Memoirs by Dmae Lo Roberts

This collection features three works made over fifteen years, but Roberts takes listeners on a journey that spans thousands. Roberts’ relationship to her mother, and their individual relationships with Kuan Yin, the Lady Buddha, are at the center of these works. Sonically, they flourish with playful sound design that uses voices like instruments. Each weaves tape and theater to immerse listeners in the complicated bond between a Taiwanese mother and her American daughter. Together they offer a window into the experience of a multicultural family, well before these experiences had a home on public media. Listening to these for the first time, I thought about why we have public media. Bill Siemering’s 1970 essay “National Public Radio’s Purposes” framed public airwaves as a place that would “preserve and transmit the cultural past” and “broadcast the work of contemporary artists.” But that cultural past was relatively homogeneous and at some point, delivery of the news became paramount. This left little funding and opportunity for cultural endeavors, and listeners were the poorer for it. So these memoirs feel like beacons of possibility to me. What we might get to hear if we consistently fund artistic endeavors. Enjoy, and donate to your local public radio station.