor, by the way, just for the record. Yeah, but, but one of my students, they go into the city, my mothers voice starts coming out so, so aggressively, like she that this otherwise just sort of completely boring midatlantic accent every other day second shes on the phone with some from new york. Oh, my god, donna, how you doing . Oh, my god. Did she just hear enricos close over in the bronx. Cant even believe it. Were going to get a good pastry now, right . That. So thats part of my upbringing only in the south and i spent 13 years in Catholic School. I spent four years Public School over at loch lomond groceries, and then from fourth grade all the way until i graduated in parliamentary university in 2006 and college, those last four were by choice. Those middle nine absolutely were not. And the thing about being a closet case in a Catholic School is its already pretty suffocating environment that just makes it worse. And i was looking for outlets and i was scared to death of anyone finding out who i was and at the same time, when you will have that fear, you want, be associated with other things, and so you start overcompensating in some ways, right . And at the same time wanted people to think i was the middle person i was, you know, whatever other identity i was the funny person. I never wanted to be perceived as the gay guy, which is how i was basically referred to for most of my childhood with a series slurs. Thats for the perception of being gay, let alone the actual reality of being trans. And as i would find out in my upbringing, when i was just basically trying to figure out how to talk to the world at large, i would use sexuality as a stepping stone to get to a gender identity, which i wrote about a lot in from the page about how i would come out as bi first. Im so sorry to everybody person, by the way, because they always are like, are you actually or not . Its used by two gay to two trans and you know keeping my social rotation. Gender identity are different things, but it was just an easier way for me to start like tiptoeing, just talking to people. For the first time. I told anyone i was 17 years old and once it got into college and i was 343 miles away from home, thats when i first start telling the women in my life. And really, because wanted them to feel safe around me, i want them to know it was going to be okay to talk to me just like they would do any of the other girlfriends and then, you know, like we would get dressed up and go club and go dancing or go into like, you know, gothic shows and stuff like a band called jen tortures. Ill see you after the show. And you go to these shows where its just like, it doesnt matter your gender, they are everyones wearing makeup anyway and all black. So hey you know fit in and that was kind of my tiptoeing out. I had some pretty bad events that happened in between that i wrote about in the book, but eventually i always described general for is kind of like having a hand. It closes around your throat slowly over time, to the point where you cant breathe anymore and you got to do something about it. That moment happened for me when i was eight. I knew, right, tom . I was ten years old, that i was trans, but i never even thought it. So at 28, i finally started seeing a psychologist. I came out to my mom, my sister, my 30th birthday, and just to put a wrap around this one, mama said that night, well, im just concerned. How are you going to actually find someone . And i said, well, i got a date next week actually at this with a temptation concert in baltimore with this trans guy whos from finland, originally lives in maryland now. And so that was october 7th, 2014, when we had our first date. And then september 9th, 2022, we went back to baltimore to go see apocalyptic art because finished tell metal girls and of that person who my mom was concerned about, whether i would ever find out just proposed to me so yeah hey. We have breaking news on the panel to that. Thats very good. Excellent. So chen, julie wong has now has joined us and i want to we just opened up. I just asked i introduced everybody bio and then just wanted a little bit more kind of talk about their earliest childhood memories. I know you have many, many, many of them in your book, but in sort of what were the most some of the indelible ones and that you wanted to sort of just, you know, clue people into is where you came from literally and figuratively. Absolutely. I apologize for being late. I used to live five minute walk from here, but today i had the fortune of commuting from new jersey. So, yeah, i mean, my my story when you said, danika, the fear of being found out, being terrified of that that although we have very different experience is i relate to that so deeply that hits at the very core of me so i went from being a pretty privileged, spoiled kid, north china, to getting on a plane, getting off that plane at jfk airport and realizing that i was half a world away from everybody i ever knew. It was just me and my two parents and we were what was called undocumented. And i never been aware of documents before. I never knew that that was an issue anywhere in the world. And all of a sudden because of that change we did not have enough money for food. We shared a home with six, seven other immigrant families. Every time i saw a cop, a firefighter, a sanitation worker, anybody in uniform, i would turn and run the other way. And so this this fear of being found out became the defining sense of me. And with