169: My Brother's in Prison. Could I Have Done More?

Allison Langer  0:15  
I'm Alison Langer.

Andrea Askowitz  0:16  
And I'm Andrea Askowtiz and this is Writing Class Radio. You'll hear true personal stories and learn how to write your own stories. Together, we produce this podcast, which is equal parts heart and art. By heart, we mean the truth in a story, by art, we mean the craft of writing. No matter what's going on in our lives, Writing Class is where we tell the truth. It's where we work at our shit. 

Allison Langer  0:43  
Shit.

Andrea Askowitz  0:45  
There's no place in the world like Writing Class, and we want to bring you in. Before we get to today's show, I want to say two things. One, we just hit 1 million downloads. A million downloads. We're about eight years in, right. We've been doing this podcast for eight years, every other week. 1 million. 

Allison Langer  1:04  
Yes, as of recording, as of recording, which is November 2nd 2023. So you guys are getting it, like a month or two later, because we are on a recording ahead of schedule. However, by the time you hear this, maybe we'll be up to 2 million.

Andrea Askowitz  1:21  
It doesn't go that fast, but I can't even believe a million people have downloaded our podcast. 

Allison Langer  1:29  
I was gonna say no, it's not a million people, we've had a million downloads.

Andrea Askowitz  1:33  
So that okay, let's just say that I can't believe that this podcast has been downloaded 1 million times. I mean, you know what, I can't believe, that it hasn't been 100 million. But I'm still psyched. 

Allison Langer  1:44  
I know. Because we're that good. 

Andrea Askowitz  1:45  
Yeah, we're that good. The other thing I wanted to say, and I've been thinking this, I've been thinking a lot about this, I want to say thank you to all of the authors, all of the narrators, all of the people who submit stories to us, and especially the ones whose stories we air. I mean, they trust us with their personal shit and I mean, I don't know, I'm really moved by it lately. What's funny?

Allison Langer  2:10  
Sorry I'm laughing. I don't know, because you're so passionate about that. So it is it's true. It's hard to trust people this day and age, like, what are they going to say about my stuff? Yeah.

Andrea Askowitz  2:18  
And they let us air their, hey don't know what we're going to say their stories are intimate and beautiful and heart wrenching, and just I don't know vulnerable. Today on our show, we bring you a story by Claire Tak. Her story is about her brother's incarceration, but the lesson is about structure and also, there's a really cool thing that that this narrator does, which is she uses an object to kind of carry the story forward. And she also plant seeds. Oh, and she also plants seeds. 

Allison Langer  2:50  
Well, you don't have to repeat me. I'm allowed to say that. 

Andrea Askowitz  2:52  
Well, I was saying it. 

Allison Langer  2:54  
I know but I can pop in like I am here, I might as well say it like she also plant seeds. Okay, yeah, yeah, cool. You could just pretend it's a conversation we're having.

Andrea Askowitz  3:03  
Thanks for popping in. I was feeling like you were talking to my ear, but I get it. Everyone hears you. Okay. Sorry, Alison.

Allison Langer  3:12  
I know how you like to take over the script that we barely ever writers stick to. But yeah, I can it. It doesn't say Allison say that.

Andrea Askowitz  3:22  
Yeah, you just took over the script. 

Allison Langer  3:25  
Yeah. 

Andrea Askowitz  3:26  
We'll be back with Claire tax story after the break. 

Allison Langer  3:30  
We're back, this is Alison Langer and you're listening to Writing Class Radio. Up next is Claire Tak, reading her story, The Unopened Letter.

