The Moth Radio Hour: Saving Graces
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I'm just playing. Get the Angel Reef Special at McDonald's now. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. And participate in restaurants for a limited time. This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Chloe Salmon. A saving grace is what usually rescues something or someone from being a lost cause. But I've always appreciated another, more optimistic view. A saving grace as the support we get unexpectedly. And often when we most need it. In this hour, stories of finding grace in surprising places.

It seems fitting that our first story comes from a man named Hope. He told it for us at a slam in Chicago where we partner with public radio station WBEZ. Here's Hope Iyeoyi live at the Moth. So growing up in Houston, I was shaped by a couple things that I couldn't escape. One of them was my siblings.

And they're good people. My sister, Praise, is three years older than me. My younger brother, Peace, is one year younger. And Truth is two years younger. But don't let the names fool you. They're OK. And we're all really close in age, and we're all really close in size. So we were really cramped. And the second thing that shaped me, this tiny apartment, two bedrooms, the bathroom

was frankly disgusting, for the kids at least. And a big part of that was the routine of us cleaning that, and the entire house, honestly, the entire apartment. My mom would come into our room. We heard her before we saw her because she was singing Nigerian gospel music. And we knew that it was that Saturday that we were going to clean the bathroom.

It was a little traumatizing. The bathroom itself, there was a corner that was just completely mildewed. I think the roaches there would rent to other roaches. It wasn't a good look for anybody, but thankfully we were able to move out of that apartment. My mom and dad bought a house, thankfully moving up. But that routine continued. We had the Saturday morning gospel music, the Saturday morning cleaning. Things continued as usual.

I'm thinking back to a time when I was about 15 and my mom had come upstairs, she was directing us where we were going to go. And she points to me and she's like, "Hope, alright, go fix up that room, sparkling, sparkling clean, and then go take care of this bathroom." And the one thing siblings are good for is the chore rotation. It was not my week for the bathroom. And I mean, as people who have been in bathrooms before, no one likes to clean them.

And it was not my week, more importantly. I tried to get my mom to see the injustice of making me clean it when it was Truth Week, and she said, "No, I'm gonna go to the store. When I get back, you're gonna have clean this bathroom."

So I storm off, I head to my room, I try to slam the door but I catch it real fast because I'm raised right. And I just like pace around my room and I'm looking at, I need to release this anger so I see the wall right beside my window and I'm just, I'm getting ready, I draw back and I smack the wall, expected to hear that same pop. But instead of hearing that pop, I feel my fist give a little.

And I realized that instead of cinder blocks and wallpaper that was the walls of my old apartment, this house had drywall. And I learned about its existence the hard way. And I step back and I just look at my fist and my first instinct is to go wash my hand and then go wash the bathroom. Out of just fear of what would happen if my mom found me at the crime scene.

My second instinct was to figure out how I was going to tell her because I didn't want her to find me, find out and then find me. I'd rather break the news to her gently. But at the same time, my thoughts were just racing. I couldn't imagine what would present me to do this because I'm not an angry kid. And something from my high school classes just clicked in my head, and I rushed downstairs to go catch my mom before she leaves for the store. I tap on her window, and she rolls down. I'm like, I had to tell you something. I think I'm going through puberty.

Because I was mad that you told me to clean the bathroom when it wasn't my week. And I punched a hole in the wall. And I didn't see her face because I was really, really focused on the ground. But I just hear her say, I will do what you want when I get back. And then she rolls out the window and peels out. And I just stumble back into the house, just a 15-year-old shell of a boy. Just abjectly terrified of what's going to happen when she gets back.

So I go upstairs and I finish cleaning the bathroom. I go to my room. I finish cleaning my room. And slowly this unintentional plan starts forming in my head where I go help Peace and Truth with their room. And then I go downstairs. I help Praise with the kitchen. I start cleaning the refrigerator. I clean the stove. I clean the counter. I clean the dining room. And then I go to the living room and sit down and just open my Bible and hope that my mom will find me like that.

