Not to sound like a shiny-happy-people PSA, but one of the things I really do love about my job is working with people from so many different backgrounds. The main idea behind the glossy I work for is celebrating cultural diversity in Los Angeles, and our office actually reflects that. I went out to lunch in Little Tokyo with the girls the other day, and we looked like a damn United Colors of Benetton ad.
It’s absolutely essential to me to be in this kind of working environment, one with close ties to different minority communities (not necessarily limited to ethnic ones), if I’m not doing something exclusively related to the Asian American community. And I’m not sure I ever imagined that I’d be so passionate about this.
In case you didn’t get this spiel about me before, I grew up in a predominantly white suburb in Connecticut (are there any other kind of suburbs in Connecticut?). I spent my entire childhood getting clowned for being different — other kids always asking if we ate dogs for dinner, my friends never wanting to come over to my house because the way our food smelled, always having to translate what my dad was saying to my friends because he spoke in a heavy accent.
I think my way of coping with this in junior high was to become the absolute weirdest girl in my class; I dressed in way out there clothes, listened to music nobody had ever heard of, and read books and basically educated myself about issues we weren’t learning about in school that nobody in my class gave a shit about. It was sort of an ass backwards way of never letting myself get hurt by other people’s comments, because I turned being different into a lifestyle and a personal choice rather than a disadvantage. All of that benefitted me in other ways too — I aced all my ethnic studies, gender studies, and political science classes in college, and even though my wanting to be different came off a little contrived back in high school, it taught me how to just be myself as an adult. I am who I am and I’m proud of it.
Anyway, that’s all sidebar. Even though we’re not specifically an Asian organization, tonight we were able to attend an event to reach out to the Asian American community, which is much more than I can say for my past experiences in publishing. Everybody seemed to be feeling what we were about, and the coolest thing was that I got to meet a lot of other young, creative Asian American women in the same position as me. And I very well could have (should have?) met my future husband there — the mixer was full of Asian hot boys in suits and ties. It was a beautiful thing.
Even though being in this industry requires the ability to weather a lot of shitstorms, this is the kind of thing that makes it all fun and worth it to me.
