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.

Vanessa Fabiano grew up in Switzerland, the daughter of immigrants, speaking six languages before she ever thought of herself as a writer. She studied East Asian Studies at Columbia, first traveled to China in 1994, and was back there working during the SARS outbreak in 2002. She's built a parallel life in brand strategy and communications, co-founded a literary nonprofit, and curated an international literary festival. She now lives in Copenhagen.

Her debut short story collection, Chinese on the Beach, was published by Ybernia in 2025. In this episode, we talk about what it means to write across languages, why English became her creative home, and what happens to identity when you've never quite belonged to just one place. We also get into Vanessa's next project, which takes her somewhere new: the world of Soviet-era ballet.