secrets come this implicit shame of you should hide who you are. Theres something inherently wrong with you. And like danica, i chose to overcompensate by achieving. I thought that i could weave an American Dream where i would earn my worth in america and prove that i was thoroughly american, that i was i belonged here and i deserved all the documents that i had so longed for. And was not. Until you achieve your your dreams that you realize that there were some fallacies in there. Im sure well talk about that a little. Can joe just want to ask you so you mentioned to the first black legacy student at taft school, and you start there in three. Is that so . Did you feel a responsibility to your family and or other students of color to excel not in terms of like that like being the first because i when i got there like being the first so i was the first black american legacy, i should say. There was another person the School Started accepting black students in like 1953, and the first black student who attended was actually from bermuda. And so then he sent his granddaughter there in the eighties. So she was actually the first black legacy to graduate. And then i was the first black american one. And i make that distinction because taft was actually the first place where i really learned that there was sort of that distinction within the diaspora of black american versus like black from anywhere else, like literally anywhere in the world. I remember i had a friend who was on haitian or haitianamerican, and someone referred her her as africanamerican. At one point she was like, i am absolutely not. Which comes like with that statement also like comes some things that you have to unpack, but it is an important distinction to make because the experiences are really different. But in terms of pressure to excel, i didnt really know that i was the first black american legacy to who had the potential to graduate until it was announced during an all school like an all school assembly. Um, about black history at taft. And that was like kind of when i realized like, oh, okay, this like a thing. And there were also a bunch of other kids there who were freshmen when i was a senior who were also legacy students at the time. And we were all friends just because all the black kids at the school friends. So in terms of excelling like i did feel pressured to do well outside of that that fact just because like i knew that i was there i was at the school. A lot of my friends from maplewood where i had gone to Public School through the ninth grade, i had a lot of friends who would leave between like eighth and ninth grade and they would go to other schools like they would go to my care. Montclair kimberly or like kent place, other schools in new jersey. And the idea of having to then like go away to that Privileged School and then come back like that was sort of like an embarrassing thing that might happen. So like that where a lot of the pressure came from, it was like, you dont want to you dont want to come back. You dont want to have that associated with you. And it again came up for me when i was applying for college as well. It was of the main reasons i did not want to to rutgers. Rutgers grad school. It one of my favorite actors, avery brooks, is on faculty there. Its a great place, but i like was really like conscious of the fact that i did not like to go to college with the people that i had like quote unquote, escape kept going to Public School because a lot of my friends from columbia, my Public School winter records because it was cheap and it was a good school and. So yeah there was that pressure of like wanting to do better than what you had left behind and and one of the jean of the story tell, a story about a roommate that you had there who who made racist comment to you. But basically, he she said that she didnt like that you had to get up early to your hair and complained about the, quote. Gross, unquote, smell in the room from your hair products. And then you sort of devised was sort of a prank that meant to be not vengeful. But in and where you were going to put a hex on her and set up the witchcraft symbols in the room. Yes, i was very revenge motivated and how did that experience affect how you would see your other white classmates after that . Was it did it change that in many ways, yeah. There was like so like i said, the this maybe i didnt take it, but the school was it was very segregated socially white students pretty much like you only hung out with white students. Black students hung out with black latin students. And then everyone just kind of assumed like we had a black table in the in the dining hall. But then there was also like an asian table and by asian table, like it was just assumed that everyone was chinese essentially when in reality was like there were kids from hong kong, there were kids from china, japan, korea. I had a lot of very good korean friends. Like it was just like it was a whole mixture, but the school was just so segregated. And when i got there i was not i wasnt aware of that. And back in maplewood, like one of the big things thats always touted by the realtor is its like its so diverse. You, like everyone is friends with everyone. And for me that was really true. My group was very, very diverse. And so i got attached and i really thought i was going to do the same thing and that was not the case for me. And so, yeah, it was my, my friends, two of my black friends were the ones who told me when my roommate