Healing the Tigress: An AAPI Maternal Mental Health Podcast

In this November episode, we honor veteran and author Dr. Joan Sung, whose memoir Kinda Korean: Stories from an American Life looks at what it means to feel to straddle bicultural worlds and not feeling Korean enough or American enough. She talks with us about growing up with a Korean tiger mom, becoming a mother herself, and choosing to parent differently.

Joan shares how motherhood made her rebuild her identity and traditions from scratch, while trying to heal her own intergenerational wounds and simultaneously learning how to mother. She talks openly about postpartum depression and the...

Dr. Theresa Nguyen, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and researcher of almost 20 yeras, joins Healing the Tigress to discuss why Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities have been underrepresented in perinatal mental health research and how that gap can affect care for mothers and families. Drawing on her Vietnamese American background and her work in women’s and perinatal mental health, Dr. Nguyen shares how her personal experiences, structural inequities, and gaps in data shaped her research.

Dr. Nguyen also gets personal with us about her own decision to be child-free by choice due to her own me...

What happens when the person telling everyone else’s story is quietly carrying infertility, burnout, anti-Asian racism, and becoming a first-time mom at the same time? Dion Lim reveals the private cost of being the public face of Asian American truth-telling—and why vulnerability, not perfection, is what finally opened doors.

Peggy and Jasmine sit down with three-time Emmy Award-winning journalist and author Dion Lim for a conversation that moves from identity and motherhood to the emotional toll of reporting on anti-Asian hate during the pandemic. Dion shares how growing up as the daughter of immigrants in over...

[This is a sneak peek version, but you can SUBSCRIBE TODAY for the full episode #5 at healingthetigress.buzzsprout.com!]

Last year, we read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and we've been having a lot of discussion between the two of us since finishing the book. Because we are so invested in mental health topics, the topic of our children’s mental health is naturally really important to us too. This book talked about "How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness" by "overprotecting our kids in the real world an...

In this Subscriber Only episode, Jasmine and Peggy reveal exactly what it takes—beyond just hitting record—to launch and sustain a meaningful podcast. You may have heard a little of how Healing the Tigress was born from our passion to destigmatize maternal mental health challenges in the very first episode, but this one gives you a look at how we've grown over the last 3 seasons and the inside scoop. From naming our show and crafting impactful branding to navigating tech choices and building guest relationships, we share actionable insights for anyone aspiring to create their own podcast. Or mayb...

[This is a sneak peek version, but you can SUBSCRIBE TODAY for the full episode #10 at healingthetigress.buzzsprout.com!]

In this bonus episode, Peggy and Jasmine dive into the real realities of summer break for parents: the childcare scramble, the mental load of camp sign-ups, and the pressure to make every summer “magical.” They reflect on how summer has changed from their own childhoods, comparing camps, travel, family support, and the freedom of slower days at home. We also explore the history of summer vacation, why the school calendar looks the way it does, and whet...

[This is a sneak peek version, but you can SUBSCRIBE TODAY for the full episode #9 at healingthetigress.buzzsprout.com!]

As children of immigrants, Peggy and Jasmine both grew up speaking Chinese in their households and attending Chinese School on the weekends. In this episode, we share about our personal experiences learning Chinese and how/why the end results may have differed in our later years despite both of us attending the same length of schooling. We also talk about how our experiences may be shaping our journey to teaching our children the language now and...

Happy Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month AND also, Happy Maternal Mental Health Month! May is always a big month because of these two things coincide and are also the basis of our podcast themes.

We don’t usually do a season finale episode, but starting at the beginning of 2026, we had to make some shifts to think ahead for the future of Healing the Tigress. And after working it out amongst ourselves, we thought it was important to share it with you, our listeners. That’s what this episode aims to do: we want to be tran...

[This is a sneak peek version, but you can SUBSCRIBE TODAY for the full episode #8 at healingthetigress.buzzsprout.com!]

