The Moth Radio Hour: Hidden Beauty

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Speaker 1 When I was five, my mother sewed me a classic clown costume, red and yellow with a pointy hat. It's since been worn by my sister, three cousins, and four of our children.

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Speaker 1 Thanks to the efforts of AstraZeneca, there are treatment options so more patients can choose the legacies they share.

Speaker 1 This year, the Moth will partner with AstraZeneca to shine a light on the stories of those living with HATTR. Learn more at www.myattrroadmap.com.

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Speaker 4 From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jennifer Higson.
In this hour, hidden beauty, from cosmetic to creative to cosmic.

Speaker 4 Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or at the moth, in the ear of the listener.

Speaker 4 This first story is from someone important to the moth, our founder, George Dawes Green. Already a celebrated author when he launched The Moth way back in 1997, George has continued writing novels.

Speaker 4 His most recent one, Kingdoms of Savannah, has a strong connection with the story you're about to hear.

Speaker 4 We'll talk with George in a moment, but first, at Benaroya Hall in Washington where we partner with Seattle Arts and Lectures, here is George Dawes Boone.

Speaker 7 There's a town called Sorensey in the backwoods of Georgia about an hour inland from Brunswick where I grew up. And Sorensey is just a Baptist church and a holiness church and a gas station.

Speaker 5 But it was kind of famous in South Georgia

Speaker 9 because Sorensey had two flashing lights about two blocks apart.

Speaker 16 So if you were driving at night on Route 341,

Speaker 7 about 10 miles out of Sorense,

Speaker 6 you'd start to see this blinking,

Speaker 19 blink.

Speaker 19 Blink,

Speaker 19 blink.

Speaker 16 And you don't know it's two lights because from here it looks like one light, but you go a mile and it seems to stretch

Speaker 7 and it starts going

Speaker 19 bubbling,

Speaker 19 bubbling,

Speaker 21 bubbling.

Speaker 22 And you just don't know what the hell you're looking at.

Speaker 11 Is that aliens?

Speaker 5 Is that an alien spacecraft?

Speaker 22 Am I about to get probed

Speaker 19 here?

Speaker 18 And after about seven or eight miles of this,

Speaker 5 you begin to get completely hypnotized.

Speaker 24 And if you don't snap out of it, you'll drive off the road into a pine tree

Speaker 5 and you'll be just another victim of the famous Sorensey lights.

Speaker 7 When I was 19, I got summoned to Sorense.

Speaker 15 I had dropped out of high school and gone hitchhiking around the country

Speaker 27 for some years.

Speaker 28 But now I was back in Brunswick and I found a job at the local crisis hotline.

Speaker 5 Now, those were all the rage back in the early 70s because there was a nationwide war on drugs.

Speaker 7 Our crisis hotline was in this big Victorian house with live oak trees and Spanish moss and I trained there

Speaker 24 for

Speaker 12 a few weeks so that I could man the telephones

Speaker 5 and if anybody was having a bad trip on LSD I could be their friend

Speaker 12 and my bosses were Don and Calvin and they were

Speaker 16 lovely guys,

Speaker 7 very mild.

Speaker 18 But they warned me that I might get some prank calls, but I should never hang up, because sometimes a call will start as a prank, but if you wait, then

Speaker 13 the caller will start to trust you and

Speaker 22 might open up about some real problems.

Speaker 19 So I had this old-fashioned black telephone with a long cord that I could take out onto the veranda and wait for crises.

Speaker 32 But crises

Speaker 18 didn't come,

Speaker 9 and I just waited.

Speaker 28 I read, I read novels.

Speaker 16 I read Robert Penn Warren and Flannery O'Connor.

Speaker 23 I wanted to be a writer, but I felt no inspiration.

Speaker 8 These were books about fascinating,

Speaker 33 tormented southerners.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 9 all of the people that I knew were mild, like

Speaker 18 Don and Calvin.

Speaker 34 So

Speaker 6 I just waited. And then finally, the phone rang, and it was a teenage girl.

Speaker 5 And she said, I'm having...

Speaker 36 a bad trip.

Speaker 32 And I was trained to reflect, so I said, you're having a bad trip.

Speaker 30 and she said uh-huh because there's elves in here and I could hear people in the background going

Speaker 37 and

Speaker 14 I said there there's elves

Speaker 25 and

Speaker 30 she said yeah and they're laughing at my shoes

Speaker 26 And I said, they're laughing at your shoes.

Speaker 30 And she said, uh-huh, because I got them at JCPenney's in the mall, and they're ugly.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 18 she hung up.

Speaker 22 But

Speaker 15 about three nights later,

Speaker 7 she called again.

