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Missed Translations audiobook

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Missed Translations Audiobook Summary

A bittersweet and humorous memoir of family–of the silence and ignorance that separate us, and the blood and stories that connect us–from an award-winning New York Times writer and comedian.

Approaching his 30 birthday, Sopan Deb had found comfort in his day job as a writer for the New York Times and a practicing comedian. But his stage material highlighting his South Asian culture only served to mask the insecurities borne from his family history. Sure, Deb knew the facts: his parents, both Indian, separately immigrated to North America in the 1960s and 1970s. They were brought together in a volatile and ultimately doomed arranged marriage and raised a family in suburban New Jersey before his father returned to India alone.

But Deb had never learned who his parents were as individuals–their ages, how many siblings they had, what they were like as children, what their favorite movies were. Theirs was an ostensibly nuclear family without any of the familial bonds. Coming of age in a mostly white suburban town, Deb’s alienation led him to seek separation from his family and his culture, longing for the tight-knit home environment of his white friends. His desire wasn’t rooted in racism or oppression; it was born of envy and desire–for white moms who made after-school snacks and asked his friends about the girls they liked and the teachers they didn’t. Deb yearned for the same.

Deb’s experiences as one of the few minorities covering the Trump campaign, and subsequently as a stand up comedian, propelled him on a dramatic journey to India to see his father–the first step in a life altering journey to bridge the emotional distance separating him from those whose DNA he shared. Deb had to learn to connect with this man he recognized yet did not know–and eventually breach the silence separating him from his mother. As it beautifully and poignantly chronicles Deb’s odyssey, Missed Translations raises questions essential to us all: Is it ever too late to pick up the pieces and offer forgiveness? How do we build bridges where there was nothing before–and what happens to us, to our past and our future, if we don’t?

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Missed Translations Audiobook Narrator

Sopan Deb is the narrator of Missed Translations audiobook that was written by Sopan Deb

Sopan Deb is a writer for The New York Times, as well as a New York City-based stand up comedian. Before joining the Times, Deb was one of a handful of reporters who covered Donald Trump’s presidential campaign from start to finish as a campaign embed for CBS News. He covered hundreds of rallies in more than 40 states for a year and a half and was named a “breakout media star” of the election by Politico.

At The New York Times, Deb has interviewed high profile subjects such as Denzel Washington, Stephen Colbert, the cast of Arrested Development, Kyrie Irving and Bill Murray. Deb’s work has previously appeared on NBC, Al Jazeera America and The Boston Globe, ranging from examining the trek of endangered manatees to following a class of blind filmmakers in Boston led by the former executive producer of Friends. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for a documentary he produced for the Boston Globe called “Larger Than Life,” which told the story about the NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell’s complicated relationship with the city of Boston.

He lives in New York City.

About the Author(s) of Missed Translations

Sopan Deb is the author of Missed Translations

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Subjects

The publisher of the Missed Translations is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Family & Relationships, Fatherhood, Parenting

Additional info

The publisher of the Missed Translations is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062985231.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Sopan Deb

December 19, 2019

I am a bit biased on this, given that I wrote the book. But my hope is that there is something in this memoir for everyone. It’s a story about family, comedy, healing, forgiveness and so much more. It’s an immigrant story. A South Asian story. (Not THE South Asian story, mind you. Just one of many from the South Asian diaspora in America.) I also hope that readers find the story timely, as what we think of as the American Dream is constantly being debated today. My parents didn’t get to experience that dream in the way we typically think of it. It was challenging - and yet therapeutic to write. It was enormously difficult to confront my parents about my upbringing, while incredibly humanizing to hear their stories. I found things out about my family that shocked me. We keep calling Missed Translations a memoir because it’s an easy classification. But the book genuinely captures a year or so of my life. So the reactions you see in the book are real in the moment, similar to a journal.Thank you for reading in advance. It genuinely means the world to me.

Erica

October 28, 2019

Full disclosure, I have more than a vested interest in this book, but looking beyond that, it was a truly moving read. How often do we stop and look at our lives thinking, how did I get here? What am I doing? Why am I like this? So much of our lives are the result of the choices we make, and the situations in which we find ourselves. This is a story about an adult, seeing his parents as adults for possibly the first time. His parents had long, complicated lives before he entered the picture, and he reached a point where he needed to learn their stories in order to move on with his own. There's hope here, but it is also heartbreaking. That the author has managed to be a success in his life having lived through his family situation is a testament to his hard work and dedication to do better.Great job, Soap!

