As a female person of color who has been working in digital marketing and in tech for the last 12 years, I can say that unfortunately, I do not have the luxury of not thinking about race. I have to think about it pretty much every single day. I am oftentimes the only woman in a meeting, the only person of color, or in endless cases, the only person of color AND the only woman in the room. So, I am constantly asking myself, how are people going to perceive me and my actions as an Asian female here? I know I am the minority; the last time a colleague and I manually checked our stats, about 15% of the entire go-to-market organization were people of color. Are they going to immediately assume I fall into the “model minority” stereotype, that I’ll be quiet, passive, never speak my mind, simply take orders and carry them out? Needless to say, I do not fit that stereotype at all, and I know for a fact that my failure to conform to a racist stereotype has brushed a lot of individuals along my career path the wrong way. Here is just a handful of incidents that have happened to me personally, but does not include all of them: 

1. I have repeatedly voiced constructive feedback about my team to a former VP. Though I know the feedback I gave was shared by a number of colleagues, including several white colleagues who spoke to this leader, I was the only one out of all of us who was told that she is “one of the most negative people on this team. For your career growth, I suggest that in the future, you consider how you ‘package’ feedback.” Now, what makes me different from all the others in this group? 
2. I was once told that I was “rude,” “unprofessional,” and spoke with a “demeaning tone” when asking a colleague who was speaking far above normal office speaking volume to please lower her voice. She had antagonized a number of colleagues sitting around us to the point where most of us did not feel comfortable being around her or sitting at our assigned desks. Yet when a white male colleague literally yelled across the floor of the NYC office, on multiple occasions, “Yo, <employee name>! LOWER YOUR VOICE!”, everyone merely laughed and took him as the joker of the office. Nothing was reported in that incident. When I mentioned this to our HR rep, she responded to me, “Well, I wasn’t there,” and shrugged. 
3. I, along with another Asian colleague in New York City, have been told repeatedly by a colleague, in an attempt to be “woke”/ aware, “I can tell the difference between Asians.” 
4. On more occasions than I can count, I’ve been asked by white colleagues, “Where are you really from?” after telling them that I was born and raised in San Francisco (to be clear, this is a microaggression that implies that I am a perpetual foreigner and not truly American). 
5. I’ve repeatedly been mistaken for at least half a dozen different Asian female colleagues across offices, via Slack, e-mail, and in person.
   1. One European employee gaslighted me, insisting I had been in San Francisco in April/May 2018 when he had actually confused me for another Asian female colleague. I told him that I hadn’t been to San Francisco since kick-off that year, and I would obviously know when I traveled from NY to SF. He kept insisting I was wrong and that I was in his meetings in SF that week. 
   2. These mistakes have also been made by members of our CXO team.

How do I know that any of the above was actually racist or prejudiced? In the day and time we currently live in, all of the above would be quite hard to prove as “racist.” And if I were white, I’d have the luxury of never even thinking for a second it could be about my race because I would be the majority group. The majority group is the default group, the “normal” group to which everything else is compared. But that’s the thing: You don’t need to yell racial slurs to be racist. You don’t need to be a member of the KKK to be racist. You could easily donate to progressive causes and vote for Democrats and still be racist. The Amy Cooper/Christian Cooper situation was a classic case of white privilege and racism in action, as her actions silently said, “Your position in society does not allow you to talk to me like that. Now, you’ll be punished for not knowing your place.” This was all because she couldn’t tolerate a black male birder calling her out on breaking the law.

It doesn’t seem to matter where you go, what you do, or what industry you choose. Racism is pervasive everywhere. And the worst part is: the people you think will help you, the ones whose jobs are actually to help you (hello, human resources teams, I’m looking right at you), make the situations worse. They gaslight you. They question you to death until you question your own sanity and sensitivity. They try to make you “consider other viewpoints.” They try to make it NOT about race. BUT IT IS ABOUT RACE. It IS about sex. The white moderate is the issue here. The people who think they are helping are NOT helping. They are making the situation worse and perpetuating the status quo, which is to continually oppress people of color and under-represented groups in a white male-dominated society.

I was on a Zoom call with two colleagues today, and it began with a discussion about the protesting across the U.S. My male colleague said, “I don’t understand why they are protesting. The cop got arrested.”

My female colleague and I looked at each other. We had to address this in the most civil way possible.