Claire Tak  3:49  
Eight months ago, my younger brother, Isaac, was sentenced to 19 years in a Central California prison. His crime was a carjacking in which the driver was killed. My brother was not the shooter—that guy got 100 years. By no means is he innocent in this, and he deserves to be punished, but I wish he didn’t get the maximum sentence for his crime.
 My brother wrote me a letter, but I couldn’t get myself to open it. The day it arrived, the envelope leaned to one side of my mailbox—the only letter I received. I instantly knew it was from Isaac. The dread began to creep in. 
 For a month, the letter was with me on my commute to the office, at the grocery store, and on weekend hikes. I shuffled the letter from backpack to purse to gym bag. 
 The letter remained sealed because I didn’t want to understand my baby brother’s new reality. I never knew when sudden, dark thoughts about Isaac’s new life in prison might suffocate me. I could be totally fine making small talk with co-workers at the office but feel completely wrecked while driving to the grocery store. 
 Sometimes, I’d get stuck in a trance—as if I were watching a prison movie, except the main character wasn’t Jake Gyllenhaal or Tom Cruise, it was Isaac. I imagined him in a heated argument in the cafeteria with a guy built like a brick and armed with a toothbrush fashioned into a shank. It made my stomach turn because my skinny brother always had to prove he could hold his own. 
 In these moments, my worry spiraled into anxiety and I’d fixate on 19 years. I’ll be in my mid-fifties by the time he is eligible for parole. My 80-year-old dad, whose health is failing from diabetes, won’t live to see his son released.
 I wanted to scream at him for all of the stupid decisions that led him to prison. How could he do this to our parents, who have only shown him love and support? 
 Each time I looked at his letter, I ached with shame and guilt because I didn’t help him when he was spiraling out of control.
 From the day he was born, his presence lit up our household. As a newborn, he looked like a carbon copy of my dad, only my brother was adorable. His hair was so fine it stood straight up like someone had run a balloon over his oval head. He had an infectious laugh and bright, mischievous eyes—a Korean version of the Gerber baby. 
 Being a decade apart in age, I helped raise him. I learned to hold my breath when I changed his diapers. I fed him from tiny jars filled with orange and green mush. I watched him learn how to crawl and was horrified the day he tumbled down the stairs in our house. I picked him up and checked for broken bones. He looked rattled but didn’t even cry. I adored him, marveling at his ability to talk at eight months and how cute he looked in his mini PJs after a bath. 
 As the daughter of Korean immigrants, I was his noona, which means older sister. To me, noona meant babysitter and disciplinarian, and I didn’t want to be either one. When my friends were riding bikes and playing at each other’s houses after school, I was walking to pick up my brother from daycare. 
 When I got my driver’s license at 16, my responsibilities and my resentment grew. I longed for carefree after-school days to hang out with my friends at the mall, but I was Isaac’s half-parent.
 When Isaac was in junior high, he started getting into fights with other kids and on a few occasions was suspended and even expelled from school. My parents asked me to talk to him, but I didn’t know the first thing about being a mentor. I only knew how to talk at him. I had no patience or the skills to listen, which is probably what he needed. 
 When he was 14, I caught him smoking a joint at home. Instead of asking why he wanted to get stoned, I yelled at him and snatched the joint from his fingers. In an overly dramatic move, I flushed it down the toilet and told him to “Stop smoking!” I hate myself for the way I treated him in moments when he needed me most. 
 As we grew into adults, I worried about him constantly. He was stoned all the time and hung out with guys whose outward appearances made me uneasy. My parents urged me to inspire him and show him the way. Obviously, I couldn’t and their insistence annoyed me. I wanted them to “show him the way.” But my parents were always working. 
 Since he got locked up, I talked to him once—a 15-minute call that got cut to eight because the call dropped. He sounded far away and muffled. The prison’s automated robot kept interrupting, “This call and your voice are being recorded…”  
 During that call, I asked why he didn’t call more, he said there were constant lockdowns, which meant he was stuck in his cell for long stretches. Like when the staff discovered a missing pair of scissors or when a fight broke out. This made me nervous despite his assurance he was fine. Was he really fine or was he just telling me what I wanted to hear? Maybe, he was taking care of me, for once. 
 After I got the letter, I flew home hoping that just being around my folks would make us feel better, but no one could find the right words to comfort each other. I still hadn’t opened the letter. 
 At my parent’s house, I opened the closet in the guest bedroom to shove my suitcase inside and noticed my brother’s orange Nike shoe boxes contained his high tops and golf shoes with dirt still on the cleats. 
 I spotted his large black suitcase, oversized hoodies and a few pairs of jeans. I imagined him packing and unpacking these items, covered with sweat and popping Xanax. My parents asked me if I knew why Isaac was so on edge. I didn’t know. But I felt his intense fear. 
 Isaac was constantly on the move, paranoid that the authorities were on his heels. I wish I could say carjacking was the only crime he committed. Instead, it was the ending to a string of activities that lined his pockets with wads of cash. 
 When he gets out, my brother will be in his mid-forties —a number that feels impossible, because, to me, Isaac will forever be that squishy little baby. I still hear his calls from the bathroom, “Nooooona, I’m done! Can you wipe my butt?” 
 After seeing his belongings, I sat on the bed and fished out the envelope from my backpack. My address was written in pencil and officially stamped with the prison’s name. I peeled it open, careful not to tear the thin piece of paper inside.
 His penmanship was surprisingly neat. “Hey Noona.” As I read it, I imagined him sitting in his cell, writing with a number two pencil. 
 He asked how I was doing and said he was good. It sounded like he had a routine of breakfast at seven and goes to the yard when it’s not too hot. The weather was changing and nearing triple digits—summers in Central California are downright brutal. He was dreading the summer because the prison doesn’t really have air conditioning. 
      After reading the entire letter, I noticed there was nothing about getting pushed around by other guys or fearing for his life. The tone of his letter felt light-hearted like he was away at band camp. The knot in my stomach began to loosen—a tiny sense of relief. 
 I realized I created a story in my mind and now I had a choice—I could stay stuck in my dark thoughts or move forward. He’s going to be in prison for a long time, that same voice reminded me. 
 I immediately tore a page out of my notebook and wrote him back. 
 

