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Recently a new friend of mine asked me a question along the lines of "How did you get this way?/What makes you tick?"
I found that rather difficult to explain. After all, we are who we are and there is certianly limited control over that sort of thing. I wrote a brief autobio chapter for a book we (ACMHS) were working on (shelved right now due to funding)…anyways, here it is. The Cliff notes version of how I got here doing what I do. (be warned, for a blog entry it is HELLA lengthy. As in "print and read on BART" long).
Salud y’all-
HHH
Belle from Taiwan
In the Beginning
Unlike many Chinese daughters, I was very much wanted and welcomed to this world. My brother had been born four years earlier, and my paternal grandmother had never borne the daughter she wanted; after four sons, she stopped trying. All my paternal uncles had two sons. The feminine future of our family was looking at its end. But that winter day in Taipei, a Leung girl entered this world. I was born ugly, jaundiced. They put me under therapeutic heat lamps, where I browned, becoming more ugly yet.
My uncle suggested bestowing on me the American name Belle, "like Belle of Beauty and the Beast.” Talk about wishful thinking. My maternal grandmother would bathe me while muttering to herself, “Who says we’re ugly? We’re not ugly, we won’t stay ugly forever!” They were overjoyed they had a girl. But she was failing that oh-so important role that Chinese girls have: to be pretty.
Taiwan & Immigration
My parents didn’t give much thought to me when they decided to immigrate to America—mei guo, the beautiful country. We had comfortable lives in Taiwan, Mother working for the postal service and Dad teaching Chinese literature and traditional Kung-Fu. We were surrounded by the attention and love of extended family members, and we enjoyed the luxury of domestic servants.
Yet there were two pressing attractions to America: professional opportunities and educational opportunities. My brother Lance was already chafing under the strict, authoritarian Taiwan school system. His energy and sociability had little place within the confines of proper Taiwanese education. As for me, well, no one was thinking about my education much. Lance is the oldest and only son of my father, who is the eldest of four brothers. In a Chinese family, he was predestined for achievement and leadership, and I was destined to follow his good example. For Dad’s dream to teach traditional Kung-Fu in the U.S., and for Lance’s schooling, the decision was made to immigrate. Weeks shy of my fourth birthday, we boarded an airplane to California. At the airport relatives and friends saw us off, awash with tears, filled with envy, doubts, and concerns. We all knew that coming back was probably not an option, partly to save face and for economic reasons, but also because my brother would have faced mandatory military service when he came of age.
Our arrival in San Francisco heralded a new frontier, whereupon I immediately threw up on Dad’s lap. Welcome to America!
Adjusting to San Francisco was not a problem for me. Too young to have been formally educated in Taiwan, picking up English at pre-school was easy. I merrily took part in the Christmas play, and made friends among the diversity of the city. I was too young to comprehend the fistfights Lance got into when others called us “Chinks.” I didn’t know that we took the bus, and that my mother clipped coupons and waitressed all night because we were poor. I could not comprehend that my parents were struggling to build their English skills after a long day’s work, studiously watching TV news and penciling in ESL workbooks.
Every weekend we worked at the flea market, selling a mishmash of goods ranging from knock-off handbags and Michael Jackson merchandise to ceramic figurines. I thought it was kind of fun. I did not see how it added years onto my parent’s shoulders and wore furrows into their pride.
To this day, I feel a bond with Mexican immigrants, as I remember all those dusty, windy, endless weekends toiling at the flea market. Always it was Mexican and Asian immigrants like us, loading cardboard boxes of merchandise, salvaging aluminum cans, earning miniscule profits. We ate our pride at breakfast and brought our entire families to daylong work, but shared an honest living and dreams of bright futures.
On Saturdays, we’d arrive a bit late due to my morning ballet class. We had no money for fancy clothes or cars, but there was always money for my books, and for piano or dance classes. My parents were determined to bestow knowledge and skills on us that would extend to a place we could not yet see.
Confused Adolescence and the Years of Not Wanting to be Asian
It is hard to pinpoint where things went awry. By fourth grade I became
preoccupied with fears of nuclear war or kidnappers, guarding myself against my parents’ arguments and relentless criticisms, wondering why I was so unable to be a happy child. My parents feared that the “gangster” kids of Daly City were overly influencing us, but I felt these friends were the only ones who understood me–although even they could not relate to my “over-thinking” and “over-reading.”