Me: Getting arrested is not enough. It was third degree murder when it should have been 1st degree. And it’s not a guarantee he will get convicted. That doesn’t even include the other three cops involved. Then there’s Ahmaud Arbery getting chased down, shot and killed, and us finding out about it two months later? What is that about? And then there’s the long history of black men unarmed getting shot by the police that has been going on for hundreds of years. How can you answer for any of that?

My female colleague: Well, I have a black fiance who I’m going to be marrying, and if we procreate, that means… I believe, that I will have black babies. So, I have a black future husband and black future babies, so I am personally invested in solving this ongoing issue.

My male colleague’s face was hard to read. He looked a bit defeated. He simply responded with, “Well, I hope justice is served.”

I hope it is, too, but I also wish that he would acknowledge that his lack of understanding is 100 percent his fault. Who knows if anything that we said got through to him. It’s not up to other people to educate him, particularly people of color. It’s his own personal failing as a human being to not seek out resources, whether that’s a GOOGLE SEARCH, news articles, blogs, opinion pieces, books, documentaries, movies, NETFLIX or HBO. The digital world we live in makes it so damn easy to find information, but the key part of finding the information is to SEEK IT OUT FOR YOURSELF. And if you choose to whine and whinge, insist that you “just don’t understand,” then you are part of the problem and will only exacerbate the oppression.

I’m sure he got off the Zoom call and ran to his wife, complaining that “My liberal colleagues ganged up on me!” Well, I’m not going to apologize for hurting his white fragile feelings because this is beyond politics. This is a human rights issue, and if you do not care, you are not human. Clean and simple.

A colleague and I were chatting about life in general during an age of the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine. She asked if I was planning to still take time off despite the fact that my three trips between May and July have officially been cancelled.

“Wedding cancelled in May, Ecuador trip that I’d be leaving for tomorrow is not happening, and my Sri Lanka trip at the end of June/early July just got cancelled and refunded,” I said to her. “If I’m not traveling, what exactly would I be taking time off for?”

“You can go to the park!” she suggested. “Read a book! Exercise more!”

I sulked further. “I go to the park for a walk nearly every single day when the weather is good since I live two blocks away. I’ve read 11 books this year already when my usual goal is 12 books per year. And I exercise every morning before work in my bedroom! I’m doing everything! I’m even doing all these cooking projects I kept adding to my list but never getting to!”

“WHY ARE YOU SO PRODUCTIVE?” she exclaimed. “I do nothing outside of work on the weekdays, and my only activities are on the weekends!”

I’ve always been obsessed with productivity and efficiency. It’s a really good and a really bad thing. I obsessively look at the time no matter what I am doing. So when quarantine first began, I told myself that I had to make the most of all this anti-social, no travel, no life-outside-of-the-home time. I wanted to maximize everything I possibly could: the podcasts to listen to, books to read, lists to organize, nooks and crannies to clean in the apartment, videos to edit for my channel, cooking projects to test out and film, increase my social media presence for YMF. All the things I could do within the apartment to be efficient and productive are all the things I immediately thought about as lockdown began.

But all of that seems exhausting sometimes. Sure, I’m happier because I’ve done a lot of these things, such as edit a ton more videos than I would have if COVID-19 had not hit, or read a lot of amazing books that had me completely hooked, but everything just seems so mundane when you have nothing tangible to look forward to, whether that’s a restaurant to try out, an oldie to go back to, or a new destination to explore.

Many companies, from tech companies to major financial firms, have been making announcements in the last week about becoming more flexible and allowing employees to work from home even after shelter-in-place orders have been rolled back. Twitter has announced they will allow employees to work from home forever… if they choose to do so. Slack says they won’t have employees come back to the office until at earliest, September. The idea behind this is to ensure that employees feel safe and can take control of their own health. It’s also because a lot of companies, even those who were vocally adamant against employees working from home, have realized that productivity actually has declined with mandated work from home in light of COVID-19. In fact, and much to my own personal disgust, people are actually working more hours because they are having a hard time drawing a line between “work time” and “home/personal time.”

There are a lot of problems that this presents, as attractive as this might initially sound. What happens to office real estate? What happens to neighborhood coffee shops, restaurants, takeout spots, and other businesses that would rely on its usual loyal business workers to patronize them during the work week, or restaurants who rely on team business power lunches? In addition to that, people will be even more sedentary than they usually are, so what does that mean? Obesity will increase as physical activity decreases? Even with my daily walks and my morning workouts on my mat every weekday, I know for a fact that I am moving a lot less in terms of steps.

