Other than my first job out of college, I have never taken advantage of any network that I belong to, whether that’s my work network through LinkedIn and previous jobs. During college, I used my Wellesley network to help get me a coveted PR internship at Fleishman-Hillard (and since, have had absolutely zero desire to work in public relations ever again, but hey! It was a good opportunity, and I felt very lucky and privileged because I knew those internships were hard to come by). My cousin referred me to my first tech job after I graduated from college. And since then, the only way I’ve ended up landing my next new job was literally applying on companies’ websites or applying via LinkedIn. So this time around, I’ve been doing more networking, and it’s resulted in a number of positive leads and referrals. I’m kicking myself a little for not taking advantage of my networks before, but I guess it’s better late than never, right?

So far, I’m keeping tabs on leads at five different companies all based on my connections. If I am lucky, at least one or two of them will come into fruition.

Dear Ed,

Seven years. You’d think it would have passed by slower than it has, but it actually seems like just yesterday when you left us. I don’t even know what to say anymore. I’d like to say that I’ve learned a lot since you died, but I’m not totally sure that’s even accurate. I feel like a lot about my life has been at a stand still. I’ve tried really hard to maintain my integrity, to keep with my values, to be my genuine self. But I feel like that is just being chipped away slowly working in the corporate world. I’m tired of the pressure to suck up to people I don’t like or care about. I’m sick of the backstabbing, the lying, the fabrication of stories. I’m sick of the HR gaslighting, the racial injustice, the white fragility constantly on exhibit at work where no one does a single thing to address the issues at hand. I’m tired of not being recognized for my achievements, and instead, having them be overlooked simply because others choose to be louder and flaunt their pointless and revenue-less activities. It’s no wonder you rejected the corporate world, the idea of just being another rat in the rat race. There’s no value in the work that we do. Who cares about making rich people richer, about getting acquired, about going public? At the end of the day, we are all disposable, and the work we have poured ourselves into will be forgotten. No one ever wrote on their tomb stone the number of upsells or deals they worked on or sold. No one’s eulogy ever talked about the success playbook they wrote for a scaling startup based in San Francisco. All of this work is meaningless at the end of the day. The only thing that really matters are the relationships we take away from this white supremacist, capitalistic society we live in.

In the last year, though, I think you’d be excited. I’ve been actively working on Yvonne meets Food. You’d be so happy for me with my YouTube channel. It may not do much now in terms of money, but it’s part of my passion and a part of my future. I’m now at 205 subscribers, which is still small, but hopefully, fingers crossed, it will only grow. I actually can see your face light up now when I think about how you’d react at the work I’ve been doing on the channel, and even all the time I’ve spent learning how to video edit.

I honestly don’t know if I’ve done anything else in the last year you’d be happy about. I’ve thought about it, and I just cannot come up with anything. I haven’t spoken with our mother since the end of February. She falsely accused me of speaking ill about her to our aunt, and I refused to tolerate her false accusations and constant comparisons anymore. It seems a bit abrupt to stop talking to her about this, but this was truly years and years in the making. I’ve really had enough of the constant criticism, the constant false accusations, the constant comparisons to our oldest cousin, who she sees as the “ideal child.” I know you can relate to this. I’m 34 years old. I just can’t take any more of this negativity. She can call me whenever she wants to apologize. She won’t do it. So the ball is really in her court. If we never speak again, while I may feel sad about it, I will not regret that I chose this path. She did wrong, and she needs to acknowledge it. She should acknowledge her wrong for the both of us.

In that moment on the phone when she started comparing me to our oldest cousin, I immediately thought about how she constantly compared you to all our older cousins from everything to grades to school to college to attitudes. It makes me sick to the stomach to remember all this toxicity. I don’t know how you put up with it for so long… too long. I’m sorry I didn’t help you enough. I’m sorry I didn’t defend you enough. I was young, naive, powerless… she does the same to me and always has, but never to the degree she did it with you.

I thought about you a lot during the worst points of the pandemic here in New York, in the U.S. I thought about how miserable your life would have been if you had still be alive and at home with our parents. Just the mere thought of it made me angry. I can’t imagine you being under the same roof as them and not being able to go anywhere other than the grocery store. That would have been like a different type of suicide.

We like to think our lives move forward, that we move on. But I haven’t really moved on from your death. I woke up in the middle of the night a few nights ago thinking you were still alive, and that I had to call you. And when reality sank in that you were gone, I felt sullen and immediately went back to bed. This happens to me occasionally. I can’t really help it.