A couple of hours later, she pulls up and I stop praying. I dash outside to help her with the groceries. And she's noticing a couple of things that are different. And she's like, "Oh, that refrigerator. Who cleaned that?" And I was like, "That was me, mom." And she notices the dishes and she's like, "That one's a little dirty. Was that you?" I was like, "No, that was Praise. That was Praise."

And she sits me down and instead of me getting the anger and the wrath that I deserved for punching a hole in a house that still smelled like Home Depot, she gives me love, which was unexpected. And I think it's the thing that shaped me most outside of the routine, outside of my apartment, outside of my siblings. It's made me slow to react. It's made me think about what I do.

It's made me quicker to smile than to react in anger because things that are done in anger I can't take back so easily. So I didn't escape the routine, I didn't escape my siblings, we did leave the apartment, but more importantly I did dodge the whooping that could have stopped me from being 6'4". Thank you. That was Hope Eoy.

Houston-born and Nigerian-raised, Hope now lives in Chicago, and by the time you hear this, he will have finished his final year of medical school. You can usually catch him cycling through the city on the hunt for the best Korean barbecue Chicago has to offer, or teaching himself new skills, like patching drywall. To see a photo of the Yehyei family, again, that's Hope, Peace, Praise, and Truth, plus their mom, Adesua, head over to themoth.org.

Our next story is from Anaysha Roy Chowdhury, who found herself looking for support in a place where things are usually everyone for themselves, the New York City subway. She told this at a virtual main stage, which means she took the stage from her living room. Here's Anaysha Roy Chowdhury live at The Moth. So it's a cold, rainy November evening, and I am sweating profusely.

And that's because I am currently entrenched in that very specific hell that is lugging heavy groceries on a subway to get home. Luckily, I force myself onto this crowded, hot F train, but I find this coveted spot by the back doors. So I get there, I'm able to put my bags down and lean up against those doors, and I heave this big sigh of relief because I think I'm home free. But at the next stop, this guy gets on the train, and he's holding a Bible in one hand.

And he just launches into this really hateful monologue. He starts talking about how some people, based on who they love, they're going to hell. Other people, based on like where they're from, what they look like, they're probably going to hell. I mean, this monologue is going on for a while. The basic gist though that I'm getting is that there are a whole lot of us and we're all going to hell. And my fellow New Yorkers and I, we do our job, right? Like we do our job of ignoring him. The problem is this guy, he is not following the rule.

So like the unspoken rule is you get on a train car, you say your crazy shit, but you keep it snappy, and then you like move on to the next train car down, and then you say your crazy shit there. Everyone understands that this is the unspoken rule except this guy. He did not get the memo, he keeps on going and going. And the longer he's going on for, the more the atmosphere in that train changes. And I think a part of that might be because this was only a couple weeks after the 2016 presidential election.

There'd been this uptick in hate crimes even around New York City, and these shared public spaces that I had started to take for granted would just be safe. It suddenly felt less safe. And in this moment, I really started to feel this deep need to do or say something to make him stop. And I know my fellow New Yorkers did too. There was one guy who just told him to shut up, but of course that didn't work.

And the longer this is going on, the more this sensation, the closest thing I can explain it as is just like this full body itch starts growing. But alongside this itch, this need to say or do something, comes this really old mantra that goes a little something like, "It's not that big of a deal. Keep your feelings to yourself. Don't make a scene. It'll be over soon." And this mantra is so familiar because it's been with me since I was a kid.

See, I was that kind of kid where all through elementary school my teachers would tell my parents, "She's really well behaved. She's quiet. She's thoughtful." And it's true. I was really well behaved. But that's only because all of the not well behaved feelings, thoughts, the anger, the questions, the frustration, I mostly kept to myself. Or I funneled it into these quiet private spaces like diaries.

When I was a kid, I also used to go to Florida every summer to spend time with my mom's side of the family. And Florida meant a lot of really great things, a whole lot of rule bending. I got to stay up late, I got to eat a whole bunch of sugar, got to set off fireworks. But it also meant my uncle Bill. Now, my uncle Bill didn't believe in what he called mixed marriage. And because my father is Indian and my mother is white, he didn't approve. And what this actually looked like is he just never spoke to me. He didn't look at me. He didn't acknowledge me.