Coffee shops will close. Beloved restaurants and holes-in-the-walls will go under and shutter. Neighborhoods known for their “charm” will… lose their charm. Wall Street will become a ghost town.

Now, more than ever, do I believe we are truly living in a dystopia.

The last few mornings, I’ve been waking up with my hands feeling numb. They’ve been sore the last week, likely because I’ve been spending more time video editing, which means more time at the computer on top of already being on a computer most of the weekdays for work. The upside of COVID-19 quarantine is that I’ve been spending more time shooting cooking videos and editing. The downside of the quarantine, other than the obvious, is that the more editing I do, the more time I spend on a computer, which means the more my hands and wrists get sore and angry at me for abusing them. I did a quick Google search for “waking up with hands numb” and found that most of the results I got were around early onset carpel tunnel symptoms.

That’s exactly what I need to hear. Granted, I’ve been able to handle wrist and hand pain from computer use with my dyna-flex power ball and stretching, so it’s been manageable for all these years in front of a computer. But I hadn’t needed to use the power ball in months now. More physical therapy is needed for my body and me during shelter-in-place.

One of my colleagues, who recently started just this past December, has resigned. It was really sad to hear this, particularly since most of the people I’ve gotten along with well and trusted have all been leaving. I can count on a single hand the number of people I genuinely care about and can trust at work now. She said she had a bad feeling from her very first day here, that there was some eerie vibe, that a toxicity was just seeping through the walls. It got to her more and more each day, and last month, it really came to a turning point where she would wake up feeling sick about going to work. It was affecting her mental and physical health. Just the mere thought of work on an evening or weekend would make her stomach churn. So she resigned and is leaving for another job effective two weeks from now.

It’s sad to see how things have evolved where I am where people can “feel” hostility, tension, and toxicity on their very first day in the office. Is this what work life should be in the corporate world, in the year 2020? Why does it have to be so hard?

I was looking at the calendar today and realized that if the COVID-19 pandemic did not hit, in ten days, we would have been leaving for Honolulu to attend our friends’ destination wedding. I had meticulously made a list of restaurants and hole-in-the-wall spots to potentially film food videos at, and we had already booked our flights and hotel months ago. All of that has been cancelled. The food list has been de-prioritized in my bookmarks list for perusal. I ended up cancelling my planned days off for the wedding/Hawaii long weekend.

My manager has been strongly suggesting that we take at least a day or two off in April, just to unwind and not think about work given the pandemic. I’m not even sure I’ve ever done that — taken a day off just to stay in the city and not travel. That feels like a very foreign idea to me, especially since it’s not like I have kids or elderly parents to take care of. What would I do all day — just cook, read, and walk around the block?

Today marks three years that I’ve been working at my current company. In June, I will mark 12 years being employed full time after graduation. It’s strange to think in some ways about how far I’ve come. It’s not as though I’ve aggressively climbed the corporate ladder (I haven’t), but I think more about how green and naive I was when I started 12 years ago, and how jaded and skeptical I am now. Three years ago, I knew very little about the real SaaS world since this was the first real SaaS company I’ve ever worked at. I’ve learned more about the software space, more about how internal politics works (that’s not necessarily a good thing), and more about how fragile work relationships are. You come in thinking you can remain friends with people once they leave, but for so many of us, once you leave a company, you leave behind everyone there, as well. You say you will be friends with these people, but the odds are against you. In the last three years, endless colleagues who I was friendly with have left, and I’ve only genuinely stayed in touch with maybe three of them. That means I’ve stayed in touch with one a year, which is more than I can say for all the other places I’ve worked at.

After all these years working in digital marketing and SaaS, I feel a lot more empathy now, more than ever, for working moms, for stay-at-home moms, and for women in tech who eventually leave the tech world permanently. It’s really hard being a woman in tech, and even harder being a woman of color in tech, because you have no idea how much your last name, your face, your gender, play into whether you are liked or disliked, promoted or given a raise, or pigeon-holed into certain stereotypes and roles. And as a woman of color over the last 12 years, I oftentimes feel misunderstood or betrayed by white women in the workplace. And it’s not like you can openly question it that way because then you’ll be accused of using the “race card or “gender card,” which for really perverse people, they believe that you have a leg up as a Asian or as a woman (because, as Ali Wong once said, that’s always been a winning combination in this world!).

But I do recognize I’m far luckier than so many people I know. And I’m grateful for that. But I do not feel like the tech world is changing at a rate I am comfortable with. It seems more like every day, I have to choose from a crappy situation to a crappier situation, as opposed to a situation that I actually feel is good for me, or good for future women in tech who come long after me.

