Minor Feelings

A few weeks ago I was invited to be a panelist for one of my company’s women’s network events. The event was to watch a Ted talk called “Small ways women can support each other at work.” and discuss how we felt about it. In the spirit of diversity and inclusion, the panel consisted of three women SVPs, one white, one black and one Asian. I was the token Asian woman.

The Ted talk was done by a black female programmer who started the talk by describing her experience of making a passionate speech which she thought was super valuable to the company but only to receive complete silence. Moments later, “a dude basically said the same thing I said”, she grumbled, and “he gets a standing ovation.” “As a woman, especially a woman of color, society tells you to keep your head down. Don’t take up any space. Don’t ruffle any feathers. Don’t piss anyone off. Just do the work.” She continued. And of course her point is we should not do that. As women, we should bond together, speak up and fight the societal prejudice against minorities.

Then it was the panelists’ turn to share their experiences during which their voices were not heard and how they overcome those roadblocks. The white representative (who is also my direct supervisor) and the black representative (who is our HR leader) did not answer the question directly. Instead of sharing their personal experiences, they talked about how they acted as advocates for other women. A less polished public speaker, I felt compelled to answer the question directly – so I said “I actually feel that way all the time, but I have always attributed it to myself, that I could do a better job in getting the points across.” I went on to elaborate that as an immigrant, I was always conscious of the cultural and linguistic nuisances and always focused on self-improvement. Ironically, I believe that self-consciousness and internal attribution have pushed me to be a better communicator, which in turn has helped my career.

On the Zoom screen, I noticed our CEO shaking his head as I talked. I wondered if he disapproved my experience of not being heard, or the fact that I attributed it to my own flaws rather than racial and gender discrimination. I also thought about how just a few months ago, I had that exact experience where I brought in a great opportunity for the company and instead of assigning the job to me, it was assigned to my white male colleague, who subsequently squandered it away. I wondered if it ever occurred to my CEO that his decision felt unjust to me. I attributed that injustice to the fact that my male colleague had been with the company for over 20 years while I was a newcomer. I wondered if I should have attributed that to societal biases against an Asian woman.

That panel discussion, along with a myriad of D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) initiatives organized by my company, and the constant racial debates in the media, “woke” me. Woke is a MEME used in social media that refers to awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial justice. It came from the African-American Vernacular English expression stay woke, and became popular during the Black Lives Matter movement, as a label for vigilance and activism concerning racial inequalities and other social disparities such as discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, women, immigrants and other marginalized populations.

And being “woke” is a not a pleasant feeling I have to say. I told my truth in that panel discussion. Unlike the African Americans or the ABCs (American Born Chinese) who feel entitled to their rights in this country, I have always felt like an outsider. I’m not a banana (yellow outside, white inside). Rather, I’m more like an egg (yellow or brown on the outside, the egg white on the inside, and the yellow yolk at the core). As an egg, my “yellowness” and my “whiteness” are entangled, as my bio on my blog page reads “Equally blessed and cursed by my Chinese upbringing, American ideology, and my cross cultural being.” It is both a blessing and a curse, but that is the life of my own choosing, which I do not and cannot blame anyone. If every time I got a rejection during my strenuous journey as an immigrant, I thought “damn, that was another example of how Asians and women in this country were being discriminated against”, that I was doomed by my gender and skin color, I would not have gone this far. I would have been too angry, but more likely, too hopeless to even try.

Instead, my ignorance was bliss. It wasn’t bliss exactly. It was my motivator. I believed in the Hollywood propaganda that America was the melting pot, that the American dream was everyone had equal opportunity and as long as you work hard, you can make it some day. So I worked hard. If I did not get a job, I told myself I wasn’t good enough. And that “good enough” did not mean I was equally good as the one who got the job. It meant I had to be 100% or 200% better than other candidates that no one could say no to me. And that meant I had to work 100% or 200% or even 300% harder.

I remember a couple of years ago, my company sent me to a leadership training at Smith College with many other senior women executives. One of the things they taught us was many women executives suffer from “imposter syndrome”, a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as an "impostor” or a fraud. I remember hearing many women in that program share their “imposter syndrome” stories, while I thought to myself “Wow, that must have been nice! I wish someone would have given me a job that I felt I was not qualified for!” Not that I was over confident, or exceled at every job, it was just I knew I had to work so hard to prove myself that every job I got I knew I was the best candidate they could get.