I want to talk to you all the time, to tell you about things I’ve made, what I’m filming, what I want to do next. But I can’t. I’ve considered going to a medium to talk to you, but when I think about it more, it seems pretty ridiculous because she’s probably going to rip me off, and I’d likely not really be talking to *you* you. It sounds childish for me to keep saying this, but life just isn’t fair. It’s not fair that people like you have to suffer and die and others who are just awful, toxic, two-faced human beings can continue on this earth, seemingly thriving and conniving through life. It is not fair. But, I have to keep going. I think about revenge for all the people who have wronged you, have wronged me, but I realize it’s all pointless.

It’s why I feel like I have no more words to say. I just feel sad and angry about so many things – the state of our world, the state of the working world, the state of the world without you in it with me. This world really sucks right now. It’s like there is nothing to look forward to.

So… when do I get to see you again? You haven’t showed up in my dreams in a while, and you seem to do that to be a bit of a jerk. You are my brother, after all. Can you come swing by for a little? I really need a hug from you right now. I hope you are doing well, and that your mind is clear and free from any negativity. Hope to see you soon.

Love,

Yvonne

I was on the phone for over an hour with my work mentee today. She was lamenting the layoffs that have happened at our company, saying that she felt like she tried so hard to be nice and kind to everyone, but in the end, it didn’t matter because she was still disliked. She still got laid off. She mentioned to me this one person at work who is a manager on the team. She clearly got there because of politicking internally, constantly advocating for herself and talking herself up every chance she got, even when she wasn’t actually the one who achieved anything. People like that in our work world get ahead. The general theme that has rang quite loud and true for me since the beginning of my career is that activity is valued more than genuine achievement. Activity is what will prevent your getting laid off, not the achievement. Because when it comes to “achievement,” even when there is hard data, real numbers, to back it up, even when you have killed your retention rates, expanded your customers by hundreds of thousands of dollars, company leadership who is against you will do whatever they can, smear you however they can, to get your job eliminated. It’s the dirty capitalistic society we live in.

I tried to console my mentee. I told her I really empathized with her, but at the end of the day, she needs to get over the desire to “be nice to everyone.” That will never get her ahead. It will never get her recognized. If anything, people would use that against her to manipulate her, take credit for her work, ignore her, gaslight her, and do anything they can to undermine her. Hasn’t that already happened here to her? This needs to be a lesson to her. “Nice girls finish last.” There’s a fine line between maintaining one’s integrity and playing the game. I still haven’t mastered it at all, but one thing I never strayed from while working at this current company is maintaining my integrity. I’ve stayed true to myself no matter what, and perhaps at times, that has costed me, but I have zero regrets. She shouldn’t have regrets either, but she needs to wean herself off the “be nice to everyone” mentality and put herself and her values first. That is such a female way of thinking that we women are taught; what BOY is ever taught to be nice to everyone and to value that above everything else…?!

Since quarantine began and when the weather has been nice outside, we’ve taken a short walk on Sundays around the neighborhood. Chris has always hated these walks, as he said they are aimless, pointless, and just a total waste of time. Okay, so maybe we do not always have an end goal in mind. Perhaps we’re just going outside for the sake of going outside to get some fresh air, a little exercise, and simply just to get out of the apartment. In a day and age of COVID-19, what else are we supposed to do to go outside, anyway? We don’t have that many options. As humans living in the western world, we spend the vast majority of our time indoors. So what’s so bad about “going outside for the sake of going outside” during a pandemic?

In addition to our Sunday walks that usually last for something between 30 minutes to over an hour, I also make time to cook vegetable dishes. Today’s dish was oong choi / kong qing cai, or morning glory. I prepared it with one of my favorite methods, which is to stir fry it with some white fermented bean curd. It’s super stinky and pungent right out of the jar, but it really mellows out once heated and stir fried with vegetables. I’m pretty certain this is one of my all-time favorite Chinese ingredients on earth. This stinky jar of goodness makes me so happy when the final product is ready to eat.

It really is the little things we should be appreciative for. And now, I no longer need to worry about sourcing it since I can go to Chinatown whenever I want now!

As people who are attempting to be responsible citizens of the world in a time of Coronavirus, Chris and I have not been doing any travel domestically or internationally. Not to say that any country would want to accept us, but even if they did, it would just be really irresponsible and selfish of us to travel overseas. It’s really made me angry to see posts about people within my network and beyond it who just insist they need an “escape” and then travel to another country. You never need to travel; you want to travel, especially when it’s for a beach or to go snorkeling, NOT because your parent is dying. This period of COVID-19 truly has revealed the true depths of selfishness of some human beings. It’s really embarrassing to see this lack of humanity exhibited by a lot of people.

