Transcript: A to BE Episode 9

Mimi Kwa (00:03):
People say life is a journey, not a destination, but how do you know you are on the right path?
Jo Stanley (00:10):
If only we could see the signs when they appear.
Mimi Kwa (00:13):
Well, I’m Mimi Qua.
Jo Stanley (00:14):
And I’m Joe Stanley.
Mimi Kwa (00:15):
And on A to B, we speak to fascinating people about how they navigated their way to be here now having profound impact on the world.
Jo Stanley (00:25):
We hope our conversations will help you reflect on everything you’ve been through to get here, the triumphs, challenges and bumps along the road. And
Mimi Kwa (00:35):
If you haven’t already, find your own map to what matters.
Jo Stanley (00:41):
Mimi. Here we are in episode nine, and at my suggestion, I’m interviewing you.
Mimi Kwa (00:48):
Thank you for suggesting that, Joe, I think
Jo Stanley (00:52):
Now we’re making this episode all about you because you have written a memoir. It’s called The House of Choir. It’s had a worldwide release. Amazing. It’s very beautiful, and I think it opens the door to so many really heart-centered questions, maybe even answers around our A to B journeys. So I thought, well, we need to dive into this with you. For me, it really was centered around the concept of how our family shapes us, our ancestors, even those that we might not have even met how they create us for now. So I felt you needed an episode of
Mimi Kwa (01:29):
Your own. Oh, thank you. Well, I’ve got a book of my own.
Jo Stanley (01:33):
That’s it. You’ve earned it. So that’s my first question to you. Is that why you write a memoir so that you can understand who you are better?
Mimi Kwa (01:41):
Well, I wrote my memoir because it was a form of therapy. It was actually just journaling to begin with, and then it started to form into a book. And quite obviously, I was writing a book, but I didn’t realize I was writing a book until somebody read a few pages and said, oh my gosh, that’s a book. And that was a friend of mine. And I thought, yes, I must deep down have known that it was the beginnings of a book because I would not have handed the first pages to my friend if I didn’t want somebody to read it.
Jo Stanley (02:14):
Right. And therapy is about trying to understand who we are in a lot of ways, isn’t it? It’s about sort of working through things that are stuck in us.
Mimi Kwa (02:23):
Yeah, I mean, writing is a form of therapy, and so it took me five years to write House of Choir, but that was in between all sorts of life events. And I basically wrote it at soccer, football, dancing, swimming, every type of kid’s activity that I had to drop off and pick up from. And I’d just sit in the car and I would just write. And it was so therapeutic and it was so cathartic, and it was so rewarding and joyful at times. And then it was also really dark and challenging when I got to certain elements, particularly of my story in more modern times, or not that my childhood is that modern. It’s quite a long time ago, but that was tough.
Jo Stanley (03:09):
It’s fascinating too, which let’s not get bogged down in the process of the writing, but you would’ve been a different person five years later than when you first started the book.
Mimi Kwa (03:17):
Oh, totally. And that book has been that juncture, that sliding door moment, if you will, on A to B. That changed my life. I mean, we are sitting here now, had I not written the book, you and I would not have met and I would not have sort of gone on this amazing trajectory where I’m meeting so many readers and people through the book and it’s opening opportunities for me to speak to more people, and that begets more and more. And that is so fantastic to me because it allows me to share something that’s so authentically, uniquely mine, which is my story, and to be able to help people as much as I can with that. Because I was even thinking today, everything that’s teachable has already been taught to an extent. There are so many experts and everybody’s an expert in something. And I guess the only thing that I’m really an expert in is me,
Jo Stanley (04:14):
And
Mimi Kwa (04:14):
I’m the only one that can teach the things that I have learned in the way that I have learned them.
Jo Stanley (04:20):
But what’s wonderful is that the things you have learned whilst specific to you, are universal.
Mimi Kwa (04:26):
Yes.
Jo Stanley (04:27):
That’s human existence, right?
Mimi Kwa (04:29):
Exactly. Exactly. And we are all just completely interconnected in terms of the intergenerational traumas that we have experienced across culture, across time, the personal experiences that we’ve had, the family relationships that we have. Everything is so relatable in all of our lives, and I think that is what links us inextricably as human beings, is just this human experience that we are all living, and so many people feel so separate from others when in fact, there is so much more that we have in common with one another
Jo Stanley (05:04):
Than
Mimi Kwa (05:04):
Differentiates us.
