About this Podcast

My podcast, “Loving Laksa,” is about the multiculturalism of Malaysian and Singaporean food, as well as my personal connection to it. When planning for this project, I was really looking forward to researching a bit more about the origins of one of my favorite dishes: laksa!

Podcaster Bio

I’m Allison Teo, a senior at Mountain View and an animation student at Freestyle. My greatest passion is making art based on interests and topics I care about, and I feel that– regardless of where I am in life– art will always be a constant for me. I love telling stories through my artwork, especially ones that incorporate visual elements of my culture in my work. This podcast is inspired by my experience growing up as an Asian-American kid who would spend summers with my family overseas, in which one of the most memorable parts was, naturally, the food.

Introduction

This year, we did a podcast project in order to highlight the importance of modern forms of communication and storytelling. Oftentimes English classes focus on literature written in the last couple of centuries– that’s not a bad thing either, but analyzing and learning to create podcasts of our own was a really refreshing experience. Podcasts are an accessible medium, thousands of episodes being free to listen online, as well as extremely effective for a large percentage of people who prefer to take in auditory information over reading.

My podcast episode was modeled after the narrative nonfiction genre. One inspiration for my podcast project was the NPR featured podcast challenge, “He’s just 23 chromosomes.” I planned to emulate the style used in this podcast episode, where the topic is informational yet personal to the speaker and follows a relevant narrative.

Process

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Reflection

Although the production itself took me a long time, I still gained a lot of insight about the process of scripting, recording, and producing a podcast. I faced some challenges in creating a narrative that flowed well with my topic of choice, and it was also difficult to find multiple academic sources on Malaysian food, and even more so for laksa. Much of the history behind the recipe’s development is unrecorded, meaning a lot of the articles on the dish that I did find were on the vague side. If I were to attempt this project again, I’d prioritize recording my audio since that was the part I had least experience with, and I think I could improve my tone to sound more engaged.