Speaker 19 I'll call her Tara.

Speaker 5 Tara was

Speaker 13 17, and she was a high school dropout.

Speaker 24 like I was.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 15 she lived with her grandmother, and she called night after night no crisis she just

Speaker 32 she'd just say hello my therapist

Speaker 8 mocking the whole therapy thing and then she'd talk she'd complain about

Speaker 5 boredom she'd complain about her grandmother she'd complain about my accent she'd say well how come you don't sound like you're from around here and I said well I I hadn't moved to Brunswick till I was 12.

Speaker 9 She said, are you really going to be a therapist?

Speaker 5 I said, I hope not.

Speaker 5 I said, I wanted to be a writer.

Speaker 13 She said, she never read books herself, but she loved stories.

Speaker 5 And so I told her the story of this Walker Percy novel that I was reading, the moviegoer, and she seemed to like that.

Speaker 18 She even came by the big Victorian house one night.

Speaker 16 The doorbell rang, and I opened,

Speaker 39 and there was with these long red ringlets and kind of an angular face and she said hello my therapist

Speaker 16 and I had to tell her that we weren't allowed to have in-person visits and she sniffed and

Speaker 12 floated away and I told my bosses

Speaker 8 Don and Calvin that Tara made me uncomfortable because

Speaker 37 it didn't feel like therapy, therapy, but they said I should hang in there because maybe she was hiding some real pain and she'd open up.

Speaker 5 So I hung in there because I really wanted to do well at this job.

Speaker 8 And then real people started to call with real problems.

Speaker 13 There was

Speaker 25 a woman in her 50s named Betty, and she'd just call and weep

Speaker 23 for hours.

Speaker 31 But But once I asked her what she loved and

Speaker 13 I can't do her voice, but

Speaker 5 I will try because this beautiful smoky voice she'd say,

Speaker 19 well,

Speaker 33 I love

Speaker 19 my Valium

Speaker 9 and I love my Librium.

Speaker 9 And I love my little dog Willie because he fights for me.

Speaker 11 And Willie was her incontinent old poodle.

Speaker 32 And I said, how does he fight for you?

Speaker 34 And she said, well, today at the rectory,

Speaker 15 he came in and made a doo-doo on Lynette Taylor's purse.

Speaker 15 And that dog just brightens my day.

Speaker 6 And there was a guy named Albert in his 60s, very lonesome.

Speaker 28 He

Speaker 24 had this high country voice and he'd say, George, my wife almost never speaks to me.

Speaker 9 Albert was

Speaker 41 always full of surprises.

Speaker 5 Like often he and his buddies would go quail hunting, but Albert confessed to me once that he was a terrible shot. He said, but you know when you're on a quail hunt,

Speaker 11 everybody shoots at once.

Speaker 18 So nobody ever knows who hits the quail.

Speaker 37 So my friends, they all say, Albert,

Speaker 36 you shot that bird.

Speaker 37 You're a good shot.

Speaker 36 But I think I have never shot a quail.

Speaker 6 One time Albert told me that as a young man,

Speaker 10 he had had some intimate moments with his best friend.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 15 even

Speaker 11 sometimes he'd put on a jacket and a tie and drive to Savannah and go cruising, looking for some connection.

Speaker 26 But he said,

Speaker 5 I never do nothing. I just drive.

Speaker 37 But then one night, Albert called and he seemed particularly sad.

Speaker 25 And I...

Speaker 19 I

Speaker 20 happened to ask the question,

Speaker 5 was it hard to be a gay man in rural Georgia?

Speaker 32 And he bristled and he said,

Speaker 6 I never said I was gay.

Speaker 19 I'm married.

Speaker 24 I'm a Christian.

Speaker 13 And I felt devastated to have used that word so casually.

Speaker 9 And after about an hour, after we hung up, he called back.

Speaker 36 And he said, George, could you come out here?

Speaker 5 I just feel like I need to talk to somebody face to face.

Speaker 26 Well, he said he lived way out past Sorency.

Speaker 24 And I was terrified to go, but I called my boss, Don, and he said I should. So I drove out there.

Speaker 7 I made it past the Sorency lights.

Speaker 6 And I came to this cinder block house,

Speaker 14 Albert's World,

Speaker 28 and I could see through the window there was this old woman watching TV, Albert's silent wife, and I knocked.

Speaker 24 And you know, for all these hours of talking to Albert, I had created some picture of him in my mind, but the door opened, and instead was a girl in long red ringlets.

Speaker 7 And she saw the look of astonishment

Speaker 11 on my face

Speaker 38 and she said, hello, my therapist.