Jo Stanley (05:06):
Absolutely. Well, let’s get to the story. It weaves its way from your great grandfather in China in 1884 through the generations via Hong Kong and World War II to your life story, which started in Perth. So there’s many events that make up your journey, and we will get to those. But the first thing I was struck by is your knowledge of your family from so long ago. Your writing is so present, you put yourself in the experience of your great-grandfather in China, which is beautiful. But how did you know? I mean, so many of us don’t have that connection with our family members from so far back.
Mimi Kwa (05:42):
Well, a lot of it of course, I didn’t know because I wasn’t there. So the dialogue, the setting, the scenery, I mean, that’s just something that I felt from all of the cultural experiences that I’ve had in China and Hong Kong, all of the things that I’ve read, all of the films that I’ve digested, all of that obviously informed my writing because it’s not separate to everything else. But the one thing that I had was my connection to my auntie, and she told me, and my other aunties as well, told me lots of stories when I was a child that I just thought, oh, that, oh, just another story and just another anecdote, just another, oh, when I was young sort of thing. And that in the end just turned out to be so invaluable because once I was able to string that family story together and really get the sense of how difficult it must have been growing up in China at that time, and just the size of the families. My dad had 32 brothers and sisters, but his father had goodness knows how many, because it wasn’t documented. And a lot of the girls were not documented unless they had sons themselves. So they were only legitimized by bringing a boy into the world.
Jo Stanley (07:04):
It felt aristocratic in a way, the way that your great grandfather lived, and then the concubines and this very traditional Chinese house that was like a court. It felt like a court to me as I read it, but it felt like you’re connected to it somehow. Did you feel a connection?
Mimi Kwa (07:22):
Yes, I do feel a connection to that. Not because I think that I’m any sort of aristocrat, but because my dad clearly does. He’s quiet face. So I think I’ve probably grown up with just this expectation that I am connected to the emperor somehow because my dad loves to bang on about it. And he got hold of some supposed inverted commas truth in recent years and pointed out that we were 24th generation choir and descent, direct descendants of the emperor. But then I have to point out that every Chinese family is a direct descendant of the emperor. So we are all children of the dragon.
Jo Stanley (08:05):
You talk about the dragon and the tiger. Can you give me an understanding of the significance of the dragon and the tiger?
Mimi Kwa (08:12):
Yeah, so the dragon and the tiger are both very important celestial signs in the Chinese Zodiac, I was born year of the tiger, sadly, because it doesn’t fit the narrative of the story. My dad isn’t born in the year of the dragon, but to actually be able to bring it all together, I have a grandfather who was So to bring it all in, it just seemed that the battle between me and my dad in court, which is where the story starts.
Jo Stanley (08:42):
Yes, we’ll get to that in a minute.
Mimi Kwa (08:43):
My dad sues me in the Supreme Court, the metaphor of the tiger, and the dragon just seemed to fit better than the tiger and the pig,
Jo Stanley (08:57):
The best poetic license I’ve had. No, but the fact is this is I guess where I’m really trying to AB, how much of us is made up by just literally the DNA that we carry, right? And so you are carrying the dragon’s DNA as is your father who may have been born in the year of the pig, but doesn’t matter.
Mimi Kwa (09:18):
Doesn’t exactly. Doesn’t matter. As my dad would say. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.
Jo Stanley (09:23):
Just leave it out, leave it out. I support your choice around the dragon, but also I do see that it connects great-great-grandfather
Mimi Kwa (09:32):
With
Jo Stanley (09:32):
You now, and in fact, at the end of the book with your own children as well, in a really beautiful way that felt very mystical as well. I mean, there’s a spiritualism to it that was really beautiful.
Mimi Kwa (09:43):
Well, there really is, and obviously that metaphor of the dragon and the idea that those qualities really do come down through the bloodline, and they’re just expressed in every generation, and this is really my metaphor for the intergenerational behaviors and patterns that we carry with us, unless we put an end to those unhelpful patterns and behaviors and stop the cycle.
Jo Stanley (10:10):
Yes. Someone said to me once that trauma travels through generations until someone is the full stop
Mimi Kwa (10:16):
To that
Jo Stanley (10:17):
And that someone is you.
