Radiolab's "Yellow Rain" Segment
“That the story would be heard and the Hmong deaths would be documented and recognized, that’s why he agreed to do the interview…That what we know has been questioned again and again is not a surprise to him or to me. I agreed to the interview for the same reason - that Radiolab was interested in the Hmong story…We can play the semantics game. We can. But I am not interested. My uncle is not interested. We have lost too much heart and too many people in the process.”
Very powerful segment from the Radiolab podcast “The Fact of the Matter,” broadcast on September 20, 2012. The segment titled “Yellow Rain” features an interview with Eng Yang, a survivor of the Hmong genocide and an official documenter of the Hmong experience for the Thai government, and his translator and niece Kao Kalia Yang, an award-winning author and activist. In the interview, the Yangs were interrogated about the scientific truth of the incident with little respect to their personal experience. The above quote is an excerpt from Kalai’s response after Robert Krulwich trivializes Eng’s experience with yellow rain as “hearsay.”
Kalia published a response to this podcast yesterday titled “The Science of Racism: Radiolab’s Treatment of the Hmong Experience.”
Robert Krulwich issued an apology statement the day after the podcast was published.
Radio Ambulante is a Spanish-language public radio program whose goal is “to create a community of storytellers and listeners from around Latin America and the U.S.”
The program was started by David Alarcón. According to his impressive bio, he’s the author of a graphic novel, two story collections, and Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post, among others, and winner of the 2009 International Literature Prize.
Radio Ambulante is currently running a Kickstarter project to help raise funds to develop the program, which you can check out here.