Ashendri

May 16, 2020

i can easily say that this is one of the best books i’ve read this year. i’m so happy that it came my way because i don’t think my relationship with my parents will be the same after this—i’m determined for it not to be! sopan’s writing is equally poignant as it is hopeful because he artfully takes on the role of a journalist while balancing his own vulnerability. getting your (brown) parents to open up to you is a talent and this level of emotional outpouring was so hard to read. it’s not just a story for south asians, though. it touches on many universally-experienced themes such as familial trauma, the importance of mental health, perceptions of love & marriage, understanding your inner-child, figuring out the things that make a house a home, and most of all, forgiveness. i highly recommend this book. it’s damn good.

Emma

December 24, 2019

I read “Missed Translations” in the week leading up to Christmas—the first one I’ve spent without family, which has me thinking about my family relationships and how they affect the holidays. It was a poignant time to read Sopan’s treatise on his own family, one fractured by trauma that left its four corners well out of touch with one another. His story of reestablishing family relationships is deeply moving, funny, and not in the least straightforward. It is complex and incomplete, but that is what makes it truly human. I have not lived the immigrant experience, but Sopan’s writing evokes empathy and creates a window into what immigrant families must surmount to survive in this country. The book left me feeling thankful for my own dysfunctional family, and hopeful for those with painful family relationships, particularly during this holiday season. It is, as he says, never too late.Note: I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway.

Hitha

April 27, 2020

The South Asian experience has been preserved in a stereotype in the books published and the shows launched in the past 5 years. And while I'm just grateful that our stories are finally being told in mainstream American culture, it's something that's unsettled me as more and more art is being published.Two incredible works have shaken the model minority South Asian stereotype. The first was Hasan Minhaj's excellent one-man show, Homecoming King. The second is Missed Translations.Sopan Deb's memoir on defining his own South Asian identity and discovering who his parents were - and are - is deeply moving, wickedly funny, and unlike any memoir I've ever read. Deb writes with incredible honesty and sensitivity to his parents, despite their wrought relationships. It's an emotional journey that had me crying, laughing, and tapping my Kindle furiously as I read it. It's an extraordinary book, and an important one in the canon of both memoirs and the South Asian diaspora. And I guess I'm going to have to get into basketball, so I can continue to enjoy Deb's incredible writing.

C.J.

December 22, 2019

Although I devoured this book, it left me with a lot to chew on. (I will now cease food-related metaphors.) The author’s voice is endearing — reflective, funny, and above all earnest. Following along as the author learns so much about his family (one very dissimilar from my own!) and by extension himself is bittersweet and complicated. I highly recommend it.

Tehreem

December 23, 2019

I do not have enough words to describe this book except I could not put it down! It is very well written and really hones in on a range of emotions from making the reader cry to laughing out loud. It is a very personal story and I commend the author for sharing it in such great detail. A must read!

Preeti

January 12, 2020

Absolutely brilliant. Review coming soon.