Mimi Kwa (10:19):
Yeah. I mean that someone is me in my own lane, whereas of course, I have siblings and I have other people of my generation of choir who are putting full stops or commas or semicolons who are punctuating that in their own way. For me, it was writing a book. I mean, some people say to me, oh my gosh, how could you write your family history, your own history for the world to see? And I think, well, I’m a journalist by trade. I’m a storyteller just by birth. And I just feel like looking back at the whole process, I now think, how could I not have done that? That was my destiny to write that story. It was actually my destiny and my father’s for us to end up in court against one another. I mean, this was all, if you believe in some sort of fate and some sort of higher force guiding us through life, then it was all, it was predestined. It was predetermined. It was written before we lived it.
Jo Stanley (11:22):
The book opens with your father suing you. And I don’t know how much spoiler alert there is to this.
Mimi Kwa (11:27):
Well, I can explain a little because that is how the book opens
(11:31):
Without giving the denouement. So the book begins with me receiving the documents from the Supreme Court giving me the information that my dad is suing me in the Supreme Court. And that’s the first that I’ve heard of it when I open this letter and that then triggers a full-blown panic attack is the only way that I can describe it really. And a breakdown, for lack of a better way to put it. And I literally went gray overnight. And the timing is perfect because as you know, Joe, I got my grays covered today. But what started my, and of course my hair would eventually have gone gray anyway, but not overnight in a matter of hours. So it puts paid to the truth of Marie Antoinette and other people throughout history who have famously gone gray overnight because of the stress, the cortisol that just seeps through you and somehow into your hair.
Jo Stanley (12:31):
Yes. So without giving away the ending and why the
Mimi Kwa (12:35):
Oh, yes. Why was he suing me? Yes, yes, sorry. So he was suing me because he was one of 32 brothers and sisters. Sometimes I say he had 32 brothers and sisters. But truth be known, there is no actual evidence to show whether it was 32, 33, 34, some newspaper articles on the family say they were 28. But then my dad and my aunties say, well, that didn’t count some of the siblings who passed away. So when I am inconsistent, you’re not allowed to pull me up on it, because
Jo Stanley (13:05):
That’s a dream of it. I would like to point out that his father had three wives. Yes. It was not 32 to one woman. That’s
Mimi Kwa (13:13):
Right. No, it was not. However, 32, still a lot. So he sued me over the estate of one of his sisters, my late auntie who left me in charge of her affairs. And that made my dad very, very cross so cross in track that he was like a dragon.
Jo Stanley (13:36):
Dragon.
Mimi Kwa (13:37):
Yes.
Jo Stanley (13:38):
You, however, being the tiger,
Mimi Kwa (13:40):
Yes, I had to use my jungle tenacity and whilst to get myself out of that situation that it was a bit more than a scrape really, wasn’t it? But it was certainly a tangle and a tussle, and it was, for me, it actually triggered an awakening for me just on my own purpose and my own mortality and so many very, very deep things that I’ve written about in subsequent books that I hope one day will be published. But it was almost like there’s that expression that you have to crack open for the light to come in. And that experience of being sued by my dad really cracked me open. And I felt like it was darkness, but in actual fact, it was the darkness leaving me through writing the book and it was allowing the light in.
Jo Stanley (14:31):
So you’re a different person because that happened
Mimi Kwa (14:33):
So different.
Jo Stanley (14:34):
In what way?
Mimi Kwa (14:35):
Actually, I’m going to rephrase that. I’m not a different person. I’m just more of who I am. I love
Jo Stanley (14:40):
That. So
Mimi Kwa (14:41):
All of the stuff throughout life that has molded me and cajoled me to be one way or the other, and that has encouraged me to up who I truly am and all of the influences and the conditioning throughout life that have made me think that I have to behave in a different way or that I don’t need to be sincere to myself, all of those things just started to fall away because I began to see it for what it was. And I think a lot of us walked through life accepting that about our conditioning and our upbringing and who we are. Doesn’t matter what age, we just accept it. Maybe not even with any sense of consciousness about it. It’s just the way it is. Well, that’s just the way that girls behave, or that’s just the way that boys behave, or that’s just the way that it is. Or
Jo Stanley (15:32):
In our family, this is how we are.