Besides for talking to each other about their perinatal mental health challenges like postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety during the early motherhood years, Peggy and Jasmine have also had many reflective talks over the years about the decision to have just one child or not. Having a safe space to contemplate is not often easy to come by, and we were lucky to have each other's company to discuss this topic in depth. It has taken...

This episode dives into the topics of non-traditional paths to parenthood, as well as not settling for a partner if it doesn't feel like the right fit. Our guest today is Jen from @AsiansInBloom. Jen is a second-generation Taiwanese American woman and eldest daughter of immigrant parents, with degrees in Psychology, Speech-Language Pathology, and Human-Centered Design Engineering. 

Jen shares with us how she had always felt like a "late-bloomer" when she was growing up, though she doesn't like to refer to herself as that anymore. We talk about how she had tried following her parents' path laid o...

Today's guest, Lana Marcucio, found us through last year's episode 40 that we did with Not a Tiger Mom Podcast's hosts (two neurodivergent moms raising their own autistic kids), and she connected with us in hopes of sharing her story too. In honor of April as Autism Awareness Month, we were thrilled to speak with her about her journey.

Lana is a 1.5 generation Vietnamese/Chinese American mom of 3, one of which is a non-speaking or non-verbal daughter with Autism. She eventually turned to technology to help her daughter speak, as Lana has been a mobile app developer for...

For this year's National Infertility Awareness Week, we wanted to give the spotlight to a beloved friend, fan, and contributor to our podcast. Joining us today from her usual behind-the-scenes role is Emilie Chuong, the gracious Japanese/Chinese American photographer who took our podcast photos and headshots to help us launch Season 2!

Emilie walks us through her infertility journey with her husband, which entailed all the tests and a year of IUIs before attempting to try IVF. But literally just before they were going to do their first IVF round, the pandemic shut down everything and "elective...

Today’s guest will be talking about the topic of hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) , which is a severe form of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy that requires medical intervention. Raag Malhotra is a PMH-C certified perinatal mental health therapist who transformed her own journey through postpartum depression and HG across two pregnancies into a mission to support mothers navigating their darkest moments. 

Raag is a mother of two and brings a unique lens of experiencing one pregnancy in India during the pandemic and the second pregnancy in the United States. She was not informed that getting hyperemesis gravidarum in...

Join us in this episode as we explore the inspiring journey of Michele Elizaga, a Filipina American single mom by choice. Michele shares her decision to embrace motherhood on her own terms and defy societal expectations of needing to be partnered to have a baby. It started on her 40th birthday in Costa Rica where she had a pivotal conversation with a good friend that led her to consider having a child without a partner and pursue fertility options.

What started as a wild idea turned into a fast-paced roller coaster as Michele navigated sperm banks, fertility...

In this episode, Stella Falkner shares her inspiring journey from postpartum mental health struggles to creating and founding Dowa, a platform that bridges community support with clinical care for mothers. We dive into Stella’s personal experiences through postpartum that led her to discovering she had complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and how she started healing from this. Stella tells us about how C-PTSD is different from PTSD because it arises from not one singular traumatic event but from an accumulation of prolonged, repeated, or chronic traumas that becomes woven into daily heightened feelings of being under duress. 

W...

On today's episode, we dive into the often-overlooked topic of mental health among AAPI men. Our guest is John Wang, the award-winning author of Big Asian Energy. John with us shares his personal journey of overcoming burnout and redefining his identity, highlighting the cultural challenges faced by AAPI men in seeking mental health support and honoring where they come from without losing who they are becoming.

We explore the impact of societal expectations, the model minority myth, imposter syndrome, people-pleasing, and the importance of creating spaces for emotional expression and healing, particularly in the AAPI community. John...

This episode delves into the critical topic of maternal mental health research and policy, especially as it pertains to the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Our guest today features Cindy Herrick, a certified peer support specialist and Senior Editorial & Research Manager at the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health. 