And this made for some pretty awkward family dinners, at least for me. And there were a lot of things sitting across that dinner table from Uncle Bill that I wanted to say or do. I think mostly I wanted to grab him and shake him and just make him look at me, but I didn't do anything. Instead I sat there, maybe I closed my eyes and thought, "It's not that big of a deal. Don't make a scene. It'll be over soon." I think I was afraid that if I actually expressed my feelings or asked questions,

I wouldn't feel supported by those around me, and I would end up feeling more alone and alienated than I already did. And so that's kind of how it went. Every summer in Florida, and those feelings stayed there, but they became sort of like old furniture in a familiar room, so that I was aware of them in as much as I moved around them, but that was about it. It was just there, fading into the background. The real problem is that that inability to express my feelings when I most wanted and needed to followed me into adulthood.

And I'm gonna give you just like a snapshot of what that looks like. So, I'm in my early 30s and I am hanging out with a good friend of mine who I just so happen to have a massive crush on. And I know I need to tell him my feelings for him. And so we spend this amazing day together, you know, it's coming to an end, he walks me home, we hug goodnight, he turns to go, and I'm like, "Okay, now's the moment. Don't let it go by." So I say, "Wait!" And he turns.

And then I watch as though outside of my body as I go in for a high five. Yeah, so I gave my friend a high five instead of telling him that I had feelings for him. So all of these moments from my past

are just like running in my head as I'm still on that crowded hot train. It's like the world's shittiest "This is your life" movie montage. And I feel convinced that if I do not do something in that particular moment, I'm just gonna be condemned to repeating these moments and I don't know, probably dying alone. Like all of that is happening in my head. And so...

I get this idea, and as soon as I do, this younger version of me is like, "Oh, there's no way we're doing that." And so I know I have to get ahead of this younger version of me, so I just look at this guy who's still hateful monologuing, and I'm like, "If you don't stop talking, I'm gonna start singing." Which as soon as I said out loud, I was like, "Oh no, why now I actually have to do it? 'Cause I said I would." And so of course he keeps going, and I start singing.

"Row, Row, Row Your Boat" because it is literally the only song that I could think of in that moment. And I was really hoping that it would come out like strong and powerful even though it was kind of a silly song, but it was just like I'm not a great singer so it's just kind of like weak and sad and weird. But I'm like, "Okay, you gotta commit." So I'm singing, this guy looks at me and he, it's like pity, like he pities me and I'm like, "Oh God, how is this gonna end? This is gonna be bad."

But I, you know, I'm like, I committed to this, I gotta keep going. I get through like a couple rounds of Row, Row, Row Your Boat on my own, and then I lock eyes with this kid who's in a stroller across from me, and I notice he's clapping. And I get to like, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. And he starts singing! And I feel such relief, I'm like, okay, it's just you and me, kid, but we got this. Um, but then the fact that he's singing gets his parents in the mix.

So then it's the four of us singing. So this guy, he has to get a little bit louder. Uh, I'm feeling a little bit better. And then I notice there's this other guy who's at the other end of the train. He's like in his 20s. He takes down his Beats headphones and he's like, "Oh, yeah, all right, I'm in." So he starts singing. This other guy who's like a divinity student who earlier had been like, "Have you even read that Bible?" to the guy, he starts singing. And before long,

Every single person pretty much on that train is singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" with me. And that guy, he's trying to keep up with us and get louder, but it's nearly impossible because there are so many of us. We're singing and we're singing. I start to get cocky. I start rounds. We were singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" in rounds. And this guy, as much as he's trying to match us, he just can't. And he gets off the train. We keep singing.

because it's just this magical moment in which like we've reclaimed the space without even having to address this guy directly. I can feel my face hurting because I'm smiling so big. Because here's this moment where I spoke up and I was afraid that I would just be alone, but I was backed up by this whole crowd of strangers. And even though it was still hot on that train, and even though that song was off-key, it's still one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. Thank you.