Mimi Kwa (15:34):
Yeah, that’s how we do it in our family. And so then it just becomes this almost mass amnesia, and in my case, it was my singular amnesia to who I truly am. So I feel like that whole process has allowed me to recognize and realize that who I truly am has always been there, but I’ve allowed that armor and those superficialities of personality to ever way.
Jo Stanley (16:05):
I love this about the tiger, you being the tiger quiet on the outside tigers raw within. So there’s a lot going on underneath there.
Mimi Kwa (16:14):
Yeah. I think that says a lot about the strength that we all have as women and girls is that we, and of course I can’t speak for everyone, but sometimes I say we, the royal, we are conditioned in society to behave a certain way. We’re conditioned to be the mouse, but inside we are the lion.
Jo Stanley (16:36):
And
Mimi Kwa (16:36):
Really that’s what that lion speaks to is this idea that I was brought up to be educated and to believe in equity, but I was also brought up contrarily to be meek and to only speak when spoken to in certain situations and that women and girls had their place. So it was this weird maybe tension and contradiction that a lot of us live with
Jo Stanley (17:07):
Where,
Mimi Kwa (17:08):
Hang on, but you told me I could be anything.
Jo Stanley (17:12):
Yes,
Mimi Kwa (17:13):
But now you’re telling me I’m not allowed to be at the table because the uncles are over and it’s only men.
Jo Stanley (17:19):
But I think that that sense of being made smaller version of you or just not given an opportunity to include yourself in whatever’s going on, is sometimes about gender, sometimes about control. And I think as you alluded to that sense of we don’t want your uniqueness to be here because it’s not what we expect of someone. We wanted you to be a certain kind of person,
Mimi Kwa (17:45):
But still be a doctor.
Jo Stanley (17:46):
Yeah, be a doctor or a lawyer. Why aren’t you a doctor or a lawyer? Yeah, that’s right. We’ll get to your career in a little bit, but you talk about this conditioning growing up to be a different version of actually who you are on the inside. A lot of that though, would you say, and you speak and write at great length about the trauma that you lived with growing up, both from your father and his continual mad cap ideas and shenanigans, right? Yes. Shenanigans, but also because of your mother’s extreme mental ill health, which was profound. So to a degree, perhaps it was survival for you.
Mimi Kwa (18:24):
Yeah, definitely not being my true self, it was about survival because you work out in life what works, and if you do something and it works, then you do it again. So with behavior, if we behave in a certain way and it works, then oh, well, that’s something that I’m going to keep doing. And the reverse for stamping out behaviors that don’t work. So say as a little girl, if I showed up and I was just being genuine and being me, and I got slapped down for it metaphorically or physically, then you think, well, hang on. I’m not going to do that again. So we navigate life just working out what works for us and what doesn’t. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the right way because we are just responding to these external triggers. And so it’s just the circumstance that you find yourself in that determines what it is that your particularly personal algorithm comes up with as being, oh, that is the right way.
(19:23):
And it’s crazy when you think about it, when you actually have the space to look back, which I’ve been very privileged, I’ve got to say. I mean, writing a book and I talk about, oh gosh, so hard sitting in the car writing a book, really, I’m so lucky that I’ve had the time and the headspace and the psychological support and all of the other modalities that I’ve had around me as all of the trauma came up after the court situation with my dad, I’m so lucky that I’ve been able to bring that to the fore so that I could heal and so that I can use this book to maybe help other people, or maybe they just enjoy the book for the ride that it is.
Jo Stanley (20:06):
I do think it’s a really important book from that point of view as far as helping other people. Can you share around the trauma that you grew up with your mother? Because I think that the mental health conversation is really important, but also understanding who you are, because you mentioned a memory that stays with you, memories that are formed at age three and four, that is always in, you always still, what impact does that even have, right?
Mimi Kwa (20:37):
Yeah. I mean, we know about neural pathways and the more that you think something, the more you think something. And we also have this propensity to default to the negative, so it’s called negative bias. So all of this was exacerbated in me because my mom was an undiagnosed schizophrenic and chronic schizophrenic as now the diagnosis is. And she was so paranoid that not only did I have the normal human negative bias that we all have, I had my mom who was very acutely paranoid of everybody and everything around her that they were out to get her out to get ass out to kill us. It was really, that was the soundtrack of my childhood going into a bank and my mom saying, watch out. It was like, know that movie, A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe, it was really like she was sort of living this alter egoic life, but because I was her child, she sort of drew me into it as well.
