Vox RVA: Immigrant Stories in Richmond - Part 1

In this episode of VOXRVA, three Richmonders share powerful, funny, and deeply personal immigration journeys that explore what it means to find home in a new place.

Emcee Emma Ito frames the event as living history, starting with language teacher Kefu Huang recounting leaving a “small” Chinese city of seven million for graduate school in the U.S., discovering spring in Richmond, and slowly blooming into her roles as educator, immigrant, and mother of a child with autism through the support of an inclusive community.

Amma Gatty, founder of the nonprofit Culture Encounters, tells of growing up in Ghana with a father in America, finally immigrating herself, wrestling with U.S. racial categories and accent bias, and ultimately reclaiming her Ghanaian identity while building cross‑cultural spaces in Richmond.

Finally, Taiwanese‑born educator Sandy Ting weaves humor about disastrous pandemic baking into a gripping family story of her grandfather smuggling a stranger’s child onto a train fleeing communist China, bribing fellow officers with precious food, and forging a lifelong kinship that reshaped their family tree—and her understanding of what it means to treat others as honored guests.

Our next episode will feature part 2 of our Immigrant Stories evening.

Recorded live at Common House in Richmond, this Vox RVA storytelling night is the second segment of our first event, exploring the theme of “beginnings” through three deeply personal, often funny, and unexpectedly moving stories. Host and MC Reese Williams introduces a lineup that includes VCU podcast professor and audio producer Max Wasserman, veteran storyteller and ad-man Les Schaefer, and Reese herself. From an adult-ballet class that becomes a lesson in ego and vulnerability, to a bloody job interview that launches a high-stakes advertising career, to mismatched shoes, and the mentor who quietly changed a young woman’s life, each story captures what it means to start over, take a risk, and let desire pull you into a new version of yourself in RVA.

Everything we do begins somewhere, somehow. These stories show that beginnings can be gruesome or grueling, funny or sad, uplifting or scary. 

Professor and podcast host Rich Meagher talks about how he got his start as a storyteller at a poet’s cafe on NYC’s Lower East Side & Producer Meg Lindholm talks about the roller coaster ride she took on the way to her first professional radio job.