Beating Racism & Redefining Asian America, with Daisy Chung
How can we be the best version of ourselves? Can you be the change you wish to see in the world? How would you define Asian — and Asian-American — representation?
Here’s Daisy Chung, who spoke at the annual Imagine Talks symposium, transcribed on to Mental Power Hacks.
Daisy Chung is a First-Generation Chinese American Sales Executive, World Traveler and Miss Asian California 2020. Born and raised in San Francisco, her tech sales career led her first to New York City to lead a high-performing team and now to Los Angeles where she partners with C-Level Executives. She became “rep of the year” in her first year in tech sales, a manager at age 26 and broke company records 5 years in a row.
Find out more about Daisy Chung:
- LinkedIn: Daisy Chung (daisychung13)
- YouTube: Daisy Chung
- Instagram: @narutoprincess
- TikTok: _daisychung
- Clubhouse: Daisy Chung
- Twitter: @_daisychung
What does Asian representation mean in 2021?
Hi, everyone! In today’s talk we’ll be going over: what does Asian representation mean in 2021?
Before we get started, I’ll go ahead and introduce myself. My name is Daisy Chung. I currently live in Los Angeles and born [in] the beautiful city of San Francisco, I work in tech sales at a small growing startup called Orum, and in my spare time, I love to travel once, not during the pandemic. I love to look into investing and I love Hot Cheetos and cream cheese.
So what does Asian representation mean in 2021? Well, let’s take a look back at 2020. In 2020, we faced a pandemic, we saw the rise of Black Lives Matter protests and dishearteningly enough, we also saw the capital insurrection at Capitol Hill. And so — indirectly or directly — these are events that impact the Asian-American community, and so it makes us think, “How can we represent ourselves? And what does that mean for us in 2021?”
It is important to know that every single person have their own perspective and their own story behind it. I’ll go ahead and share mine. And so my background is I grew up in a very big Asian community. In high school, I went to a magnet school called Lowell High School in San Francisco and the population was over 70 percent Asian-Americans. In college, I went to UCSD, and over there I was over forty-eight of that Asian-American population. So I was always surrounded by Asian Americans. I’ve always felt like the majority.
Becoming a minority
It was when I enter the professional world was when I saw more diversity. That’s when I became a minority: everyone else was very different from me. And given it’s a professional world — so there’s no ostracisation — I didn’t really see or feel the racism discrimination in the world. Granted, this is what I called an Asian Bubble, so I was always around people that looked like me, that felt like me, that had a very similar past, and background story. You can even call it self-segregation, where I never really broke out or saw what else is out there besides the community I was so comfortable with.
And granted, even those in this community, I did see and feel a lot of different stereotypes growing up. So I’ve heard and seen things where Asians are categorized as people who excel in math, they are obedient, shy, submissive things that you might see in TV today. They’re depicted as the model minority that don’t take part in politics, and the emasculation of Asian males. And granted, no one likes to be stereotyped. But again, in a sense, it always felt safe, because in my eyes, a lot of different cultures and ethnicity were also stereotyped.
So it didn’t feel like Asians were any different: the stereotypes were just different. And so, granted, that’s another story, stereotypes actually feed into races and the violence attacks behind it, but I didn’t really think or know better. It was during the pandemic of this year that I actually felt and saw what — how scary racism really is. And so, during the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, which some have categorized as Kung Flu, that sparked a lot of the racism that has happened and the attacks on the Asian-American community.
A look at how racism impacted the world & Asian representation
We see businesses get attacked because it belonged to an Asian family. We saw people get beat up in New York. There’s a story of an 89-year-old woman who was set on fire. And, as someone who’s Asian-American, these stories not only disheartening, but it made me feel scared. My dad is 60 years old, and he fits the category of these people who are being attacked. And I remember every single day, I would be so worried sick about my dad, about him going grocery shopping and maybe attacked out of nowhere.
I remembered I would call my brother and say, “Hey, can you do all the grocery shopping? Don’t let Dad go outside because I don’t know what might happen.” Personally, I also felt the same way: there’s one time when I went into the elevator in my apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and given it’s in Koreatown, it’s actually pretty diverse and it’s not just [a community of] a lot of Asian people.