(21:43):
So I’m also very lucky, and I used to wake up every day as a teenager and pinch myself. I would look in the mirror and I would just be waiting for it to descend on me. And that’s what really I find still so emotional now, is that I just had such a long period of my life just thinking, surely it’s going to happen to me because I’m her daughter. And it didn’t. And it took me a long time to kind of come to terms with that very happy, positive outcome, I suppose. Yeah, it’s really looking back on that period with my mom, and I love my mom so much and she has taught me so much because having children, obviously you develop patience and you learn so much from your children, but she was like my child from a young age because even when all of the paranoia set in, even when she was barricading herself in her room, or even when she was thinking that people were out to get her, there would always come a time with my childhood when I would wake up and realize, hang on, that’s not right. Not everybody is behaving like that, or, no, I didn’t hear that person say that. So I don’t know at what age it dawned on me or it began to dawn on me that there was something wrong, that my mom was seeing the world differently to everybody else. So I can’t pinpoint that moment, but I know that it happened because I then became like her mother and became very protective of her because I realized that she wasn’t experiencing the world the way that most people I knew were experiencing the world.
Jo Stanley (23:27):
But at a very young age, from a very young age, you also quite literally was involved in saving her when she attempted suicide, that kind of experience no child should have. It impacts the child you are. How does it impact the adult you are even?
Mimi Kwa (23:48):
It makes me very or had before a lot of therapy. It made me very triggered over so many things, particularly parenting. You hear about helicopter parents, and I’ve never really been a helicopter parent, but I’ve always been overly nervous. I think about my children taking risks or harm coming to anybody that I love. And I think that, of course, that’s a natural thing in all of us. But again, it was magnified or exacerbated because of my experience as a child, because that’s my, as far as I can think, that’s my first memory is finding my mom lying there after she had tried to commit suicide. And so for that to be, I was three and I had to call the ambulance. I didn’t know how to call an ambulance. My dad had taught me the speed dial on the phone to call him in the office.
(24:43):
So I pressed the speed dial on the phone and it went through to him at his work. He worked for the public works department, good old fashioned job in those days, and he answered the phone and he called the ambulance, and the ambulance got there before my dad could get home. And I was standing by the window and I remember the paramedics just telling me to get out of the way so that they could smash the window to get in because I couldn’t reach the door or I didn’t know how to open the door to let them in. So that was my first memory, and understandably, it ingrained itself in my brain because obviously that was one of my probably first real feelings of that fight or flight and that cortisol and that pressure. And also seeing my primary caregiver dying. I guess that’s just instinctual in all of us as humans. Like, oh my gosh, that survival, that connection to her, how am I going to survive?
Jo Stanley (25:47):
The one I love
Mimi Kwa (25:48):
Is it was
Jo Stanley (25:48):
Just so much that in people now we know that it creates hypervigilance. It also changes even as you say, the cortisol. And it can change the structure of how those sorts of hormones travel through our body.
Mimi Kwa (26:05):
Absolutely. And I think
Jo Stanley (26:06):
Are you aware of that as a person now?
Mimi Kwa (26:09):
Yes, I am, because I meditate a lot. I do a lot to actually regulate the physiological responses that my body has to triggers that bring back memories or bring back just that physical experience of being in a time and in a place. And so yeah, I’m very aware that it’s still in me, and I still do some very helpful deep breathing exercises at times when I see my mom and a will come back, and that’s not her now, and it’s not me now, and yet I’m almost 50 years old. And to still be experiencing that 47 years on from that first memory, it just shows you how profoundly impactful traumatic experiences are on children
Jo Stanley (27:02):
If
Mimi Kwa (27:02):
You’re still processing it so far down the path.
Jo Stanley (27:07):
When did you first decide to develop that spiritual practice? Because this is the Mimi, I know this very,
Mimi Kwa (27:14):
You are coming into my
Jo Stanley (27:15):
Story at a really good time. No, I would’ve loved every version of Mimi, but I just find it fascinating that your energy is one of extreme calm, which of course can belie what goes on underneath. But at what point and how and why was there a person, an event that sent you on this sort of more spiritual path?
