Recording
Selina Kaing: Birthday Candles
"Birthday Candles" is a first-person radio commentary by Selina Kaing for KQED Perspectives, told through a box of reused birthday candles.[1] It follows how an immigrant family blends the habits of its birth country with those of its new American home.[1]
About the recording
Kaing's parents were Cambodian refugees who fled the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge regime. Like many Cambodians, the family found a living in California's new donut shop industry in the 1980s. Birthdays, like the donuts they sold, were American traditions that had not been part of the family's life before her parents came to the United States.[1]
Kaing's earliest birthday memory is a strawberry cake from a local Asian bakery, topped with eight spiral-striped Wilton candles from a 24-count box. After the party, her mother wiped the frosting off the candles, rinsed and dried them, and put them back in the box with the unused ones. Every year her mother reused the same candles and added one new one.[1] Kaing ties the habit to the frugality of the family's immigrant background, its gratitude for escaping genocide and war, and its adoption of American traditions.[1]
The piece closes with Kaing's own young daughter, who will never grow up the way her mother did. Kaing says the stories her daughter's grandparents tell her "will seem as foreign as the Cambodian language they speak." As the girl's fourth birthday approaches, Kaing takes out her daughter's own set of burnt candles and prepares to add a new one.[1]
The commentary appears on KQED Perspectives under two dates, January 6, 2021, and December 2, 2021.[2][1]
Credits
Selina Kaing is the narrator and author. She works in the tech sector and is a writer.[1]