Allison Langer  12:34  
I have this entire sense of like, God, why can't we prevent the bad things from happening to other people? Can we just go backward the whole time, I just want to go backward. But that's just not what life is about. So this narrator did a great job of just really having the reader the listener feel her sense of like remorse and pain and all that I thought it was really, really well done. What about you?

Andrea Askowitz  13:04  
I felt that too. I really felt her shame and guilt. She just really wishes that she had done more when Isaac was spiraling and instead of yelling at him, like stop smoking, she wished that she could have been there and just listened. She takes responsibility for not being a better older sister or a better mentor or a better half parent and I love that about this story and the very end, she tells us that she has she has a choice. She can keep telling herself and maybe the story that she has been telling herself is that she's the one who failed. Maybe that is what it's about. It's about changing the story that she's been telling herself, which is that it's it's kind of her fault, because how can it be?

Allison Langer  13:55  
Or maybe she's telling herself that she can't really go back. So she's got to just stay in the present and she busts out a piece of paper and just writes him back because that's where they are right now. That's all she can do. 

Andrea Askowitz  14:05  
Oh, yeah. That's good.

Allison Langer  14:07  
To support him now. Maybe she was supportive back then. And she doesn't realize it, it's a chance that she's being really hard on herself. I mean, as parents as friends like you try, but if somebody's not receptive, if they're the power of the street, or whatever else is more powerful. It's, you know, there's not much somebody can do.

Andrea Askowitz  14:28  
Yeah, I didn't get any sense that Isaac was blaming her at all. No, not from this story.

Allison Langer  14:35  
I mean, even when you scream at your kid, and you're like, ah, the kid is always like they get it. They're they don't hold you accountable because you couldn't pound it into them. 

Andrea Askowitz  14:44  
Because you couldn't be compassionate and loving and gentle in those moments, right.

Allison Langer  14:49  
Well, does that work? We don't know that it she may think it would because that's not how she reacted could she have changed the outcome had she been like more patient. Who knows? That's not a question anybody can answer right now. 