Mimi Kwa (27:39):
I had a series of little mini breakdowns, I think since that cracking open from the court case and from all of the different traumas coming up. And I think those little mini breakdowns were different traumas that would arise in dreams or just in my waking life. I’d touch something, smell something, walk past something, and all of a sudden this memory that I’d forgotten, I had hope that’s not a tology, but
Jo Stanley (28:05):
This
Mimi Kwa (28:06):
Memory would pop up and I’d be triggered and my heart would beat faster, and I’d start to have an anxiety attack, and these things would come up completely unexpectedly because I’d already opened the can of worms, and I can see why older generations and I can see why other people want to keep it buried. I understand that. I totally get it because I heard this analogy the other day. It’s like running a magnet over your heart and you have all of this metal in your heart from all of the traumas and all of the hurt that has happened to you, and running the magnet over your heart and pulling that out, that is painful. It really hurts. But on the other side of running that magnet over my heart, which actually my spiritual mentor was the one who told me that analogy on the other side of that is just this great healing and this great joy and this contentment and the spirituality, I think found me. I don’t think I found it. I think I did go searching. I did go searching for something more. And
Jo Stanley (29:13):
How old were you?
Mimi Kwa (29:13):
Because of the pain that would’ve been 10 years ago, right? Yeah. And I’ve always had an interest in mysticism, but maybe just to the extent that most of us have with palm reading and all of that sort of stuff. Horoscopes, Dolly Magazine.
Jo Stanley (29:30):
Thank you.
Mimi Kwa (29:30):
Doy introduced
Jo Stanley (29:30):
Star signs to
Mimi Kwa (29:31):
All of us. That’s right. That’s right. I
Jo Stanley (29:33):
Dolly doctor,
Mimi Kwa (29:34):
Dolly doctor and Chinese horoscopes. And I thought that I was ever so special because I was the only one amongst my western friends who understood feng shui and all of
Jo Stanley (29:44):
That. So I was so
Mimi Kwa (29:45):
Ahead of my time. You were so I thought. So all of that. But then there was just, I think as people, we all have this yearning, and you and I have talked about this. I just thought there must be something more. Even through the healing, even through the great kind of mental emotional rehabilitation that I was having, having therapy and walking and doing yoga, I just felt there’s something more. And reading the penny just started to drop a little bit more, a little bit more until I just had this awakening, this epiphany when I was doing some yoga stretches. One day I was crying it out and I was doing yoga on my balcony, and I just thought, there’s got to be something more than this pain that I keep revisiting. It’s like, God, how much work can one person do to heal? And then just, maybe it was that call to God or to the universe or whatever it was, but it was just in that moment, something more broke open in me and allowed the light in. And it was almost like this. It was quite indescribable, just this epiphany in that moment that I had of peace and oneness and being held and knowing that everything was going to be okay. And I dunno why it happened particularly in that one moment, but it was a series of moments of very dark moments that led to that moment. And that was kind of, wow, I could go back and read the same books and read them completely differently, take something more from them.
Jo Stanley (31:32):
So then when we come to generational trauma, we talk about this conflict, inter-family conflict that is so common for so many people, and you have been able to come at it with love. And that’s the thing that is profound because it tears people apart and families never talked to each other for 20 years, 30 years for the rest of their lives. But you approached it with love.
Mimi Kwa (31:58):
And I think understanding my dad’s story allowed me to do that because I never stopped loving him. I just could not understand why he was putting me and the rest of the family through this court case over his sister’s estate. So going back through history to find out what made him the sort of man who would behave in the way that I’ve always known him to behave, and then obviously that’s quite a spike in behavior suing me. What made him that sort of man really helped me to just understand and have compassion and to deepen my love for him, actually, which still some people even in my family can’t quite fathom. But it’s really made me profoundly empathetic towards him in a way that I don’t know that I could have been if I didn’t go back and examine his history.
Jo Stanley (32:57):
So understanding his A to B, it just is a key to, as you say, compassion and kind of just really bridging a gap in a way between two people. It’s so profound.
Mimi Kwa (33:12):
Well, it bridged a gap between two people, and it bridged a gap between generations before him as well to even be able to think back and try to understand my grandfather and my grandmother and what they must have lived through, and then their forebears. And the forebears. I mean, how far back do we go as humans? It’s incredible. And we are not separate. We are not living separately to any of those generations. We are the product of the ancestors who came before us and our ancestors walk with us. I really have this very strong sense of my ancestors walking with me, whether it’s my aunties telling me off or, well,
Jo Stanley (33:58):
Let’s speak about your beautiful Aunt Theresa because, and amongst the turmoil and this very, very tumultuous childhood, you had Aunt Theresa and you had Hong Kong.