By sixth grade we had moved to a new city south of San Francisco featuring award-winning schools and few minority students. Economically we barely clung onto our home at the edge of this affluent suburb, and ultimately lost it to bankruptcy. But I pretended to fit in. I wanted nothing to do with the geeky, “fresh off the boat” Asians at school. I was repulsed by their squareness and lameness and insistence on speaking their native tongues. I hated their moneyed homes and good grades. I swore I’d never date or marry an Asian person.
I had loved the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) classes of elementary school, the creativity of the young teachers who encouraged us to push the limits of learning. At the supposedly “top notch” school I now attended, I felt trapped in a factory-education environment. Gone were the participatory projects, replaced by ruthless testing and competition for a name-brand college admission. I cultivated a crew of friends who were cool outsiders, who stole liquor from parental cabinets and fearlessly bought Marlboros at the corner store, their swaggers and budding facial hair challenging the clerk to ask for I.D. I envied their fierce independence and sense of entitlement.
I also began to hate my parents for their strictness and what I perceived as sexist, ancient, naive traditions. I felt stifled, choked, a total misfit who hid my fears behind fashionable clothes and tough talk. I would stare in the mirror, loathing my stick-straight hair and the round cheeks that marked me as a child, the almond eyes which betrayed my roots. “Belle’s not fuckin’ oriental," my friends would say, illustrating their belief that I was better, different than those FOBs at school. I took this as a compliment, and shrank further and further from my home, my past, my parents. I acted as if I didn’t even know how to speak Chinese anymore.
Thank god my parents had laid down a foundation of love. Because no matter how I loathed them, there was a seed inside that would never turn away completely from their hopes for me. Though their sacrifices for me felt like an angry burden that I never wanted, there was always someone to pick me up when the cops called home.
“You don’t even know me!” I would scream at them in the throes of teen melodrama. The power of both their love for me and their denial of who I was becoming was intense. As I flaunted the huge pot leaf motif embossed on my wallet, my mother sighed, “Why do you buy these things for show–when you’re simply not that kind of person?” When they discovered I had all sorts of incriminating paraphernalia, they knowingly yet willfully chose to accept the oldest line in the book, “I’m holding it for a friend.”
"Banana Boat"
By the time I was 14, my parents feared that they were losing their grip on me, that I was ignorant of my own culture and hanging around the “wrong” kinds of people. Of course that was pretty much an accurate assessment on their part, but I was astounded at their extreme solution. It was announced that I would be sent to spend an entire summer at a Chinese boarding school in Taiwan. I could not imagine a more dull and confining possibility.
At the Chien-Tan campus, I was dismayed at the dormitory bunks and lack of privacy in the showers, and thoroughly unimpressed with the rice porridge breakfasts and sparse concrete classrooms. But I was intrigued to meet other Chinese youth from New Mexico, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, France, Indonesia, and London, as well as native Taiwanese. They weren’t geeky or dull. They were fun, complex, and instantly related to my experiences of confused bi-culturalism. For the first time I could see Chinese people who were hip, funny, attractive and, most importantly, confident and comfortable in their own skins. Maybe they had southern U.S. or British accents, but we were soon talking as if we’d always been friends. I was nicknamed “Chinese Madonna” by my peers (don’t even ask about what I used to wear!), and marveled in my newfound, natural popularity. I didn’t have to pretend to be “not oriental,” wasn’t embarrassed about being an immigrant or having strict parents. I was free to use my energies socializing honestly. Until that summer, I’d never realized how reflexive it had become to spend my time and efforts pretending to be someone else. At Chien-Tan, my Chinese-American reality was the norm. Many of my bi-cultural peers were impressed that I could still speak Mandarin, and I was happy to utilize this skill hailing taxis around town in Taipei, and befriending locals.
Of course, despite the headiness of having pride in my roots for the first time, some things just didn’t change. My cousin John immediately clarified that there was no enforced legal drinking age in Taiwan. I quickly introduced all my new friends to metal rock music and their first expeditions into truancy and public drunkenness. Remarkably, over the summer I did manage to learn the phonetic Chinese alphabet, some Chinese brush writing, and traditional dance. I also deepened bonds with my maternal grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousins.
The campers dubbed this summer program “Banana Boat,” referring to the American kids being white inside and yellow outside, or "Love Boat,” acknowledging the numerous romantic liaisons inevitable in a co-ed setting. We would joke amongst ourselves about the Taiwan government (which sponsors the program for overseas Chinese) and our parents being in cahoots to “fix us up” with other Chinese youth and instill bonds to Taiwan. Often, they were successful. Legions of kids returned from camps or trips every year promising to stay in touch with their newfound friends. The friendships I made at Chien-Tan have lasted over 16 years thus far. We’ve stayed in contact through college, weddings, new babies, graduate school, the trial of Wen-Ho Lee, (father of my Chien-Tan friend Alberta), and numerous moves across states and continents.
