I come back from an incredible nine-day long vacation, the kind that if I had it my way, I’d never return home from, and somehow within an hour of starting work again (from home, though), a colleague decides to pick a massive fight with me and call me a lot of demeaning adjectives, making sure to use words like “always” and “this is standard for you all the time.” As you can imagine, I didn’t just sit there and take it like a punching bag, and I fought back. Needless to say, we got nowhere with the conversation and it ended with a massive lingering conflict.

It’s hard working in the industry that I am in – as a woman and as an Asian American. It’s a male-dominated, very white place (that is, my company), and people love to make sweeping assumptions about how you will act based on your background and your title. As an Asian woman, people assume, whether consciously or subconsciously, that I will just take orders and not question authority. Well, I wasn’t brought up to be a doormat, so that’s never really going to work for me. I will always say what I think whether people like it or not. If that’s something that gets me to be unpopular or even fired, then it’s probably a testament to that place’s terrible environment and low standards of work, innovation, genuine accountability.