Speaker 20 She said, I thought you knew.

Speaker 15 You didn't know? I said,

Speaker 28 you're Albert.

Speaker 26 And she said,

Speaker 19 yeah.

Speaker 36 George, I hunt quail every day, but I've never hit one.

Speaker 30 She said,

Speaker 39 you really didn't know.

Speaker 15 And she turned and called her grandmother and said, grandma, my therapist, and I are going to go sit out on the porch.

Speaker 6 And so we did.

Speaker 5 We sat in these wicker chairs and this old

Speaker 9 dog came up

Speaker 32 and she said,

Speaker 33 that's Willie.

Speaker 38 Don't let him jump up.

Speaker 36 He'll make a doo-doo.

Speaker 30 So

Speaker 40 Tara was also Betty.

Speaker 9 She was Betty and Albert.

Speaker 5 And I said, Tara,

Speaker 36 why did you invent these people?

Speaker 18 And she said, I don't know, I'm bored.

Speaker 20 I live in Sorency.

Speaker 36 She said, you want a jack and coke?

Speaker 8 And I was humiliated,

Speaker 9 partly, but I was also partly dazzled.

Speaker 13 But I didn't stay for a drink.

Speaker 17 I went home.

Speaker 7 And the next morning I told Don and Calvin

Speaker 19 and they were over the moon.

Speaker 26 They said,

Speaker 41 this is clearly a case of multiple personality,

Speaker 5 which was the holy grail for psychologists in those days.

Speaker 31 And they couldn't wait for Tara to call back.

Speaker 9 But she didn't.

Speaker 5 I waited on the veranda,

Speaker 5 but Tara never called.

Speaker 5 Nobody ever called.

Speaker 15 And the nights grew very long,

Speaker 34 and I quit.

Speaker 9 I got

Speaker 5 an equivalency diploma and went to the University of Georgia, which meant I often drove through Sorency on my way back home to Brunswick.

Speaker 11 And I'd always slow down.

Speaker 10 you know, when I was in front of Tara's house.

Speaker 6 But I never saw her.

Speaker 8 But once,

Speaker 13 years later,

Speaker 6 I was approaching the Cerency lights and there was this weird glow on the right side of the road

Speaker 7 and somebody

Speaker 5 had had an accident, had driven off the road into a pine tree.

Speaker 14 And there were other cars pulled over and

Speaker 9 the police were on their way.

Speaker 17 But as I drove past, I could glimpse the driver and he had a jacket and a tie, and he was a small, elderly man.

Speaker 6 And I had a flash of, is this Albert?

Speaker 24 But of course, it wasn't Albert.

Speaker 13 Albert was Tara's creation.

Speaker 14 She was such a powerful storyteller.

Speaker 15 And even now, when I write,

Speaker 29 I hear your voices,

Speaker 15 your character, something you did that freed me to create.

Speaker 33 And I hope that you got out of ceremony and I hope you're not bored anymore.

Speaker 15 And I hope you don't hate me for calling you Tara.

Speaker 5 I know

Speaker 11 you'd have come up with something much better. You'd have found something perfect.

Speaker 4 That was novelist and founder of The Moth, George Dawes Green.

Speaker 4 His books are Caveman's Valentine, The Juror, Ravens, and his latest, The Kingdoms of Savannah, which won the 2023 Crime Writers Association Top Award, The Gold Dagger. I'd like to see that statue.

Speaker 4 Well, George, we just listened to your beautiful story from Seattle. You had an unconventional ending to the story, and you're the founder of the Moth, so you get to do that.

Speaker 4 You

Speaker 4 reached out to Tara directly in it. You had a message for her.

Speaker 17 Yes, I mean, her real name isn't Tara.

Speaker 17 And I haven't seen that girl

Speaker 13 for 50 years, but

Speaker 29 I always hope that I'll run into her.

Speaker 29 And so I think, well, somebody will know Tara or she'll be listening to this.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 if you're out there, Tara, again, I'm sorry I call you Tara, but you know who you are.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 6 I would love to see you again.

Speaker 4 And Tara's especially important because in your book, The Kingdoms of Savannah, she's fictionalized.

Speaker 17 I kept imagining over the years

Speaker 23 what

Speaker 39 would Tara have become.

Speaker 27 And so a few years ago, it came to me that Tara might well have gone to Savannah and

Speaker 27 she could do any accent in the world, so she could easily persuade Savannians that she was an eighth-generation Savannah.

Speaker 27 And in my book, she becomes the doyen of Savannah

Speaker 24 Society.

Speaker 27 And she has a detective agency, and she inveigles

Speaker 15 all of her dysfunctional family, her adult children, to come in and help her with the detective agency.

