Pauline Nguyen

speaker

164 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 3 Feb

Pauline Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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The Moth · Punks, Blessings, Burlesque and Lotus Flowers: The Moth Radio Hour · 3 Feb 2026 podcast

And I carried this anger for many years.

And later, when my partner and I wanted to have a child, I was determined that this cycle end there.

I was determined to not be the same person I had always been because I was frightened.

Frightened of history repeating, frightened of treating my own child the way I had been treated, and I needed the cycle to end there.

I could not pass on my anger to the next generation.

Towards the end of my pregnancy, I landed a book deal to write a memoir about my family.

And as I'm writing this book, my fears returned.

As I'm writing this book, I'm thinking, how am I possibly going to survive my father's reaction to this story?

There are ten chapters all up in my book, and it's not meant to be a scathing account about my father.

It is a beautiful story about personal freedom and family and hope.

But in order to talk about the good things, I have to talk about the bad things as well.

And it was my plan to finish my book and give it to my father in its entirety so that he could see the full arc of the story and so that he could see what a beautiful story it really is.

But as I'm writing this book, this cloud of dread is hanging over me.

I know that one day it's going to be published, and I know that one day the world's going to read it, and I'm just dreading the day my father's going to read it.

But there's a job to be done and a story that needs to be told, and so I write.

By the end of the seventh chapter, my father demands to read my story.

And I freak out.

I freak out because he can't read it now.

It's not finished.

The seventh chapter is actually the most confronting chapter, and it was the most difficult chapter for me to write.

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