How Can We Heal The Hurts From The Past?

During the past few months, all of us in America have lived through some unusual and difficult times.

First, there is this COVID-19 that makes us stay home for over two months. Then when we think our cities and states are ready to open up so we can all operate our lives like “normal” again, burning and looting of America start.

Literally within 3.5 months, America as we all know it has become this lawless country without any order or regards for the laws. The conversation in the news back in March, April and May originally is about vaccines and how to defeat the virus now in June has turned into race based, black versus white, to economic based such as haves versus haves not (as in if you have it and I don't have it I will take it away from you and destroy what you have built in your life), justice versus injustice, all lives matter vs black lives matter etc... All the skeletons in the closets start coming out one by one.

For those who had lived through the '60's and 70's, you thought the issues were settled but in reality they haven't. You just swept them under the carpet, hiding them for the past 40-50 years hoping they would go away. Now, they are all coming back to haunt you. Regardless, I believe we shall overcome once again and we shall be able to move forward, this time, stronger and better.

I am a naturalized citizen of this great country. I was born and grew up in a far away place called Saigon, Vietnam. I have never participated in any kind of protests in my life. As a minority in America, I have experienced "some" discrimination during my 3 decades living in this new home. Some is obvious and some is very subtle. The perpetrator(s) vary. If I had to categorize the discrimination based on race then I would have to say this behavior has come from all kinds of color: white, black, brown, yellow (not in any kind of order of severity). You may ask "that's impossible Suzanna. You're an Asian, how can you experience discrimination from another Asian?". The truth is yes, within the "yellow category", there are sub-yellow as in Chinese Asian, Korean Asian, Japanese Asian, Cambodian Asian etc.. And just so you know within the sub yellow Vietnamese Asian category, there is also a sub sub-category AKA Northern Vietnamese vs Southern Vietnamese vs Central Vietnamese.

As a female Asian American who was born into a Southern Vietnamese family, I have faced further discrimination by Vietnamese male counterparts. Now, that'd be "gender" based discrimination. So from my perspective, I have all the reasons to tell the world my life sucks since the day I was born. However, I never for one second wish my life to be any different. I never wish I were born into a white upper class family so my life would only experience the very very best of the world. I believe life in general is designed to help me grow into the best version of myself. As long as I keep that as my goal in life, any kind of discrimination, if any, doesn't dictate the outcome that I want for my life.

I can list a very long list of all the discrimination I have faced since the time I could recognize right from wrong, around 5 years old. I chose not to. I remember one time when I was running after a soccer ball trying to kick it, an older lady in the neighborhood told me "look at you, soccer is for boys, are you a boy or a girl, you go home and learn how to cook". She then picked up the ball and walked away with my ball leaving me standing there extremely confused as a 6 years old. Then one day another lady told me "I want you to stop teaching that black girl how to read. She doesn't deserve it". What had happened was around that time when I was 8 years old, I hung out with a poor African Amerasian in the neighborhood and taught her how to read since she never went to school even though she was much older than me. Amerasians are children of Vietnamese women and their American fathers who came to Vietnam to fight alongside with the South Vietnamese government. These children are discriminated against by "pure" Vietnamese. More specifically black Amerasians experience the most discrimination within the Vietnamese society because of the color of their skin. In Vietnam, light skin is preferred because it indicates you're not in a working class having to work outside in the sun. I still remember her name until this day after nearly 5 decades.

Black Phuong, as she was called, and I would go to a nearby people's grocery trash pile and dig out food for her to eat. At the time, all food was rationed. After decent vegetables were distributed to all the families in the neighborhood, whatever was left went to trash. Most of the time, there's really nothing good left but sometimes we were lucky we could find a carrot with a little edible portion left in the trash. All we did was cut the bad section out and eat the good section. Phuong and I had a lot of fun digging for food like that in that big pile of trash, sometimes as high as to our knees. Some day, we found cabbages. Other days, we found carrots. It was like treasure hunt for us. After the food hunt, I would sit down and teach her the alphabets, and work on her hair picking out lice from her curly hair. I remember asking her "why your hair is so different from mine, it's so short, very fine, and curly, it's very hard for me to catch the lice inside it". At the time, I was too young to even distinguish the fact that she's black and I was pure Asian. I treated her like any other friends in the neighborhood I had. We never talked about race. More specifically we never said "you're black and I'm yellow". It was never in our conversation between us kids. My mom never forbid me from playing with her. No one did except that one woman who I mentioned above.

In my classroom, there was another white Amerasian with white skin and curly blond hair. There was an Indian Vietnamese whose facial features were exactly like that of the Bollywood Indian actresses I saw in Bollywood movies. We girls were so obsessed with her photos she had taken at a photo studio that we all wanted to look like that Indian Vietnamese girl. Overall, we got along fairly well. Again, we never spoke about how different our facial features and skin all looked. We kids just played together and never fought with each other. We had our ups and downs but race never came into the picture as in "she's black, she's white, she's Indian so I ain't play with her."

So needless to say, when I came to America I was quite surprised to find out race was and still is the major thing in America that divides us. I remember when I was in 12th grade and being in this country for about a year without any English I needed to get a summer job to make some money. I saw a job poster at my high school career bulletin so I went to the address listed on the poster. When I walked in, there was a group of African American teenagers probably about my age sitting in the front lobby talking. I tried my very best with my limited English to tell them I needed to apply for the job that had been posted at my school. They all broke out and laughed at me. I waited for about an hour and no one bothered to come out and asked me what I needed or handed me any applications. They all ignored my presence there. So I went home wondering why they had posted a job opening and didn't even bother to give me an application when I showed up and waited for an hour. Again, I never thought race was a factor in that experience as I was still a brand new immigrant not understanding the dynamics of race in America. I thought it was just a very weird experience here in America. I remember making a comparison between the US and Vietnam. In Vietnam at the minimum if they don't want me there they would at least tell me to leave. But in America they don't even bother to tell me to leave, they would just ignore me. They'd just let me sit there waiting. I thought Americans were just rude and had no courtesy at all.

