And on that day, I learned to shout.

tl;dr-

• One major challenge for many Asian-Americans advancing in their careers with a goal towards leadership is how to effectively use their voice to demonstrate leadership skills and achieve recognition
• Using your voice extends beyond self advocacy and into being thoughtful on which opportunities you try and take on
• Challenge yourself to take career risks - high visibility opportunities that will earn you more recognition - as stepping stones to building your professional brand and reputation
• Build relationships thoughtfully, as they are often the gateway to obtaining these opportunities - and break through relationship gatekeepers that stand in your way (as best you can)
• Be true to yourself; be aware of what steps in your career brought you the most joy, and what steps brought you the most frustration (and why)

To those of you who don't know, this quote - 'And on that day, I learned to shout.' - comes from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, which describes the intertwined stories between four Asian and Asian-American mother-daughter pairs. This particular line is a pivotal moment in which, having watched her mother driven to suicide through a bloodless death-by-a-thousand-cuts, one of the characters finds it deep within herself to find her voice & assert her will. The moment is made all the more dramatic by the setting of premodern China, where massive gender inequality was the norm and mostly everyone feared the consequences of 'shouting.'

My mother repeatedly emphasized to me that same fear when I was a child. Keep a low profile and don't draw attention to yourself, she reminded me. The pragmatic reality my mother recognized was that we, as poor immigrants (not the rich Crazy Rich Asians kind), simply did not have the resources of bounce back if anything happened. If my mother was let go, if we made an honest mistake on a tax form & draw the attention from the IRS, if we were seen as 'the other' - if anything happened, we wouldn't have survived. So, my mother taught me throughout my childhood to keep my head down. That silence is safety.

This fearful silence I refer to is for me - and for many of my fellow millennial Asian-Americans - a deep part of who we are. It drives the unconscious projection of a charicature of ourselves we believe will be more acceptable to others. It is why so many of us rejected learning our mother tongues, only to regret it later in life. It is why one of our greatest professional challenges will always be finding the balance between being too quiet and being too loud.

Since 2017, I've found myself wrestling more and more with the relationship between my racial identity and my career. I won't lie - I'm incredibly underwhelmed with where I am currently in my career relative to where I could be. That mixture of frustration, anger, and shame has driven me to continually challenge my understanding of myself and the world around me - and at the end of one of those paths lies the 'fearful silence' deep in my psyche. While there are many externalities I can also point to, what I can control is recognizing my inability to use my own voice to shout - and to do something about it.

Beyond absorbing other people's perspectives on the actual 'act' of using your voice (check out this fantastic essay written by Dave Lu and this amazing book by Jessica Chen for some great resources), I've been meditating on how my fearful silence has influenced the very roles I seek out to apply for. Over these past fifteen plus years, I've built my professional reputation on being a fantastic support character, but never the main attraction. Strategic consulting, competitive intelligence, analytics & forecasting - I've always executed on these roles with an eye to supporting others in making better decisions. Additionally, I've always leveraged these roles to aid the enterprise in avoiding future problems through insight - which never truly gets the same recognition as creating a solution to an existing problem (if that). Perhaps I've always operated in this way due to that fearful silence - because the one benefit of support functions vs. execution functions, if things go wrong, you have some amount of protection from blame. Yet, despite my success, I have found myself staring at the elephant in the room - were these choices truly driven by my enjoyment of these roles, or by my fearful silence?

The answer became extraordinarily clear to me when I meditated on which role I enjoyed the most throughout my career. For a few brief months in 2022, I was Director of Corporate Strategy and Operations for a small, clinical-stage biotechnology venture. For all of the challenges I faced from that somewhat emotionally intense war story, one of the things I still remember is how it felt being in the middle of it all. I loved building relationships with a coalition of amazing VP- and Director-level colleagues. I loved discussing on how to make our company better. I loved learning more about how different parts of the company operated. I love seeing the big picture. Most of all, I loved the professional accountability and visibility - that through these interactions, through open mindmelding thought partnerships, I felt as though I was making decisions with people, not simply an input. It was the first time I shouted and I loved it (and miss it greatly).

It is always bittersweet for me to look back at my choices in this way - but instead, I would like to close this essay with a simple hope.

Sometime in 2030 when I revisit this piece of writing, I hope it will be with a smile, knowing that I've made progress to achieving a career that I can be overwhelmingly happy with. Time to get to work.

Talk soon.

-WY