How can you become an API ally? Dani and Le share their advice for those seeking to help uplift Asian voices

API Heritage Month is always a vibrant celebration of culture and identity at Dropbox — but this year, showcasing our API heritage or our allyship with members of the API community carries more weight than ever before. We spoke with Sydney-based Dani Tam and Le Tran, Marketing Operations Manager and Head of APJ Communications respectively, about the challenges they faced growing up because of their heritage, and how anyone can help other young API people find their voices and step out of the shadows.

How was your culture a part of your upbringing?

Dani: I’m Chinese and was born in Fiji, so I am both Pacific Islander and Asian, but I grew up in a pretty Western household. We didn’t really eat Chinese food, and I didn’t speak Cantonese. I kind of pushed my Asian culture away — the media I consumed was either American, British, Aussie, or Kiwi and strangely, I felt proud to be less Chinese because it matched more of what I saw in the media. When I got older, I started to get interested in Asian pop culture through music, because when you’re a teen, music is everything! So Japanese rock, anime, and Korean pop culture are what drew me back into Asian culture. Reaching my roots is still something I’m trying to figure out!

Le: I had an opposite experience from Dani’s — my parents were refugees, and when they came to Australia they had no understanding of the language or the culture here. We were raised speaking Vietnamese at home, and I actually didn’t speak English until I was about seven. As refugees, my parents clung on to our heritage, so the conflict I felt growing up was the burden of being torn between two very different cultures. Asian culture is about the collective, while Western culture is about the individual. I still struggle with that and am trying to find a way to balance the two. But now, it’s less of a burden and more of “wow, I’m so lucky to have two cultures!”

What challenges did you face because of your Asian heritage?

Le: Asian culture values humility. Its rarely about the individual — it’s all about the collective. In a work context, it’s been challenging to find a genuine way to navigate that. I wasn’t taught to promote myself, so it’s something I’m still very uncomfortable with! I have to remember it’s not a zero sum game — it’s not choosing one or the other, but creating a new identity by taking the best of both worlds.

Dani: I questioned notions of beauty a lot growing up. I thought my black hair and brown eyes were so boring because I never really saw myself widely represented in the media. And when I migrated to Australia at 14 was when I truly felt different from everyone else. At my Chinese school in Fiji, I would get teased for being fat, but in Australia, kids would tease me for being Asian — one of the only things I can’t change. So for the first couple years here, I just really wanted to go home.

How have you internalized the #stopasianhate events of last year?

Le: It’s been so heartbreaking. I’m following a lot of what’s going on in the US, particularly violence against elderly Asians. I don’t know why, but I almost feel shameful — it’s a mixture of feeling embarrassed, powerless, and helpless. And then there’s a lot of worry — is that attitude and that level of violence going to spread to other parts of the world?

Dani: I felt the shame thing as well — I just wanted to keep my head down. I feel like I don’t know as much about the Asian American experience, but I do feel empowered by hearing younger voices, particularly those of YouTube creators — hearing younger generations speaking up is not common for the Asian community. There is some hope there!

How can we help our peers be allies and advocates?

Le: We can learn a lot from the gender equality movement. The path towards empowering women began with allyship from men. The parallel here is that we need people outside the Asian community to help us strengthen our own voices — because when you’re the minority, it can be really hard to even articulate what you’re feeling. And secondly, I’m thinking about my platform — how can I use my role in Communications to uplift other Asian voices within my network? I want to normalize Asian leadership and so that this isn’t just a conversation that starts and ends once a year during API month, but becomes an ongoing narrative.

Dani: People don’t really like being told what to do, how to think, or what to say. They need to be the one to want to understand. So for us, we need to find common ground and share things we can both empathize with. We can’t force education on others; we have to let them come into it in their own way and change from within.

Even after API Heritage Month is over, we support API Dropboxers and Dropboxers of all backgrounds year round through our ERGs. You can learn more about them here.