said that me they were the ones who said like, thats racism. Because for me, racism was very much like a water hose. Its a slur its like a very big event incident that happens because we didnt have language like microaggression back then to describe those sort of smaller incidents are so yeah it really after that it really did change sort of my perception of like who i am going to be friends with in this environment. And i really did start like that was the moment i stopped really trying to be friends, the white kids at that point. And there were a few who would like come into the group because we were very we would take in misfits like that because we were at the school essentially misfits. But it was it was very much it was not an effort that i was making on my part on outreach, because it very much felt like it wasnt possible. No. Danica, i wanted to ask you so you mentioned that you dont know that danica was in a you call it thrash metal or we just call a heavy metal, what we call oppression, melodic death metal. Okay. Okay, good some people in the room respect the differences. So, you know the big question is, do you go from being as you write about youre a thrash metal boat vocalist working also as a food Delivery Driver. At one point, right to. A legislator who beat a 13 term incumbent. I think its really funny that of the parts of my like career biography, we went over it, we just talked about metal band for 12 years. We talked about food Delivery Driver and my 92 dodge and. We completely missed the ten years i was a newspaper reporter. Well, no, well get that. But the reason i beat that, though, is that was my chief qualification for office. The 2500 news stories i heard about covering western Prince William county, my home area, and i was working for for a two full time jobs for four or five years. At one point where i was working for the hotline in dc covering campaigns at six something in the morning until mid afternoon, and then i would hightail it out to haymarket and go cover, you know, maybe a battlefield girls volleyball game or maybe i would go all the way down to gerry, virginia, to go cover an electric chair execution in person. Theres a fun little way to spend your evening. I saw that. And you know, for all of the things that i you know, that i did, all the different identities that i acquired kind of along the way, its kind of in the personal loyalty type where you see its like its not that you cant focus on. One thing is that theres a lot really cool things you want to do and you kind of want to try a whole lot of different stuff, which also means you have the in ability to be really good at particular one of those, but maybe you could be like, you know, above average. And thats kind of where i was shooting for in a lot of ways. But the way the reason i, you know, went from all of that was when i came out, when i turned 30 and i and then we changed my byline in the paper. The next year i stopped being afraid. What other people were going to think of me. I stopped being afraid and stopped giving a what other people were going to do to judge me. I stopped caring about my god. What if they find out and trans yeah i am . And then it was just like and now what . And when you just start confronting people with it, then suddenly all the things in life that you thought were impossible dont to be. I always thought it was from the first day i went into therapy. November 21st, 2012, i thought that my worlds were going to have to exist and two different things. They were not going to be able to link like this. I was not going to have a bean diary. I was just going be like this where i could do metal things here and journalism here. Because if you come here, this is going give you a negative reaction here. Youre not going to get hired here. And by the way, the not getting hired part completely true. Coming out as trans is, probably one of the top ways to kill your Career Prospects in a lot of ways until you get elected. Then you have a lot of people who are very interested in you. Suddenly, a side note, you shouldnt have to get elected, to have health care. And its like me too. And i was unemployed for two and a half years before i liked it. Thats a different thats a different story where i was kind of tied in together, though, is that i had used metal really not just as a, you know, escape or whatever, but was also an audio rebellion for me. There was a way to kind of, you know, really also see the world in a bit. My band would go to you know, northern ireland. We would go to glasgow, edinburgh and aberdeen over in scotland. I loved traveling. We go, you know, just all over and even on when youre dylan broke doing it, i always thought, you know, you dont get to take to the grave with you guys take experiences so you know might as well go you know them up but at the same time i started getting really bad in that i mean 25, 30,000 Credit Card Debt and i started working two full time jobs again or two part time jobs again. This time after i came out for one job, 30 hours a week for 15 an hours in newspaper editor, side job, 5 an hour plus tip as a weekend asking bob house Delivery Driver which i wrote about you know actually very very early in my book and burn the page and i lost money at that job because of car repairs. And i was 32 years old, uninsured and, you know, just driving a car that had been would functionally be dead in months. And thats when i the phone call saying, hey, have you considered for office youd