Speaker 13 And the story is about

Speaker 19 her,

Speaker 13 you know, it's a thriller, it's a contemporary thriller, but it's about stories and savannah stories and how the stories of Savannah and Georgia really shape that area of the world.

Speaker 4 Tara, look what you inspired.

Speaker 39 And

Speaker 24 Tara also,

Speaker 17 to be honest, those stories in some way inspired the founding of the moth because I remember the night that it was revealed to me that Tara had made up all of those characters.

Speaker 15 And I can just remember that sense of the power of these Savannah stories.

Speaker 17 And it was right around that time.

Speaker 10 It was not long after

Speaker 17 I worked at Patterns at that hotline.

Speaker 27 But there was something about Georgia, I guess because there was nothing to do.

Speaker 13 So I guess that's why we were able to gather on porches and just listen to full stories.

Speaker 17 But

Speaker 29 absolutely, there's that.

Speaker 27 And there are other elements to living in the South.

Speaker 10 There's that sort of southern Gothic strain, which comes into

Speaker 10 the most casual personal stories. And so I do think that the stories of Savannah

Speaker 24 were so vivid that years later

Speaker 17 I was living in New York and missing

Speaker 6 those

Speaker 13 slow-drawled stories and

Speaker 15 going to cocktail parties and you know there's always these vultures who will interrupt every conversation after 10 seconds and not because they are particularly rude or interruptive it's just the way of life in New York and so I think one of the keys to the moth was

Speaker 15 my thought that

Speaker 39 we needed to just shut everybody up and let people tell full you know 10 12 minute stories and here we are 25 years later 25 years later

Speaker 4 that was the founder of the moth and novelist George Dawes Green. Tara, whatever your real name is, I hope you recognize yourself in this story and reach out.

Speaker 4 In a moment, sibling rivalry and a jar of noxima. Can't you just smell it? When the moth radio hour continues.

Speaker 41 The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org.

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Speaker 4 This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jennifer Hickson.
We're talking about hidden beauty, or in the case of this next story, emerging beauty.

Speaker 4 Archie Jam Jun told this story in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where we partnered with the Zyterium Theater. Here's Archie.

Speaker 31 I opened the bathroom cabinet, and my sister's beauty supply seemed to speak to me.

Speaker 36 We'll make you pretty, they whispered.

Speaker 31 My cooling sensation works wonders, said the jar of Noxima Cold Cream. I will tighten your pores, declared the St.
Ives Cucumber Face Mask.

Speaker 31 And then the bottle of sun and hair lightener threw down the gauntlet. I will give you white people hair.

Speaker 31 I was 11 years old and constantly locking myself in the bathroom for the wrong reason. I just wanted to be pretty.

Speaker 31 Now my parents' friends always said that I was handsome and my sister Annie was pretty, but as her eyes moved quickly from me to linger on her, the truth became translucent.

Speaker 31 On this highway called life, Annie could stop traffic. And if I didn't figure it out, I would get runned over.

Speaker 31 My sister's beauty allowed her to attend Barbazon, a modeling school in downtown Chicago attended by 12 other girls.

Speaker 31 On Saturday afternoons, they would practice essential life lessons like how to walk down a runway and take off a jacket at the same time.

Speaker 31 As I sat in the corner with my mom, I just seethed with envy.

Speaker 31 See, I had seen George Meitgel's music video for Freedom, which featured real supermodels walking down a real runway, and I had practiced in our basement, and I knew I could outwalk all those girls.

Speaker 31 But even at our temple, my sister was the star. When they put on a production of Menorah, the Thai story of creation, they cast Annie as the lead angel.
I had to play monkey number three.

Speaker 31 On the ride home, my parents told my sister what a great job she had done. They were so proud of her.

Speaker 31 And I, I crossed my arms and crunched myself into the back seat. I stared out the window at the moon and stars, wondering what I would have to do to get out of her shadow.

Speaker 31 I remember my mom turning back and looking at me.

Speaker 33 Archie, why do you look so sad?

Speaker 31 Oh, that's Archie, my dad started. He see the moon and the stars and he think about science, just like he's sad.

Speaker 31 These people did not know me.

Speaker 31 These people just saw their young Asian son and figured I would be good at things like math and science, the academic roadmaps for nerds.

Speaker 3 I was not a nerd.

Speaker 31 I had Zach Morris saved by the bell hair.

Speaker 35 I was pretty.

Speaker 31 I would be a star like my sister. And I had a plan.
Step one, go into the bathroom, lock the door.

Speaker 31 Step two, take my sister's jar of noxima and lather it all over my face until its camphor, eucalyptus, and menthol made it feel like a cough drop.