Yes. This is 2020.

I’ve used a lot of different video conferencing software during the last nearly 12 years of working full time. I’ve used WebEx, Go-To Meeting, Join.me, Google Hangouts, Clearslide (truly the worst, and of course, predictably, the very worst company I worked at licensed their disgusting software), among others that I cannot even remember now. But until I joined my latest company, I had never experienced the beauty and glory that is Zoom. Zoom is truly everything amazing and everything one can ask for when it comes to video conferencing software. It is so intuitive that it pretty much defines “intuitive.”

You do not need to download any new software or apps; if you simply have the meeting link or dial-in number, you can click on the link, immediately be added to the conference, and listen in via your phone if you prefer phone audio. No stupid plug-ins or applications to install. The app is the most intuitive. Want to screen share? Click the big green “SHARE SCREEN” button on the bottom. Want to end the meeting? Click the red “LEAVE MEETING” on the bottom right. Want to raise your hand to ask a question and not seem rude to to the presenter? There’s that option, too! On top of that, you can even create a white-board, sub-conference rooms. Concerned about not getting enough sleep last night? Well, there’s a solution for that, too: enable airbrushing on your video! And the sugar on top for fun: you can change your video background (in the event you don’t want your colleagues to see what your bedroom looks like if that’s the only available room in your house to take a video call). Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time (or so it looks like) in Newfoundland in my work meetings.

So while it was great news to hear that Zoom decided to make their app free for non-businesses during the current COVID-19 pandemic and allow the world to easily connect with their loved ones while we all self-quarantine, it was frustrating this morning to find out that my meeting quality was not as high; the audio was failing. Other times, the video was not working. Screen-sharing was lagging. I ended up rescheduling a meeting today for another time because of this failure. I don’t think they had enough bandwidth to cover for their extreme generosity, and so now, even if only temporarily, people like me have to suffer a little.

A friend of mine who normally isn’t particularly opinionated and has responded very passively to my comments around feminism has been chiming in more about this in the last couple of years. It’s likely because she’s finally noticing that she’s not getting treated fairly as a female person of color, so she’s feeling the pain directly. At her office, she participates in a book club where they read Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. After she mentioned it, I put it on my NYPL Libby app request list and got to digitally borrow it this weekend.

Here’s an interesting fact that I learned from this book: For most of the 20th century, the New York Philharmonic was nearly 100% men. Then, in the 1970s, the numbers of female players started to go up… due to blind auditions. The hiring committee would not be able to see who was playing in the audition because there would be a screen between them and the player. The screens had an immediate impact: by the early 1980s, women began to make up 50% of the share of new hires. And today, the proportion of female musicians in the New York Philharmonic stands at over 45%.

So, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could do this for all job interviews?! It’s hard in practice given you cannot really give a presentation or even a phone call screen without hearing the person’s voice/seeing the person’s face, but it really brings into question all the biases, whether conscious or subconscious, that we have when evaluating candidates and defining “meritocracy.” The concept of meritocracy is a complete myth in the workplace no matter what any Human Resources team tells you, as anyone who has half a brain knows that women do not get treated the same way that men do at work. We get criticized for our behaviors, emotions, personality at a far higher rate than men do. And the situation only gets worse when it’s a female person of color, not a white woman.

I’m not completely sure this was the best time to be reading this book given that during the day, I’m angry about the failure of our federal government in acknowledging the gravity of the Coronavirus sooner, for de-funding the CDC, and for calling this “Chinese virus” a hoax; I’m also angry about the level of racism/violence against Asians as a result of this global pandemic (I do not recall anyone getting angry and having racist fits at white Americans when swine flu happened?!). So, in other words, during the day, I’m angry about politics and racism against my own kind, and during the evening, I’m angry while reading this book to think that something as basic as the design of restrooms and cars, office temperature settings, and even city infrastructure planning are biased against women (I actually once asked my driving instructor about the design of air bags and whether they would really protect women given that on average, they are smaller in stature than men, and therefore the airbags are not designed for that smaller sized person…), and that the ‘norm’ has and will always be considered “male” and women, as Aristotle once famously said, are just “mutilated men.” To this day, our medical communities across the world do not think there’s a reason to spend more money and time on research to ensure that both men AND women are included in clinical trials… because how on earth can women’s bodies respond differently to drugs and treatments than men’s?

Yep, women are screwed. And women of color are even more screwed in the world. And this is 2020.