be really good a day after i got an email, they didnt respond to saying the same thing. And when i ran for office in 2017. I was uninsured, driving at 324 a piece of as transgender metal head reporter do any step mom vegetarian, you know, central casting . And when i decide to run, i said, well, politics and elected government shouldnt just be the sole domain of the rich and powerful. Its for us, too. And its our time to run it. And what we we do now, great, great. Chin so you came you came to new york in 1994 and you were seven, right . And youre both your parents had been professors in china. So in his undocumented immigrants, their jobs were much different. Others, and they worked to survive live. Did they talk about how they felt about not being considered professionals here in any way and comparing their lives . Or were they just have to said have a family and we have to do what we have to do. It was a little bit of both. I think my parents kind of try to keep out of some of the emotional and psychological hardship that they themselves dealt with. Its very different coming to a new as a child, you kind of the of childhood is that you kind of accept everything as it comes and you think its just temporary and you dont think about long term what should be. And for my parents, it was a very different experience. My father was an english professor. My mother a math professor on the forefront of developing computer technology. My very first memories of her were were for sitting in front of a computer that was the size of this room in china typing in on a black screen and. When we got here, she worked at a sweatshop on division street in chinatown. She made 0. 03 per article of clothing, attaching the label to the back of shirts and dresses. And i sat next to her and i snipped off the loose thread off every piece of clothing for 0. 01. And she told me to pretend it was a game that i was playing hide and seek with the thread i was snipping off and the way described the sweatshop room in the book is very much through my childhood lines of im just is my task of finding every Single Thread and if there is no thread that i can find, im going to rip one loose and cut it off because thats my job. Later on i would see my mother work much, much harder job. So even she would stand in ice water 14 hours at a time, processing sushi in a plant. She very rarely let slip what was going on deep down inside. But there were times when i would see her spit in the mug of a boss you had to bring tea to, and she would say things like, i was an academic. I was a professor, i was develop up in Computer Science and here i am fetching tea for someone who sees me as subhuman and thinks they can exploit me because by virtue of documents and that that that fate is still going on today, its not you know, it was in the nineties, but to this day, there are people who come here ready to contribute to country, to contribute all of their talents, training and really stuck in places where they are being exploited and. Weve about in the book about you said you didnt want send your kids to taft do you still feel that way and and if what have to change there and maybe its not just taft but in prep schools in general diverse students. Yeah i i was on the so i live los angeles now and i was just on the east coast two weeks ago doing a tour of various schools, basically like from massachusetts down to new york. And i would send its twofold. Its like i would send my kid to an Independent School actually live in l. A. , like down the street from one but i often because my college hosts all their interview stuff there so im there a lot and i quite like it. I just very firmly believe that i to be within 50 to 20 minutes of my Childs School so that i can be there, like should, should something go down the a lot of my pop culture references have not been flying with the children that ive been speaking to just because theyre not getting them but the one that actually has really stuck with them was theres this the they did the reboot of the fresh prince of bel air on on peacock and. There is a scene in it that i watched. Luckily after i had finished the book and because it would have just triggered me so badly otherwise its a scene where a white kid puts drugs into wills backpack because hes trying get him expelled from bel air academy, which is his Independent School that he goes and so well gets pulled into the head of Schools Office and theres like a whole like thing. And hes going to be expelled until like his aunt and uncle, uncle phil and aunt viv come down the mountain from their mansion and are like in the office, is immediately asking questions like making demands. Theyre like, we are paying tuition here . Like you have to have some sort of interaction with us in terms when it comes to punishing the child who is in our who who is its not his looking for who is in our care and the thing with boarding schools is that they use this phrase called in loco, which means in place, place of the parent and so you are basically saying when you send your kids to a boarding school, we trust, to make decisions as we the parents would. But i think when you are a black parent in america, there is a very specific way of like parenting and things that you have to deal that you that you cant necessarily trust a white person to be making the same decisions that you as a black parent would make or think of the same things or no like sort of how to deal with specific. And so for thats kind of