That was Anaysha Roy Chowdhury. Anaysha told that story for us once before in person at a pre-pandemic main stage at the New York Historical Society. While we couldn't quite cart an audience into her living room for this virtual version, we thought you might like to hear the love that she got from the crowd after her last line that night. Feel free to clap along. And even though it was hot and cramped and totally off-key, it was the most beautiful song I've heard. Thank you. Thank you.

Anisha Roy Chowdhury is an author and educator, and she calls herself a strategic troublemaker. Her book, The Marginalized Majority, Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America, was named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus Reviews. She lives in Kingston, New York, where she is learning, with varying degrees of success, how to refurbish a house that was built in 1903. ♪

When we return, an unprepared triathlete and a TMI mother-daughter moment for the ages when the Moth Radio Hour continues. ♪♪

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Chloe Salmon. We're listening to stories of finding grace where it's least expected. This next story comes to us from Gregory Brady, who told it for us at a slam in New Orleans, where we partner with public radio station WWNO. Here's Gregory live at the Moth. I'm a heroin addict in recovery. I'm a heroin addict in recovery.

I started shooting heroin at 17 and I did it for years and years and years. In 1999 was one of my worst years, worst experience. I was shooting dope every day. I got in a car accident. I was half blind. I had broken my shoulders.

The doctors gave me Percodan and Valium, and I still had my dope, and I was losing time. A judge put me in Bridgewater State Prison, which was a place where they put heroin addicts for 30 days just to get the drugs out of your system. It was probably the closest I came to death in my whole life. I get out of there, and I'm in my living room in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I was living in the Berkshire Mountains, and I'm with my best friend Marilyn and my daughter Bianca.

My daughter at this time is 11. And Marilyn was reading the paper and she was talking about the Josh Billings. And I said, well, what's the Josh Billings? She said, it's a triathlon. You go 28 miles on a bicycle, five miles in a canoe, and seven miles on foot. And so Bianca said to me, Daddy, you should do the Josh Billings. And it was a big joke. And I said, one second. I said, I'm going to do it. Okay. So I did. I began to train. Okay. Little at a time.

My body mended. I came back to life. I thought it was great. The Berkshires, the foliage, the mountains, the lake. Marilyn had a bike. It was an inch smaller than others, but that was okay. And she had a great big canoe. That was okay. We duct taped it together. We tried to make it proper for the race. And I had my Converse basketball sneakers.

And so I trained and trained and I finished first every night that I trained in my mind. You know what I mean? I could not be defeated. And I was so much feeling life.

And so I'm playing the Stones with my earphones and I'm listening to "Daddy you're a fool to cry" and I'm coming right over the finish line like this and it was just absolutely awesome. The day of the race came, okay, I go to the race. I got my little bike which is okay and I see people clipping their shoes into the pedals of their bikes.

And I went, my God, that's dangerous. What are these people doing? And so first is a mile uphill. And I'm passing people. And I'm feeling good. Man, man, I might not even finish last. This is great. And then going down the hill, they went right by me. They flew right by me. And so little by little, I was starting to understand how much I was...

where I was going to finish in this thing. So I get to the lake, I get to the canoe, and there's canoes everywhere on the lake, and I was so excited because all I wanted to do was finish and not be last. That's all. And so I get in my canoe, and it's like a family canoe. I have a milk crate in the center of it, and I'm rowing it.

You know, kids are flying by me in kayaks with their eyebrows shaved and their heads shaved and flames on their boat and all that. And I'm in like the Titanic. And I'm up higher than everybody on my milk crate. So I scream, is this moving? And...

A man answered me. He said, yeah, you're moving. I can see that you're moving. He said, look at the hill. You'll see that you're moving. He took the question literally. He thought I was really asking if I was moving. So we go around the lake and go around the lake and go around the lake. You have to go four times. I think I went five. I might have gone five because we get to the end. I got a quarter mile left. Marilyn's waiting for me at the end. And the lake is like ice. And I'm the only canoe on it.

And so I go like hell, I go like hell, that's alright, that's alright, I'm gonna finish, I'm gonna finish, I might not be last. I get to the end, I say, "Marilyn, give me the water, give me the water." She said, "I drank it all." She said, "You took so long that I got thirsty."

