What does being Asian American mean to me now?
What I'm Up To (A lot of Work), What I Reflected On (Asian American Identity), and What's Occupying My Mind (skipped this time)- all part of Allen's Friday Flights
Hello Professionally Curious One!
I missed two weeks. Mike called me out on it.
Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month was this past May. It felt a little more quiet this year than other years.
It’s now pride month.
Time does fly!
Anyway, enjoy.
Cheers,
Allen
Past Publications
I Do Nothing as My Passive Systems Do Everything, and Sometimes I Feel Guilty
What was the basis of my professional confidence before burnout?
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: A couple weeks worth of activity…and that’s it?
The Things
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 is GOAT for MCU but you have to watch the holiday special (yes there’s a holiday special) to appreciate this.
Thinking of building a new computer that isn’t an example of the Ship of Theseus, I want this case - a white one, I want an RTX 4090, and most of all, I want 3 to 4 NVME M.2s so I can go almost all wireless and silent.
The Chicken Shop in Costa Mesa is amazingly great, and I had the pleasure of hearing Armenian people eat there.
Kareem’s Falafel in Anaheim is throw your hands up in festive cheer after the first bite worthy. It’s just too good.
Gotta give a shoutout to Chicken Maison - a simple chicken shop.
Colombian Cuisine can be found in … Long Beach at Selva! And damn were those potatoes good.
I went to a cycle workout at 12 noon and I was the only person there with the instructor and let me tell you that is one of my worst nightmares come true. 1) I like hiding in groups during workouts and turning off my brain and 2) don’t talk to me.
Went to The Hobbit…in Orange, Orange County. Easily leagues above French Laundry, at half the price, plus with more namesake decor. It’s an incredibly fun experience that involves zero socializing with strangers.
Picked up Anno 1800 complete edition, and have been furiously living my colonial empire capitalistic fueled dream.
Warhammer 40k Boltgun secretly released - it’s the game we all wanted back in the 90s, and so far on the Steamdeck - ITS GREAT. Run & gun and don’t stop.
Do I get a PetSnowy?
I applied for Meow.Co checking and I’m annoyed that they require a $250k balance cash balance to be considered. They are basically just a cash-sweep account but with slightly lower interest rates. Market opportunity here…
Segestorm Center for the Arts held an AAPI Arts Celebration and I went there to get as many bags of Dough & Arrow as decency allows.
Update: I spent $700 on the PetSnowy Automatic Litter Robot. Cats hate it.
De Nunno in San Diego La Jolla UTC is one of the best al dente pastas you can get. There, I said it. Fight me.
I binged the entirety of Ted Lasso Season 3 over 4 days, and it is my top TV show that I’m willing to write an entire paragraph or two on. Going to miss that show. Go Richmond!
I find myself not writing as much as I used to. It looms on my head. Then I realized, it’s not that I’m not writing as much - I’m not publishing publicly as much. Bit of a difference.
BRB going to Vegas.
Asian American Reflections
TL;DR: What does being Asian American mean? I have no idea, but perspective allows me to choose.
For more than two decades, I didn’t comprehend what being Asian American means. I still don’t, but I did make attempts to broaden that horizon.
Primary School
In High School, I was surrounded by a predominantly Indo-European (All Armenian/Persian/Farsi) environment where where every April 24, my class room would have 2 to 3 people in it. (Barev y’all!).
What did being Asian American mean then? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure what remaining other minorities I knew of didn’t either. Perhaps food in Chinatown at Sam Woo can be the closest thing to accentuating what being Asian American meant: Great food on Holidays.
And also me completely avoiding the SAT / ACT rigor that I observed other Asian Americans participating in.
My community was found in Marching Band and Journalism - which are very merit driven, racial-less & identity-less environments.
Undergraduate
In College, I never participated in any racial-based student organizations. It didn’t appeal to me as I had the then view that merit and technical excellence were better focus points opposed to social organizations based on what I thought was “throwing ragers on Atherton Street”.
I found myself in interesting groups. Forensic Speech & Debate (I just want you all to know, Impromptu speak is a thing I did back then, for the 2 Forensic nerds here), Dorm groups (Shoutout to C & G - two completely different groups), Video Game groups, though admittedly I was more of an organizer, than a participant, of video game groups, and lastly, business organizations.
What did being Asian American mean then?
Being Asian American itself carried no significant meaning to me. However, being a minority (non-caucasian) did carry some weight when I was engaging different public accounting firms for job opportunities. Realizing finding and interacting with people who were at least my colored skin meant I had better chances at getting not only a job there, but a fit.
…you know what, Asian American, back then, meant I was too large of a minority to be a minority, so any minority programs or representation programs that any company typically excluded (felt like it) Asian-Americans.
Post College
Post-College, I had a few years participating in a Filipino Professional Membership Non-Profit called ISFFA. While it racially identifies as an organization to benefit Filipinos, I, not being a Filipino, enjoyed the “D&I” (Now DEI?) aspect of it and completely used its resources to the benefit of under-represented communities across Southern California. I did appreciate that professional Filipino events still had some form of photo booth, and leftovers for all around - no matter how fancy it is.