Anywhere But Here
The effects of that summer in Taiwan carried me for a while after my return. But before long the persistent sense of alienation, with all its fallout in my school and family relationships, began to run my life again. I remember an evening when my parents corralled me in the living room for a talk about my future plans. “Maybe, if you pull yourself together, you can at least get into a state college,” they ventured. I was drunk and, staring at the ceiling, utterly depressed at the life I saw before me. State college sounded both unattainable and undesirable. I fit nowhere, and I saw nowhere I would ever feel at home or hopeful about. They didn’t press it, and never dared to ask what was behind my moodiness and irritable despair. They also failed to tell me, or possibly to realize, that depression runs in our family.
Somehow, someone noticed the winning combination of my high test scores paired with erratic A to F grades. I was beckoned out of class one day in my sophomore year and asked if I might be interested in a pilot program at De Anza Community College for “non-traditional” students.
“Anywhere but here,” I thought to myself. My peers were flabbergasted that I would ditch out on “the best years of your life,” that I would voluntarily opt out of junior prom and senior trip. Like I gave a shit about that fluff they use to camouflage the abyss of high school. My parents signed the papers and sent me to community college at the age of 16. I would take two high school requirement classes each day, and the rest of the week I would be enrolled in regular college courses.
I discovered "general psychology" class, which became the first of the five or six psychology classes I would take. I enrolled in all the psych courses I could, feeling an excitement for knowledge and a commitment to the helping professions that sparked hope across the pools of cynicism in my mind. I became inspired and incensed about politics and history. I also got my first part-time job. What had seemed merely like my last chance for graduating from high school now glimmered with the promise of so much more.
I went to see an academic counselor about the future I was now beginning to sense was possible. He was the father of one of those beautiful, white, coltish girls at my old high school–the kind of girl, definitely homecoming queen material, whose ease in life and confidence wilted oddballs like me. Friends recommended him to me. “He’s real good, and he’s Alexis’ dad you know.” So I went to see Alexis’ dad and explained to him that by the looks of the academic catalogs, it seemed like I could not only get my graduation requirements, but I could maybe get more classes, and enroll in summer school, and progress toward an A.A. degree too. I needed help, instruction as to how to go about this. My parents, holding their breath, thought, "Yes, maybe Belle could get her act together now.” But they knew nada about how to go about it. Alternative education was a foreign concept for a couple from Taiwan.
Alexis’ dad droned at me from across his desk, and my heart froze as he spoke. “You know, it’s not realistic. You need to get focused on just passing.” My fears confirmed, my mind went paralyzed and blank. For once I aspired to more than the minimum, and this counselor was shooting me down with his smiles and paternalistic guidance. What a screw-up I was, he implied. To which my own inner critic added: I was Asian and had failed math. Not a good student. Could never be a preppy popular kid, alabaster skin Goth girl, can’t even manage to do well in an alternative program. Too chicken and not entrepreneurial enough to be a dealer or an actual dropout. What was left?
I fell back into depression. Continued dating a man who pretended to support my aspirations but tried repeatedly to test my love, to expect me to choose between him and my parents, who encouraged my writing and academics so long as I never surpassed him. Snuck alcohol into my soft drinks, at both school and work. Had my first experience of being propositioned by a professor. Sold children’s clothing for minimum wage, part-time, and did homework at Coffee Society the rest of the time (where said professor asked me to call him for “fun times”). Barely resisted the temptation to sell drugs and make more money in two days than I was making in a month. Lost a friend to drunken driving as he turned 17, which brought me to my first funeral. My parents would look at me and say, “Childhood and youth are carefree and the happiest years of your life. You should enjoy it more.”
One afternoon I wandered back into the counseling office. Unable to face Mr. Alexis’ dad, unwilling to bear the shame of having more questions for him, I signed up for the next available counselor. A young African-American man greeted me with a smile, retrieved me from the sign-up clipboard, and helped me set a new course. “Well, it won’t be easy, but if you work hard, if you really want it, I can show you what you’re going to have to do.” With that, he got up, photocopied some papers, deposited them on a desk in front of me, and breathed his confidence and guidance into my life. College was possible for me, he said. And in my head I thought, this is gonna be my ticket out of this house and this city.
