No Goodbye (2016)

No Goodbye

By Xiaoyan Li, 2016
Listen to this edited audio piece through OHMA’s SoundCloud channel

This episode is from an interview that Xiaoyan Li conducted with Alexandra Patz, an immigrant who is originally from Johannesburg South Africa and currently lives in New York. Her father is American while her mother was South African. Her mother died when she was 13 which hugely changed her life. As she said: “there are two big things in my life, one is immigration and the other is my mother’s death.” In this episode, she shared her early memory about her mother and the sad story of her mother’s death.


Xiaoyan Li
is an international student from China and 2016 Davis Fellow. Her study in oral history focuses on the complex intersectional relationship between history and the individual.

Prior to coming to OHMA, Xiaoyan worked in Cui Yongyuan Center for Oral History at the Communication University of China for two years. Her thesis project focuses on former Kuomintang soldiers in New York, aiming to document the life stories of those old soldiers whose images are vague in modern Chinese history.