Preservation of Memories: Barbara Tien's Journey

Bobbi: 0:26

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Fly Mom, fly the podcast, where we celebrate the journeys and experiences of mothers navigating life's adventures. Today, we have a special guest, Barbara Tien, whose story and expertise can benefit empty nest mongs and midlife women in two significant ways. Firstly, she has a thriving online community dedicated to families who seek to share this stories in the digital realm. Secondly, our guest's personal story is both inspiring and relatable, as she experienced a newfound liberation to pursue her dreams after her two daughters had grown. Barbara, welcome to the podcast.

Barbara: 1:13

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. It's Tien, just like the two letters.

Bobbi: 1:23

Oh, I like that. Where does that come from? It's Chinese.

Barbara: 1:27

My husband's family.

Bobbi: 1:28

Perfect, perfect. So that leads us into. You have two daughters. Tell us about your daughter's names, and do they have any Chinese meanings or heritage, or are they just good old American?

Barbara: 1:42

names. It's interesting you put that because it's funny, I think in many ways, when we begin with the name of a child, we are bringing to them so many different things of our own as parents expectations for them, hopes and dreams, and then the legacy as well. So in our case, both our daughters have names that would be familiar to anybody in any English-speaking environment. But they also have Chinese middle names, chinese, full Chinese names, which are their names from the perspective of our Chinese family and as I learned when we first named our eldest, who's now in her 30s, the name actually the characters in the name is a Chinese family. Tradition in our family and it's in many families I've since learned is picking a character, a sequential character, from a poem written by an ancestor in like the first century, and each subsequent generation takes the next character. So it's the first of two characters, two or sometimes three characters in a name. So each of our daughters are designated by their generation name and the Tien family, and so they're like the 20th generation or 21st generation of this long line. And it suddenly transformative, isn't it? In terms of how you look at your role. I mean, everyone has a pedigree, we're human beings, we have parents and it's just a question of whether you know that history and know why it mattered, know what your ancestors went through and why it mattered. And sometimes they were successes and sometimes they weren't. Sometimes they were struggles, and that's all something you can learn from.

Bobbi: 3:38

I think it gave me goosebumps when you said that because your daughters have a connection to their past Exactly, and that's really profound. Actually, it's not just you know. Oh, this person lived there and this is her name or his name, and that's all we know. You actually have that link through those letters. So that's quite incredible. I did not know that about the Chinese culture.

Barbara: 4:00

Yeah Well, and you know, when you scratch the surface on almost every culture in the world that we can understand, I would bet probably every single one of them in one form or another, has a way to respect the generations that preceded it, because it's, frankly, healthy for the human species and it has a way of passing down. And I think so often we generalize things to our own familiar culture anywhere and don't bother. Looking beyond that, my own family has a set of like six names that get repeated over and over again and in the time that I've had now I start to realize why. Who was it? That was a big deal that got to be named, you know Elizabeth, so we have Elizabeths and Betsy's and Lizzie's, and then I come along and I couldn't find any barbers.

Bobbi: 4:56

Well, it's nice to be unique. It's nice to be unique. I'm fortunate enough that my grandmother was very much into researching our family history and she wrote a lot about when the family came out to Australia on my father's side and they were free settlers on my mother's side. They weren't free settlers, they were sent out. One of them probably stole a loaf of bread or something like that way back when they really just wanted to populate Australia. So even if you were starving and you took a loaf of bread, you were sent out to Australia. But it's fascinating. It's fascinating seeing who they are, where they've come from and getting a glimpse of what they were about. And this is such a great segue into what you're doing now because I put a post on my Facebook profile the other day. A lot of people say I post a lot on Facebook and it's almost done in a cynical way. Why do you do that? But what they don't know? So this is what I explained and I think it was enlightening. For some people it's like sorry, I'm not doing it for you, I'm doing it for my grandkids and my great-grandkids can really see warts and all the bumbling, awkward, self-deprecating, sometimes funny, sometimes totally weird woman that came before us, and not just the pretty things but the things that were hard, or the awkward dance moves and that sort of thing. Because I seem to have this longing for those who I never met and it's mixed with me and I'm not entirely sure. I think now, because I've lost both my parents, I think it's just a longing for, and because the world is changing so much, I do have a longing for what's passed. So that's why I post so much on Facebook, and we will go back to talking about your emptiness journey, but I think this provides a wonderful segue into what you're doing now to help families make digital memories, if you can shed light on this.