Pageant life
Weird as it is to admit it, winning a local beauty pageant was a pivotal event in my life. Even as a teen I felt conflicted about joining a pageant. How does a budding feminist reconcile pageants and self-respect? But I desperately needed extracurricular activities for my college application, and having never been a softball, student council, cheerleading kind of gal, I entered a Chinese pageant in San Francisco. What the hell–it was dorky, I’d never win, but it’d go on my application, and maybe I’d meet some people. Besides, I loathed the assumption that one could not be smart and good-looking at the same time.
Number 13 won. No one was more astonished than me (and my parents) when I was crowned 1992 Rose Ball Queen & Miss Congeniality. It seemed like a joke, wasn’t I the total screw-up rebel? Did I not spend my entire adolescence wishing I would magically transform into a wide-eyed, long-legged “American girl”? Suddenly, I was pressed to showcase the best of Chinese-American young womanhood.
I found myself establishing ties with a Chinese-American community I had never been a part of, and was welcomed like a long lost relative. I liked visiting senior centers and being at fundraisers and yes, waving in parades. I was suddenly an integral part of a community vibrant with celebrations and pride. Although the stilettos and thigh-slit Chinese chi-pao gowns were not so great, the confirmation that there was a place for me was priceless.
I was welcomed back to Taipei as an honored guest, as a shining model of idealized Chinese-American-ness, a goodwill ambassador. My beaming grandmother watching Queen Belle on Taiwan TV and in the papers was a heartwarming sight. Somehow, her ugly girl had come home again, just as she’d always dreamed of.
Two years later I earned my high school diploma. Within weeks I earned my A.A. degree. And the following fall I moved into a dorm at the college of my dreams, UCLA. I would be a psychology major with a minor in Asian American studies.
College
Fortunately, my brother had shocked the family a few years earlier by joining the Marine Corps straight out of high school. My parents were so relieved I was going to college at all, they didn’t spend much time trying to dissuade me from what they saw as an impractical and weird choice of studies: “You want to work with crazy people?” my dad asked. Sure, I thought, that sounds a heck of a lot more interesting than being a computer programmer or someone’s secretary.
I dumped the drinking. Dumped the boyfriend. Dumped the depression. Dumped the denial of my heritage. Stopped running away from the mirror, from myself. There were other Asian-Americans here. So many, in fact, that folks joked about it being the “University of Caucasians Lost Among Asians.” People were comfortable being bicultural, didn’t hide their Asian-ness, were loud and proud and constructing a new identity for those of us who could never move back to Asia, and would never be accepted as mainstream Americans. I found friends who also had a solidly working-class background, and were damn proud of it too. I didn’t need to hide anything anymore.
I had thought everything I hated about my parents was due to our being Chinese and all the junk brought over from Taiwan. As I grew older, and across the 450 miles between them and UCLA, I realized they were just people. We fought, they fought, and they split up not because we were Chinese. Just because of life.
The ACMHS Years
ACMHS (Asian Community Mental Health Services) was founded the year I was born. In my third year of graduate school, it became an approved practicum site. I had long heard of the agency, and now I applied. It was time to use my budding psychotherapy skills within my own community, where I saw depression, trauma, substance abuse, stigma, and other needs festering under a patchwork of denial and laughable misinformation.
I had spent two years at other training sites, and was finally becoming more confident about my psychotherapy capabilities. Now, with a small cluster of Mandarin speaking clients, I discovered that, in Chinese, my entire therapeutic style became different. I referred to myself differently, I referred to clients more formally, we referred to history and current events differently, we approached the work differently. So much had to be expanded and re-learned.
In addition, in the ACMHS lunchroom I met Asians of all ages, at all levels of acculturation, from multiple countries and speaking languages I had never even heard of.
My identity continued to grow, to encompass the many different concerns and variations of being Asian-American. At UCLA, those of us in the Asian-American studies department were young, brash Asians who were either U.S.-born or had acculturated early in life. We had educational advantages and historical roots in the U.S., which many Asian-Americans do not possess. I learned as much from my co-workers and clients, if not more, as I was learning at school. My understanding of identity began to take on more global proportions.
To sit in the presence of people who had been through the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian killing fields, the Vietnam War, was a privilege. The strength and drive of these survivors to press on, and the terrifying experiences they endured, taught me important lessons about human evil as well as human resilience and will. I came to see that our freedoms must never be taken for granted. Our strength lies in deep reserve pools. And even those who spent years in refugee camps could rebuild the lives that history tried to crush.
I became outraged by the struggles of my clients, who often found themselves at the mercy of a court system, a child custody system, a school system. Many of them were monolingual and could not speak for themselves, and did not even know that they had any rights to assert.