Samarth

May 16, 2020

"Missed Translations" is one of the most powerful and intimate books I’ve read.Reading it, I felt seen and represented in a way I don’t think I ever have before. I’m so grateful he took the time to tell his story with eloquence and humor.________________“ I had spent much of my life running away from my skin color and culture, and yet the thing I felt most comfortable discussing onstage was my South Asian ethnicity. Talking about any version of the brown experience felt cathartic, whether it was the mangled one of my childhood or the way I imagined a happy brown kid growing up.”“There was a coldness that cast a permanent cloud over the house for all of us. This often manifested itself in the mundane. When I came home from school, I felt anxiety, a sense of foreboding, about walking in the door. Not because I was worried about walking into the shouts of fighting parents, but because of the silence. When there wasn’t fighting, there was just uncomfortable stillness. We rarely talked about our days. My parents never talked about their past. The future was a nonstarter”“The rare feelings of warmth gave way to resentment as I observed my friends with their fathers, especially as I became a teenager. For example, I always loved basketball and desperately wanted my dad to help coach me. He didn’t really know anything about it, which could explain why I’ve never been very good. Meanwhile, I would see a lot of my white classmates being taught by their fathers. I’d go over to their houses and hear about their plans to go to a Knicks game. I was jealous. That’s how bad it was: I was jealous of people going to see the Knicks play.”“There were times the three of us would eat together (or the four of us, before Sattik left for college), but it was rare. And those dinners were quick and silent. I didn’t think much about why we ate separately. I processed it very simply as, I would rather eat while watching television than sit here in silence with my family. It didn’t strike me as strange until I became friends with kids like Shaun.”“She may have thought she was motivating me, but my response to the resulting social alienation was an attempt to suppress my brownness in the hope of finding friends.I wanted to fit in, and I viewed my parents’ insistence on academic perfection as a by-product of our brown culture. It’s a stereotype of Asian parents, but it was an accurate one in our household. Their relentless focus on report cards seemed designed to torture me. I never thought much about what their childhoods had been like, what lessons their lives had taught them, or how those lessons shaped them as parents.”“ I blamed arranged marriage, Hinduism, and India for the ills of the household, even though I didn’t know enough about any of those things. I just knew I wanted distance from whatever culture had forced my parents together and produced this misery. I stopped playing the harmonium and performing at Indian festivals. When my parents hosted Bengali family gatherings, I started avoiding the party because I was embarrassed by the number of saris and dhotis being worn around my home. I became a self-loathing Bengali child.I grew to idealize whiteness, which I conflated with safety and easy communication. This desire to be white didn’t come from feeling socially or politically marginalized because of my skin color. It was about white suburban moms who made after-school snacks and asked my friends about the girls they liked and the teachers they hated. ”“We said our goodbyes and hung up the phone. I sighed deeply. Have you ever walked into an ocean that’s just a little too cold? It’s a deeply uncomfortable shock to the senses at first, but you hope your body gets used to it as you submerge yourself farther into the water. And then you take another step. And then another.”“I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the contact that said DAD. That’s a weird way of describing a father, right? “A contact that said DAD?” But it was indicative of our relationship at that moment. I knew that he existed, but he was just a phone contact, in the same way that DAN FROM THE NETWORKING EVENT YOU HATED lingered in your contact list: something between a stranger and a forgotten childhood acquaintance.”“What fatherhood meant in his mind and my desire for what I believed to be the quintessential American experience my white friends had were two vastly different things. To Shyamal, being a father was a black-and-white equation about putting forth the hard work through whatever means necessary so that the family could survive. In America, in theory, it should have been easier to do that. That’s why he immigrated here.I never saw it that way. As a kid in a New Jersey suburb, life wasn’t just about survival. It was a kind of privilege I never realized I had. I wanted our relationship to be about playing catch or riding bikes together. I wanted Shyamal to know my friends and teach me how to shave. I wanted someone to talk to about girls and tell me where babies came from. That was America, I thought, especially considering the experience my white childhood friends were having. Where I wanted less from my mother in many ways—less pressure, less interference—I badly wanted more from Shyamal.”“The cultural gap was widened further by my father’s pride in being an immigrant. I saw his pride as a burden, especially in middle school and high school, where feeling like an outsider was a constant. Hardly anyone in class looked like me. If they did, I bet I would have spent time with other parents similar to Shyamal, and my assumptions about race and parenting would have been different. These feelings, specifically the ones I had equating whiteness with being American, weren’t justified or rational. With the benefit of time, I can say they were wrong.”“She struggled with depression as I grew up. It manifested itself in various ways, but whatever form it took, the result was anger and tears. My best reasoning is that she was a deeply isolated and lonely individual, trapped in a failing marriage and getting through her days without feeling unconditionally loved. In Howell, there wasn’t a sizable Indian community for Bishakha to be a part of. There was no escape from the unhappy home for her. Whereas Shyamal had an engineering career he had built over many years, and Sattik and I had college and our careers to look forward to, she had nothing of the sort.”“Bishakha never asked me about my day when I was young, nor did I ask her. Shyamal never asked me, and I never asked him. Bishakha and Shyamal never asked each other. Same goes for Sattik with each of us. The Deb family household would have been so much different if we asked each other to run down our respective days, just like my friend Shaun’s family did. Instead, the four of us lived in four corners of the house, finding our own outlets for our sadness and clawing at the outside world begging for release.”“Dealing with the fallout from my parents’ lack of choice gave me the strength to carve my own path, whether choosing a college or a profession. I never even asked my parents before making critical life decisions. I just made them.”“When I didn’t hear from you for a couple of weeks, I was very worried,” I said quietly, inwardly ashamed. It was like we were at the Chinese restaurant all over again after I punched my classmate. How could I, as a son, ever let our relationship get to that point? As an adult? As a human? My own father didn’t think anyone loved him enough to care if he died or not. The bare minimum that a father (and a mother) should expect from a son is to feel cared for; to live the back half of your life knowing that you aren’t alone. As I thought about this, I didn’t look away from Shyamal’s face. For the first time, I noticed his wrinkles. They seemed to etch out a map. When I first arrived in India, my father’s unexpected youthfulness stuck out. In this moment, I was reminded that he was older, that he was mortal. But even still, I remained defensive. This wasn’t just my fault. It couldn’t be. Could it?”“At the hotel the night before, Wesley had made an observation that I kept thinking about now, sitting across from my father: “He wants to know you but he doesn’t know how to know another person,” she had said. Maybe the opposite had been true as well. Maybe it was me who had not learned how to know him. That’s not to assign blame. It may have just been that our respective places in the universe had been incompatible, and there is nothing we could have done about it until now. This particular intersection of time and place, both of us in a new stage of our lives, may have been the cipher we needed to find each other.”“It was a terrible thing to hear. She was living in her own house, surrounded by family, but feeling loved by none of them. During that period, she took my confusion as a lack of caring for her. This is what I mean by saying she deserved better from me.”“ The holidays are supposed to remind us of what we have and to be thankful for it. But for me, they’ve always been a reminder of what I lacked”“Where many of my white friends saw therapists growing up, it wasn’t the kind of treatment my family was ever open to considering—because they didn’t know to consider it. In the same way that Indian parents, or at least my Indian parents, had their children solely focused on academics as opposed to social development, they didn’t know how to turn the gaze inward, or even that they are supposed to. Depression, abuse, and trauma can fly into a family like meteors, leaving massive craters in their wake.”“No, it isn’t. A significant portion of the South Asian experience, at least from what I have seen among brown friends and my own family members, is about seeming a certain way to give off the impression of stability and status, at the expense of emotional needs”

