Fears the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The great awakening is coming.
What is happening? Every week on Conspiratory Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. Hello, kids, this is Risk. The show where people tell true stories, they never thought they'd dare to share.
I'm Kevin Allison, and every Thursday, we release these special episodes that we're calling Classic Risk Singles. Each of these episodes features just one story from our previous years. If you're new to Risk, you should know that the podcast can be very uncensored. This week, a story by the remarkable photographer, Shen Wei, that he first shared on the podcast in 2013, it's called But Now I See.
When I was 23 years old, I found myself standing in front of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. The painting was the olive trees with yellow sky and the golden sun. The painting was so fascinating to me because I had seen this painting many times when I was a child in the newspaper, but I just couldn't imagine when I was standing in front of the painting, look at it so closely, almost recognize the brush stroke from the artist. Then I walked from room to room, I saw Monet's grain stacks, I saw Roman statues, Egyptian mummies, even the art collection from China, my native country was astonishingly.
You see, I had never stood so close to creations I found so magnetic. I had never seen these sort of masterpieces that spoke directly to my heart, right in front of my face. Because I was raised in Shanghai in Islam, I had never stepped foot in an arm using before and I couldn't get over how much I feel like I'd arrive at home. My childhood in Islam was full of trouble.
I lived with my parents, my grandparents, three aunt, two uncles, a few cousins, some cats, rats, and the cockroaches, all under one roof. I didn't have my own room, so I spent a lot of time just outside, playing with other children, chasing around the mace that was the street of Islam. In the summer time, I would sleep outside in the communal courtyard for the entire season to escape the heat of the house. Our cooling system was fans made of bamboo leaves and just one electrical fan that everybody was fighting over.
My parents married during the Cultural Revolution in China. That last from late 60 through late 70s. People who were wealthy and suspected to be in capitalist were being harassed or put in labor camps or even worse. My mother's father was an entrepreneur.
He owned an engineering firm and the family lived very largely in this mansion in French concession. But my grandfather's success made him a target when the Cultural Revolution began. He was stripped nearly everything he had owned. So, my mother did what so many other wealthy young woman in China did at a time.
She decided to marry into a poor family for a more stable future. She met my father, the son of a construction worker. She married him and left her childhood in the mansion behind and then she moved to the slum with my father. They fell in love, but their life were very hard.
They both walked the long hours in the factories and the countless different in their family background got them fighting all the time. Because my mother's upbringing, she was very westernized. I have never seen her dressed in Chi Pa, which is this traditional Chinese style dress. She drank a lot of coffee rather than tea, taught me how to use fork and a knife.
She once brought a whole family to a park for a picnic trip, but no one around us actually understand the concept of picnic. She was also an interesting fashion design. She always dressed very nicely and she made clothes for everywhere in the family. I often looked too dapper for the slum.
I had this chocolate colored striped suit, very, very chic. She was sometimes poured hair or your army, just make me look extra nice. My hair is always so shiny under the sun. When I strode with her through the slum, everyone commented on us.
Some are marrying us, but most were just very jealous. My mother became like a fashion icon in the slum. All the women came to her and asked her to design clothes for them. She developed a tie-in for making very classy-looking dress from very cheap fabric.
Yes, after the culture revolution ended, she left her factory job, went to a fashion school, and became a full-time clothing designer. Even before she was retired, she designed clothes for publishing houses and TV productions. Meanwhile, my father never left his factory. He's been fixing machines his whole life.
When I was young, he would walk long days and came home very tired and sometimes frustrated with everyone at home. Perhaps life was too overwhelming for him at the time, the constant stress and the work and exhaustion. Sometimes he was even abusive because of it. I was very scared of him when I was a kid.
He was always him when I went home with a very bad school report. We had a good time too, but I started to forget all about those. My memories of my childhood always went back to getting beat up like my father. After a while, I just stopped talking to my father.
I began to feel that we were so different. It was almost as if we weren't related. One day, when I was eight years old, my mother discovered my textbooks were covered with pencil drawings. She said, this is my art gene.