So I get my water and then I'm off. My sneakers are wet now because I screwed up in the water. And I'm running my seven miles to Tanglewood. Now the race ends at Tanglewood, which is an outdoor theater and the Berkshires and the Boston Symphony plays there all summer. And when the race ends, everybody parties up there. And so...

I'm running and it's like post-apocalyptic. There's tables, nobody. There's chairs, nobody. There's just glasses of water there waiting for me. I was kind of losing it a little bit and I get to the entrance of Tanglewood and there's all people there. I thought they would have been gone by now.

And they were all there. They were all partying. And then I looked, and the finish clock was still running, the great big clock, and it said four hours and 42 minutes. And I fell down. I hit like a pothole in the thing, and I fell down. And I was going in and out of it, and I couldn't, I couldn't, sounds were coming in and out. I heard somebody scream, get him an ambulance. Make him stop. And then a man came over, and he put his hand on my back, and I felt safe.

I just felt safe. And his wife walked around me and poured water on me. And I couldn't look up. I was looking at their $500 running shoes. And I had this attack of shame. And he said to me, listen, buddy. He said, the guy that won this race won in two hours and three minutes. Next week, nobody's going to remember this guy's name. He said, if you can get up

and get yourself over the finish line. It says four hours and 43 minutes. He said, "You're gonna be a story for grandchildren for years to come." And I went, "Oh my God." And I kept getting up and staggering and falling. And I could see Marilyn and my daughter at the finish line. And Bianca Lynn, my daughter, she was looking at me and she just had that awful look on her face and she was scared and she was...

She was looking at me like she had been looking at me my whole life. I was always in that kind of friggin' condition. And so I got up and I fell and the man stayed with me and his wife kept pouring the water and all of that and, you know, it was just, to me it was just like a whole failure. And then Bianca got right up in front, right next to the clock and she clenched her little hands and she stuck her chest out and she screamed, "That's my daddy!" And my God.

So I stood right up and I walked over that finish line and she jumped into my arms and she said, "I love you so much, Dad." Thank you. Gregory Brady now lives in Worcester, Massachusetts and has written and published a book called "Suicide Watch." He is a recovered heroin addict and provides opiate education through storytelling.

When I reached out to him about airing this story, he made sure to tell me all about how proud he is to call Bianca his daughter and asked if I could give her a shout-out. I couldn't say no to that, so, hey there, Bianca. Thank you for being such an important part of this story and for reminding us all to give our dads a call. To see some photos of Gregory and Bianca together, head on over to themoth.org. ♪♪

Sometimes saving graces come as lightning bolt moments. And sometimes, like in our next story, they're as small and beautiful as a reason to laugh again. Charlotte Klein told this at a London Grand Slam. Just a note that this story involves a funny misunderstanding about a part of the female body. Here's Charlotte live at the Moth.

We didn't have a lock on our bathroom growing up, which meant that there were often three or four of us in there at once. Two in the bath, one on the toilet, and my dad soaping his bristles at the sink. They say that the kitchen is the heart of the family home, but in my house it was the bathroom. As we got older, my sister Robin taught me how to wedge the dirty laundry basket behind the door. It took the two of us in fits of giggles to shift it, but it was no match for my family when they wanted in. LAUGHTER

Like the time when I was reading in the bath and my mum crept in with a sketchbook tucked under her arm and begged to use me as practice for her life drawing class. Outraged, I said no, but she said that she was only going to draw my face. She promised faithfully she was only going to draw my face. When I glanced up from my book a chapter later, she was sketching with joyful abandon across the full double-page spread, and I realised I'd become an unwilling centrefold. Or the time when my first boyfriend...

Griff, a flame-haired Welsh metalhead, came to stay for the first time. I tried to warn him of the dangers and I told him to make splashing noises in the bath to signal that it was occupied. But despite his best splashing efforts, my dad appeared at the door, Winnie the Pooh style, a shirt on his top half and completely naked from the waist down, and nonchalantly went for a sleepy wee while Griff lay utterly horrified in the bath. LAUGHTER

and try to act like he was cool with it. The rest of the house was always fairly lawless and alive, so I don't know why we expected the bathroom to be sacred. And I always thought that I wanted more privacy and more boundaries when there was a time when those things unexpectedly and uninvitedly crept in. When in the summer before I turned 13, the house went quiet and we lost my sister Robin in a car accident. Afraid to upset one another further, we gave each other privacy.

