Primary Change Agents: Profile
Ivy, 19 | Lifelong Resident of Westminster (Next city over)
Ivy is the first friend who I ever had the pleasure of living with. We had actually gone to the same middle school, had classes with each other and everything, but did not interact until our senior year of high school. And the summer after we graduated, she packed her things and moved into my house for a 5-day stint leading up to my 18th birthday. I remember sometimes during school she refused to sleep over because she would forget the little tweezers to take out the blood-red costume contacts she wore every day. Her unique approach to self-expression and her unwavering confidence paved her path during high school. She grew into a phenomenal poet and writer, and I couldn’t have been more excited to give Ivy her first spoken word platform during a Black Student Association poetry slam.
“But you, as the white person, will never understand or experience the racism I experience.” Ivy is easily the most militant one out of every member of the Marina Black Student Association. The idea that a white person can never empathize with us, is a sincere sentiment. But that they could never understand… led us to a standpoint that excluded the student body from even attempting to learn from us or see us as anything more than an ‘other’ that happened to be their locker neighbor. Either way, she says, her experience in both academic and counseling settings reflected that there was no sympathy for students of color who experienced white resentment at Marina.
Having dealt with constant apprehensiveness and ignorant hostility from the white majority at Marina High School, Ivy felt motivated to hold these students accountable and vocalize her discomfort with her treatment.
Other white students were notorious for making jokes towards students of color at their expense. This has extended from her unabashed pride in her Vietnamese heritage and culture to acting as a big proponent in the Black Student Association which had the campus buzzing just because of its existence. Many a time I was fearful of pushback, acts of vandalism, or unfriendly drop-ins when organizing events and meetings, but Ivy was usually one of my biggest supporters and cheerleaders. She always reminded me that we were not obliged to make white kids comfortable. The confidence she had in herself was gradually instilled in our peers who felt uncomfortable in white spaces.
I would like to make a point that when we ask for space and acknowledgment, we are not asking for special treatment. Honestly, whenever we are asking for these things, I wouldn’t consider it even being vulnerable. We have the right to feel safe to walk around at school just as much as everyone else who resents us does.
Although the Vietnamese Student Association was never overtly unwelcoming, she felt the differences between her and the majority of other Vietnamese students were enough to steer clear. She noticed that a lot of them were dealing with the tremendous pressure of submitting to the model minority myth whereas she had developed anger towards conforming to it.
Although a relatively liberated individual, Ivy was trapped in the narrative expectations of immigrating to America for a better life, in which the improvements supposedly came from complete assimilation.
Her mother had a very comfortable immigration from Vietnam and was welcomed into the Orange County community with open arms from the surrounding paternal conservative community.
I should note that the large Vietnamese population in Orange County was a result of the proximity to Camp Pendleton, where 40% of first-wave Vietnamese refugees were sent in 1975. As a result, Little Saigon (in Westminster) had the largest population of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam by 1990.
The abuse and treatment in her household were largely dismissed initially as a byproduct of ‘tiger parenting’ methods. There is a common perception of the ‘tiger parenting’ style that is characterized as an ethnic parent who maintains high educational and extracurricular standards for their children in the name of their success. This has become mostly synonymous with Southern and East Asian households due to the 2011 memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua.
When discussing her experience with counselors, she was immediately addressed with a comment about how “I know Asian parents can be tough”. By confirming the treatment as common A hands-off, culturally blind approach that initially accepted this treatment as a cultural difference they would make no effort to understand. Manipulation was a huge part of the experience. Being told it would be her fault that she is taken away, accusations of trying to make her mother into a monster (for simply existing). Although, being taken away was the least of her mother’s worries.
“At 3 different stages of my life, I had different CPS people come to my house because of the abuse, and all of them left. And never revisited that ever.” Concern was surface level at best. There was an unspoken dismissal of physical and psychological abuse in this Vietnamese household because the people evaluating the situation held a bias that “Things were just like that”. They did not take the time to evaluate her parents, who were mentally unstable and mistreating Ivy to an extent that drove her out of her home at 17.
“Usually kids who are being abused don’t have nicely furnished houses like this,” HBPD confirmed the class interactions were based on seeing something familiar to him, a sign of wealth was a sign of moral purity. Especially because of the history in Orange County of conservative Vietnamese people, the assimilation and suburban evidence of living was enough to convince the cop to not take the steps to look at any records and recognize that CPS has been called here before.
“[Birthday Candles] was a story about me attending a white friend’s birthday party, and then me having to sneak out of my house to even get to the party.”
Subconsciously overcompensating to feel a sense of belonging and observing, both in the context of the perfect nuclear family dynamic that dominates HB, but also as one who experienced a cold and distant household that was dismissed as normal purely because of cultural assumptions of the surrounding area. Even though HB is right next to Westminster, there is a general assumption of a Vietnamese (Asian) family dynamic. She found herself resenting that family, her friend. Inserting herself in the dynamic to understand a part of that life.
Later she found herself racked with guilt for even feeling that way.
“It felt like I was being made to [overcompensate]. There was something about being made to prove myself because I am an Asian immigrant. Because that’s how we are supposed to make our way in the world. We have to earn our place to live.”
She contrasts this with the rich white families that saturate the area, who define Huntington Beach as a whole. Beach city, big houses, white and conservative. Where do we fit into that? We’re already here. We always have been.
Read Ivy’s piece “Birthday Candles” in the Primary Change Agents Zine
