Meghan Markle’s podcast returns after four-week break after Queen's death
4 October 2022, 12:29 | Updated: 4 November 2022, 10:10
Meghan Markle’s podcast has returned after a four-week break following the death of the Queen.
The latest episode of her podcast Archetypes on Spotify was released today.
In it, she talks to journalist Lisa Ling and comedian Margaret Cho about the ‘dragon lady’ stereotype faced by women of Asian descent.
The Duchess of Sussex starts by talking about her ‘real love’ of getting to know other cultures and her experience growing up in Los Angeles saying it’s ‘full of culture that you can see, feel, hear and taste’ on a daily basis.
Speaking about a memory of going to a Korean spa with her mum as a teenager, she said: “It's a very humbling experience for a girl going through puberty because you enter a room with women from ages nine to maybe 90, all walking around naked and waiting to get a body scrub on one of these tables that are all lined up in a row. All I wanted was a bathing suit."
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Journalist Lisa Ling told Meghan she had been named ‘hot reporter’ in the Rolling Stone’s Hot List when she was a broadcaster at Channel One.
She said: “Someone at my place of work cut out that article, drew slanted eyes over the eyes and wrote ‘yeah, right’ and then put it back in my mailbox,”
Adding: “It was like every kernel of excitement that I possessed just withered away. It was so devastating that someone that I would see every day in my place of work where we're supposed to feel comfortable, just harboured those feelings about me and had the nerve to make it racial."
"Once I was over that adolescent embarrassment, my mom and I, we would go upstairs we would sit in a room and we would have a steaming bowl of the most delicious noodles," she said.
Meghan said she was not aware of the stigmas faced by women of Asian descent until many years later. The duchess said: "The Dragon Lady, the East Asian temptress whose mysterious foreign allure is scripted as both tantalising and deadly.
"This has seeped into a lot of our entertainment. But this toxic stereotyping of women of Asian descent, it doesn't just end once the credits roll."
Korean-American comic Margaret Cho spoke about enjoying life to the full, saying: "I think it's growing old and understanding the brevity of life that you have to really enjoy the time you have because it's, it's not very long, you know, it goes by very fast."
Meghan replied: "Yeah....it's so true."
The duchess urged her podcast listeners to be their "best and true self."
"You want to be weird or be sponge-like, be silly or fierce, be curious, or even self doubting or unsure some days and strong and brave on others," she said at the end of the episode.
"Whatever it is, that's up to you.
"Just be yourself no matter what any societal framework or archetype or loud voice coming from a small place tells you that you should be. Be yourself. your full complete whole layered, sometimes weird, sometimes awesome, but always best and true self. Just be you. You're so much greater than any archetype."