why boarding school is just like not in the picture right now. Its also because specifically taft its actually not just because of the experiences that i had there because in some ways i am very thankful for the education that i got there. Its also because, quite frankly at the schools founded in 1890, theyre in a head of School Search right now, 1890, its 2022. There have only been five heads of school. Since 1890. So there have been five white men who have run that school since 1890. And so theyre all like have theyre all educators. So they all have the best interests of the kids at heart. But when you saw the current head of school was my head of school and he graduated from in 1978, went to college and then immediately came back to taft and has been there ever since. So the only place that he has really interacted with people of color in his lifetime has been at taft. So when you think about that, its like when that is the the administration in place and when that like the type of people theyre its really hard to then bring change into school because they have no other life experience. And so for taft specifically, thats kind of why thats thats where my thoughts immediately go. But school in general, i would certainly consider just because i also think that when youre the parent of any of any child of color in america or any child who is going to fit into a marginalized us space in america, youre kind of looking theres, theres Public School obviously. And then theres Independent School or private any of private school. And its like with Public School, its like the devil, you know versus the devil you dont know either way, youre going to be facing as a parent color some sort of racism. It just kind of depends which races and you feel you want to deal with it. Yeah, yeah. But danika, you read about book, you hired an Opposition Researcher to do look into dig up anything they might throw at you in your first two campaigns. Right . Both of them. Yeah, both of them. And i just would like to read one line that was very funny from your book where you say, quote, theres nothing like watching a Television Ad portraying me as a conceited. I knew i was an absolute lie. I am not conceited. I just thought of some of the humor in the book. But what what what kinds of i mean and then in your some of your chapter kind of beginnings, they also the actual up research that they found. And you said there was some that was accurate, some that was way off base. Is that anything so . Nothing surprised you, i guess so. If you listen to the audiobook, which i also narrated, youll youll get the right diction for how i, i said i am not conceited and smart. And another one of the headlines that i really like. They actually was there was the chapter where two weeks before my first election, 2017, there there is a Washington Post headline that says rome or it was it was marshall ad accuses rome of lewd behave here an old video of her bad and the then executive of the Republican Party of virginia john finley says that in this video is clearly implied direct performed group oral sex and i wrote well whoa whoa time out hold on implied. Was that was pretty direct john sack in it was the equivalent of a spit take on snl or the daily show and quite frankly and this is really kind like one of the things i really wanted to get at with especially doing a lot of the Opposition Research and everything and including all that after 2016, where it was not unacceptable for a majority of voters, according to the electoral college, to vote for someone who bragged about sexually assaulting women openly about it as locker room, talk to, call whatever they wanted. I thought, what the hell in my background is anything even close to what this guy has done and hes gotten elected president United States for it. And then he put Brett Kavanaugh on the supreme court, by the way so is making someone laugh with a pg 13 joke in a comedy video from 2012 going to be my downfall . Well, apparently not. So, you know, i looked at that. I the first part, you know, where they were you know hit me on tv ad for it and i think how well i wanted to do here they really get part in the book is i even thought about having a section my website called the dirt where i would just put my stuff out there and then i would compare all the other terrible things, you know, whether my now predecessor had and theres an actual headline you can find if you look it up that says that is the cbs news headline of where i was. Marshall says that are marshall says that disabled children are gods punishment for abortion. Thats who was up against. He was like the 13 times over 26 years since i was seven years old. He was the selfdescribed chief homophobe of virginia who authored the states constitutional amendment against marriage equality. Offered, you know, bathroom bill and all the other sort of stuff. My gut, my Current Governor is now trying to do, by the way, its not going to go over well for im going to sue all other things. I looked at that. I was like, well then, yeah, i dont come from central casting. Yes, i have lived very funny life in some regards where you front metal bands for 12 years and we were a drinking band our big song for drunk on arrival theres stories behind that. I mean i had cops break up our one show two times. I was out in a farm in knoxville and at the second time where they cut, they told us to cut the power and everything. I then had the crowd do all sort clapping together like, and we did