Barbara: 7:08

Well, you've just captured it perfectly. Actually, you know that desire to you have, through your professional experience, developed a comfort level with the tools at hand. You talk about them as Facebook, and I will wager a lot of experience and a lot of the media creation tools to just put stuff in, and that makes it nothing to just put it together, because you're focused on the emotion, you're focused on the expression that is, digital storytelling in a media, in a linear media typically, but also, sometimes not, in various interactive kinds of media as well. And what we've discovered is, in my experience, my previous company, ponga Pongacom, realized that there was this burning need to tell those stories. I'm really touched at how you described it, in terms of not only your experience in Australia, which I would wager is a lot, very comparable in many ways from historical perspective to the United States, in the sense that you have a frontier, you have people you know not homesteading and creating these experiences in this large open spaces, and then indigenous populations as well, and then you have this historical connection back to a place very, very far away. You talked about it being a point where you lost both of your parents and, looking back at that kind of connection. I think that's actually as key a milestone as the empty nest moment. And what we find is the empty nest moment suddenly gives this time to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, I'm not done yet, I've got other things I need to do. And that moment when you lose your own parents, whatever that story might have been in doing that, is suddenly it's a recognition that wait a minute, the storytelling is on me, cause if I'm gone, it's gone and I've got something. Either just tell the stories of those who came before me that I have been the carriers of, or to tell my story to those who will follow, to inspire, to give them confidence, to give them reassurance. I mean we know as we grow that we gain confidence to take the next awkward moment because we saw us succeed at the last awkward moment. That's a secret, right? So if you can convey to others, to younger daughters, that it's okay, you can put yourself out there. You can fail, it's okay, cause you're gonna just fail and you're gonna pick yourself up and you're gonna learn and you're gonna take the next one and there's just no better. Success isn't a good teacher, it really isn't. Look, it's a looking validation. And so we realized in building the company how important that moment was and as we weren't able to really make the economics work in the near term for the platform the software platform we were building we took it offline and I asked, with the generous cooperation of my co-founders, to say, hey, wait a minute, you know what? Let me just keep the conversation going. I'm gonna build a little community and just keep the conversation going. We did that in between April and May. We returned money, we returned archives and gave people essentially the opportunity to come join this community, and now the people that we're seeing join have no idea what this Ponga thing was. They're coming from all over and I expect me changing the name just to open it up a little bit more. But watching that growth and watching what Brent brings people and it still comes down to exactly what you just said that I got a ways to tell us. And, frankly, my technology background has taught me a few things. First of all, understanding those kinds of tools like digital storytelling, but also from a family history perspective, to help people, help guide them through the challenges of the really complicated elements to doing this. First, is digitizing right? I mean just scanning pictures. You're not done. Well, you could be done if that's all you wanna do, and that's okay. But once you've got stuff digitized and you're dealing with the stuff that you're taking in digital form now, then what? Well, you know what Storytelling you're doing. You're doing exactly that in the ways that you're communicating these things. But there's also lethargy of these amazing AI powered tools, digital tools that, frankly, have been around for 20 years. The photo editing that we've been doing has been powered by AI. You know the genius of Photoshop, but there's just been a sea change with machine learning and what can be done. We did that at Punga by bringing in facial organization to say you know what? You got this 2000 images and you don't know who's who. Let's just take care of that for you. We'll sort them all out by matching faces, and then you put names to faces. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom. Now you're looking at a folder and everybody is labeled. It's mind-blowing to now get a deeper understanding of who's. We lost that software so I had to go do my own stuff all over again with whatever else is out there in the market. So I went through and have studied that and we talk about a lot of that. That's my talk later this week. And then there's storytelling. Once you can really know who's in there and get that kind of background, how do you tell those stories? Well, there's a thousand ways to do that today that never existed before. Sure, let me record a video. Sure, let me do a PowerPoint. But you can also bring in a talking head to do the storytelling for you, do a voiceover in some very cool Australian accent. You could bring in sound effects, all these kinds of things. The tools are out there. We're at how and what do you do with them. But once you've done all of that, forgive me, but is Facebook the best place to put that For just the question you raised? Sure, it accomplishes a key objective, but, looking at things from a longer perspective and a larger curve of family history, there are some stories you tell in a living room that aren't the same that you would tell in the town square. And Facebook is fundamentally a very public space, even if it's a closed group, and having control over who is in the room is really really important and scenes of Hamilton come to mind. But who is in the room is really really important, and I think that's where we have to have the conversations that we need to as a family. And then, finally, is really the archiving. How do you make sure that those stories are not lost, the hearts that are poured out into any environment and are brought in? The mechanics of getting that stuff out of Facebook. The mechanics of understanding how resolution changes, depending on where you put it, how Google Photos is different from Apple Photos in terms of the metadata of images and exit files, and HEEIC and C anyway, heef I mean those kinds of file format details. It's frankly, just a technical knit-nory detail. It's not complicated if you know which questions to ask. So that's what we're trying to bubble it up and help people guide them through those steps. And I've started by spelling out these five elements of essential elements of digital family history as a framework. Sure, there could be seven, there could be six, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that there's a basic framework that we can latch onto and structure conversations, structure materials, and that's what we're doing.