Cindy is a Taiwanese American mom of one who shares her personal journey through maternal mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression, and perinatal OCD, and discusses the systemic gaps in research and policy that affect AAPI mothers. While Cindy never imagined herself doing policy work, through volunteering, s...

In this episode, we had the extreme pleasure of interviewing New York Times bestselling and award-winning author, Joanna Ho. Many of you may know her from her children's books like Eyes that Kiss in the Corners or even her young adult novel The Silence that Binds Us.

Joanna tells us about how her passion for equity, inclusion, and social justice led her to eventually writing the dozen plus books she has published to date in an unexpected departure from her previous jobs. She shares how after becoming a mother she did not see the Asian American representation i...

Last February (2025), we sat down with co-founders Soo-Jin Lee and Linda Yoon of Yellow Chair Collective as guests ourselves for the first time as a duo on the Yellow Chair Collective podcast! We focused on the topic of Eldest Daughters and the traits that typically embody. Linda and Soo Jin were gracious enough to share the podcast recording with us so that we could share it more directly with our listeners too at some point. And that is what today's episode is!

For those of you who are newer to Healing the Tigress and may not have...

[UPDATE: JANUARY SPECIAL!] Happy 2026, Healing the Tigress Fam! As a New Year gift to our listeners, we are letting everyone listen to one of our Subscriber Exclusive episodes for free during the entire month of January! If you like these kinds of episodes, you'll find more inside our Buzzsprout Subscriptions and you can access all the past Bonus Episodes when you sign up! 😊 Hope you enjoy!

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[Note: Originally published September 2025] In this bonus episode, we are diving into all the cycle-breaking themes and mental health lessons from the record-breaking summer blockbuster – K-Pop Demon Hunte...

For the final episode of the year, we have the pleasure of talking to another reproductive psychiatrist on the show! (Check out Episode 17 if you want more details on debunking myths for perinatal psychiatric medications). In this episode, we talk with Dr. Kristin Yeung Lasseter,  a Board-Certified Psychiatrist based in Texas who specializes in Reproductive Psychiatry and Women’s Mental Health. 

Dr. Lasseter opens up to us about her experience with postpartum anxiety after the birth of her first child while being a second year medical resident. We discuss what ultimately led to her decision to start medi...

Maternal mental health goes beyond just the immediate postpartum period and that we know that as we learn to parent, our mental health is also affected by the way we parent. We love talking about breaking generational cycles in parenting because we think, especially as AAPI parents, that is one of the keys to achieving better mental health in the long run. So for today's episode, we talked with the two clinical psychologist co-founders of Modern Asian Parent, Dr. Michelle Chung and Dr. Laura Berssenbrugge!

Together we discuss:

*Special Thanks to our sound engineer Dr. Tony Huynh, PharmD for helping us edit this episode and introducing us to Dr. Jenny Kim*

*Trigger Warning: This episode discusses infant loss.*

We had the honor of interviewing our guest today on Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day last month (October 15) to hold space for her story and loss. Dr. Jenny Kim, PharmD, BCPPS is a Chinese American board-certified pediatric pharmacy specialist who has worked in the NICU, PICU, and CVICU for almost 10 years in places like Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford...

We had the great pleasure of talking with Kriti Lodha in today's episode about her postpartum story that surrounds the highly stigmatized and misunderstood topic of postpartum psychosis, which can affect 1 to 2 in 1000 women. While Kriti didn't have noticeable risk factors for postpartum psychosis, her experience with being a first-time pandemic mom while also grappling with the postpartum mental health emergency has profoundly affected and shaped her motherhood journey and career path going forward.

Kriti is a South Asian mom who was born and raised in Luxembourg, Europe and moved to the U.S. when she was 11...

We've had several guests on the podcast talk about postpartum depression, but fewer have notably admitted or recognized depression during pregnancy too. In today's episode, our guest Serein Wu shares about how she was worried about postpartum depression with her mental health history going into motherhood, but she did not expect to have prenatal depression while she was pregnant too.

