My Heartache as a Model Minority: an Asian Female in San Francisco

Photo by Bart LaRue on Unsplash

I am a Thai woman, of Chinese heritage and a first-generation immigrant. I’ve spent 22 years working in tech before leaving corporate to start my own business coaching and advising leaders in tech. Last year, after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor amongst many others, I started introspecting about my own role in racism, and remembering the casual racism of my youth. I wrote about my Asian privilege where in the world of Silicon Valley and tech, I’d personally experienced far more sexism than racism. This is when I first encountered the term “model minority,” often used to refer to Asian Americans, defined in Wikipedia as “a minority demographic…whose members are perceived to achieve a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.” This success is often measured with education, income, and professional representation. Stanford degree, check. Tech salary, check. Representation of Asians in tech, at least in the rank and file, check. Yup, that’s me, the model minority in San Francisco.

Last year, I did my own work, reading through books on race, taking my children to the Black Lives Matter protests, and continuing my leadership coaching with women, people of color, and immigrants. And I kept working and building my own business. I focused on living through all the uncontrollability of the pandemic. I put my head down in the sand. I was the model minority. 

I ignored the media when the former president talked about the “Chinese virus” and the “kung flu.” In my liberal San Francisco bubble, I told myself: “Nobody takes those clowns seriously anyway,” ignoring the fact that half the country had voted a different choice than my own. I vaguely noted the spike of hate-fueled attacks on Asian Americans in cities throughout the U.S. and breathed a sigh of relief assuming that they would stop when President Biden took office earlier this year. But they didn’t stop.

The dam broke last week and I could no longer bury my head in the sand. I’d been avoiding the news of attacks on elderly Asian Americans in Oakland and San Francisco. Last Tuesday, a white man struggling with “sex addiction” killed eight people in three Atlanta-area massage businesses. Six of them were Asian women. I could no longer ignore the negative swirls of racism and sexism around me by diving into my work. This was too much. I didn’t want to face the hypersexualization of Asian women. It felt too close, too intimate. 

Sexism AND Racism

I thought I was the one with Asian privilege. I’d subconsciously spent much of my life trying to fit in. For most of my Stanford Computer Science classes and years working in tech, I’ve been the rare female in rooms of men. For much of my early career, I emulated the command-and-control style of leadership that I’d seen work so well for white men. I put on my armor and acted the part of what I thought a leader should be. It took me many years of introspection, vulnerability, and building up confidence to relax into my own feminine leadership style, full of big emotions, compassion, and tough love. 

Sexism was a familiar fight, racism less so. When I was in college, I’d briefly flirted with the Asian American communities but backed out when I was called a banana— yellow on the outside, white on the inside. The term was not meant as a compliment, but I proudly took it on as one. 

In tech, Asians had never been the minority. At Facebook, when we hired for underrepresented groups, we focused on women, African Americans, Latinx, Indigenous people, and people with a military background. Asians and whites were in the majority. I never felt like I experienced racism in my happy little tech bubble.

Racism in San Francisco

Today, as I raise my head out of sand, I am afraid and saddened. As a first-generation immigrant, I chose to settle in the United States after coming to college here, aiming for a different life, though largely subconsciously. I married a white American man. My children are biracial. 

As I raised my head out of sand, I scrolled through the news that I’d been ignoring. I stopped at a familiar photo. She looked like me, a person of Thai-Chinese heritage. She was holding up a framed formal photo of her father. Behind her was the statue of golden Buddha as well as a Thai monk in saffron robes. It was the traditional photo taken at a Thai Buddhist funeral. I knew because I had those same photos of myself from my father’s funeral almost two years ago. I felt a rush of grief, and I dove into the emotions to fully embrace all the details. I read the story of Vichar Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old immigrant from Thailand, who’d been in San Francisco helping take care of his grandkids. He looked like my dad. They would have been the same age. I watched the surveillance videos of a young man crashing into Khun Vichar, knocking him down with the full impact of a raging bull. I started reading about the attacks on elderly Asians in Oakland.

I haven’t been out walking much in present day San Francisco so I’ve been inoculated from the present-day outbreak of racism against Asian Americans. I’ve lived in San Francisco for 18 years and reading these stories pulled up memories I’d been ignoring… 

…I’d grown used to walking through cities as a solo female. I knew the drill—confident bold stride, look straight ahead, and make no eye contact. My office for many years was near downtown at the corner of Mission and 6th Street on the edge of the grimy Tenderloin; only a couple of blocks away from the tourist center of Union Square. Yet it wasn’t there that I was yelled at for the color of my skin. I don’t remember where I was, I think somewhere in the Mission District near my apartment. My brain rationalizes that it wasn’t a bad incident. A man yelled a series of profanities at me calling me a “Chinese b*tch”and saying; “Go back home to China.” It was the familiar feeling of shame. I hollowly walked home and cried. I didn’t want to be different. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be like everyone else…