Bobbi: 15:53

So, although the first attempt is now done and dusted, so to speak, and you're now resurrecting this, I mean, I always think there's silver linings in this sort of thing. When the universe pulls the rug out from under our feet, it's always surprising what then turns up. So, is this platform available at the moment, or still available, for people to use, or is it down for developmental changes at the moment?

Barbara: 16:19

The Hulker platform as software you could use is now offline. So no, you cannot use it. What we did fundamentally was say, if you take an image and you digitize it, every pixel in that image should be accessible from the internet so that you could do stuff. That's the idea. That's to me, the powerful big idea. It seems so stupid at the base, but what you can do with it is mind blowing, and so I've started playing with that core idea in things like Canva. Speaking of Australia, canva introduced last fall something they call digital whiteboards. Lots of people had digital whiteboards before, but they're targeting it, like the rest of the Canva platform, to consumers and small businesses and people who want. And it doesn't handle the privacy the way I think it needs to, but the core bits to it are mind blowing in the way Punga was mind blowing and you could bring a lot of what you did in Punga into it, and it does things that Punga didn't do. So I've started exploring that. Those are the edges that I'm exploring and pursuing, and you can see all of that at our post Punga community, postpungacom, and you can absolutely play with that. Now it's not even a platform and the cool thing is I don't have to pitch anybody's business. I don't even have to be nice about what features people do and don't have. I like to be nice but from my perspective growing a community together we can influence the software developers to do things that address this part of the market. Because I think that's what we're doing we're highlighting what's needed and, frankly, I've built a career in product management. I know what it's like on the other side, so I look forward to helping grow that. And you learn as an entrepreneur and as a product developer that if you think of something, it probably exists or somebody probably tried it. So you got to go look on the internet and find it and there are some close approximations. There are things that have bits of it that are getting there, so we get to celebrate them all. And there's some wonderful new ones that have started to come up. There's a new one out of the UK called we arexyz, which is essentially building an entirely private. It's like a website, entirely private, and you can put anything you want in there, as far as your family tree, for example, and then invite people. Only two portions of it that are about them and you could be telling those stories there just for them. So, in that sense, for what you were doing with posting things, you may do things professionally, because obviously you do and you have a message to say there, but for things that you want to be sharing just with your family, it might be a really lovely platform for that. They don't do any of the facial organization. They don't do those kinds of things because, hey, you got to get a business done, and that's the other side of this. You know which is the pieces. We didn't do any family trees because we had to get things done. You pick pieces of it and I think, at the end of the day, just like everything that we do, we don't do it on one platform anyway. We do it on a lot of different pieces, everywhere, exactly. And so what are the pieces that are just not there in the market and what are pieces that are making us be the product as far as advertising or data collection, things like that?