While we are not traveling, the mini type of traveling we have been doing is visiting neighborhoods beyond our own during the intense quarantine period of the last few months, whether they are in Manhattan or beyond. Today, we spent the afternoon in Crown Heights in Brooklyn and enjoyed Trinidadian food from a spot that had a very notably long line going out of it. It was cash-only, had no menu, and every single thing on offer looked absolutely delicious. I only have surface level knowledge of Trinidadian food given one one of my friends/former colleagues has roots in the Caribbean. We got this massive roti filled with a lamb curry and a chickpea curry, plus a little snack called “doubles,” which is like a fluffy roti that is stuffed with a chickpea curry. The texture of this bread was just mind-blogging – super fluffy, airy, but chewy and moist. The chickpea curry had a lot of similarities with Indian chickpea “channa” curries, but the flavor profile was a little bit different. After further research, I noticed that the type of spice/peppers used is different, plus there seems to be more thyme and allspice used, which I don’t see much of in Indian cuisine. The roti also felt flakier and dryer in many ways than the average Indian roti. It was incredibly addictive, and even though I was stuffed (we shared one!), I still wanted to keep eating it because it was so good.

There’s so much to learn about different regions of the world, and so many have overlapping characteristics given patterns of migration, colonization (oh, British colonization…), and oppression. The more I think about it, the more and more grateful I am to live in a city as eclectic and diverse as New York. I have pretty much anything I want from a wide variety of cuisines available to me — as long as I am willing to walk or take a subway ride there. Not everyone is that fortunate.

On Monday of this week, massage parlors and nail salons were finally able to open. All must comply with new regulations, including both the workers and the guests wearing masks at all times, and separators have been installed between payment counters, between massage chairs, pedicure stations, etc. A lot of thought and effort was put into this, not to mention money, and the time has finally come.

As soon as Chris found out that the massage parlors would be reopening, he immediately booked appointments for us. We got rained out on Friday when we originally planned to go, so instead, we went down to Manhattan Chinatown today. While it was strange pretty much being naked except for my underwear and a mask while getting a massage, it actually did feel quite good. My hands and wrists have still been tight and not feeling “normal,” so I asked the masseuse if she could spend some extra time on those areas. When she found out I could speak some Chinese, she asked me what I did for a living. When I told her I work in technology and spend all my working days at a computer, she sighed and said, “You use your hands for work all day, too, just like me. We are the same. Working and working. Work is hard, isn’t it?” I insisted that it wasn’t the same at all, but she persisted. At the end of the day, it is the same. We use our hands to work, and we feel pain.

She’s right. That’s all we do. We work with our hands to earn our paychecks, and then we are left in pain. It doesn’t matter what we are doing or how much we are paid. If we had to distill it down simply, that is definitely a fact. And that is a really sad thought.

A few of the Instagram personalities I follow for lifestyle, fashion, and food have posted in recent years about all of the interesting things that are available to children of today that I never had access to: the ability to have books that teach multilingualism in an inclusive, non-cookie cutter way, customize children’s books so that the characters look like that child’s family (for example, if your mom is Chinese and your dad is Indian, you can have images of an olive-toned mom and a mocha-toned dad), and books that teach anti-racism and inclusion. Many of these books were made by people who felt unrepresented in children’s books, got sick of it, and decided to actually do something about it. Well, we really are the change we want to see, right?

I was giving some of these recommendations to my friend who is just over three months pregnant. There’s a lot of big questions when you’re bringing a child into the world: what types of values do you want to instill in this child? When and how do you want to teach them about racism in society and how to face it? Are you going to teach your child to be apathetic and indifferent, move along with the status quo (which is clearly oppressive and not working for anyone who isn’t White), or teach them to challenge the status quo, learn as much as possible, and actually speak up against it to effect change? How many parents or potential parents actually think about these issues or talk about how to address them? Perhaps not enough, which is why we still have the divided society in the state that it’s in today.

We have to be the change we want to see. We need to be the change we want to see.

This week, I’ve been slowly getting through the book Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad. What originally started as a 28-day social media challenge ended up going viral, garnering the support and responses from tens of thousands of people around the world. The point of the challenge was to have each person lean in to challenge, examine, and ultimately take ownership and responsibility of the ways that they uphold white supremacy in their lives. Now, this guide has been published as a book with a foreword added by the antiracism educator and sociologist Robin DiAngelo, as well as additional historical and cultural contexts, stories and anecdotes, and expanded definitions.