We built those boundaries and we locked invisible locks and it didn't feel like home. I missed the madness that had once driven me crazy. We were all looking for our own ways to cope and my mum had started swimming to try and find her happy place again. She came home and she went for a wee and I wandered, uninvited, into the bathroom, something which I hadn't done for a while. As she looked down...

she found, tangled in her pubic hair, a purpley-pink mysterious blob that looked like it should have been attached to an intimate part of her body and now wasn't. And she held it up in shock, and a look of recognition passed between us, mother to daughter, daughter to mother. And she said, "In the most British way possible, when you think you have spontaneously lost your clitoris at the local swimming pool,

"Oh, Charlotte, I think something terribly important has fallen off." So she squeezed it and it squished. And she held it up for a closer look. It smelt of strawberries. The pink mystery blob was in fact a piece of strawberry hubba-bubba bubble gum that had been chewed completely accidentally into anatomical perfection by its careless previous owner.

and found itself stuck to her as she sat on the bench at the swimming pool changing room. Sorry, I'm going to ruin that gum forever for anyone that's watching. We dissolved into bits of giggles reserved only for times of absolute relief, not only for the lost and now found clitoris, but also the sounds of joy and silliness starting to return to our house again. It felt good to laugh.

my teenage self behind me. I can see what we lacked in privacy we found in this beautiful naked closeness of what it means to be a family, forever bound by blood and bath water and bubble gum. I have a house and a family of my own now, funnily enough with that first flame-haired Welsh boyfriend Griff who didn't run for the hills as he ought to have done. A few years ago as I went to close our bathroom door

The lock mechanism, which had been wobbly for a while, came off in my hand. As I held it in my fingers, I realized something terribly important had fallen off and decided to keep it that way. Thank you. Charlotte Klein is a graphic designer who lives in Brighton, England with her husband and seven-year-old twins. Beyond the visual stories she creates with her work, she also aims to make magical life stories that her kids will remember.

She says that her parents are still rocking the same 70s avocado green decor and that the family continues the tradition of lockless bathrooms and the beautiful madness that follows. To see photos of Charlotte and her sister as children, visit themoth.org. Right after the break, a creative and courageous fight against the book burning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Do you know about Jerry Lee Lewis wanting to murder Elvis? Or the hip-hop star who cannibalized his roommate? What about the murders ACDC was blamed for? Or the suspicious deaths of Brittany Murphy and River Phoenix? Or about Anthony Bourdain's wild lust for life and untimely demise?

These stories and more are told in the award-winning Disgraceland podcast hosted by me, Jake Brennan, every Tuesday, where I dive deep into subjects from the dark side of music history and entertainment. So follow and listen to Disgraceland on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Chloe Salmon. In this hour, stories of saving graces and the surprising places we find them.

Our final story was told by Wang Ping at the Mesa Arts Center in Mesa, Arizona. Here's Wang Ping live at the Moth. When I was six, the Cultural Revolution spread to the island where I live. It was in the East China Sea. It crushed my dream to read every good book on earth. Everything was shut down. Stores, factories, schools, libraries.

My father was exiled. My mother arrested for teaching Western music. As the eldest child, I had to feed my family, my grandma, two sisters, and a brother. I raised chickens and grew vegetables in the backyard and walked six miles every morning through minefields and bullets to look for food for the family. Two years went by. My dream...

seemed to be more and more dangerous and impossible. One early morning, I took out my stove to light a fire. This little stove cooked three meals every day for my family. I opened the door and saw Jiajia. She was reading Mao's book under the streetlight. Her face smeared with tears. Who would

Weep over Mao's words these days, let alone Jiajia, the uptick girl from Beijing who had been exiled to the island with her father, waiting for the verdict from central government, either to go back to Beijing as a general or go to Mongolia to die. I tiptoed over and peeked.

