What I learned about being Asian in Asia

I’ve spent the last 6 months working and living with people who at a surface level look more like me than most of my peers ever have. And yet being here in Japan, I’ve spent every single day remarkably amazed at how incredibly different than my peers I am — from the jokes that I tell (“I die” when my American sarcasm doesn’t quite translate…), to my approach to expressing emotion (hint: happy or sad, I’m always crying), to my fundamental beliefs about people, relationships and family. I am different from my peers — we are different.

And even my peers, regardless of how much people refer to the Japanese as a homogenous society, my peers are incredibly different! I’ve been nothing short of impressed by the diversity of people I have met here. Diversity in thought, dress, values, sexual orientation. Japanese people are each different.

At the same time, in my day-to-day work, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about personalization, often touted as the future of retail. Perhaps the one rule of true personalization is not to segment customers based on one user trait. It’s to design an algorithm that can take into account as many data inputs as possible regarding one individual’s preference, store all that data into one account or user profile and make a unique decision based on that user’s profile. Sounds simple, right? Trust me, I’ve spent the last 6 months in conference rooms understanding just how difficult this is from IT teams. But yet, if we can design our machines to do this, how beautiful would it be if we could program our own minds to do this too? How liberating.

In short, my time in Japan has been (color) blinding. Because it’s become undeniably clear to me that each of our personal traits — height, weight or ethnicity — they are nothing more than inputs. We, as living, breathing human beings on this planet, we are each dynamic individuals with free will. We are (thankfully) living in a day and an age in which we are no longer chained to our birthrights — be it our class, religion, family. We can each make our own decisions, like when Malala decided she would go to school that day, or when Rosa decided she wasn’t going to give up her seat on that bus. We each choose our own destinies.

It’s been disappointing to follow the ongoing news of racial tensions at home in America. This instance highlighted here is certainly not the most concerning. But it comes at a time when I celebrate my 6 months in Japan and I reflect back on some of my big learnings.

I’ve learned that for me, being Asian, like many other characteristics, is an input in my account profile. But it’s no more than one data input. It’s not life defining and I refuse to allow it to be (is that controversial to say?).

Perhaps more importantly, I now more than ever refuse to allow myself to define others by one input — be it their height, weight, religion or ethnicity. That’s a terrible personalization campaign! I know that stereotypes exist for a reason — they’re tempting — they’re fast, simplifying and maybe even right, but they’re also incredibly lazy. They lure us into applying a lazy man’s theory of averages instead of designing our own powerful algorithms to perceive the world.

I won’t be perfect every day. There will be many moments where I choose the lazy road and slip into old habits, but I “commit to start” to overcome this laziness every day. I will strive to operate myself on an individual level, to choose my own destiny and to design my own algorithms that inform my own decisions about people and the world.