Serein goes into depth sharing her story about the complicated emotions of losing her mother, who she shared a very close relationship with, before becoming a mother herself. Then when she thought she was ready to conceive...

In today's episode, we sit down with Shivani Berry, CEO and Founder of Career Mama, to talk about the raw realities of balancing career and motherhood. Shivani is a Harvard MBA, a LinkedIn Top Voice in Leadership, and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Nasdaq. But more importantly, she is a mom of two who has lived through burnout, identity shifts and even a near-death experience just days after giving birth to her second child.

Shivani shares candidly about the identity shift that came with becoming a mother, the burnout she faced during...

Peggy and Jasmine are back for a third season of Healing the Tigress! This opening episode goes over a few updates and recaps, and we also answer some listener questions that we collected from you guys!

One of the biggest updates over the summer is that we've switched to Buzzsprout Subscriptions! This is a way that you can give us a little more support if you resonate with our mission to continue to destigmatize mental health and open up more conversations in this space for AAPI parents. We go over how to sign up if you're interested a...

On our final episode of the season, we were thrilled to interview another AAPI mom duo, who host a podcast named "Not a Tiger Mom Podcast." We have been wanting to bring on AAPI moms who identify as neurodivergent or are raising neurodivergent children, and both of these moms identify as neurodivergent themselves AND are raising autistic children AND work with neurodivergent children in their careers (behavioral analyst and speech therapist)!

Jenny Lai, MA, BCBA and Bettina Lopez-Lam, MS, CCC-SLP, IBCLC, are the amazing duo behind Not a Tiger Mom Podcast. Jenny is Chinese-Cambodian American, and Bettina...

In this episode, we explore how doulas or birthkeepers can be so powerful and helpful during the birthing and postpartum experience with Leonora Ilovea Willis.

Leonora is a native-born Samoan, born on the island of Tutuila in the great Pacific ocean, but who is practicing and working in diaspora as a Birthkeeper, childbirth educator, lactation education specialist, perinatal yoga teacher and bodyworker, serving her community in Oakland and the greater Bay Area. She owns and operates her own birthwork business called Daughter of Samoa, which is part of the title of a book that an ancestor wrote...

May is AAPI Heritage Month and also Maternal Mental Health month, and what better cross section to represent these things than our podcast! For this special month, we have the absolute pleasure and honor of interviewing Dr. Jenny T. Wang, PhD. Many of you may know of Dr. Jenny, but for those who do not, she is a Taiwanese American clinical psychologist speaker, and author on the intersections of Asian American identity, mental health, and intergenerational trauma. 

We were able to talk to Dr. Jenny about her own experiences with her mental health during her postpartum periods, a...

In this heartfelt episode, our guest Elise Ruiz-Hom, a Portland-based new mom, shares the powerful story of her and her wife Lydia’s years-long journey to parenthood. Raised in a multicultural, biracial  family in Hawai'i, Elise reflects on how her identity has shaped her worldview—especially as a white-passing Asian woman navigating life on the mainland.

She takes us through their emotional fertility journey: from Lydia’s eight failed IUIs and three rounds of IVF—including traumatic procedures and heartbreaking losses—to Elise’s smoother journey to pregnancy after just two IUIs. With raw honesty, Elise opens up about grie...

Among our AAPI community, it can feel like not enough people talk about the neurodivergent population and how it can impact their families and communities because of a heavy stigma–a stigma that echoes the one around talking about mental health. Our guest for this episode is Clarissa Chui, LCSW, a second generation Chinese American therapist, who works as care coordinator with families who have children diagnosed on the spectrum--specifically autism spectrum. 

We talk about how her own postpartum journey led her to work with other parents who need more support with their children. Clarissa breaks down wha...