Speaker 31 Step three, take the St. Ives cucumber face mask and apply it evenly and slowly so it came off in one sheath instead of dozens of flakes.

Speaker 31 Step four, pump in that sun-in-hair lightener because in the 90s nothing made an Asian person look cooler than orange hair.

Speaker 31 Step five, think about Keanu Reeves.

Speaker 31 In 1991, Keanu Reeves starred in the mega-hit blockbuster music video Rush Rush by Paula Abdul.

Speaker 31 It was a remake of the classic film Rubble Without a Cause and I often imagined that I was Paula and Keanu was my rebel.

Speaker 31 But one day as I sat on the bathroom counter engaged in my beauty routine, I must have forgot step one. Because the door busted open and there was my sister Annie.

Speaker 31 She took one look at me playing with her stuff and she was like, oh my god, you need to stop. And don't you know these things are for girls only?

Speaker 31 I grabbed the jar of Naxima.

Speaker 31 It does not say for girls anywhere on this product.

Speaker 31 It doesn't have to. Why can't you just be like other brothers? What is wrong with you? Do you want to use my maxi pads too?

Speaker 31 Annie, I will use whatever I want. It is my bathroom too.
And then I pushed past her. In those days, however, my sister was so much stronger.
She grabbed me by my t-shirt and flung me into the wall.

Speaker 31 She drew back her hand and clawed three marks onto the side of my face. Like Nancy Kerrigan after the attack on her knee, I fell to the ground screaming, why, why, why?

Speaker 31 Not only would these marks forestall my plans for beauty, I would have to explain them to the kids at school, where rumor had it, I might be gay.

Speaker 31 That's when I decided I'd had enough. Now, this wasn't the first time my sister beat me up.
It wouldn't be the last time my sister beat me up.

Speaker 31 But nobody was going to stand between me and my plans to be beautiful. Now, I didn't usually engage in boy activities, but I had been playing a certain video game, Street Fighter II.

Speaker 31 And I had become very adept at a certain character, the mistress of the tornado kicks mother, Tucking Chun Lee.

Speaker 31 With the video game as inspiration, I rose to my feet and imagined my sister and I in Chun Li's alley from the video game.

Speaker 31 To her utter confusement, I started bouncing around on my two feet, and then I pulled back my leg and kicked her with a loud ya!

Speaker 31 She grabbed her leg and fell to the ground. I had won.

Speaker 46 Or so I thought.

Speaker 31 Like a phoenix I had failed to even kill, my sister rose with angry flames of puberty and pride.

Speaker 31 She lunged at me and pinned me to the ground, and then she started berating me, at which point I was reminded we'd had dried fish for breakfast.

Speaker 31 Then, just as she was about to claw the other side of my face, my mother intervened and saved me.

Speaker 31 And the next day she took me to Walgreens, where she bought me my own noxima, my own face mask, and my own own bottle of sun and higher lightener.

Speaker 31 Why did my mother do this, you ask?

Speaker 31 Because she was not ready for this conversation, and sometimes it's just easier to go to Walgreens.

Speaker 31 There was someone, however, who was ready for this conversation. and that was my aunt Nathu.

Speaker 31 My aunt had moved in with us about a year before this, and she had like bright makeup, big hoop earrings, big curly hair.

Speaker 31 She reminded me of I want to dance with somebody Whitney Houston and I just fell in gay boy love with her.

Speaker 31 A few days after this fight, she pulled me into her bathroom and she showed me how to how to cleanse my face in a circular motion to increase circulation.

Speaker 31 how to use a toner to pH balance my skin. And then she showed me the key to life, moisturization

Speaker 31 after I perfected my techniques with my Walgreens brands she upgraded me to a line from Shiseido

Speaker 31 and she gave me a mud mask from a dead sea

Speaker 31 before my aunt there was always a part of me that I was hiding from everybody else But in my aunt's room, in her bathroom, I was free to be whoever I wanted to be.

Speaker 31 Growing up gay, there are these parts of you you're so ashamed of and you just don't even understand it yet.

Speaker 31 But when someone you love sees it and nurtures it, it isn't too much to say that it changes who you think you can be in this world.

Speaker 31 When I came out to my aunt in my 20s, she looked at me and said,

Speaker 31 Oh my God, you must think I'm stupid.

Speaker 31 And today,

Speaker 31 my sister is a Northwestern graduate and academic head of her department. What a freaking nerd.

Speaker 31 And I...

Speaker 31 I have an MFA, which means my career is on a journey.

Speaker 31 I love where it's been, but I have no idea where it's going.

