For the love of dumplings
This September marked the third East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) Heritage Month in the UK. It is an initiative led by besea.n, whose mission is to empower, educate and embrace ESEA communities in the UK. This year’s theme for ESEA Heritage Month was ‘Roots / Routes, an explanation of cultural identity and belonging’.
This year, to belatedly celebrate my second Ada-versary (Ada Ventures anniversary), in conjunction with ESEA Heritage Month, I’ve been thinking about how my cultural upbringing is reflected in the way I show up at work.
It makes me chuckle, but I remember the first time I heard about ESEA Heritage Month. The first thing that popped into my mind was — perhaps a cliché — dumplings. I was excited by the prospect of having many dumplings to eat throughout this month (!!).
In my family, food is at the heart of everything. It’s in the plate of fresh cut fruit that is deposited on your table in the middle of a video call. It’s in the effort it takes for your partner to shop for and cook your favourite dishes, every day, just because. It’s in the greeting, ‘have you eaten yet?’ the minute you step through the door. In the way you cook a dish slightly differently each time because a random dinner guest likes it just so.
Whatever you want to read into my personality type, throughout my education and career, I have gravitated towards the things that let me show this care discretely, in the background: being a stage manager, playing defense on the hockey team, working as a lawyer, and now in operations. I struggled to understand anything that was individualistic, where you weren’t part of a team (family) — to succeed is to do what you can to make the whole team better, no matter how small that thing you’re doing is.
In operations, you really have to care. About the detail and about how all the parts form the whole. You have to care about the people your work affects, and to make anything work effectively, you have to care enough to put yourself in their shoes and think about how this thing that you’re doing will affect their day-to-day. When I think about how to make a new process easier for my team, I’m really thinking about that plate of cut fruit. How will this thing help them to focus more, help to make their day that little bit easier — am I serving them sweet, crisp watermelon (my favourite!), or am I really just serving up unripe avocados?
I have been cooking since the age of 3, shadowing my mother in the kitchen. If you’ve ever made a stir fry, you will know that the trick is to be prepared (chop everything up before you start cooking), use a super hot wok, and move quickly. In my household, this is usually happening while you have a pot of herbal soup bubbling and another dish prepped and cooking in the steamer. You have to be efficient in our kitchen.
As I have described before, a job in operations in a small VC fund is broad. My day-to-day involves a lot of context switching, from compliance, to investor reporting, to impact & ESG, and to helping out our Ada Scouts & Angel community. This can sometimes be stressful, but there is also a lot of joy, and it sometimes reminds me of being in the kitchen. When I cook, I know that if I leave this to boil, I can prep the next thing for the stir fry; if I add chilli flakes and vinegar to hot oil, I get a delightful combination (usually!). When work gets a little too busy, I remember that it’s not much more difficult than that. I can take a deep breath and figure out which small step will likely get something going while I move on to the next thing.
I have spent most of my working life in London, much of that time trying to figure out where my innate cultural identity fits in, particularly in the corporate world. There have been many moments of doubt, as with many second-generation immigrants, silent clashes where I have tried to translate my distinctly ‘other’ cultural instincts into words and actions which my colleagues would understand. But in the last couple of years, I have learned to recognise this ability to translate across cultures as a superpower. I never needed to worry all along. So many of the cultural values I have grown up with have been the underlying force driving my actions and the roles I pursued, whether my colleagues knew it or not, and they have brought me where I am today. Kudos to the Ada Ventures team, who have created the safe space for me to embrace this cultural identity, in a very human way. Perhaps more on this another time.
So I’m curious, how do your cultural values show up in your work?
If you want to learn more about the ESEA experience in the ‘western’ world, here are some resources I have found helpful:
- East Side Voices edited by Helena Lee
- The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla
- Prachi Gupta on the Model Minority Myth, in Dax Shepherd’s Armchair Expert (podcast)
- Everything Everywhere All At Once (film)
- Asian Lit for Kids (social media account on children’s books that feature Asian characters!)
- Besea.n resources page
- Interview with Erik Lim (Potluck Ventures) by Ved Nathwani, an Ada Scout, for last year’s ESEA heritage month