Andrea Askowitz  15:03  
True. True. True. 

Allison Langer  15:05  
Yeah. You know, what I loved about this narrator is and we say this all the time that she really planted some seeds, like there were like-

Andrea Askowitz  15:12  
Seeds. 

Allison Langer  15:15  
We call them seeds, signposts, indicators. Like there's something that we drop in early to kind of foreshadow what's going to happen and I feel like she did that really well with the pot, you know. And then later with the Xanax. 

Andrea Askowitz  15:30  
A friend she was hanging out with he was hanging out with. 

Allison Langer  15:33  
Exactly. So it didn't just appear at the end, and you're like, oh, wait, did that happen earlier, and we missed it, she really shows us a pattern, which I think is really productive. 

Andrea Askowitz  15:44  
I loved how this story was structured, it starts with the crime and whenever we've and we've had a lot of prison stories on our podcast, and you've dealt with a lot of prison stories, because you taught in prison. And I don't know if it's just me, or if it's everyone, but I'll just speak for me, I always want to know, what did the guy do. And so she started right from the very beginning with the carjacking and she said that he wasn't the shooter, but she also said, he's not innocent and that was cool. So I trusted her from the very beginning and also my suspicion was relieved. I wasn't like, not suspicion, I mean, my curiosity was was it because, I was trying to say like, quenched my curiosity was quenched from the beginning. Okay, then she brings in the letter, and the letter is the, it's like this object that kind of carries the story forward. From that point on, she's going to work, she's going to the gym, she's carrying this letter. So we get a little bit of information about her and then she can't open it and she's sometimes stuck in a trance, as if she's watching a movie, which I thought was really cool. Because, I mean, this is just, again, me as a lay listener and I mean, lay as in I don't know, prison. But what I know about prison is what I've seen in movies. Again, it felt like she was really talking to me, that's what she knows about prison. Did that part. did that part help you or how did that part make you feel? Was that like, sort of cliche since you really know prison? Or did it work for you?

Allison Langer  17:26  
I feel like that is what most people would do. So I feel like it appeals to the most the largest group.

Andrea Askowitz  17:33  
The dumbest audience. 

Allison Langer  17:35  
Well, yeah, but you know, the lay person, like you said, and it is you're trying in a story to connect with that person, the person who's actually reading the majority of people, you cannot connect with everybody. So you're trying to connect with the majority and I feel she did that here.

Andrea Askowitz  17:50  
Don't they say that when you're writing you, I don't know who they are, but I've heard said that consider writing to one person.

Allison Langer  17:58  
If you only want one person to read it.

Andrea Askowitz  18:01  
No, because the more specific, the more universal and maybe that works when you're thinking about the more specific reader. So maybe she was really considering like one reader like someone, maybe one of her friends who might not know what prison looks like, maybe she was doing that, I don't know we'll ask her. Okay, one thing that I love though, is when she was imagining that movie, she got to show us what her brother looks like because she said skinny brother, and the skinny brother who always tries to prove themselves so we got a sense of who he was and that kind of that felt dangerous. Like it raised the stakes a little I mean, he's already in prison, but now she's worried that he's gonna get hurt. So he's a skinny guy that like needs to prove himself I love that. This line guts me every time. my eight year old dad whose health is failing from diabetes won't live to see his son released. That that is brutal. And that's a perspective I've never heard from any of these stories, any of these person stories. No one talks about their how their dad is not going to be able to see him release, just that was beautiful. We already talked about how she brought in the guilt. What she really shows is how much he loved him that I thought she did so well. This Korean Gerber Baby who is adorable. Love that part. 

Allison Langer  19:24  
And I just want to say like, I don't know too many teenagers, 18 and 19 year olds or whatever that would be like, able to parent well, they're a little brother. It's one thing when they're your kid, but this was her brother, this is a sibling, this is the idiot who's taking attention away from her who's making her work her life different. Like she didn't choose it you know, there's a lot of things.

