Why the blog

There’s always been a lot of questions in my mind around identity, culture, social responsibility, and my place in the world. These are my raw thoughts.

Who am I

I’m a thirty something yuppie in NYC.  Successful Model Minority on the outside.  Still angry woman of color on the inside.

I have really strong opinions on culture, politics, technology, race and social justice informed by standpoint and invoking intersectional identity.  

Culturally, I’ve also felt like an anomaly in Asia American, born in the Los Angeles but fluent in ancestral languages, unwilling to let go of my Taiwanese identity.  From my career to where I have a half-tech and half-advertising role, to my identity as an Asian American, I’m the code-switcher.  The one who will go down to an underground hip hop show in Bushwick but get on a plane to Taipei and dine at some of the finest restaurants in the East District.  I’m the kind of bitch that reads Complex and Monocle.  Boundary points have always been a feature of my life, crossing borders, tangible and invisible, an emotional immigrant of sorts.

Honestly, I don’t have any easy answers or even answers on anything except my perspective and the time I’ve taken to do research and examine facts from multiple angles.  I wouldn’t be surprised everything I say is perceived as totally inflammatory (including the title of this blog), but I’ve always felt like I’ve existed in a boundary zone, the way Asian Americans exist as an effective racial buffer.

I have to acknowledge this is a position that is heavily informed by privilege.  I’m really aware I’m not White (clearly), but I’m also a light-skinned East Asian woman born in America who is upwardly mobile whose managed to hang on to her ancestral language and culture.  That really counts for the degree of autonomy and being able to control my destiny in a way that many people of color in this country have not been able to do.  That’s also why I’m not writing under a pen name.  Part of the reason why I’m doing this now is that I feel the benefits of expressing myself now outweigh professional backlash.  I’m totally aware that what I have to say will not be universally beloved, especially by a lot of parts of mainstream White America or the more assimilationist factions of immigrant America.

Footnote: I had a crazy longer stream-of-consciousness about me section saved in this post here.