Kristen

December 05, 2019

A touching story about self discovery and how it is never too late to try to build a relationship with your family that also manages to be very funny!

Laura

May 02, 2020

Memoirs are my favorite books to read, so I was excited to add this one to my list when I saw the publishing announcement last year. A relative once told me she has conflicting feelings about memoirs because they often throw the writer's family under the bus. This is the first memoir I've ever read in which the author gives the major players in his story a chance to share their side, and it is so powerful. Sopan Deb starts the book by explaining he had an unhappy childhood living with two parents in a disastrous arranged marriage. His older brother is nine years his senior, so he weathered a lot of the tension in his house alone, as an only child would. Everyone in his home lived past each other, and the result was estrangement as Sopan came of age and went off on his own.But as he spent time with the woman he knew he was going to marry someday, he started to wonder about what went wrong in his household. So he interviewed both his parents for this book, and the finished product is stunning. Sopan has interviewed many famous people in his career as a journalist, but I cannot imagine the courage it must have taken to confront his family about all the ways they seemingly robbed him of a happy, normal life. He mentions his dad came to the US in pursuit of the American Dream, but this life was a nightmare for all involved.Sopan goes to India for a wedding and asks his father why he abandoned the family more than a decade earlier. This book contains multiple perspectives for what went wrong in this broken home, and you walk away with compassion for everyone, especially his mother, a sad example of what happen when women get erased after having kids and getting married. She was forced into a marriage she never wanted and therefore had no advice for her young son when he wanted to talk about a girl he liked. Sopan beautifully outlines the disconnect between him and his parents. At the beginning of the book, you cannot believe some of the things his parents did (or didn't do) in his childhood, but their side shows the nuances and complications of raising a family. No one is perfect, and Sopan comes to the mature realization that everyone in the family failed each other, not just the parents. You really feel for the parents when they explain their side, and you also learn that you may never get an answer to certain family mysteries or questions. (view spoiler)[There's a shocking revelation toward the end of the book that changes everything about the way Sopan looked at his entire life. (hide spoiler)]I really loved this book. To say this is cliché, but this book will make you laugh and cry. Sopan's side career as a comedian flies off the pages, and the direct quotes between him and his parents will grip you until the very end. I finished this in two days. I'd love a follow-up on how everyone is doing five years from now.

Kathy

April 26, 2020

Wonderful. Deb is so very honest, earnest and brave in this memoir. In meeting his parents as an adult with an open heart and mind, he comes away with a full heart and engaged, compassionate mind. Of course, families are complex and as children we don’t see our parents as who they are but rather what they do for and to us. With the steady support of Wesley, his fiancée, Deb moves beyond the transactional into something transformational. He reconnects with his family and his roots and works toward a new relationship with both parents. Deb has captured very well the particular cadence and vernacular of Bengalis speaking English. This made it more endearing for me. I could hear my in-laws speaking in my head! His father’s exuberance and his mother’s reticence are felt on the page. Deb explains Bengali culture quite well: the living room visits, the importance of shared meals, harmonium performances, nicknames used for loved ones, complicated family relation names and the remarkable heat and humidity of Kolkata. I felt I was there with them on their journey, which is the most you can ask of a memoir, and it definitely delivered.

Daphne

June 04, 2020

Bittersweet is definitely the word here - this memoir is honest, moving, funny, and heart breaking all at once. This one really struck a cord. It’s a reminder that our parents are their own people too, living their lives in a completely different context from our own. I really admire Sopan’s willingness to push himself to learn more about his parents, confront uncomfortable truths, and ultimately heal for himself and his family. I came to this with my own challenging relationships, and it’s pushed me to take responsibility for my own role as well as forgive the mistakes of others. Truly anyone and everyone will gain something from reading this book. I’m definitely recommending this one!

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