I gasped. The book she was reading had nothing to do with Mao. It was Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, the story I had heard on the radio a year ago that sparked my dream for good books and go to college. I had begged Mama to let me go to school a year earlier so I could read

on my own. Mama agreed and even promised she would buy me a whole set of Anderson's stories if I got good grades. But the Cultural Revolution began. Her students became Chairman Mao's little red guards. They shaved her head along with other teachers, paraded them on the street. They came to our homes, took all our books, and burned them on the street.

I had rigged every book pile before burning, hoping to find my mermaid, but no luck. Now I found her in Jaja's hands, wrapped under Mao's red dress.

Jiajia was so engrossed with her story, she didn't know I was reading over her shoulder until she heard me sobbing. She jumped, little mermaid clutched her chest. Her eyes told me she would fight me to death if I dared to report her. We glared at each other. Suddenly we laughed, pointing at each other's tear-streaked face. We know our secret is safe. I begged Jiajia,

to loan me the book just for a few hours. I would read it in the cornfields. Grandma would pound me for not bringing food home today, but I didn't care. Jiajia shook her head, walked back home. I said, "Wait, wait, I have something to trade with you." She snorted and kept walking. I don't blame her. Why would she believe that I would have anything worthwhile for her?

"I have 'Yi Qian Ling Yi Ye'," I whispered. She paused. I took my time walking to the chicken coop to retrieve my book. I knew she would be waiting because 'Yi Qian Ling Yi Ye,' aka 'The Arabian Nights,' was the most banned and most difficult book to get. I had found it outside Uncle Shi's apartment

When he died of TB, his family threw out everything, including his book collection, on the street, hoping the Red Guards would burn it for them. But nobody would touch his stuff. The book had been rained upon, yellowed by the sun, but I didn't care. The stories had brightened my gloomy days. I sang, waving the book to Jiajia's face. She snatched the book from my hands and thrust the little mermaid into mine.

"Oh, and where did you get this?" she screamed. I smiled. We underground book traders have this rule: no question asked. We agreed to return next day to return the books or renew, but two weeks went by. I couldn't finish the book. I had to feed my family from morning till night, and besides, I had no place to read.

I shared the bed with my siblings. My grandma also slept in the same room. I tried to read in trees, in the public bathroom,

in the cornfields, but I almost got caught a few times. So Jiajia finally let me in her bedroom. We loo around on her bed, reading, chatting. I finally confessed that Little Mermaid had inspired me to read, to find every book and read and go to college. And Jiajia confessed that she had been practicing dancing like Little Mermaid.

We fantasized that someday we would love to form our own underground Little Mermaid book club so we would have endless books to read. But we would need more than just two books in our hands right now. One of my chores was to raise chickens. I have ten hens and one rooster. My favorite was Silky. Silky had...

white feather and black face. Even her bones, her meat and blood were black, Grandma told me, the best tonic for human. So whenever Silky went into hatching mode, my mom would order me to kill her for the meat. I had managed to save Silky a dozen times, but this time I knew she was determined to hatch her eggs.

So I started digging a nest for her behind the chicken coop to keep her away from weasels and mama. A few strikes, my pickaxe hit a wooden box. I brushed away the mud and pried open the lid. Music sheets of Chopin, Beethoven, Anthony's books.

Shakespeare, Huckleberry Finn, Dead Soul, War and Peace, and, to my disbelief, the complete fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. On the first page, Mama's handwriting, to my stubborn ping. So Mama had actually fulfilled her promise, but she couldn't give me the book before the Cultural Revolution began.

I ran to Jia Jia and dragged her over to the treasure box. We screamed, ran around like headless chickens, chanting, "Our Little Mermaid Club! Our Little Mermaid Book Club!"

Jiajia found a bunch of her friends who were also exiled to the island with their families. They each had a cache of banned books. We gathered in the woods, cut our wrists, mixed our blood together to swaying as little mermaids. Now we have hundreds of books to read: stories, poetry, history, philosophy, math, physics, even military training manuals.

We were careful if we got caught, we would go to jail, including our families. A year went by. Jiajia got ambitious. She wanted to expand the club so we had more books to read. I told her to wait. Something bad was about to happen. That night, I dreamed a monster picked me up by my braids and threw me into a fire pit.

