A Cultural Dilemma: Asking and Giving Support in the Asian Male Community (Part II)

I want to first take the time to address the current social climate of the many racial attacks in the Asian community that’s been popping up recently. I’ve been lucky to have avoided violent racism in my 20s living in the New York area — but for the first time in a long time, I felt a little on edge when I took a walk to meet some friends in the West Village neighborhood this past weekend. This is coming from someone who’s been in the area for around 10 years — I cannot imagine how other Asians must feel who are newer in the city.

The timing of these incidents couldn’t have come at a more coincidental time to cement my strong resolve: to support and give back to our community emotionally and mentally regardless of these sudden acts of terror against us. At the end of the day, the news cycle will continue to change into the next big trend — I hope, at that point, our community can sustain our momentum in uniting together and providing support for each other today and into the future. Please consider donating to the many organizations and fundraisers of the victims here.

In Part I of this Cultural Dilemma series, I left you with two personal questions to ask yourself at the end of the post:

How many successful, relatable Asian mentors have you missed out on connecting with due to your negative outlook on your relationships?

How many people in our community could you have given guidance and mentorship if you actually took the time and opportunity to help someone who is similar to you?

I hope you took the time to really think through about your own personal experiences and learned a little more about your own held perspectives. At the end of the day, reading my posts are the simplest actions to take — it’s easy to feel that achievement when you finish reading something that resonated with you. I like to keep a journal where I write down my thoughts and emotions every night — it helps me stay honest about how I feel inside and forces me to reinforce what I hope to remember going to the next day.

Note: I’ve had quite a few people reach out to me in the last couple weeks about my mentorship program — it’s a 1:1 session and if you’re interested in knowing more — send me a private message via email and we can definitely discuss more about you!

Breaking the Cycle

For the longest time, I kept waiting on other Asian men to break that cycle and connect with me — I didn’t ever think I needed to change my attitude if I personally felt nobody else did, too. Funny how irrational it was to actually believe that logic — if I wasn’t open to making a perspective adjustment, how could I have even noticed when other people in my community tried to reach out and connect with me? And how else could I have seen an opportunity where I could have stepped in to help somebody in the community who is in need for direction?

For Part II, I want to share my personal values and perspectives that help break the competitive and apathetic cycle in our Asian male community. Of course, you are more than welcome to develop your own — none of what I write will 100% align with everyone, but I hope it can serve as a guide. To me, I believe there are many changes we can individually take to make our community more unified and accessible to communicate our needs.

Celebrate, Don’t Compare

You, me, everybody else in this world — we are all unique and different humans. We may come from very similar backgrounds and experiences, maybe even went to the same school or have the same job, but nobody is identical one to one (even twins). Letting go of comparing myself to everyone else is an incredible freeing feeling, but it took an everyday commitment to remind myself to stop comparing.

To be honest, it still can be tough seeing other Asian males succeed over me — whether it’s through their lucrative job or having a successful dating lifestyle. But this was tough for me because I grew up with the cultural baggage of cutthroat competition — it was easy for me to see better Asian guys not as idols or mentors, but another person that I must be better than… for what? Would it make me feel better if I did have a better job? Would it make me feel better if I were dating more women than him?

I realized that no matter how much better I can be, it’s an endless cycle of comparison. It will never end until I realized that I didn’t have to be better than someone else. We were never on the same path to begin with. The path might’ve looked very similar, but we are different. We have different goals and ambitions that drive us — we’re all just trying to make something out of nothing in this thing called life. So I stopped comparing and instead, acknowledged other people’s successes because just like me, they are on their personal path to success.

My parents still remind me when someone they know got into an incredible job or recently engaged with a fantastic partner. I still see many Asian males making more money than I do or starting up their own company that’s about to take off. Those events will continue to happen — but my approach and perspective has changed. I enjoy hearing when other guys in my community succeed — and I have made it a point to connect with them when I do have the chance.

Let’s talk about a problem that is unique to our culture that makes it difficult for us, as Asians, to feel empowered when we see people of our own succeed in the real world.

I can completely understand why, from the surface-level, it can be difficult to feel empowered when we already see so many Asians in high-paying jobs with high-income lifestyles. I mean, check out the chart below from the U.S. Census Bureau — it’s hard not to quiet that confirmation bias in the back of our head saying “I knew it!”