Speaker 9 But today,

Speaker 31 I walk with my head held high and a proud swish in my hips, just like my aunt taught me, because today, I truly believe I am beautiful.

Speaker 23 Thank you.

Speaker 4 That was Archie Jamjum. Archie reports that he and his sister Annie officially ended their rivalry when she had her first daughter, Natasha.

Speaker 4 Natasha goes through more beauty products than little Archie could ever dream of, and like her uncle, loves watching RuPaul's drag race.

Speaker 4 Archie is the co-curator of Outspoken LBGTQ stories at Sidetrack in Chicago. And for the record, Archie is beautiful, and you can see for yourself on our Radio Extras page at themoth.org.

Speaker 4 I encourage you to become a part of the Moth by pitching a story of your own. Start with a turning point in your life.
Think about how it changed you and then fill in the colorful details.

Speaker 4 You'll have to keep it short for our pitch line, so plan it out. We only give you two minutes and it goes by quickly, but we listen to each and every pitch.

Speaker 4 Maybe one day you could join storytellers on stage to share it. You can pitch us at 877-799MOTH or online at themoth.org, where you can also share these stories or others from the Moth Archive.

Speaker 4 In a moment, a harrowing story about survival when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

Speaker 4 can set me free.

Speaker 4 Don't you leave me this way? No.

Speaker 4 Don't you understand?

Speaker 4 I'm at your command.

Speaker 4 Oh, baby, please, please don't leave me this way.

Speaker 4 No,

Speaker 4 baby,

Speaker 4 don't leave me this way.

Speaker 41 The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the public radio exchange prx.org.

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Speaker 4 You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jennifer Higson.
Our final story is told by Annette Herfkins in New York City.

Speaker 4 It's a story that wouldn't typically conjure the idea of beauty, but it's in there. And I should warn listeners that it involves an accident and has some intense details.
Here's Annette.

Speaker 3 November 14, 1992.

Speaker 43 We were on top of the world, my fiancée and I.

Speaker 43 Both investment bankers, we were going to on a romantic getaway to the beaches of Nhatrang,

Speaker 43 Vietnam, South China Sea.

Speaker 43 We were 13 years together, Parsha and I, college sweethearts.

Speaker 43 We board a small plane with 31 passengers and five crew.

Speaker 43 Too small for me. I'm very claustrophobic.
And

Speaker 43 he had to convince me to get in. It's only 55 minutes.
It's the only way to get there.

Speaker 43 I sit down,

Speaker 43 pounding hard. counting the minutes.
And the 50th minute, the plane makes this giant drop.

Speaker 43 Now Parshi looks at me scared. So this I don't like, he says.
I said, don't worry. It's just in their pocket.
But then another drop.

Speaker 43 People are screaming. He reached for my hand.
I reach for his.

Speaker 43 Everything goes black.

Speaker 43 I wake up to chaos.

Speaker 43 And the eerie sounds of the jungle. One moment roaring motors, next

Speaker 43 this jungle.

Speaker 43 I can see the growth through the front of your fuselage. The cockpit has broken off.

Speaker 43 I'm stuck

Speaker 43 under a seat

Speaker 43 with a dead man in it, as it turns out, when I push it off me.

Speaker 43 Left of me, I see Pasha,

Speaker 43 still strapped in a seat.

Speaker 43 He has a sweet smile on his face, but he's dead.

Speaker 43 I must have gone into shock because my next memory is a little bit down the mountain, out on the jungle floor, on a thousand little twigs.

Speaker 43 I check my legs. They seem broken, big gaping wounds.

Speaker 43 I can see the

Speaker 43 book. I see the bone of my shin, blue bone.
and the flesh curling around like a biology book and the insects are having a ball.

Speaker 43 I didn't know it then, but I only knew my pain. But I had 16 broken bones,

Speaker 43 my jaw was loose and a collapsed lung.

Speaker 43 And behind me was Parsia.

Speaker 43 Parshe, my rock, my love,

Speaker 43 my life.

Speaker 43 Parsha is,

Speaker 43 don't think of Parsha. Don't look back.

Speaker 43 I look around.

Speaker 43 There are more people on the mountain slope scattered around.

Speaker 43 Some are gone, some are moaning.

Speaker 43 But the man next to me

Speaker 43 is speaking in English even.

Speaker 43 And we have a few conversations about when the rescuers

Speaker 43 will come. But I see the light going out and the life going out of him.
I beg him not to die. But he does.
By the end of the day, he's gone. Everyone is gone.

Speaker 43 Everyone is dead. There's no more sound coming from the plane, no more sound on the mountain.
And never have I been so entirely alone

Speaker 43 and thirsty, so thirsty. So I begin to panic.
But my collapsed lung

Speaker 43 forces me to breathe in, out, in, out, and it calms me down.

