Hoangmai Pham: Piecing the self together

Hoangmai (Mai) Pham is a Vietnamese American physician, memoirist, and former Chief Innovation Officer for Medicare and Medicaid. At six, she fled Saigon with her family at the end of the war and arrived in America with a new language to learn and a life to rebuild. Her memoir, Bridge from Saigon, shortlisted for the International Beverly Prize for Literature, is out now.

In this episode, we talk about mastering English while losing the emotional vocabulary of your first language, about imposter syndrome and dissociation, and about what it means to spend a lifetime being the bridge between worlds.