Tying this back to my first written post, we are constantly labelled as the “model minority” because we are, on average, to have many successful people in our race that achieved remarkable education and lucrative careers. I believe that same viewpoint is one of the many reasons that makes it so much harder for us to recognize the hard-work and efforts of our collective selves. It’s a personal reason why I never felt proud of other individual successes in my own race — there are so many of us in those amazing opportunities, I don’t care about him, I want to be him or better!

But this perception of having an abundance of high-income Asians doesn’t paint an accurate picture of just how divided the income inequality is for all Asians living in the U.S. According to Pew Research Center, “while Asians overall rank as the highest earning racial and ethnic group in the U.S., it is not a status shared by all Asians: From 1970 to 2016, the gains in income for lower-income Asians trailed well behind the gains for their counterparts in other groups.” In fact, the top 10% of the income distribution earned 10.7% times as much as Asians in the bottom 10%. Are we to simply ignore the large gap in income inequality and carry on focusing only on our own individual pursuits with no regards to our collective success?

Whereas another minority race, such as U.S. Blacks who statistically have made less income and have less people in high-paying employment, can feel a sense of unified pride when they see more of their people financially succeeding and breaking in new achievements that were unheard of in their racial groups.

Whether it’s through social media or real life interactions, I would see Blacks celebrating each other’s successes much more profusely than what I have seen in our Asian community (despite, for me, having a larger network of Asians as compared to Blacks). I believe it’s a profound lesson, for Asian men, to learn from the Black community and show the same amount of enthusiasm and support for our own when we see each other hit personal milestones.

The beauty of it all is that we can feel the same wave of joy in these situations for our brothers if we check our toxic comparison attitudes and wean ourselves off of how society incorrectly defines us as the “model minority.” We can pave the way for celebrating our successes, individually and collectively, as one unified community. There is still so much more room to celebrate our own unique individualities, even out the income inequality gap and support more Asians to succeed in executive/board roles, untraditional non-STEM fields, and entrepreneurship. Celebrating, not comparing, gets us closer as a community that truly lifts each other up.

So I encourage our community, as Asian males, to adopt an attitude of encouragement and celebration for our fellow peers’ small or large successes and work towards dropping our toxic comparison and shame-driven culture. By framing our mindsets to a more positive and celebratory perspective of looking at our community, I believe we can make progress in developing a stronger and healthier support system for all of us.

To Ask, or Not to Ask?

Short answer: you shouldn’t be tormented with the decision to ask for help or not — just go ahead and do it. Universally, I think all men suffer the same fate here: we are more likely to refer others to seek help, but we don’t do it ourselves. There isn’t strong scientific proof to indicate why men are prone to not asking for help, so I can only hypothesize from my own opinion — it’s just one of the traits of how we define masculinity. Seeking help is a sign of weakness and we would rather shroud it and forget about it so we don’t need to confront it unless we have to.

Couple that negative mentality of seeking help with the perceived notion of Asian men being emasculated in Western media and culture, I couldn’t bring myself to naturally ask people for help. Especially as something as intangible as my thoughts and feelings — I felt I needed to keep that inside of me. I think that’s why I frequently went online behind a computer screen to find solutions to my personal problems — I did not want to “admit defeat” to someone better in real life and ask them for assistance.

This attitude only reinforces why there are so many more Asian men who are willing to post personal questions on forums such as r/AsianMasculinity or r/AsianAmerican than openly having vulnerable real life dialogue with their immediate network of friends and family.

Asking online for assistance is better than not asking at all — but extending your reach to offline interactions can have a far-more reaching impact on our community. The reasons being that many people around us may have the same questions, but are unable to voice their concerns due to social stigmas, and another being that putting a face to the problem is more intimate and personable. Being not afraid to ask vulnerable questions to our community can potentially open up more Asian men who would be willing to do the same.

To me, acknowledging your own weaknesses and working up the courage to ask for guidance is the purest source of internal confidence. It means that you are comfortable with the insecurities you have to work on and can fully embrace learning from other successful individuals.

There is absolutely nothing to lose by asking for help from other Asian men who may be more qualified than you on a subject you are interested in. The worst case scenario is he chooses to not support you and the best case scenario is limitless: you make a new and strong relationship that may propel you to higher career, social, and other personal goals. I believe that risk in asking is worth it for the amount of satisfaction you will be able to achieve once you connect with the right people in our community who are just as willing to connect with you.

Redefining Success

When my parents asked what I have been working on in my free time the past couple months, I told them I was working on creating a mentorship program for other Asian men. They didn’t understand why I would be wasting my time working on this idea when I could have gone for an MBA or even settle on picking up another career-related skill that would help me improve financially. In addition, when I told some of my Asian friends what I have been working on, many of them were doubtful about how potentially impactful it may be because they didn’t see many of their peers who would actively be interested in such a program.

