The Wonder Years married the bewilderment of a child with the nostalgia of an adult; and for a generation, the TV show created by Carol Black and Neal Marlens is a time machine back to the sixties, youth and innocence. In today’s episode, we return to “The Wonder Years” with Carol Black and writer Titi Nguyen to reflect on childhood with the help of Kevin Arnold.

From the theme song to the super-eight home movies in the opening credits, The Wonder Years, is steeped in nostalgia. Through a wistful narrator, it takes the audience back inside the mind and heart of a pre-adolescent boy as he tries to make sense of how the sixties impact his family. We all live at the intersection of our personal lives and the historical events around us. We grow up focused on the personal until one day we realize how history shapes us. For Titi Nguyen, her birthplace, Vietnam, loomed in the background of her childhood, but since her parents never spoke of the place or the war they’d fled, Titi turned to the TV, specifically The Wonder Years, to make sense of her story.