What did being Asian American mean then?
At the time, I didn’t have the vocabulary or understanding to appreciate what I was driven to do - creating spaces and environments for the people we were targeting for them to thrive. This meant poking fun of traditionally taboo topics (skin color) and creating a nexus points where racially-similar people were engaging each other.
The phrase “Asian-American” is a monolithic approach to what is over 25+ racial groups. Logically, there should be all kinds of Asian backgrounds with their own approach based on each individual culture’s upbringing and value systems. For me, I was realizing I appreciate the Filipino professional organizations (some of them), but I had a distaste at what I saw as more traditional Asian organizations (Ascend, basically).
Early Career
At my first years of EY, I found that I wasn’t really that at all attracted to "the Pan Asian Professional Network”, and instead found fun through the Latino Professional Network. I got sponsored to go to ALPFA conference in Dallas Texas, 4 years before the EY Asian-focused affinity group would sponsor me to go to an Ascend Conference. To be fair, I am one of those people that attended the “Unplugged” session for my racial-identification group and said “wow, how useless is this”, but I least I got Bottega Louie.
What did being Asian American mean then?
I remember going to the Ascend conference (as well as many Pan Asian Professional Network) and I remember all of them were thematically the same.
Bamboo Ceiling, Executive Presence, and Inequality.
Bamboo Ceiling - I genuinely didn’t care for, but it was always a prevailing topic of how to get more Asians into executive positions.
Executive Presence - Let’s teach Asians how to public speak.
Inequality - this didn’t come up in those groups. This came up when I observed that company resources used to support Asian American professionals amounted to 5 hours of activities on a Thursday afternoon (Unplugged was what it was called), where as Latino and Black professionals got, wait for it, 4 to 5 days.
Being Asian American in the workforce meant that I was part of a collective demographic that was too big to be a minority to get resources, but too small of a minority to, I guess, influence policy and working culture at the executive level. So basically middle class.
Before you get any ideas that it was only at one firm, I also interact with all kind of firms, and more-or-less found the same results.
5 Years In
In 2020, I went for a radically different approach in my Asian American participation and sought to create a different relationship with what it means to be Asian American in U.S. society. I participated in a CAUSE (Center for Asian-Americans United for Self-Empowerment) Leadership Institute that spanned 6 months - and yes, I was one of those lucky few that went from in-person, to zoom, as a result of Covid-19 WFH mandate. This was a program that taught, and engaged me, in civic service in U.S. Society, specifically in the Greater Los Angeles and California.
The phrase Asian American came out during 1968 as a way to replace the word “Oriental”.
Model Minority is quite fucked, and is a term that is applied to juxtapose 2 different groups.
The prolific-ness of pink donut box comes is because of a Cambodian Refugee, Ted Ngoy.
What did being Asian American mean then?
It took me half way through the CAUSE program, with me “not really feeling the significance of the curriculum” to recognize, I’m not feeling anything here.
And then in 2021, a shooting in Atlanta that left 8 Asian Americans dead happened. Between March 2020 to December 2021, there would be 10,905 AAPI Hate crimes reported. Key word is reported, because previously it wasn’t reported at all, or classed as such.
And then I concluded, damn I had a privileged view of life that I didn’t need to care that I was Asian American.
And now we’re here.
…What did being Asian American mean then?
I did spend quite some time engaged with the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community during those incidents, and for quite some time after. At some point I did provide safe-spaces for several hundred AAPI professionals. I have some observations:
Invisible - Being Asian American means you may feel invisible, or by policy, you are invisible, and no one will check-in on you, unless they too know your existence, and any pain you have.
Spotlight & Sideline - Being Asian Americans means you may feel the need to sideline yourself, or you may be sidelined, because there is another group that needs the spotlight more.
Suffer in Silence - Being Asian American means you are at risk at suffering in silence, and you won’t even know that this is what is happening. Nor will anyone else.
What does being Asian American mean to me now?
I don’t actually know. But I did want to articulate some starting thoughts on it.
I think being Asian American means I live in a state of constant middle, constant transition, too Asian to be “American”, and too “American” to be “Asian”. I could see this as being bad, but perspective counts here. To me, I see that as the building blocks of great fusion provided that you know a lot of history.
I went about most of my life not caring about being Asian American, and being in environments where they were merit-driven enough that no one cares that I was Asian-American. I’ve only been in a shockingly low amount of events where people cared I was Asian-American. I’ve been to to zero male Vietnamese-American events - and I don’t know if I missed anything.
I do know that if I interact with another Asian American, I like to try to make sure the person I’m talking to knows that I see them. I’ll crack a couple of jokes at Asian American Professional Dynamics, and hopefully, will have connected with them.
Alternatively, I’ll encourage the inner foodie in them. Turns out, I believe a core trait of being Asian American is found in food, and our unique characteristic at taking pictures of food.
I am still trying to figure out what Asian American definitively means.
I get to choose that meaning.
You are a great human, Allen! That's for sure.
Also, here's some fodder to inspire a portion of your next post: https://wapo.st/3qqyYrx