Speaker 43 People will be looking.

Speaker 43 My family, my boss, my colleagues,

Speaker 43 I just have to wait and trust.

Speaker 43 And don't look over my shoulder.

Speaker 43 Don't think of Pasha. That will make you cry and crying will make you thirsty.
You cannot afford to be more thirsty. You cannot afford to lose your wits.
Look at what is. Look in front of you.

Speaker 43 Look at the jungle. Look at the beauty of the jungle.
I'm a city girl. I like shopping.
I don't like hiking.

Speaker 43 And the more I focus on the leaf, on the vein of the leaf, the dew, the catch

Speaker 43 on top of the leaf and the light in that dew, catching the light,

Speaker 43 it's beautiful. And I marvel at my lack of fear.
I just tell myself to go to sleep at night.

Speaker 43 I wake up in the morning, I focus on the beauty.

Speaker 43 And I keep track of time by glancing at the watch now and then of the dead man next to me.

Speaker 43 But then I glance and I see what what's coming out of his eye that's moving.

Speaker 43 It's a maggot.

Speaker 43 That smell. I just have to move.
I have to move. So I just move on my elbows and I drag along my broken bones.
That's all I can do. And I move past the dead man and past a few more dead people.

Speaker 43 I snatch a bag from a dead girl and I settle in a more open area where they they can see where I can see the sky and probably they could see me if they actually were looking.

Speaker 19 I opened the bag.

Speaker 43 I found a blue rain, a rain porn,

Speaker 43 bright blue. I put it on, keeps me warm.
Why am I so cold? It's supposed to be hot here. I'm so, so cold and so thirsty.
But hey,

Speaker 43 it starts raining. I can hold up the porn child and I I can just catch the rain.
And I see it filling up with water and I get to sip it up.

Speaker 43 And that's those sips of water is better than the best champagne.

Speaker 43 And that's how I kept myself alive.

Speaker 43 And by focusing on the beauty. And it became more radiant.
And by day six, I did not find the pain any more.

Speaker 43 I didn't... I was just one with this jungle.
one with this process of rebirth and decay and

Speaker 43 well I was like on some loving wavelength. I love, had love for the whole world, for everyone.
I would not mind staying in forever.

Speaker 43 But then

Speaker 43 I see a man.

Speaker 43 A man?

Speaker 43 He's dressed in orange. He's framed by the jungle

Speaker 43 growth. And he looks at me.

Speaker 43 And I...

Speaker 43 He gets me out of my state of mind, right back to earth, in my body, in the pain.

Speaker 43 And I just think I have to make a decision, I have to get out of here. My family, my family, they don't even know that I'm here.
They will never know that I've been here.

Speaker 43 And I start looking for my voice. Hello?

Speaker 43 Can you help me?

Speaker 43 And he just stands there and stares at me. I said, Hello, can you help me?

Speaker 43 Would you please?

Speaker 43 Eti moi, si vous press

Speaker 3 mi?

Speaker 43 Ayura mer?

Speaker 19 Povavor?

Speaker 43 Ayura me?

Speaker 43 Nothing.

Speaker 43 He doesn't lift a finger, he just stares at me. And now I'm getting angry.
This man is my ticket out of here. I he has to get me out of here.
Hey, salo, pendejo, schweinunt ayurame, po vavor.

Speaker 43 He he leaves. Shoot, now I insulted him.

Speaker 43 But I don't mind. I just go back to my beautiful state of mind.
I love it. I'm happy.
I just stay there forever.

Speaker 43 But then, at the end of the eighth day,

Speaker 43 I see a group of living men approaching, coming up the mountain. They carry bags for the dead bodies.

Speaker 43 And at passengers list, and they approach me and they show it to me. And I see, I have to point out my name, Annette Harriet, which is not my name.
Annette Harriet.

Speaker 43 That's me.

Speaker 43 They give me a sip of water out of a plastic bottle that will be forever etched on my cornea.

Speaker 43 And next they they put me on a cloth,

Speaker 43 bind the ends together on a stick

Speaker 43 and they carry me

Speaker 43 between the shoulders out

Speaker 43 away into down the mountain away from the wreckage. But now I truly panic.
I say I don't I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave my partia.
I don't want to leave eternal love.

Speaker 43 I want to stay here. And I really truly completely panic.
But the men

Speaker 43 realized that, and they they tread so lightly as not to hurt me. And then I realized I should better be grateful to them.

Speaker 43 And I find my sense of humor. I said, Well, who would ever fought to be carried like a piglet out of jungle door through a jungle up and down?