Andrea Askowitz  19:52  
She was still a kid when he was born.

Allison Langer  19:54  
Of course. So I don't know I see it as like a very normal, typical way to deal.

Andrea Askowitz  20:02  
Yeah, you're not putting the blame on her at all. She did set up the world in which she felt responsible. Her parents were always working. She was like, I wish they would show him that way, but they couldn't. So it did fall on her so often to take care of this kid.

Allison Langer  20:23  
And it's probably true for a lot of people that that happens. We just happen to be extremely privileged, and that did not happen to us. But I do know that in many, many cultures, I mean, that is responsibility. That's the way it is. 

Andrea Askowitz  20:36  
Also, we're both the little sibling. 

Allison Langer  20:39  
I thought you were gonna say little shit. 

Andrea Askowitz  20:42  
We're the little shit siblings. Where are they adorable Gerber babies, but, but our brothers didn't take care of us. No way. My brother was like, bashing me with a tennis racket. Okay, so oh, another thing that I so loved was, I thought was really well done was when she was talking to him on the phone. This call and your voice are being recorded, like we got, how disconnected she felt from him how she was pissed that he only called once like she was she couldn't take care of him at that point at all and then this part I thought was super interesting when she tells us that he tells her that he's fine. And she's like, was he really fine. And then she considers that maybe he was taking care of her for once and that was a really nice twist. Great details about Isaac's the stuff in the closet. 

Allison Langer  21:41  
I love that part. We got a real sense of like who he was just by this, like the stuff that's inside. So the Nike shoe box with the high tops and the golf shoes was searched still on the cleats, oversized hoodies and a few pair of jeans like I really felt like, okay, I got this guy. That was a brilliant way to describe her brother, Isaac.

Andrea Askowitz  22:02  
And then we saw him being nervous and always thinking that the authorities were on his tail. And the way that she said she wishes that carjacking was the only crime but it wasn't and then all these other things he did that lined his pockets with wads of cash. Good detail so visual, so like, evocative of like, I don't know, just just shit. And then the moment where she he's a little kid and he's like, can you wipe my butt? So sweet. So sweet.

Allison Langer  22:42  
It's a sad and very sweet story and it sucks.

Andrea Askowitz  22:45  
Well done, Claire Tak.

Allison Langer  22:48  
Thank you for listening and thank you Claire for sharing your story.

Andrea Askowitz  23:00  
Claire is a freelance writer and editor living in Denver. She's actually one of our students so she knows us, but still thank you Claire for trusting us with your story. I want to tell you that she has a column in prison journalism project.org called Outside Slash In where she writes about her brother's incarceration. Claire is currently writing a memoir. As a child of Korean American parents, her book deals with the immigrant guilt she faced growing up. For more, subscribe to her substack Stories About My Brother, and Memoir Junkie Wannabe Author. All of that will be in our show notes.

Allison Langer  23:42  
Writing Class Radio is hosted by me, Alison Langer. 

Andrea Askowitz  23:45  
And me Andrea Askowitz. 

Audio production is by Matt Cundill, Evans Surmisnky, Chloe Emond-Lane and Aidan Glassey at the Sound Off Media Company. Theme music is by Justina Shambler. There's more Writing Class on our website including stories we study editing resources, video classes, writing retreats, and live online classes. Join our writing community by following us on Patreon. If you want to write with us every week, you can join our first draft weekly writers groups, you have the option to join me on Tuesdays 12-1 Eastern, and or Thursdays with Eduardo Wink 8 to 9pm Eastern. You'll write to a prompt and share what you wrote. If you're a business owner, community activist, group that needs healing, entrepreneur and you want to help your team 

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Allison Langer  24:33  
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Andrea Askowitz  25:02  
There's no better way to understand ourselves and each other than by writing and sharing our stories. Everyone has a story, what yours?

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  25:18  
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