an a cappella version of drunk on arrival that was kind of fun, but i wanted to tell those stories to encourage people in the that the central premise of this book, the central, you know, like the thesis was own your narrative. I spent decades of my life allowing the fear of what other people thought about me, control the narrative i would put out there. But, you know, its funny when you own your own narrative, when you actually start telling your own stories and you start living your own truth as we say in lgbtq world, youre authentic sense of self. You know what happens that point suddenly. Not only are you not afraid of all the other sort of things, whatever, but the Opposition Research thats out there, what are they going . Do you want something youve already talked about . Hits. You want something youve already put out there . You know, for the republican redskins against me next year, heres 320 pages of Opposition Research. Have fun. But like what are going to hit me when ive already said . Yeah. Here are all my foibles. My warts, flaws, everything else. And im still standing. Ive been elected over life of earned election three times. Now weve passed 32 of my bills into law, including ten to feed hungry kids. And the reason that i keep coming back and you know, i keep earning election is because my constituents, like the job that im doing, i show up in front of them authentically myself, i speak to them authentic actually myself. A funny thing is in northern virginia, you got a lot of new york transplants. And so soon as i go in front of like a town hall and heritage home, which is like a 55, an Older Community and i know like have to cross from new york. I just let my mothers voice over and i start really condescending really quickly toward common enemy. So its like, can you believe mail in drivers, you know, just like this sort of thing. But what i also find is that you can be radically different from people around and still find Common Ground is when youre yourself because you know my voters will tell you very often the anchor i have no idea what its like being trans, nor do i even probably care. The metal thing thats just weird. I dont get it, but i do get that. You get stuck in your commute too. I do get that. Youre the only person in town who actually has a plan to fix my commute. Go do something. It will you. And the way part thats under construction now. So long and short of it. You know what . Im really trying to stress and burn the page. Is that real importance of unabashedly being yourself . No matter who youre up against . Because what are you going to . Whats what is in your story thats worse than the now former president United States, who is now a viable contender again for a nomination for a third election cycle in a row . What is worse . Well, then go be yourself. If running for office is your plan, go it. But otherwise, if its just getting around, being employed, having you family or just being yourself in day to day, well, go do it because this is your to. Chin you would said and this is it probably will be somewhat but mirrors may be or maybe not but kendra was talking about you said that you could not have felt more out of place at yale law. What what were those some of the experiences that made you feel that way . You know, the end to the American Dream is so often you come here, poor immigrant and you make it to the ivy league. Thats the happy ending. And the truth is, my years that swarthmore and you were absolutely the most miserable of my life. I would have happily traded those days for going back to the sweatshop with my mother. I felt so out of place, so ostracized, so incredibly ashamed of my background. My first day at swarthmore, i came upon a few white girls just hanging out in the cafeteria and they were talking and i wanted to fit in. They were talking about writing. So i sat down and i was like, huh . I never learned to ride a bike. And they were like, were talking about horses. And i was like, oh, think about riding horses and think people did that. And im like, oh, thats funny. I dont know how to ride those either. And they just stare at me and then i start listing things. I didnt know how to do because i wanted to. I thought, like, vulnerability, you know being me would pull in. So i was like, i dont know how to swim, you know, i still know how to drive. And they just look at me, theyre like, do you not have a childhood or something . Like what . This look of disgust. And they just walked. And from day on i knew there was something wrong with me that did not in, in this world and i had always loved to read and write my father was an english lit professor. He grew up in a dissident and his most Cherished Memories were pulling out. His eldest brothers band books from america and from england, from the floorboards his eldest brother had been persecuted and thrown in prison and when he missed his brother most, he would pull those out and read them by candlelight. Dickens. Twain. If Scott Fitzgerald and he would dream of this place where there was equality and justice and you couldnt make your own way. And that was the story of america that he had told me. And so i thought if i spoke english perfectly, not to give suspicions of the fact that i might be undocumented, not, you know, fall into the stereotype. Asians cant speak english. If i could just speak english perfectly. If i could write perfectly, then i would be accepted and first time this happened was in the fifth grade, i worked my off