Mimi Kwa (34:07):
Yeah, which was amazing. I got to go and live this life of Riley. I was in the lap of luxury with Auntie Theresa. She lived in a beautiful apartment in Hong Kong, and she rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous and the very influential, and she was just a very humble, spiritual person herself. So it was quite extraordinary and very fortunate for me that I had that part of my life. It was almost like this other world
Jo Stanley (34:41):
To
Mimi Kwa (34:42):
Me. It was another life. And I can only imagine it probably reads like that because one minute I’m in Scarborough with all of the bogans and all of the carry on at the youth hostel where I grew up. My dad had the biggest youth hostel in the Southern Hemisphere, and I grew up with a hundred people sleeping over every night. So I would be in Scarborough and growing up at this youth hostel with a hundred people sleeping over every night, and then the next minute, I mean Hong Kong, driving around with Auntie Theresa going to fine restaurants and going to the American Club or the China Club or the Hong Kong Royal Tennis Club and living the life. And I didn’t really even understand how auntie had got there. I didn’t really understand her A to B until I got older, and especially not until I wrote the book, because then I found out even more of her.
(35:34):
And after Auntie Theresa died, actually, that’s when I really got to know and developed an appetite for her A to B. And the family’s A to B because she just had scrapbooks of every newspaper article that she’d been in. And of every magazine that she’d featured in, she was the world’s first Chinese air hostess for Boac, which is now British Airways. And in those days, it was such an accomplishment to get that role because not many people flew around the world. They would only have 15 passengers on a plane, and she was selected to be one of the steward Ess, and it was a highly coveted job. And as a result, she met some really interesting people.
Jo Stanley (36:19):
Amazing. I love your description of her. She sounded like an extraordinary, just glamorous and brilliant and confident and just her own woman, which at that time would’ve been quite rare. And even to describe yes, the lifestyle. But it really struck me though, that between Hong Kong, which was like a fantasy, and then the home where you went from your father’s home to your grandparents’ home where your mother lived, where you lived with was as though you didn’t ever have a grounding of a place where you called home.
Mimi Kwa (36:54):
That’s true. Yeah. But I’ve felt that each place was home in its own way, and I managed to navigate my way in those three different places. And it was only when I interviewed John Cle a couple of years ago that he said he’d written this book called Creativity. And he said that he had come across some research that showed that kids who became the most creative with those who had grown up in fractured homes, or those who had moved around a lot. And so he himself, he’d lived in eight houses in as many years. And I thought that was really interesting. It just, something clicked in me and I thought, wow, that just, of course, it rings so true that kids who have to navigate difficult circumstances or different environments and different environments frequently are going to have these adaptive skills, which we call being creative.
Jo Stanley (37:57):
Yes. Now, we always bring an origin story of a well-known thing, right? Oh,
Mimi Kwa (38:03):
Yes. I’ve been so,
Jo Stanley (38:05):
No, no, that’s okay.
Mimi Kwa (38:05):
I’m so enamored with that talk. I forgot that
Jo Stanley (38:07):
This is connected, right? Because your story is so intertwined with your family, your lineage, your DNA, if you will. It got me thinking about DNA, right? We know what DNA is. It informs ourselves, it lives in ourselves, all living things on the planet have DNA. And it’s obviously, we pass it down generationally. Right? And the discovery of DNA has a long history. It really, genetics started in 18 hundreds, but then there was a real breakthrough by doctors James Watson and Francis Creek who discovered the existence of DNA in the fifties. But this is the interesting part of the origin story that I’m sharing with you, right? So they published a paper in 1953 about the double helix structure. If you did biology in year 12, you would know that DNA is a double helix. You can see it. Well, the reason we know that is because of a photograph by a very sidelined, overlooked, brilliant woman by the name of Dr. Rosalind Franklin, who was the first person to photograph DNA.
Mimi Kwa (39:09):
Oh, fantastic.