Bobbi: 19:56

You're right with Facebook, because I often thought well, I'm going to all this trouble to share the real and the authentic, but what happens if Facebook is not around one day? Where is everything going to go?

Barbara: 20:10

Right, right, and you know the failure condition there, quite frankly, is at this point probably not likely that Facebook disappears, but that, or even grumbling that you're giving Facebook your data, that kind of thing. Even if you leave all of that aside, I have one of our members at Ponga told us a story about how she was the organizer of a private Facebook group around her family line, her historical family line, in a small town in Eastern Canada, nova Scotia or something, and they had these wonderful families, all of whom were descendants of the same small number of families in this area. She was the administrator for Facebook Group and there's all kinds of wonderful stories that were told and retold about all of this wonderful joy. Then, for a joke, for a birthday or something, she posted a baby picture of herself, buck naked. Facebook saw that and said oh no, and locked her account. So since she was the only administrator for that group, the group was offline too. So not only was a group offline, but by the it took her like three months or more to get Facebook to reinstate her account, and when they did that, that whole group had been disbanded and closed and all the pictures gone, everything was gone. So I mean it's, it's the fundamental of trusting something to somebody else. So when we talk about archiving, it's not don't do it. And I'm a big believer in the cloud, a big, big believer in the cloud. You don't have to worry that the cloud isn't backed up for the most part with your stuff, but you know thinking about the longer term and what are the ways to back stuff up, what are the ways to ensure it's going to still be there and at the end of the day, in my view at least, there's principles like three, two, one. We are different, archives are kept and things like that, which is fine. But in a complicated world like ours, I think the lots of stuff everywhere is a good strategy, as long as their structure to how it's done. So you know where things are, and it's kind of a belt and suspenders, which is sort of my practice. I'm cleaning up my own photos. Quite frankly, you know everything was a mess because I was doing all the stuff for everybody else and now I'm like hey it's my turn.

Bobbi: 22:31

That's something that I'm definitely not organized in relation to files, photos, folders, all that sort of thing. I sometimes think I think even on my phone I've got like 35,000 unread emails and I I don't know, I'm not that tech advanced, so I just leave myself in the mess and hope for the best.

Barbara: 22:55

There, there, there are professionals for that. You know, there is a whole community of people who are photo organizers, professional photo organizers, even digital live organizers, and, just like you can get somebody to come and, you know, declutter your house and that's, it's great. In fact, one of the professional photo organizers has joined. She was a Funga member and she's so well thought of and and has really turned her work to her own family collection, realizing she had a health scare and realize it's time to really pay attention to her own family stories. So she does a monthly program for us on, you know, the digitizing, really digitizing the flow from the. You know, when you start to think, Gee, I want to tell my mom's story, Let me go get those pictures, to planning it and how you archive it and all the way through to telling the stories and sharing those stories and all those kinds of things. And I've realized that it has to stink from genealogy. Genealogy is like this ongoing tree building, you know, citation capturing, and family history is much more. What's interesting to me now and I'm really realizing that we need to focus on projects, because that's how you go about it you think about a project and it's not about how to be the best possible family historian. It's how to be good at what you want to do and go do that and let me help you. And if it's about family history and you really want other people beyond you to know, there's some tricks, there's some flow, there's some frameworks and we can teach that. But we can also encourage and cajole and be inspired by each other's ideas and it's fun.

Bobbi: 24:47

So, apart from developing these wonderful ideas that can turn into platforms for this sort of thing, do you coach people as well, or talk to people, engage with people who are really wanting to make these collections for future generations to come?