… I was at a playground in Glen Canyon Park near my house. I had two biracial children. My youngest was very fair skinned — she looked like a white baby. I was on maternity leave and was pushing a stroller through the park. A white woman with her baby came up to make conversation. She spoke to me slowly, as if unsure how good my English would be. After some pleasantries, she asked me, “Do you like being a nanny? Does the family treat you well?” I froze in shock. I was overwhelmed with waves of anger at this woman’s presumptuousness. “I’m the goddamned mother. This is my baby,” I snarled, and marched away. Later that the evening. I retold the story to my husband, exaggerating my mock-outrage and making him laugh to cover up the hurt. I was good at burying the feelings. It was easier to be angry and funny. I didn’t have to deal with the mess of hormones or questioning of my identity as a mother with different skin color than my baby …

Remembering these incidents, my heart aches. I could not escape the racism in this liberal San Francisco Bay Area. 

Sexism and Racism as an Asian Female

As I read the stories of the Atlanta shooter, my heart keeps aching. I am enraged and saddened to hear familiar victim blaming. My daughters and I listen to the radio incredulously as we hear the white male gunman described as having a “bad day.” The media reports him suffering from “sexual addiction” and officials claim that the attacks were “not racially motivated.” I am sick and full of heartache with our society continuing to hypersexualize and blame Asian women while letting the perpetrators off the hook. 

Older memories come flooding back to me…

…In my mid-twenties, my white boyfriend and I had travelled around the world for seven months. I was using my Thai passport while he carried an American passport. In every country, we needed to apply for visas to our next destination. We were stuck for a long time in Turkey. We wanted to travel overland from Turkey via Syria and Jordan into Egypt. But for some reason, there were interminable delays. We made two or three trips from the beautiful places we visited in Turkey — Istanbul, Cappadocia, Konya — back to the modern capital of Ankara where all the embassies were located. After a couple of weeks of standing in line, submitting our passports, waiting several days, and returning to more waiting, we were finally admitted in to see a Syrian official. He told us that he was able to grant a visa for my boyfriend’s American passport, but that regretfully, he was unable to grant me a visa. Dumbfounded, I demanded why.

“Because you are an unmarried female with a Thai passport.”

I still didn’t understand and wouldn’t leave his office until I got an answer. The poor official looked away, blushed and stammered, “There are many Thai sex workers in our country. Clearly this is not you, however, this is the final decision that I got back from Damascus. I am sorry.”

The red flush of shame and anger on my face instantly grew to match his. We left the embassy and moved forward with our other plans. But I had been marked. That anger and shame was inside me, even though it had lain dormant for many years. 

…Another memory. On that same trip, the only time we experienced frequent harassment as an interracial couple was in Vietnam. My Thai-Chinese face could pass for Vietnamese. Many women would come up to me, knowing that I was different in my grubby backpacker clothes, hiking boots, and giant backpack. They would stroke my face and theirs and declare “Same same but different.” It was almost 30 years after the Vietnam War had ended. American soldiers had dallied with local women, and many of the soldiers had returned to the U.S. leaving behind mixed-race kids and generations of seething resentment. As my white boyfriend and I walked around, nobody directly addressed him. Instead I got spit on, hissed at, and many Vietnamese men got up in my face yelling at me in a language that wasn’t mine. I had no part in this war, and no formal relationship with either the U.S. or Vietnam. Yet I was being judged and hypersexualized …

Headwinds/Tailwinds

There’s a topic in psychology called the headwinds/tailwinds asymmetry. Most of us feel that we face more headwinds—the obstacles of life that keep pushing us back—than anyone else. In contrast, we tend to ignore or undervalue our tailwinds, the beneficial forces and resources that have helped us through our lives. This asymmetry leaves us resentful, ungrateful and unhappy. 

As a model minority, I’ve strived to fit in and coasted on the tailwinds of being Asian in Silicon Valley. And I’ve willfully ignored the headwinds of racism, hoping that I can put my head in the sand and pretend that they don’t exist, that they don’t apply to me. If I close my eyes and don’t think of them, then I can happily fit in. 

I can’t ignore the dualities of racism and sexism any more. I have no easy answer for what to do or how to process this. Unlike most of my articles, I don’t have a clear call to action with convenient links to worthy organizations. My heart aches and I’m living each day within this current pain and fear. I read common experiences of other women such as this one by the author R.O. Kwan and take hope from statements by Vice President Kamala Harris. I share conversations with my Asian sisters—we can be confused and broken-hearted together. I comfort my biracial girls and we talk about what’s happening. 

We Asian women are here, and we belong. I feel it deep inside. I have spoken out loudly through my life about feminism. I will now continue to do so about racism.