Of all the perinatal mental health disorders, postpartum psychosis is considered a medical emergency and absolutely requires treatment. It affects 1 to 2 in 1000 mothers and is often misunderstood. 

On this episode, our guest is Jigyna Patel, a South Asian mom of 3 girls from Houston, Texas. Her perinatal story spans over 10 years, including many different layers: the cultural stigma South Asians mom feel, the struggles of having a surprise twin pregnancy, being undiagnosed with postpartum psychosis, and having fertility issues while having PCOS. 

After her severe experience with 3 different perinatal mental health disorders (PMHDs), it has become he...

On today's episode, we sit down and talk about breastfeeding and mental health with Anhoni Patel, the founder of the popular Mrs. Patel's Ayurvedic Treats and Teas for lactation and pregnancy support. Anhoni started her small business in 2012 while 4 months postpartum with her second child to make Ayurvedic inspired treats and teas to support pregnancy, lactation, and women's health. She shares with us how these time-tested Ayurvedic recipes have been passed down for generations in her family and how the company is named after her mother. 

We discuss how between her Indian mother and Korean mother-in-law, she w...

Today's guest is someone Peggy and Jasmine have grown up with in their college years through early adulthood and motherhood, and we were so excited and honored to interview her. You may know her too as one of the OG YouTube content creators, FrmHeadtoToe!

Jen Chae is a Korean American beauty and lifestyle content creator. Over the last 16 years she has cultivated a following of over 2 million followers on her social platforms, sharing everything from makeup tutorials to candid conversations about relationships and motherhood. As one of the first artists to create monolid tutorials for Youtube, she...

Last year, an avid listener from the beginning suggested that we should have an episode for the expectant new mom that they can refer friends to as a resource, not necessarily focused on just perinatal mental health disorders but how to better prepare for new motherhood in general. We know it can be kind of scary to hear about all the things that could happen and in turn maybe it induces more anxiety instead. 

So we made this episode to talk about what we wish we could have done to prepare better for postpartum and what we t...

Today's episode dives into a different side of postpartum depression and treatment options that are not as widely discussed. We were joined on this episode by Stephanie Wu, a Taiwanese American occupational therapist and perinatal mental health certified professional, who talked to us about her treatment resistant depression after the birth of her second child.

Stephanie has been very open about sharing her story about being a first time mom during the beginning of the pandemic, and then going on to have her second child almost exactly 2 years later. In this episode, she shares how insomnia played...

To kick off 2025, we invited Alyce Chan, stand up comedian and founder of MomCom NYC onto the podcast! 

Alyce is a Chinese Canadian/American mom of two boys and has been featured in the New York Comedy Festival and placed finalist in the esteemed Boston comedy festival. You've likely seen her work on ScaryMommy and other major parenting platforms. Alyce has also appeared on ABC, Hulu, The Drew Barrymore Show and the Tamron Hall Show. 

While this episode is definitely more light-hearted and funny, we also dive into some heavier things. Alyce tells us how wh...

The episode today explores two big themes we haven't touched upon yet on this podcast-- being child-free by choice and then the journey of adoption. Our guest today is Katy Wang, a Taiwanese American early childhood educator for the past 15 years in both private and independent schools all over the Bay Area. Katy has held a variety of positions--everything from an assistant teacher to teacher to site director to program director to now assistant principal.

Katy and her husband fondly call themselves a PANK (Professional Auntie No Kids) and a PUNK (Professional Uncle No Kids), and they...

In honor of Veterans’ Day this month, we wanted to highlight a motherhood journey of a veteran who not only served her country but also now serves the needs of so many mothers in their postpartum period.

Our guest today is none other than Stephiney Foley, CEO and Founder of Yuzi Care. She is a postpartum doula, army veteran, military spouse, West Point Grad, and mother of two biracial boys.

Stephiney is first generation Chinese American, born in Shanghai and raised in New York City. She served in the U.S. Army for over a de...