Barbara: 25:06

Well, remember, we just brought down the Ponga platform in May and it's July, so I'm still figuring it out. I don't expect. Even in building this community, I thought briefly about how I could make essentially a business of it and realized that there's the potential to build this as kind of a self-sustaining community. I may need to do some donations or something like that to be able to fund the membership elements that'll allow it to grow bigger. For me, what I'm getting out of this is a huge learning about the market, about what's important, what people's stories. When I'm confident with my product background, then I can do something with that, and I think that will be more interesting in the long run, really even to the whole community, than coaching individuals. I may be able to help individuals find coaches who can help them with these things. One I mentioned photo organizers, and there's a group called the Photo Managers, which is an association of people who are professional photo managers. It's a group that's absolutely wonderful. It's a place called StoryCenterorg and it's a nonprofit based, ironically, here in Berkeley, just about a mile from me, and what they do is help people learn a technique for digital storytelling and how to bring that emotional moment into a digital story, which is different than a written essay or something and is as important from a skill building perspective as learning to write an essay, and you can find them at StoryCenterorg. They have full fancy programs. They're primary, it's a nonprofit, but they've become self-sustaining mainly with support from other nonprofits, teaching their community how to better tell the stories of their cause. But also they have a public workshops that they do for ordinary people that just sign up online, that are delivered online, and they were gracious enough to bring me in on one of their programs this spring, just ironically, at a time that was, you know, we were closing polka down and these kinds of things. One of the things that I found so compelling in that process, ironically, was the idea, you know, you learn growing up somewhere along the way that is it your story to tell when it isn't its gossip? But you know, is it your story to tell? But another one was are you ready to tell that story? And especially, like you, I've lost both my parents and I lost both of them in the last, in six months of each other last year. It was a very difficult and it's I realized. I realized, in putting it, all of this comes together in a moment, right, and you're like quick, pick a topic. In a sense, that's the topic I have to talk about, but I can't, and I you know you beat yourself up for not being able to for about 30 seconds before you learn it's okay, it's okay, it's too. It's it's a third rail right now. It's too. It's too sensitive. You need some distance, you need some processing time and that's okay. And it's like so many things learning that that's okay. That's part and part of what we do in storytelling process and that's why I think it's such a vital thing and I'm you know, having gone through this year, I'm better prepared for it than ever to do that.

Bobbi: 29:04

Yeah, I totally get with the storytelling I started. So I became an empty nester in November 21, and five months later my dad passed away. And it was in the last year or so that I wrote the book, the Post-Nest Plan, and it was so cathartic for me to not only write it but to take my focus away from my own grief and decide that if I'm going to help myself, I'm going to help other women as well. And I had been assisting women in transition for about 15 years and when I moved over to the US I put that business aside because there was so much going on here. It was a whole new adventure. But I knew after dad died and after Lucy left, like you, there was a double whammy of grief. You know, so hard and so challenging. So I decided to write and the book came out a couple of weeks ago and it's interesting to. Yes, it's for everybody else, but boy was it for me as well. It really helped me to write that.

Barbara: 30:16

Yeah, there's, the writing of a book is something and I look forward to reading it soon it's. I've known now at this stage in life, who knew I've now known many women who are following a very similar pattern. A good friend of mine, again in Australia, who is actually Canadian in Australia, that can also, and she's in the process now of doing the final edits on what is a story that she's been, she's been essentially incubating for four years now and it is a story that has to be told and it's so. She was one of our, has been one of our most active Ponga members and very fluent in new media, with no hesitance at all. But this one she had to write in prose and that's wonderful, that's so. It comes in its own way and it will come in many ways and it will continue to come. Sometimes you're done with the story and sometimes it needs to keep iterating, keep evolving.

Bobbi: 31:23

Can you share with us the story about when you became an empty nester and the girls left home? All of our stories are different. How, how was it for you with any challenges you faced, or did you breeze through it? I'd love to hear your wisdom.

