The Failed Tiger Mom and the Magical Glasses
I recently had lunch with a friend of 30 years — we see each other sporadically in person and even less on social media but we consider ourselves good, long time friends.
After the expected niceties about our families, kids in college and our work, they cautiously touched on more cerebral topics, specifically our friendship. Like many, they had been doing a lot of reading and soul searching in the aftermath of the events after George Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests, followed by the murder of mostly Asian Americans in Atlanta, GA. A voracious reader, my friend, by all accounts is highly educated, well traveled and worldly. But the experiences and observations of the last two years gave them pause. They shared their memories of our time in graduate school, “That you were really well liked, always going the extra mile to help someone. People always seemed to turn to you when they needed support or advice.”
It wasn’t that far off from how most people might describe me. Then they continued, “I just always thought of you as just like me. That we experience everything the same way but now I realize, or I think, you must experience the world very differently than I do.”
Most of my life, I tried to disappear via assimilation. So, my first reaction was “Wow, I really did it. They really thought I was just like them” But their comment opened up a more important discussion about what it was really like to be me. I found myself telling them what it was like doing the most basic things everyday. That my experience was only the tip of the iceberg for what happens to people of color, especially those darker than I. That you carry that extra stress everyday on top of the normal stresses of the day. That the most mundane situations can feel life threatening. For my friends with Black sons and daughters, that education starts even earlier. But we all start experiencing racism and discrimination at an early age. And coping with it just becomes part of the fabric of our daily existence. You don’t know how to live any other way.
I was really grateful that my friend and I had this conversation. I reached out afterward to ask permission to share the context of our conversation for this piece. They shared that they felt awkward and uncomfortable saying anything about their observation. It shouldn’t have felt like a courageous act, but it was and it meant a lot to me.
Which made me wish that I could invent a magical pair of glasses that they could put on and just see what it was like. Even for one day.
THE CONFESSION:
I have been an assimilator. My whole life has been about melting in. For a child born in the 1960’s, it’s what many of us were taught to stay safe. Keep your head down. Do your work. Don’t rock the boat. At some point, it becomes untenable. You hold so much in. You swallow your pride despite knowing things should be different. You do it because you’re taught it’s the way to stay alive.
My earliest memory of that was around age 3 or 4 when a group of guys hanging on their porch chanted ching chong while pulling the corners of their eyes while my mom and I walked by.
While walking through the Yale campus with two friends, one Korean American friend and the other Malaysian, a pick up truck passed by with a bunch of guys hanging out their window and chanted “I’m turning japanese” and pulled the corners of their eyes. (a touch of irony, none of us were Japanese)
Living in Boston after graduate school, I was stalked and harassed by an angry driver all the way to work one day with him screaming “you f-cking Chink should not be on the road” before he sped off. My boss walked me to my car each night for a week.
And countless times of men expressing their Asian fantasies with “Hey Suzie Wong, wanna party?”
The well meaning friends who say “I don’t think of you as Asian; I think of you as white like me.” Except I am not. So even in the spirit of inclusion, I can’t help but feel erasure and invalidation. Because I didn’t feel like I was “white just like them”.
That stuff leaves a mark. Even 30–50 years later.
THE LESSON:
I don’t expect or want sympathy, apologies or even reconciliation. What I want is for people to have the humility to ask when they know they don’t know the answer. I don’t need to point out “white privilege” because it’s, quite frankly, an abstract concept, especially to those who see or experience any lack of privilege (social, economic or race) as interchangeable. The false equivalency distracts the core of the topic. An antidote is humility and curiosity.
A colleague noted that they had seen me post more about my identity of late. It feels a little strange after dampening it for so long. When my then 15 year old daughter came home from school and told me about the regular cadre of “20-something guys with man buns” who expressed their Asian fetishes whenever she walked by, I was proud of her ability to shut them down immediately and incensed that in 40 years, life had not changed for women like us that much at all. There is much work to do.
So, if we had the courage to ask the question that makes us most uncomfortable of the people we love, what gifts could come from that?