There was one time I went to the elevator of my own apartment. It was six or seven people, not a single person was Asian. And the moment I walked in, someone said, “Coronavirus.” And I didn’t even feel anger, I wasn’t angry that someone was being racist about it — I was scared. I was so scared because the elevator doors shutting, I don’t know what could happen in that 10, 15 seconds and hearing all these stories across the world, I felt like something could happen to me because I’m Asian American.
A fear of one’s identity
It was the first time in my life that I’ve ever been scared because of being who I am. And so it was the first time I also started thinking, “What does Asian representation mean?” It was something I embarrassingly have never thought about and it was something that started to click. It’s: why are people so angry, so violent towards people because of being a certain race? And that’s when I started to dig in and learn a little more.
So when I look into Asian representation, I do see a lot of strides and representation and so, as we can see, the past couple of years and entertainment, politics, sports, we do see more and more representation. And for me — someone who is not looking to be the next Crazy Rich Asians star, the next Andrew Yang in politics or the next Jeremy Lin — what can I do and how can I impact and bring Asian presentation in a new light? And so, there are three ways that I thought and researched how we can help Asian representation in the New Year.
The first one being is recognizing Asian privilege and becoming an ally. Also, this experience that I finally for the first time felt like I can relate to an extent of what people feel when they are scared to be outside and they’re scared to see the police. They’re scared just because of the race they are. And as this poster paints on black lives are threatened, all our lives are threatened. And so to help represent Asians, not just for the Asian community, but to fight against discrimination across all races, it’s when we fight against discrimination and racism as soul and heart as when we can start being more representative.
The importance of knowing Asian-American history
The second one is learning about Asian-American history, and so I say this because I grew up in a household where my family has always told me to be quiet. Don’t make a big deal yourself. If people are talking to you or against you, just look away, be quiet, be small. And it’s very different from who I am and so it’s very important for me — and I think a lot of people — to just learn about the Asian-American history of the immigrant family, the first generation, how they came to America and how they act.
It is very different from how I grew up. And so, understanding my parents’ story where they came to America, there are all these laws against them. They were scared. If they were too loud or too public, they might be sent back to their own country. But by being able to learn and understand their history and share with others is when you can start really understanding how to represent Asian-Americans as a whole.
Third piece here is exemplify your business, your skills, and your passions. This here is Casey Ho from Blogilates. She is a famous fitness instructor on YouTube, which has really great workouts. Do you guys love working out? I highly recommend looking at her channel, but essentially she recently just launched her line of workout gear in Target and her post on Instagram talked about how when she was getting ready for this launch, she was very angry at herself and initially when she was putting together the packaging, she did not want to put her face as part of the package.
Asian Representation as a collective effort
The reason being, she was scared she’ll lose sales by having an Asian-American face on her package. This story and her example is actually very common. A lot of Asian-Americans will purposely not put their face, not attach themselves to the work, and fear that that may be backlash, a loss in sales, and things like that.
But only when we start representing ourselves and putting ourselves out there is when we get the recognition and the representation that we are looking for. And so all in all Asian representation is a collective effort. It’s not the “one person going out for a big role or the group of people putting together a movie.” It’s all of us doing our part in representing the whole.
And so, personally, I thought to myself: “What can I do?” I’m a sales professional. I love sales. I’ve been doing for over six years. But when I go to YouTube — when I go to Google, I look at things like sales techniques, how to close better sales strategy — time and time after again, all I see are people that do not look like me, do not feel like me, and makes me wonder: if I didn’t fall into sales, would I ever try this career? Because there’s no one that looks like me doing this career.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Ghandhi
So personally, what I’ve decided to do is to create a YouTube channel, to start showing other people and representing what I love and do well and showing others that look like me, they can also do it to. So, ultimately, you know, whether or not we always drive and want people to represent us in movies, in the community and sometimes these things we can’t control, but what we can control is our personal efforts, our personal ability to just start verbalizing and being out in the open of what Asian representation looks like.
And as Gandhi once said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” And that is what I believe Asian representation in 2021 looks like. Thank you.
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