It has been passed two way way, which is my nickname from my mother. She was so proud to think that I may be an artist and she began to send me to this weekend art school. As it turned out, I actually really loved art classes. I grew to love drawing and design.
Eventually, I was accepting to an art college in Shanghai and I began to understand for sure that I was an artist. I'm grateful that my parents made that possible for me. But studying art in China in the late 90s was difficult because it wasn't the best environment for self-expressions. Resource was very limited.
You don't get to see a lot of art books from overseas and the internet was not that common at the time and the Chinese society was still quite restrictive. My art school was more practical than actually artistic. One time, art assignment was to design a perfume bottle but none of the student had ever used or owned a perfume. I went home and I painted a big breast woman on this beer bottle for my assignment.
My parents were very shocked and confused but they were just happy I was not getting trouble on the street. My mother continued to be excited about my art studies. She began to speak me like a peer since she felt like we'd come from the same class as they say. But my father never seemed to know what to say to me about art.
It seemed like art was just an alien saying to him, not a part of his world of machine and work. For a while, I was working in this design firm. One morning, I was ready to leave for work. My father questioned me why I don't bring any tool to work.
I looked over to my father and impatiently response. I used my brain. I can see his eyes dinged down to a slice of embarrassment and anger. Sometimes he would listen to Shanghai Opera, which is kind of a music that comes from this folk tradition in Shanghai, seen in the Shanghai dialect.
Not like the war class Beijing Opera, which is considered high art, and it is admired by music lovers from all over the world. I remember being a teenage watching my father harm along to this Shanghai Opera and hoping he could have a better taste for a finer things in life. The more I grew to love art and the more I felt it was in my genes, like my mother said, the more my father and I seemed to be from a different world. I knew I should go see and study real art where artists can express themselves whenever they want.
So in the summer of 2000, I landed in the United States. I was accepted by the Minneapolis College of Art Design, a grey school where I continued to discover who I am and what I want. I saw and did so many things for the first time, including making the kind of art I love. After three years in Minneapolis, I moved to New York City and went to graduate school, trying to survive and making art.
When I moved to the US, I drifted apart from my father even more. I would talk to my mother on the phone all the time, but if my father answered the phone, the conversation would be painfully awkward. We were just two people with nothing common anymore. A couple years ago, my parents came to New York to visit me.
It was my father's first trip out of China. I brought them to Washington DC and we went to the National Gallery of Art. My mother was tired so she went to the coffee shop the whole time and left me with my father. We walked the room to the room silently, we don't even talk to each other completely wordless.
We walked through this long haul of sculptures. I intentionally speed up so I can just get over this awkwardness as fast as I can. Then I saw my father set down at this one bench, staring very intensely in front of him. I thought he must be lost in thought about something.
So I just stood holding my position by the door and hoping to exit the gallery as soon as possible. But I just watching him just sitting there, not even moving. I feel like he must sit in there for a long, long time. Finally, I walked over to him, trying to signal him that we ought to move on.
Before I said anything, he turned his head to me, leaning his body forward a little bit, pointing his finger to a bronze statue right in front of him and I said, that is the most beautiful thing I've seen in my life. At that moment, I realized that my father was in a museum for the first time in his life. And just as I had such a profound experience, the first time I stepped foot in a museum in Minneapolis. So was he.
He was staring at Rodin's The Thinker, a nude man in sober meditation, battling with a powerful internal struggle. And the sculpture might as well have been alive for him. It might as well have been a sculpture of him. At the moment, I almost burst into tears.
There was so much about my father that I had never seen before and could only see now that we were in this new environment. Away from the place, he had relentlessly difficult life in the past six decades. Later, I heard my father sing discreetly by himself in the hotel bathroom. I even came to realize how beautifully simple and true those old Shanghai folk opera sounds had always been, though I'd felt to see it before.
And I was telling myself, my father and I are not really so different. And that's my art gene. That's all for this week's Classic Risk Singles episode. Now, don't miss out on our regular full-length episodes.
There's a brand new one every Tuesday. And everything you might want to know about us is at risk-show.com.