One thought that immediately is shared in the book is that when most people hear “White supremacy” or “White supremacist,” their thoughts immediately go to images of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, etc. In other words, they hear “white supremacy” and think it has nothing to do with them as individuals because they try to see all people regardless of race or color as “equal.” But Saad argues that this thinking is so far from the truth, and that in fact, White supremacy is “an ideology, a paradigm, an institutional system, and a worldview that you have been born into” by virtue of your privileges and socialization into a world that has created the social construction of race and thus socializes you to conform to those social constructions.

This is pretty true upon reflection, even for those of us who are not White. There are many relative privileges that people of Asian descent face in White America. Though in the U.S., people sadly look at the world through a lens that only sees white vs. black/brown, and thus Asians are pretty much invisible, we have many privileges. We rarely have to worry about getting shot and killed by the police or randomly getting pulled over just because of our skin color. When we walk through neighborhoods with hoodies on, it’s less likely that we’ll be accosted or accused of theft the way a Black person would. While we have lots of stereotypes attached to us, “lazy,” “stupid,” “unintelligent” or “incapable” are rarely adjectives that get used for Asians, unfortunately, as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Layla F. Saad, and other antiracist educators, historians, and sociologists have found through research, these are just a handful of derogatory adjectives associated with being Black. I doubt that anyone ever questioned whether I would finish high school, attend college, or get a white-collar job after college.

For my entire life, White people were the norm on TV, in movies, in books. Probably about 90 percent of all the teachers I ever had were White, with a handful of exceptions that I can actually remember right at this very moment. When Asians were portrayed, it was always in a geeky, dorky, passive, exotified type role. When Black people were portrayed in non-dominant-Black cast shows, it always felt like they had stereotypes attached to them. Everyone who wasn’t White was some cookie-cutter stereotype that Hollywood created. “White” was considered “normal.” Everyone else was considered “other” and thus “not normal.” As a result, I always am a bit excited or curious when I see someone who is non-White NOT being in a stereotypical role. As a result, I think that “White” is normal and everything else is not. So I tend to get gleefully surprised every time I see someone make it big who is not White. I’ve embraced comedians like Ali Wong, Hasan Minhaj, Ronny Chieng, Trevor Noah, Vir Das. I support Constance Wu, Randall Park, and other Asian actors. The more I think about this, the more excited I get that hopefully one day, our next generation will think it’s just normal to see different people of different colors and races mingle together, to see Asian actors on the big screen or to have Black instructors teaching their courses. It could be a “new normal,” an improved normal. I hope that we will continue to see more people of color who are usually under represented more in the media so that people can realize that we are also “normal,” too, and not “different” or “other.”

Back in May, The New York Times published a story about how women are the worst hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. They wrote that the pandemic has “exposed gender fault lines” in numerous ways, and that the “next-to-invisible but overwhelming burden of unpaid labor, the bulk of which is shouldered by women in every country in the world,” has been even more painfully unmasked by the virus taking over our lives. Men have this erroneous perception that they contribute equally to the household work and child-rearing; women are in total disagreement about this — men say they are doing half of the homeschooling; only three percent of women agree with this. The worst part about all this is that it’s not necessarily the housework per se that women do more of (there’s no doubt we do more of this and yes, that is also a problem) that is the problem; it’s the fact that all the planning, the remembering to take care of tasks such as stocking up on household essentials like fresh fruit, vegetables, knowing when things go bad, keeping to a bathroom cleaning schedule, that are the unpaid burden of women that men fail to recognize, even men who consider themselves progressive and feminist. The most enlightening article I read on this was published in Harper’s Bazaar about two years ago entitled, “Women aren’t Nags – We’re Just Fed Up: Emotional Labor is the Unpaid Labor that Men Don’t Understand.” What the author’s experience is here is how I feel and how I’ve felt for a long time, but it’s been massively exacerbated by shelter-in-place. I also started thinking about this in the context of my own parents and how my dad used to accuse my mom of nagging. It’s men’s favorite thing to complain about: their wives being “nags.” It’s another way of men gaslighting women, to call them nags. Why? Because if you call your wife a nag, then the onus is on her to change, not on you to change. You are not the problem; she is. And thus, the status quo of the inequality of housework along gender lines continues. I still have my paid day job, luckily, but in between meetings, calls, and work tasks, I am doing what my 100% female remote colleagues tell me they do all the time: between calls, they will sweep the kitchen floor, empty the dishwasher, defrost meat, cook rice, load up the washing machine. My 100% male remote colleagues? Not a single one of them has ever mentioned the idea of being able to better “multi-task” in the house with their remote work situation. EVER. There’s bigger magnifying glass on these feelings now because all we are doing now, given COVID-19, is spending more time at home doing everything – working, sleeping, cooking, eating, and cleaning. CLEANING. My female friends and colleagues have brought up their feelings on this on multiple occasions. Cleaning that used to happen every now and then, maybe every two weeks, like dusting, sweeping, and cleaning countertops, the oven, the stove, and even the mirrors, has to happen far more often now because we’re here more and using all these things more. And when you use things more, they get dirtier faster and need to be cleaned more frequently. For some reason, men do not seem to understand this. They say they don’t expect the women in their lives to take care of these things, but simply by never thinking about these things or taking care of these things unless they are right under their noses, they are indirectly giving the message that the other person has to do it.