Here’s a couple other classic one/two-liners that were thrown at me to give you even more context:

“The best way to help others is to become really financially successful so then you can actually make an impact. You’re honestly just wasting your time right now.”

“I don’t see a lot of people would be interested in the program. Not to say that it wouldn’t work out, just that I don’t see people in our community embracing this kind of help.”

If have to be real cynical, I can agree with those thoughts — it is hard to create a large, positive impact for a community that is more culturally withdrawn and skeptical to emotional and life guidance. In the past few weeks, I have seen how difficult it is to garner attention and messages from people in my community — I have only received a few handful of claps, interest, upvotes, etc. If we were measuring success through strictly performance metrics, you may even agree that my personal efforts aren’t worth it.

But do you know how it feels when a mentee tells you that you have made them think in ways they didn’t have? Or sharing personal stories about your struggles and the other person nods, smiles, and shakes his head knowing exactly what you’re saying? And how about receiving private messages that appreciate the way you have been writing and speaking out about issues they weren’t sure how to put into words?

Despite the low, tangible visibility metrics, I have never felt more successful in my life. My past pursuit of financial gains or career development never satisfied me even when I made more money because I was doing it for the wrong reasons. My success was not my success — it was a manifest of my parents and society’s expectations.

What does it mean to be successful for you? If success is based on a cycle of chasing after dollars and a wealthy career, it’s easy to treat the people around us as foes or assets, rather than other human beings. When we see our community as our biggest competition, we begin to naturally undermine, become envious, and unwilling to support each other. And if success is completely based on giving back to our community, wouldn’t we have no individuality to live the life we truly want?

I believe we can find a balance for success if we shift our perspective for it — one that takes into account of our individual pursuits as well as a collective mission.

For me, I am more and more confident that spending the time to give back to my own people does not have to be on a different timeline of my own self-improvement. Fully embracing humility and wanting to help my Asian male community over the last few months has been a personal growth and rewarding journey for myself.

There is nothing better here to offer but the corniest of all quotes: when you help others, you are helping yourself.

I can’t help but emphasize that there is a lot more to life than just chasing Benjamin’s and Benz’s — I’m not saying those aren’t important, but I am saying they are grossly exaggerated and drilled into many of our heads in our Asian culture of how we define ourselves being successful. That shallow mentality is the culprit of our lack of humility in wanting to help bring others up or even reach out to our peers in our competitive community.

It’s one of the reasons I had a difficult time, for example, wanting to spend time to help someone else out when I am still working on my own individual self to be better than him. It eventually dawned one me that I had to redefine the way I saw success as a minority: it is just as important to work on our own individual selves as well as giving support to our own racial community to truly be successful.

When you’re part of a minority group and your community lacks the collaborative and collective spirit to define success as a team effort, it hurts everyone involved. The biggest drivers of pushing our support for each other forward are not going to come from other racial or support groups — they have their own problems they are rightfully dealing with. It’s our responsibility to cooperatively come together and make the changes we want to see happen for our brothers.

I encourage our community, as Asian males, to redefine our individual success to a collective success effort. It’s clear there are many of us who are lonely, lost, and looking for a sense of guidance online and in personal circles. Let’s not put a barrier between us — let’s open the lines of dialogue and make an effort to look for opportunities to help each other out through times of career or any personal difficulties.

I can promise you that making time for our community and helping our brothers grow is a rewarding journey — it’s a different side of success to the financial and educational — it’s raw, real, and satisfying when you know you are making a positive impact on helping many others who were so similar to you in the past, present, or even future.

TL;DR

There are three main points to take away from giving back and asking help to/from our Asian community:

1. Drop the jealousy and envy, and celebrate when we see our brothers achieve their milestones. Their success is also our success!
2. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. We have so many incredible men in our community in different careers and personal journeys we have come across — make that first move and get to learning from each other.
3. Redefine success: collective success can be equal to or even more important than our own individual success. Learn to see that we can achieve both and help each other out at the same time — it’s a rewarding adventure.

I hope my experiences and takeaways resonate with you as I continue to learn and grow from talking with individuals and mentoring more people in our community. Please do not hesitate to reach out at my email or add in any comments if you have any feedback or discussion points.

As a reminder, if you like to speak deeper about your personal thoughts — don’t hesitate to reach out about my mentorship program. I am more than happy to speak 1:1 if it makes you feel more comfortable about opening up and hearing about your specific problems!