Angie Finished Her Memoir! - Angie and Paul on the creative process, parenting, travel, writing, life challenges, and books

[00:58] Paul: Welcome to the Pathless Path podcast. Today I am interviewing my wife. She's going to be interviewing me as well. Welcome to the Pathless Path, Angie Wong. Lee. Paul Lee. So the last time we did a podcast was two years ago in Taiwan. Since then we moved back to Austin for a year. Our lease ended. You became a US citizen. We lived in like 10 different places. We spent a month in Oaxaca. We moved to Thailand for five months and we're back in Taiwan. Why did it take us so long to record another podcast? Because creative work took us away. So you took us away or you left?

[01:43] Angie: Alternatively, and parenting get us busy. This is something we're gonna talk about a lot. How to stay in connection with ourself, kid while pursuing creative work.

[01:57] Paul: And I feel like for the last two years, you've taken a pretty big leap in your creative work, which is, I think something we talked about last time in our podcast, you were still struggling to find your thing. I think when you were in Taiwan, you had started to commit to writing a book.

Did you think it would take you more than two years?

[02:19] Angie: No, at first I thought it would take me four months. I was so pissed when Paul told me, I don't think it's going to happen. I said, no. You don't know what it's like for me to commit to something. When I say I'm going to do it, I will do it. I will publish when Michelle turned one. That did not happen. And I will say, I will publish when Michelle turned 1.5. Didn't happen. And then it was two years and then it's 2.5. And I was like, it's just going to take whatever it takes. But it's finally gonna be published 2026 March the 3rd.

[02:51] Paul: What did you think you didn't understand then about the process of either writing a book or your own journey with work and the relationship to that?

[03:02] Angie: I think I got my data from...

Well, let's take a step back. When I say that I can finish in four months, I actually did a calculation of how many words

and how many words an hour. And so how many books, how many words do I want in one book and divided by the hours, divided by hours, I can definitely publish in four months. What I didn't know is my first draft

is about 200 K words, 200 K words is way more than like three books that is like way more than like the normal length of like three books in Taiwan.

And then comes the process of trimming that out, discarding all the junk and then reorganizing. And the thing is, I'm writing a memoir. It is so hard to decompose, not decompose, deconstruct. Deconstruct, yeah. Deconstruct your narrative about yourself and keep digging and digging deeper about your emotion. And new stuff keeps surfacing. I need to keep rewriting and life also happens.

[04:11] Paul: Yeah, I think the personal journey, the personal transformation you underwent writing the book was much more dramatic and jarring than me. I think I definitely went through a personal transformation, but it would be like, I'd write stuff and be like, oh, okay, updating my story. And it's sort of like, I just like let it flow. Whereas like, I feel like some like major scripts for you were rewritten in terms of writing the books. So we can definitely dive into some of the life stuff that happened. But what what were some of the scripts you sort of had to rewrite as you were going? I think there's some work scripts.

There's family scripts, self scripts.

[04:56] Angie: My book is called Made in Taiwan, and it's about I don't know what it's going to be about. What is that in Chinese? Taiwan Zu Zao. Taiwan Zu Zao. At first. So I didn't know what it's going to be about. I thought it's gonna be, I don't know, just a fun book like Fresh Off The Book, or something like creative process. I just don't want to write a book about my mom.

I want to try everything I can to avoid writing my relationship with my family. But that later turned back on me. Basically, I just realized I couldn't resist the will of the book. It wants to be written in a certain way and the only thing I can do is to comply to it. And so the emotional acceptance of that and the process of like revisiting the scars of making me who I am and then understanding that those scars doesn't define me or the scar that I thought was a scar was never a scar at all. It was just my story about what would happen, what had happened. And so like just the whole process just totally changed how I think about my life and me. What's an example of one of those like stories that wasn't real?

So for example, I wrote a chapter about my family's background and I had a story which I thought it was a fact that my mom just hated going, my mom hated normal work and she choose to work in the market because she was just not ambitious enough. And so I was, I think that always made me feel like I would, I don't deserve to pursue like a white color class type of job because I just don't have a female model of that.

And then I asked my mom about where she and my dad.

[06:56] Paul: Well, you also thought she was working in the market because she had like no choice, right?

[07:01] Angie: And then another fun fact is I thought she told me, I thought I heard them said when I was a kid that they met in the military camp that my dad was serving in the military. And my mom worked in like the grocery department, like the staff who like counting cash.

And so they met and then they got married and they accidentally had me. So she had no choice, but to like do all sorts of sketchy job to earn cash. And so I asked them was like, well, mom, what year did you meet that in the military? My, they just look at me dumbfounded. They're like, what are you talking about? I met your dad in his company.

You actually work in a company before, like a corporate world before, and she was like, yeah. And I was like, okay, then why did you end up working in the traditional web market? And she was like, well, because when you're in elementary school, one day we went back home and I asked you what you do. You're like, you're wandering around and send all your friends home and then go back home by yourself because you were so bored, there's no one home. And that's the moment I realized, Oh, I need to spend more time with Angie. And that's why I quit the job and it started to work in a web market to be more flexible so I can have time to spend with you. And that was like, holy shit, my whole life about what makes me who I am, what am I capable to do and what is the limit of my pursuit of achievement just shattered. I have to rewrite a lot of stuff in my book. Yeah, so I mean, I've read the book probably 15 times. I appreciate that. I didn't even finish the Good Work, the newest version.

[08:48] Paul: But I think I could see throughout the process it became this scattered collection of grievances, stories, and eventually sort of rewriting and reclaiming your own story of going from seeing yourself as the center of every story is sort of like a burden or not being good enough to like, oh, this is actually a journey of like self-love. That's sort of where I am now in the latest draft I read. Does that resonate?

[09:20] Angie: Yeah. Many people ask me, why do you wanna write a book? And my answer is I had no choice because when I gave birth to Michelle in the few months postpartum before I started writing a book, that was the worst time of my life. so little self-esteem, I don't think I deserve to be a mother of Michelle. I just like, why do you choose me to be your mom?

And I knew that if I don't take this chance to review my life and figure out what the hell happened to me while I have such a good academic background and I have proven myself that I did so many things, then why do I keep sabotaging myself?