on a on an essay and i was like, i finally made it been in america for three years. I can write as good as a white person. Hopefully better and it was the first white male teacher i had. He called me up to the front of the classroom and he says, i dont think you wrote this. And im like, who could write it . My parents are working all the time. There is no one else i know who speaks english could possibly have written this. And he was, like this, is not the kind of writing we see in those chinatown school. And i would love say that that stopped. I would love to say that but it happened over and over and over again and through my schooling, i just learned that was something inside me that did not match the outside of me. So every time before i handed in something, i would go in and just put in misspellings. I would just change the grammar so it was wrong. And i thought once i got to swarthmore, once i got to yale, once i proved myself, that would be gone. Well, six years after i graduated from yale law school, id been a lawyer for six years. I by then i became a citizen in 2016. Unfortunate year. But i felt very grateful. 22 years after i first landed here. So by that time, i a citizen, i was a lawyer. Ive been arguing court for for years. My supervisor calls me and whos this office and this was a supervisor that had seen me stand up in court, had seen me counsel clients, had seen me develop Case Strategy from the ground up. He calls me into his office. And the minute i look at him, i know coming because ive seen it a million times before. And he says this brief is remarkably well written. Who did you copy from . And i had some very, very choice words for him that i will not repeat. I quit that job a few months later and that was when i had it. I have played your game for far too long. Im going to be me. Im not to make myself smaller because it fits in your vision of me. Im not going to make myself smaller to fit in that box that i was trapped in before i could understand what was happening. And that is the reality of what so many children grow up with here of unfortunate you dont fit in to whatever you think the mainstream might be that they learn to shrink and they stay shrunken because they think theres something wrong them when the only thing wrong with them is their excellence. And so if i was going to go out there and tell my to tell their truth and share their story with the court, i had to do that myself. And that was first day of the rest of my life. And then. I okay, ive ive got to sort of come back to sort the since youre all memoirists and how you you can just go kind of down the line here when you when you were writing were there things that you were surprised you remembered too you had more detail. You wanted be there were things that you wished knew and you had to be. You called on a or Family Member name to sort of fill the blanks. That because i just want a little bit about since this is a book festival your process. Yeah ill go really quickly i was i was very lucky actually because i was an obsessive compulsive child and i saved literally. So i when i sat down to write this, i had a wealth of information. Not only did i have a livejournal that like i would sometimes i sometimes updated my livejournal like five times a day, like between classes documenting, things that were like happening in classes with my friends. I also before i could find a program, i coded a program myself, automatically saved all of my messages. So i have every message i ever had from high school. So when it came to like recreating the voices of my friends or things that happened in the classroom i just had everything i, my, my mom just sold her house, actually, and she gave me a folder of like all of this other stuff from high school, some of which i had. Like it had my First College list ever, that physical piece of paper that my College Counselor printed it and handed it to me, i had another copy back in california, but then it had all these like sort of teacher reports as well, and some of that. Stuff i actually wish i had had while i was writing the book because it really illuminated for me another of the way that a lot of, again, the white teachers saw my relationships, my other with my black friends and with other students of color on campus there was a lot of complaint. I hung out too much with younger kids and what that said to me was that they were not asking the sort of lack of choice that had, but also the very important, i think, role of when you are an older student of color on campuses hanging out with the freshmen, hanging out with the sophomores to make sure that they feel comfortable and that they feel welcome. There was also a lot of complaints that, like i said, too much time on the internet or like that i wasnt enough with the other kids in my dorm. And a lot of that too was my mom had actually called the school after sophomore year and made so that me and my best friend also could never live together and so we like i was living alone in these dorms with just like a lot of other white kids. And so, no, i wasnt socializing with them. I was socializing with my friends on livejournal and like online stuff. And then also with like the black kids on campus. So thats like one thing that i wish i had had. So i think it would have added definitely another interesting part to the book. So i was blacked out at the First Consulate in 2012 after drinking das boot in another liter beer right before my bands uk started and i to fill in