I’m going a little off piste with this entry - but I have been inspired by this quiet period of reflection to write something a little different for myself. In part this is inspired by Michelle Obama’s wonderful podcast which I have found deeply resonant; and by the recent rise in anti Asian hate crime in the USA following covid.
I’ve been reflecting on the importance of being yourself, wholly yourself, in professional as well as personal contexts. Up to now, I had always had an enormous edifice of a wall between my personal and my professional lives. I hadn’t been entirely certain of why. I think now that perhaps it was because I subconsciously tried to hide my otherness at work. I was in my early 30s, born and largely raised in South-east Asia, with entrepreneurial parents who had grown up poor, and there I was COO of a 250 year old art institution with royal patronage at the heart of central London. It was a crazy place to have arrived. I didn’t recognise, for the longest time, that my discomfort in receptions and fundraisers and even at social occasions with my peers around the senior management table was not because I wasn’t extroverted enough or engaging enough -- somehow I managed to blame it on myself -- but rather that there was a sort of shorthand going on amongst a group of largely wealthy white UK born and raised people which I was inevitably not part of. None of these people knew much if anything at all about the part of the world I was from. I didn’t talk about it either. I figured they weren’t interested. I did what I think I’d been trained to do: assimilate, forget my otherness, simply not talk about where I had come from. Graciously smooth over (and in fact, not even generate much internal anger) when I was mistaken time and again at events for somebody’s secretary (usually a white male). I subconsciously figured that my otherness was a weakness, something that didn’t serve me in the role; that I’d probably be better at it if I, too, were white British, middle or upper class, marinated in dinner table conversations about British art, British politics, British cultural life.
I wonder now how much more powerful it could have been if I had spoken more about my otherness. The people I think most about are the young people in the institution at the time. So many of them, too, would not have come from the types of backgrounds the rest of the management team had. Naively I was still in the mode of “keep your head down, do the work, walk don’t talk”. I think there was a part of me that thought that simply being there was good enough. I confined myself in the workplace to professional topics only. I talked about audiences, projects, money money money. On one rare occasion, during the #metoo movement, I wrote a memo to all staff about being a woman professional. I found I didn’t even know how to refer to myself, stumbling to find the words beyond “woman”. BAME? Asian? None of them seemed right. After so long seeking assimilation I didn’t even have the words to describe myself fully.
My story isn’t one of a rise from dire circumstances. In so many ways I was hugely lucky. Parents who fought for my education (above all else -- a double-edged sword); a comfortable middle class upbringing; intellectual capacity that felt gifted; an absolutely world class education from the age of 8 onwards; mentors and role models who consistently told me that I could do anything I wanted. There are so many people whose otherness is even harder, who come from working class families, who have a lifetime of being told they could not do things, that they had to dampen their ambition. I cannot speak for those people; I have awe and admiration for what they do and what they give the world every day. My story is just mine. I have an immigrant otherness instead -- not working class but no class. I have experienced intense pain from being told that I could do anything, play on a big stage a world away from my roots, and indeed trying to do a great deal, and learning too late that that alone does not make a fulfilled life; that that is not worth building your identity around.
I watch and read now as the world, and as young people, some decades younger than myself, speak up. I watch in horror as I see that Asian Americans, people who look like me, talk like me, have the same cultural references as me, become the butt of racism and hate crimes. I see them standing up and marching. I hear them say that they too, were taught to be obedient and quiet, to pursue a traditional form of success and assimilation, but they are choosing now to speak. Because individual success is nothing if your community is in pain.
I’ve had to step aside from work for a while. The chasing of a traditional form of success, one in which I was no longer my whole self, one in which I was still seeking assimilation, ended up a disaster for me. It’s taught me that without a stronger connection to who I am, my values, my tribe, my childhood, it’s too easy to be dangerously adrift. It put my health into crisis, and dragged in my family as well.
I have started healing by reconnecting to myself, my family and people, and my values. My family and friends are mostly halfway across the world -- and I know now that they will be my tribe forever, and that any steps I can take to be closer to them and to home will be good ones. I have started to articulate my values: love and family; beauty; respect. I have started to make things again for the sheer joy of it. I have made baby steps to find community in the geography I find myself in today. I have started volunteering at a local food bank -- in Tower Hamlets I am in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the UK -- and I am no longer making excuses or rationalising to myself that I can achieve more by playing on a bigger stage. It starts with me, with my community. I am starting to see that this “amateur” work, this work done for love, this work of raising my family and connecting with my friends and helping provide dignity to those in crisis who live next door, is probably the most important work that I will do in my life.
When I return to professional work, I hope to bring more of my whole self -- selfishly, because it will help me to stay stable; selflessly, because I hope that it will be useful for younger people to help them to avoid the mistakes that I made. I can start practicing that now, as I think about my next steps. That memo I wrote in the time of #metoo was a good thing, albeit all too rare. I am Chinese Malaysian. I am an immigrant. I am a woman. I am almost always “other” in the circles I find myself in professionally, but there is so much strength in that “other”. I will never speak or behave or think like a British 40+ year old privately educated white male. That is a beautiful thing. I have memories as an 8 year old of sucking garishly pink coloured syrup out of a shaved ice ball in a plastic bag in a small village in Malaysia. I have met the Queen of England in gilded rooms, which I was responsible for looking after. I have birthed a beautiful bright mixed race child, and with my husband we are raising her as best as we can. I am a professional. I am proud of who I am, and who I could be still. I hope that I can help my daughter in time, and perhaps even other young people, to think hard about who they truly want to be and to find a way to move towards their dreams, small or big, intimate or expansive, or all of those things at once -- with authenticity, grace and integrity. I hope that by doing that I can find more of my own authenticity, grace and integrity. If that is all I do, it will be more than enough.
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