Speaker 43 And I was grateful. And I am grateful.

Speaker 43 And that was the end of the ordeal that changed the narrative of my life.

Speaker 43 I mourned, I mourned, I mourned some more,

Speaker 43 I healed,

Speaker 43 I resumed my career, got married, got two beautiful children,

Speaker 43 and when life got rough,

Speaker 4 as it did,

Speaker 43 I just went back to that beautiful place. The jungle kept on giving me strength.

Speaker 43 But there was this lingering mystery about the orange man.

Speaker 43 Did he exist?

Speaker 43 Was he a monk? Or was he a ghost? A hallucination.

Speaker 43 So in 2006, I decided to go back to Vietnam, back to the mountain, up the mountain, together with six of my original rescuers and two Vietnamese officials.

Speaker 43 It's a very, very steep climb up the mountain in the heat. And there was this one man extending a helpful hand every whenever I needed one.
He just seemed to be there.

Speaker 43 And after six cruel hours we just get to the top of that mountain or wherever the plane was, we up high.

Speaker 43 And it's nothing like, it was not magical at all, of course.

Speaker 43 There was a lot of debris laying around, pieces of carpet, Vietnam Airline colours, a window, a plastic window.

Speaker 43 an exit sign.

Speaker 43 So I just think, okay, let me go to my spot. Maybe I get the feeling back.

Speaker 43 And I sit down and say hi to the ants and the twigs

Speaker 43 and look at the crew. They were preparing lunch.
And then I see it. There's something about the way he's standing, something

Speaker 43 about the angle, perhaps. But hey, that man is the orange man.
The man who helped me turn out to be the orange man. And I hurry, hurry to the group.
I ask a translator, please, please help me.

Speaker 43 I said, hey, it was you.

Speaker 43 You were there. You found us.

Speaker 43 But you didn't say anything, but you did help me, obviously.

Speaker 43 And the man very humbly giggled. He covered his mouth.
He giggled. He said, well,

Speaker 43 I'd never seen a white person before.

Speaker 43 And I've never seen blue eyes.

Speaker 43 And I thought you were a ghost.

Speaker 43 So just picture this. This man comes to his side, he sees all these

Speaker 43 dead people, a wreckage, and then this

Speaker 43 little figure, white, blue eyes, pointy blue hat, is the archetype of a ghost. So can't blame him.
And I said, of course, I said, and I thought you were a ghost.

Speaker 43 But then he goes on to tell me,

Speaker 43 via the translator, that he actually thought finally that he was

Speaker 43 going to try to shoot me away. And he already had me in his loop

Speaker 43 and then I had taken my hood off.

Speaker 43 And then he realized I was somewhat human and he ran off and got fetched his friends, the rescue team.

Speaker 43 So hey, had I not taken my hood off, I would have actually died and become a ghost.

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 43 But I did get to thank him. and be with him and thank the other rescuers.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 43 I'm very, very grateful for my experience on the mountain and for the enrichment of going back. I got to connect, connect to my higher self, to nature or to God, if you will.

Speaker 43 I got the second time, I got to connect to my saviors

Speaker 43 and the families of the co-passengers.

Speaker 43 And in 2014, I got to go back and bring my daughter and meet the orange man with whom she would not have been here.

Speaker 43 So, as it always is, the beauty is in the connection. Right here,

Speaker 43 right now.

Speaker 4 That was Annette Herfkins. Annette was raised in the Netherlands, where she studied law and economics and met her fiancée, Pasha.

Speaker 4 After the accident, she went back to work and became a managing director at Banco Santander.

Speaker 4 Her book, Turbulence, details her life before and after the accident and her lasting ability to find beauty in even the most dire situations.

Speaker 4 She is eternally grateful to the Orange Man and all her rescuers and thinks often of Pasha and all the other passengers who lost their lives on the mountain that day.

Speaker 4 To see a picture of Annette and Pasha and one of the orange man, his name is Kao van Hahn, visit them.org.

Speaker 4 That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. I'd like to thank all of the storytellers in this hour, each celebrating beauty in their own way.
We hope you'll join us next time.

Speaker 41 This episode of the Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Jennifer Hickson, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show.

Speaker 41 Co-producer is Vicki Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch.

Speaker 41 The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Janesse, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Marina Cluche, Leanne Gulley, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Caza.

Speaker 41 Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift.

Speaker 41 Other music in this hour from The Westerlies, Thelma Houston, Balkan Beatbox, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Speaker 41 The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

Speaker 41 For more about our podcast, for information on pitching this, your own story, which we always hope you'll do, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.