some of those blanks because. Yeah, they were definitely still gone. And so i called my drummer who was 19 at the time. So he had to be the server one and he told me exactly what happened on the new york city subway when i took him to the wrong airport. And apparently i was high fiving everyone and i was like, oh my god, were to uk. And this one guy goes, and this the this is months before i started my transition. So i was still presenting as male and the guy, this one guy goes to my drummer, you need to get a hold of your friend and he goes, dont own. And i said in the book i would have thrown me under a bus to misgendering, notwithstanding. But one of the other things i did was i called some of my campaign folks from a 2017 and some of the other folks and i asked for their stories in the trail and really help fill in some of those chapters to. And i would talk to my mom and heres one of the together in a real process. I was falling behind on my deadlines like, you know, like, like bless Emily Wunderlich and everyone over at viking. They had so much patience with me because once covid happens, my office, we were swamped. We constituent service work that was taking 12, 14 hours a day and then do it again the next day and again next day. You know, it was just i wasnt making the time, right. So i finally had deadline. And once once bah bah, she saved the day and she would call me and basically interview me for like 2 hours at a time. Sometimes and because im you asked me a question, im National Storyteller with just like this she would type it like basically everything is tell her send it to me and then i could put that in narrative form on certain things when i would fall behind. On most other occasions, i would get up at 3 00, 4 00 in the morning. He gives her earl gray tea, because thats the thing and thats my drink of choice. I dont do coffee and. I would just type it until i couldnt type anymore. And then i had start my day or Something Like that and what works for me is not necessarily whats going to work for everyone else here, but i absolutely do recommend to any of you who are who are writing, even if you have everything cataloged in your life and its amazing. Oh, my god. Or you dont. Despite being a reporter for most of my life, what i would very, very suggest to you is talk to other people youve interact with because they might remember something a little different than you and just start telling to each other. If you get someone really going in the storytelling, youre going to find some really good pieces that just might make your cut. So i focus my book on, ages seven, to 12. Those particularly momentous years, my life, but the focus on those years was really because of my chief belief that all of the truth of who we are, all of our strength and wisdom, are locked up in those years. And if we encountered a time when learn to be less ourselves, to hide ourselves from the world, it likely goes back to those years before we were teenagers. Before we were adults, we were just bumping the worlds, trying to understand what was happening with our full hearts out for for consumption. And i think that the best thing an adult can do was to go back to that time and reclaim some of that openness and vulnerability. So the problem with focusing on those years, of course, it was a long time ago, but thankfully revered harriet the spy. Yeah, i wanted be her. I wrote down everything around me to try to solve the mystery in new york. Unfortunately its boring no mysteries but i knew what i ate in second grade for lunch, you know, and i wanted my book to be an experience where people opened beautiful country and they felt like they were stepping into my body and seeing everything as i saw it. And then that way they could reawaken that childhood part of them, their cells and that childhood heart is still inside that maybe has been silenced for a little bit longer. So i would read the diary trying to understand and this childs there would be like five pages at a time where i would fixate on my classmate and how she ate strawberry shortcake popsicle every day and how that strawberry shortcake popsicle was so annoying because it had perfect pink and red and white dots all over it. And it had 50, probably 50 dots on one side. And i would think, what is this child rambling on about . Why is she fixated with the dots . And then i realize, oh, she was hungry, she wanted to know what it taste didnt like and not what it looked like, but what it looked like was the only thing she had access to and so in that experience i was really able to get into this childs mind. But of course i had not been able to revisit these really troubling memories for a long time. So the longer i did that, the more damaged i felt and i went into therapy for her beauty years before i could start to write my book, i needed to understand the depths of the love and longing and fear that she struggles with and buried for so long. And when i really had trouble accessing that voice for years, i did what i found helped me. It was completely by accident. I was really short on time. I was making partner. I was hundred hours a week. My only free time from client calls and emails was the subway. I had very limited reception and one day i looked down on my phone and im like, i have so many emails to do. I have this book to write and i cant it im just stuck on this train. And then i saw the notes app, so i opened it up and i started writing and i used to commute to and from school every