A Texas mother moved her family to Minnesota because her state wanted to 'eradicate' her transgender child.
Host Kate Tellers opens by framing the episode as part of The Moth's spring series on the American dream, with this installment focused on home. The first story comes from Heather Crawford, told at a Twin Cities Story Slam. Heather introduces herself as a proud Texan who moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in August 2022 after her transgender child faced escalating threats from Texas legislation targeting trans youth. She describes buying a house sight unseen, only to discover two months later that its structural beams were failing — a metaphor, she says, for her own internal state. Heather details the four months between deciding to leave and actually moving, during which her child suffered panic attacks severe enough to require hospitalization. She describes the impossible emotional labor of presenting the move as a good thing while privately grieving everything left behind. She praises Minnesota as the best place in the country to raise a trans child, while cataloguing what she misses about Texas: cicadas, midnight driveway gatherings, the heat radiating from concrete. She closes with a contradictory emotional statement — she resents Texas, hates Texas, loves Texas, and wants to go home. A postscript from Heather reveals her child Cass has since graduated high school, found their own apartment, and is thriving. Heather reflects that Texas betrayed her so fundamentally she doesn't believe she'll ever live there again, but says she will never stop mourning her first home. The second story is from Eric Yu, told at a Philadelphia Grand Slam. At 16, Eric discovered through a photo album that he had two cousins in China he had never been told about. He describes his father as an elusive figure who worked in China throughout Eric's childhood, visiting once a year to yell about dinner, beat him at ping pong, and disappear. When Eric started high school, his father moved to the U.S. to try to save the marriage, and though the marriage ended in divorce, a real father-son relationship began. Eric describes piecing together his father's personality through shared meals, trips, and stories — his operatic singing voice, his jump shot, his work ethic. In his senior year, Eric was called to the principal's office and told his father had died in a car accident that morning. Years later, Eric and his sister traveled to China for the first time in 18 years, meeting their cousins Feng Xiaorui and Feng Yu Jie and their families. At a family dinner, his aunt produced a suitcase of old photo albums showing his father as a child and young adult. Family members described his father as charismatic, hardworking, and someone who sang from sunrise to sunset. Eric concludes that he found his father not only in the photos but in his relatives' voices, eyes, and humor, and that what he thought were separate puzzles — his father, his Chinese family, his own identity — were always one connected picture.
