The Oscar season has come and gone and the 95th Academy Awards have given the Asian American acting community much to celebrate. I was reading Inkoo Kang’s March 12th article in The New Yorker right before the awards ceremony - “The Oscars and the Pitfalls of Feel-Good Representation”, subtitled “Why have we become so fixated on the award prospects of the most successful members of a minority group?” She touched on something deeper than some popular beliefs about diversity. In this case, I call it “Trophy Diversity”, the kind of diversity that is skin-deep when the attention is focused on representational appearance and the feel-good sensation it creates – ironically in Chinese the word is 膚淺, or “skin-shallow” when translated back to English. Michelle Yeoh, Daniel Kwan, and Ke Huy Quan are all deserving of our most sincere congratulations, and the celebration makes us all feel good. Like Kang, I am looking for something deeper – to not just feel good, but feel seen, feel heard, and feel loved, on and off stage.
This brings me to a topic I have been meaning to write about for the past several years: the uneven playing field for women - in my case as an Asian American woman - in corporate America.
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Part I: Identity
Winter in the Bronx is often cold and cloudy. It is my first time there meeting with a major healthcare organization’s IT leader, a client of ours, to discuss their upcoming data center migration project. It’s late in the afternoon when we are finally led into a windowless room lit by fluorescent lights, the kind that makes everyone look pale. The room is more like a conference room than an office – big white walls bare, chairs arranged around a rectangular table. Sitting at the center of the long end of the table is a middle-aged man reading something on his laptop. “I am Yi,” I clear my throat. “And I am the manager of the team who will be supporting your migration project.” I extend my hand. He looks up from his computer screen, eyebrows raised with a trace of amusement. “Oh, you are a double minority! Good. Have a seat.” He takes my hand, his hand cold and handshake firm. He remains seated and for the duration of the entire meeting, never introduces his name.
This happened at the beginning of my management career. The scene stuck with me, not because it landed squarely in blatant racist or sexist territory but the fact that the two identities of mine - female and non-white - just popped into this man’s head and then out of his mouth without so much as a thought. It left me wondering how many times I was identified with these qualities in people’s minds, short of uttering the words out loud. This identification, reflexive and maybe even unconscious, is it a primitive form of discrimination? Is “color-blind” and “gender-blind” actually possible?
Upon receiving the best actress award, Michelle Yeoh appealed to “all the boys and girls who look like me” to dream big. Look does matter. It offers the first clue about your identity.
Like many Chinese-American immigrants, my upbringing was deeply rooted in Chinese culture and tradition. We were taught at a very young age, both at home and at school, that hard work and humility are virtues. You want a good life? Study hard to get good grades so you can go to good schools. You desire fair treatment? Work hard to take away any excuses that can be used to put you down. You want to be proud of your achievements? Let others praise you, never boast about yourself. We - Asian Americans -bring these virtues to corporate America. We are dependably hardworking, and we don’t raise our hands or our voices. We quietly hope our hardworking will be rewarded, and when it does not happen, we swallow our disappointment with a smile and tell ourselves that maybe we are not good enough to deserve the reward. So, we work even harder.
Work hard, don’t fight; be compliant, don’t complain. That’s ingrained in us, and it becomes our second identity, after being Asian and women. That identity has a label of its own – “model minority”. Some of us do not take offense to that label (as we should), but work hard to enforce it, to make sure we continue to deserve to be called a model.
I look back at that poorly lit, windowless room in the Bronx. I want to tell my younger self that I am proud of her grace in letting the success of the project deliver her true identity beyond being an Asian woman, a double minority. Looking back, I now see the long road ahead for the younger me, to overcome the limitations imposed by that identity, the limitation that I did not know existed. I want to tell her, and those who look like her, that unfortunately our gender and skin color will always be identified before our capability, despite the statistics we will learn in training. The unequal power display will always be present no matter how subtle the signals are or how much we are led to believe in equality. I want to tell women leaders who are out there in the offices and conference rooms, that it is okay to be aware of how we are identified, and acknowledge it, but never accept it. What I know now that my younger self did not realize: only when more and more people who look like us walk into that room (and onto that stage for those who aspire to be the next Michelle or Daniel or Ke Huy), will we no longer be the minority in number, and only then our look will cease to define who we are.
This is Part I of a four-part series. Read Part II here.
“I want to tell my younger self that I am proud of her grace in letting the success of the project deliver her true identity beyond being an Asian woman, a double minority.” A lot of this is very resonant, and I think it speaks to how waking up to the unfair treatment can be complicated -- I know I often get stuck in the rage and let it throw me off course instead of proving them wrong. It’s so much to hold and I’m thankful for your beautiful articulation of the feeling.