I became outraged at the systemic barriers against our non-Asian clients as well. The African-American and Latino families at the schools we served struggled with countless barriers: substandard schools, health hazards, biased bureaucracies and miscommunication. I learned a great deal at ACMHS about linking the common concerns of various communities so that we can become collaborative and fight for our community rights.
I felt the heartache of witnessing families re-enact assimilation struggles similar to my own. From where I sit now, I can empathize with the desperate parent from Taiwan who can’t understand why their child has become a stranger. I can empathize with the child who shuts everyone out to save herself from the suffocating pressures to conform to her parents’ or society’s narrow roles, to save himself from the barbed criticisms that shred his self-esteem. I can understand the contempt, the hurt, the sorrow of each side as they say to one another, “You’re too traditional Chinese,” or “You’re too Americanized.” I know that those phrases are code for all the resentments and dreams and pressures of both parent and child. That each side is fearful and angry and feels rejected, that flesh and blood are wondering who is this stranger in their house.
I was living in L.A. when I completed my pre-doctoral internship and Psy.D. degree. When ACMHS’ Clinical Director offered me the job as school-based clinical coordinator, it felt like coming home. This is the work that I believe in, and when the going gets tough, I just have to remind myself, “I’d do this for free. And I wish someone, something like ACMHS was available when I was growing up.”
The 0.5 Generation Experience
Despite the incredible volume of lip service about “cultural competency,” we as Asian-Americans, and especially Chinese-Americans, have loooong way to go. Professional cultural competency refers to having enough knowledge and education about how different cultural and historical factors play critical roles in client worldviews and health outcomes. Cultural competency is the kind of experience I have gained that allows me to properly comprehend the specific fears an African American may have at being pathologized by mainstream clinicians, or the deep shame and atypical medication metabolism rates a Chinese person may have to psychotropic treatment.
I had to keep myself from choking and screaming when the M.D. who taught my graduate level psychobiology course stood before an entire class of future psychologists and stated, “Asians don’t have problems with alcohol abuse. They don’t have an enzyme to process alcohol so they don’t abuse it.” It took all my civility to rein in the urge to slap him, as I described the epidemics of alcoholism throughout such countries as Korea and Japan, and calmly pointed out that I, for one, can process and over-drink alcohol just fine, thank you.
Among Chinese, particularly from Taiwan, I think we need to reassess what we perceive of as success. I see my community brimming with folks who live under high ceilings, drive luxury cars, and wear trend-setting clothing. Their children attend school in the "best" school districts, attend Chinese school on the weekends, play classical instruments, and get into the most prestigious universities. I also see a community whose families are cracking under the façade, who are under pressure, who don’t communicate and are inflexible and treat any perceived weakness–or God forbid, mental health problem–as a humiliating taboo to be hidden away. We love being the face of the model minority, and have sacrificed our humanity, our hearts, and our families to the pressures of living this unrealistic dream. Every now and then a young suicide kicks us down on our smug faces and underlines the fact that despite the lovely veneer, there remains illness, pain, and trauma among us.
I was a child and teen who believed that the real me would be unacceptable to the world, as it was certainly unacceptable to my own family. I am now the psychologist who works with youth who are suicidal, who are self-medicating with sex or drugs or shopping, who are exerting control through eating disorders. I listen to these children tell me of the isolation they feel, the pointlessness of living their lives trying to be who their parents tell them to be, the fear of their own emotions and the terror of knowing that these feelings frighten others. They are the straight-A students who are anorexic, the drop-out kid who is flirting with joining a gang. Or the kid like me who passes classes and keeps up appearances even as she’s steadily destroying herself.
And I work with the confused parents who beat themselves up for the things that aren’t their fault and don’t take responsibility for the parenting and communication problems that actually are their fault. I see parents reeling from the pain of their babies growing up and rejecting their values, or who never allow their kids to grow up at all.
There is a book out there titled, “I Have Become the Man I Always Wanted to Marry.” I thought that was very clever (although I married a wonderful man and he sure isn’t much like me at all, but that’s another story). Rather, I have become the bridge, the guide who I had always wanted–and wanted to be. I made it out of the dark well of depression relatively safely, but there was plenty of harm that did come to me in those years. It took me years to craft a bi-cultural identity that valued my uniqueness and accepted my ancestry. I hope to assist others in navigating these dangerous paths safely. To allow them to learn and grow, while sparing them the painful errors that I myself had made. I strive to help my clients and their families cross the divides of culture, communication, mental health, and healing, and get to a place where we can all be more whole and maximize the strengths we have. To me, that’s what the work we do is all about.
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You are a true wonder.
Jack 08.24.06 @ 11:19 am