The most common male response to a woman getting mad about his not cleaning or picking up after himself is, “You could have just asked.” But as this Harper’s Bazaar article concisely makes the point — the point is that we should not have to ask. We should not have to ASK you to clean up your crumbs, clean the bathroom, sweep the floor, dust the tops of dressers or drawers. You should know to do this automatically, and if you do not, set a schedule to do all these things the way women have already been doing for hundreds of years.

There are a lot of terrible things about being a woman in a patriarchal society, even in 2020. Emotional labor was not an issue I ever consciously thought about until a few years ago. And when I read about it, I had a mind-shattering moment. And that is very, very disturbing — because that’s exactly what the world doesn’t want us to think about in order to keep the status quo.

This particular part of the article resonated with me:

“Even having a conversation about the imbalance of emotional labor becomes emotional labor. It gets to a point where I have to weigh the benefits of getting my husband to understand my frustration against the compounded emotional labor of doing so in a way that won’t end in us fighting. Usually I let it slide, reminding myself that I’m lucky to have a partner who willingly complies to any task I decide to assign to him. I know compared to many women, including female family members and friends, I have it so easy. My husband does a lot. He does dishes every night habitually. He often makes dinner. He will handle bedtime for the kids when I am working. If I ask him to take on extra chores, he will, without complaint. It feels greedy, at times, to want more from him. 

Yet I find myself worrying about how the mental load bore almost exclusively by women translates into a deep gender inequality that is hard to shake on the personal level. It is difficult to model an egalitarian household for my children when it is clear that I am the household manager, tasked with delegating any and all household responsibilities, or taking on the full load myself. I can feel my sons and daughter watching our dynamic all the time, gleaning the roles for themselves as they grow older.

When I brush my daughter’s hair and elaborately braid it round the side of her scalp, I am doing the thing that is expected of me. When my husband brushes out tangles before bedtime, he needs his efforts noticed and congratulated—saying aloud in front of both me and her that it took him a whole 15 minutes. There are many small examples of where the work I normally do must be lauded when transferred to my husband. It seems like a small annoyance, but its significance looms larger.

My son will boast of his clean room and any other jobs he has done; my daughter will quietly put her clothes in the hamper and get dressed each day without being asked. They are six and four respectively. Unless I engage in this conversation on emotional labor and actively change the roles we inhabit, our children will do the same. They are already following in our footsteps; we are leading them toward the same imbalance.

“Children learn their communication patterns and gender roles (kids can recognize ‘proper’ gender behavior by age three) from a variety of people and institutions, but their parents are the ones that they, in theory, interact with the most,” notes Dr. Ramsey. So if we want to change the expectations of emotional labor for the next generation, it has to start at home. “For parents, this means making sure that one spouse does not do more of that type of labor than the other. Speaking in terms of how emotional labor is currently divided, girls will hopefully learn not to expect to have to do that labor and boys will hopefully learn not to expect females to do that labor for them. Children watching parents share that emotional labor will be more likely to be children who expect that labor to be shared in their own lives.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, Trader Joe’s visits were like any other grocery store in New York City. Sure, it would be crowded, and yes, there might be a line to get to the register, but then the lockdown got more severe to the point where all restaurants closed, except some for takeout and delivery. People either lost their jobs or had to work from home. And once this happened, the 40 minutes to 2-hour long waits started at Trader Joe’s…. TO GET INTO THE GROCERY STORE. I waited once for 40 minutes in late March and decided that I would never go to Trader Joe’s again during this period until the lines had disappeared to get into the store. And lo and behold, they started dying down once the city started reopening. Last week, I walked right in, and this morning, I did, too! There wasn’t even a wait for the cash register!!!!!!

We have to embrace the little things during this period, and if there’s no line, then that’s always a win!