I woke up in pain. Mama was dragging me out of the bed and into the kitchen. Anderson's book in her hand. Where and how did you get this? She screamed and hissed. I looked at her. She knew damn well where I got this book. I wanted to know how she found this book. I had hidden it under Grandma's mattress, the last place she would look because the two of them were constantly fighting.

Mama slapped my face with the book, busting my mouth open from inside. I tasted blood. "Go get the whip," she said. Her whip was made of bamboo skin and it hurt more than leather belt. And we had to bring it to her as part of the punishment. "You want to kill us all, you stupid girl? I'm going to kill you first." She whipped

I covered my face with my hands. The pain was unbearable, not from the whipping, but from knowing that I would never see my mermaid again. "Bring, go bring the stove," she ordered, and opened the window. Then she watched me tear the book page by page and feed it to the fire. I could hear Little Mermaid scream as she turned into ash. "Where is the rest?" she asked.

I knew she had to find everything from the box and destroy them before they destroyed us. But I had sworn to protect my book with my life. Mama threw down her whip and started searching, pulling up floorboards, mattresses, and drawers. She knew where to look. She was my mama. Soon, a huge pile gathered by the window. She sat down and watched me burn every book.

When all was gone, she went back to bed. I walked to the chicken coop. Silky came over with her babies, nudging my hand for food. I looked up. No star, no moon, no hope. The book club had been my only joy. Now it's gone. I was choking with tears. When a voice came, "Go to the mountains, little Ping. Tell your story to trees, birds,

and your mermaid friends they could burn your books but not your story i stood up i knew what i was going to do i finished my chores that day as usual then went to the woods with

Nobody said a word. The bruises on my face said everything. We looked at each other for a long time. Suddenly, words flew out of my mouth like stars, forming a constellation of Little Mermaid, her beauty and courage to go after her dream at any cost. Everyone was listening as if it were their first time. This is how we started our storytelling club.

We would tell stories to each other in the woods, to our siblings at home. Then we moved to the yard. Children and adults gathered over fire. Everyone would bring a piece of wood. We were hungry and cold, but we had stories. Soon when we finished all our stories from our collection, we started making our own, and people loved it even better.

When Jiajia turned 14, I threw her a big party. She was leaving the island with her father to Mongolia. I told the story that sparked our friendship five years ago. The story about the girl from the sea who had kept us alive all these years. Over the blazing fire, I spotted Mama. She had tears in her eyes as she listened.

My heart quivered with joy. I might have lost my book battle with her, but I had won the war. No, we had won the war together. Our books had been burned, but not our story, not our hope. That was the moment I realized my college dream would come true, even though it still seemed dangerous and impossible. Thank you.

That was Wang Ping. Ping was born in Shanghai and came to the U.S. in 1986. She is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers Project that builds solidarity among the people who live along the Mississippi, Yangtze, Ganges, Amazon, and Nile Rivers through exchanging gifts of art, poetry, stories, music, dance, and food. Her poetry book, My Name is Immigrant, is out now.

Ping remembers the first bookstore that opened near her at the end of the Cultural Revolution. She saved for months and finally had the money to buy the first book she'd ever legitimately owned. After so much time surreptitiously reading worn copies of books with missing pages, she says holding a brand new book made her heart beat fast. One of her dearest treasures is an old print of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales.

The Little Mermaid is still one of her favorite stories, and she tries to pass on the mermaid's spirit, persistence, and dream to her sons, one of whom is named Ariel. This hour has been about saving graces. My tiny wish for you is that one taps you on the shoulder when you least expect it. Thank you to all of our storytellers in this episode for sharing with us, and to you for listening. We hope that you'll join us next time.

Your host this hour was Chloe Salmon, who directed the stories in the show, along with Meg Bowles and Catherine McCarthy.

The rest of the Moss directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Ginness, and Jennifer Hickson. Austin-Ginness and Jennifer Hickson. Production support from Emily Couch. Moss stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Bruce Coburn, The Young Lions, The Rolling Stones, Mark Orton, and Derek Feicher.

You can find links to all the music. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producers Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.