This “woke” movement has opened my eyes and made me realize America has not quite lived up to its promise, the melting pot is more of an illusion, and even Hollywood, which is supposed to be this magnet of liberal ideology, is full of racists and misogynists. But this “wokeness” has made me uneasy, confused, hurt, and angry. I never encountered any overt racial discrimination myself in the US – the only episode that came to my mind was when I was shopping in a mall in Pennsylvania twenty years ago, I found a little girl staring at me like she had never seen an Asian before. But the fact that she made me feel uncomfortable would hardly qualify her as a racist. It was simply innocent curiosity. When I was a little girl growing up in China in the 1970s, I was super curious of Westerners who had blond hair and blue eyes. They looked so different! Have I just been super lucky or super oblivious? After all, there has been a huge rise in violent crimes against Asians recently and racism surely exists!

As I was exploring my Asian American reckoning, I turned to “Minor Feelings” by Cathy Park Hong, a Korean American poet. She characterized minor feelings as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” One such minor feeling: the deadening sensation of seeing an Asian face on a movie screen and bracing for the ching-chong joke. Another: eating lunch with white schoolmates and perceiving the social tableaux as a frieze in which “everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape.” Minor feelings involve a sense of lack, the knowledge that this lack is a social construction, and resentment of those who constructed it. Wait a minute, if you take out the specifics, those were the exact feelings I had growing up as a teenager in China with uniform ethnicity. I had the exact same skin color as my classmates, but I was shy, I was skinny, and I wasn’t pretty. So I felt a sense of lack of all the desirable attributes a girl in China should possess and I lamented the fact that what society deemed desirable was exactly what I did not have. Aren’t those feelings as minor as the racialized emotions?

I’m not minimizing the racial inequality in the US. It is undoubtedly one of the biggest issues in the US. And I’m acutely aware I’m highly privileged, mostly by the fact that I came from China, a culture that values education and my free, quality education in China gave me a strong foundation to thrive in the US. Many African Americans or Asian Americans who grew up in Chinatown, do not enjoy that privilege.  They have every right to protest and fight for their minority rights. But should we look at everything through this “racial”, “gender” lens? Aren’t Sunnis and Shiites both Arabic but they absolutely hate each other? Is race the only dimension at play?

The fact that I’m writing about this sensitive topic is quite a risky act. Many people in the academia and the media have lost their jobs by questioning this “wokeness” movement. The surprising thing is many of them are self-identified progressives. One prominent example is the Evergreen College incident. Evergreen State College, a public liberal arts college in Washington State, has a tradition called “Day of Absence”, during which minority students and faculty members voluntarily stay off campus to raise awareness of the contributions of minorities and to discuss racial and campus issues. In 2017, a group of minority students got together and decided that on Day of Absence, white students, staff and faculty will be asked to leave the campus for the day’s activities. Bret Weinstein, a professor of biology at Evergreen, wrote a letter to Evergreen faculty, protesting this “involuntary absence”, which he believed was very different from “voluntary absence”, stating "On a college campus, one’s right to speak — or to be — must never be based on skin color." The students protested, which led to the resignation of Professor Weinstein and his wife (who was also a faculty member at Evergreen). He and his brother, a venture capitalist, and many others later formed a group called the “Intellectual Dark Web” to oppose what they call the dominance of “identity politics”, “political correctness”, and the “cancel culture”. I highly doubt that Professor Weinstein envisioned this as his life’s mission, but now that he was caught in this political vortex he no longer had a choice.

Race, gender, and minority discrimination are complex issues. I certainly do not proclaim to even begin to understand them, let alone to solve for them. All I know is I suffered minor feelings growing up in an environment that was arguably sexist, but absolutely not racist (there was no racial diversity). Coming to a multi racial society like the US, at times I am amazed by how the different races are living together peacefully and flourishing in many ways – even though it fell short of the melting pot ideal, it is nothing short of a miracle, at other times I am appalled by how women are still primarily perceived as sexual objects in this country which prides itself on its progressiveness. Two seemingly irreconcilable pictures co-exist: America is still the land of opportunity for many and strives to be a meritocracy-based society, but on the other hand, equal rights and equal opportunity are more of a myth than reality – if you grow up in certain neighborhoods, the odds of you ever getting out of that neighborhood or poverty are close to nil. And two conflicting beliefs are equally valid: Racial, gender, and all kinds of discrimination exist in the US. As minority groups, we must fight hard for our rights. Nonetheless, the victim mentality may not give us the healthiest attitude in life or the best growth mindset. Martyrs who dedicate their lives to these causes (whether it’s the minority movement or the counter movement that reacts against it) are to be celebrated, but for most of us, it may be much more productive to tune out the noises and focus on what is within our control.