Barbara: 31:41

Well, I think my eldest has a baddie has been teaching me all along since since she was in diapers and she also gave me permission, essentially, to start Ponga in the first place had me staring out in the back yard and said you know, mom, you have this idea, you need to just go for it. And I realized it was a little bit of permission, I don't. Yeah, I guess, come to think of it, that did happen when she was just graduating from high school, the year she graduated from high school and, as it happened, she went to UC Berkeley right here in town and I remember packing her up and taking her off to her dorm and I said, okay, goodbye, and we're gonna miss you. She's like mom, I'm across to get over it, but it is different.

Bobbi: 32:34

I mean I don't think geography really, I mean it does play a part, but it doesn't as well, because it's what's gone from, from what is right there, your routines, what your house is like, the noise level, how many people you've got to cook for. There are so many changes, even if our kids are across town.

Barbara: 32:54

Yeah, I think for us and since then both have graduated, gone essentially away to college and come back and lived with us for various periods of time it has To me most significant has been the step where you recognize they are adults and you treat them as adults. That, to me, was the biggest phase of all and our daughters are now in their mid 20s and 30s and, recognizing that huge leap, I mean, I remember when I was in labor or I'm not to be induced with our second daughter, on the way to the hospital and in that surge of emotions that is just there with pregnancy, I was bawling because I could not. How could I give birth to a second child when I love my first child so much? It just wasn't fair to the second child, right? And I realize what got me through that was to realize that I wasn't always going to be here and to know that she would have a sister, she would have someone always there with her. And you know these are the emotions of family. You know this is what brings us together, whether it's the joy of such a wonderful relationship or the trauma that it isn't such a wonderful relationship. You know these are the magnetic poles and you know the logistics of groceries and the changes in noise levels in the house. Maybe it's because we just do live in a very metropolitan area. I have had family parading in and out of here for years and I had. I was caring for my mom. So through all of that, from the time actually the same year that both graduated from college and high school Is that right? Yeah, college and high school, my mom moved here to be with us. We put her in a care home just a mile from our house. So that same year, essentially, I just flipped and turned to daily visits with her and you know all of those kinds of things. Then I had all family members visiting and staying with us. So you know.

Bobbi: 35:07

Before we go. If you had one bit of advice that you would give to an empty nest mom, based on your own experiences and your own thoughts, what might that be?

Barbara: 35:19

Don't stop. Follow your dream. You know it's that simple and finding out what your dream is is really hard for many women because you haven't allowed yourself to have that dream. And you know, my dream is my kids. My dream is their success. But as kids become adults, they need you to step back, they need you to not hover and they can show their love in helping you fly, and I think that I love the metaphor of flying. Another friend of mine has a book she's written on being the pilot of your own life, stepping into it. This is Terri Mead and she has. I don't think the podcast is currently live, but she has had an ongoing blog post. She's on Medium and many other places. She's an investor in Silicon Valley and very, very well established, very, very well respected in a variety of fields. And she turned to really this midlife step of you're in charge, always, have been, always will be and now it's. Everybody needs you to take that and I felt what even my failures as a business helped show my daughters that you can go for it, you can learn, pick yourself up, you can learn from it and you can keep going and keep learning from it and keep going, and that's what matters.

Bobbi: 36:53

Although they're quite self sufficient, they're still looking at us, they're still watching us. There's still, subconsciously or otherwise, learning from us. So, if we can be the best example, I often joke to my girls there, twenty and twenty four, and I say, well, all you need to do is look at your mother and you can take what you need. I can either be a great example or a horrible warning. Just pick, pick what's the horrible warning, pick what's the great example. And I'm not putting myself down, we're just being real and I love that we can do that. And that's how sort of inside John, the good bits use the bad bits will still learn from and just do a 180, will you? Because life is not always rosy and it's up and down and you know that they're always looking at us, they're always engaging. What are we going to do? And I think you're right to just be the best version of ourselves that we can possibly be With the tools, knowledge and resources that we have at any given time, and keep moving forward, as you said, barbara. Thank you so much. This has been a really lovely conversation.

Barbara: 38:11

It has indeed. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Bobbi: 38:13

It's a thrill no worries at all. And to our listeners, thank you so much for connecting today and we look forward to connecting with you next time on fly mum, fly Empty nest to personal best, let's fly, mum fly.