Jo Stanley (39:10):
A singular strand of DNA. And those gentlemen received a Nobel Peace Prize, and she was not named,
Mimi Kwa (39:18):
But she has been named now.
Jo Stanley (39:19):
She has been named now
Mimi Kwa (39:21):
Here. And now
Jo Stanley (39:22):
She unfortunately, very tragically died of ovarian cancer only two years after that photograph. And then they received a Nobel Prize four years after that. And there was no mention of her. But now, yes, people are aware that we know what DNA looked like because of her
Mimi Kwa (39:37):
Photo. Yeah.
Jo Stanley (39:38):
But I went to her partly because of DNA, but also because she was the subject of antisemitism at the university. All the universities where she worked in science, she was sexism, she was under-resourced, underpaid, was completely relegated to the back of the lab, and
Mimi Kwa (39:54):
Then not even posthumously recognized.
Jo Stanley (39:56):
Exactly. Right. And I know that in your career that you have faced or manner of racism, sexism, all of these things that you’ve come up against, but yet you carry on. What in you makes you that? Is that the dragon or the tiger? Ooh,
Mimi Kwa (40:12):
No, I think it’s still the tiger. I am the tiger. But I think that that’s just institutional racism, sexism, it hasn’t. Things have happened or I’ve come across incidences personally that I suppose I could have allowed to affect me. And I might have a couple of times at the time, but it was institutional. And I think that is what we strive, and I’m sure can speak for you and I, that we strive to change is this institutional bias towards the patriarchal structure and towards the white structure. And that’s why I was so thrilled. So I can actually, contrary to where I could have gone with this answer, I’m actually just so grateful that I was accepted into this white patriarchy called media and was able to eek out a career and hopefully help pave some sort of way for other people, or at least give my insights and experience that might help somebody else.
Jo Stanley (41:23):
Absolutely. You’ve done that. Absolutely. And again, it’s extraordinary to me because your presence is very still, you’re still kind of very poised person, I guess. And so there’s not ever a sense to me that you would enter a room blazing, and I feel like your trailblazing is one of action rather than words.
Mimi Kwa (41:46):
Yeah. I do feel like a bit like the tortoise.
Jo Stanley (41:51):
What is
Mimi Kwa (41:52):
It? The wishy hold.
(41:55):
Yeah. I think that part of me, that stillness and that patience and that presence and just wanting to be connected with people, that was always present. I don’t think that I overrode that with any armor or unhelpful behavior. Of course, ego probably distracted me from that presence from time to time. But I think that is what that stillness is. Probably what has held me in good stead until now is just sort of that, is it the tiger just waiting to see what happens? I don’t know. But the hypervigilance is still in the background, but I have a lot more, I wouldn’t say control over it now, but I just sort of accept it and I just allow it to pass through me now.
Jo Stanley (42:44):
So to finish, what is your B Mimi?
Mimi Kwa (42:47):
Oh my gosh. I should know that this question is coming. My be is to be present. I think that’s it, because when you’re present, nothing else matters. You’re not worrying about tomorrow, you’re not worrying about yesterday. And I think being present and that ability to be present in meditation, when past anxieties have caught up with me, that has really saved me.
Jo Stanley (43:14):
Well, Mimi, thank you for the impact that you’re having on the world and the people that you are present with is profound. And it is extraordinary where it’s come from. It’s an amazing book, read it, the House of Choir, but it’s come from great trauma and it’s a gift to the rest of the world and extraordinary that you’re able to absorb such trauma and reflect it back to us with such lovely presence and love.
Mimi Kwa (43:42):
Thank you. Love you Joe Stanley. That was beautiful.
Jo Stanley (43:45):
I love you too. Thank you for listening. We love you joining us for our A two B chats.
Mimi Kwa (43:51):
Yes, we do. Please see our show notes for our acknowledgement of country and all the people who help us put this podcast together, as well as interesting links to our guest work and other references we’ve mentioned
Jo Stanley (44:03):
Such as your frequently unverified quotes. Yes,
Mimi Kwa (44:06):
I may still need to check a few of those. Thank
Jo Stanley (44:09):
You. We’re Joe
Mimi Kwa (44:10):
And Mimi from A to B Rate Follow and get in touch on our website and
Jo Stanley (44:16):
Let us know who’s A to B you’d like to find out about.
Mimi Kwa (44:19):
We can’t wait for you to hear our next conversation.