Since my home was quite far from school, every day I had to take a bus to get to a school bus stop before I got transported to school. The bus stop I was at was the last stop before the school bus made its uninterrupted trip to the school. For those of you who have ever taken school bus to school you know what that means. It means by the time I got on the school bus there was no seats left. Again, with limited command of English, I didn't know how to tell some students to scoot over to make room for me. Some students (mostly Cambodians) were nice enough, sometimes, would scoot over to make a little room for me sitting on the edge of the bench designed for 2 people to accommodate 3 people. Most of the time I just stood there looking at these black students until the bus driver yelled at them to make room for me. I didn't understand what he was yelling about but for the rest of my school year I relied on the bus driver's yelling to get my seat on the edge of the bench to get to school. LOL. These black students were not rude or anything. Once I sat down next to them they just did their things like laughing, talking loudly while I just sat there quietly. I didn't really understand what they were talking about. But I never thought that they were talking about me or behind my back. I was never bothered by their loud talking and laughing. Sometimes they would pass stuff back and forth to each other and it landed right on my head. They would say "sorry" or sometimes not say "sorry" at all, and on continued with their passing game until the bus got to its destination. Again, I never for once thought race had anything to do with the way they behaved on the bus.

Now if you talk about living in the inner city, I have lived it. I used to live in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco while going to Galileo High School. I used to walk over needles on Hyde/Geary/O'Farrell my way to catch line 38 Geary going to City College of San Francisco. At night when I got off the bus, I would walk pass women and gay prostitutes standing at the corner making their bucks. The reason why I didn't get home until late at night was because as a brand new college student I didn't have any priority in registering the classes necessary for me to get my AA degree within two years. That just the way it was. So for the first year, my assigned registration number would allow me to take classes at odd hours such as very early in the morning 7AM, then nothing from 9AM until 2 or 4PM in the afternoon. Then I went to classes again from 4 or 5PM until 10PM at night. By the time I got home, it's 11PM at night. In subsequent semesters, my registration number got bumped up so I got better choices of classes. That was my life for 3 years at CCSF until I transferred to San Francisco State University. Again, I never thought the system actually discriminated against new college students making us waste 6 hours or more in between classes. That was just the way it was and I either accepted it or fought it. I chose to accept it, did not bother to fight with the administration about how wrong they were for not treating incoming freshman class the same way as the more senior class. It's not worth my time because frankly I had other more important things to do such as look for a job to help my mom pay rent and put food on the table, learned English so I could speak and write English better, tutored my younger siblings with their homework just to name a few (Our family never got section 8 housing, food stamps, and other government assistance despite being in poverty for many years).

Nowadays I got to work inside music industry working with hip hop/rap genre which is dominated by African Americans. I don't really know how many female Asian Americans out there that are inside this industry and genre. The last music conference I attended was in 2019 being organized by ASCAP. The majority of attendees were Caucasians, African Americans, and Latinos. I was one of the few Asians in that crowd. I didn't mind and care. Now, for the past few decades affirmative action has been implemented in various private and public institutions such as in the workplace, in universities and in various levels of governmental entities. Sometimes it works for Asian Americans and sometimes it doesn't work for us. Take U.C. Berkeley or Harvard as an example. These two institutions have consistently denied college entries to highly qualified Asian candidates so they could make room for less qualified candidates from other races. This fact has been well documented in various news articles and researches so I need not to go into the details. The one industry that many Asian Americans do not see affirmative action being implemented is entertainment and music. Let's be real. Entertainment and music are very subjective, one could argue. One can't force someone to listen to music being done by a particular race. Likewise, one can't really force someone to watch a movie in which only a certain race is being represented, can he? Well, we Asian Americans could argue that within the entertainment and music industry, there has been a systematic injustice and discrimination against Asian Americans and we have been forced for many decades to watch actors and actresses from races that are not of Asian descent. We have no other choices. When it comes to entertainment and music, the big production companies and labels are run and owned by Caucasians and other races, but not Asian Americans; thus, whatever the public likes to watch that would bring in the most money, they will produce. If that doesn't bring in profit, they would find a way to bring in profit by glorifying drugs, sex, blings, blings, violence, which is very evident in hip hop/rap genre etc...Profit motive is what drives the decision who will be casted in a movie or being promoted in music at the long term expense and detriments of their viewers and listeners. We, Asian Americans, can't really force the public to accept Asian American actors or actresses so they can all meet their affirmative action quota, can we? Generally, the fact remains that the majority of mainstream movies and music are being performed by white, black and Latino artists, not Asian American artists. It is the way it is and it will change over time hopefully but right now in 2020 we certainly are not blind to the fact that discrimination is front and center in Hollywood and at all the big Three labels. We, however, don't want to start a fight against Hollywood for systematically discriminating Asian Americans inside the entertainment and music industry. Asian Americans have been wronged for so many years by these powerful white, black, Latino men and women running Hollywood and music industry. We know but we just don't do anything about it to change.

As I have explained above, I believe life obstacles are there to teach me to be resourceful in growing myself to be the best of version of me. If everything comes to me so easily where I can learn and be resourceful? I just do what I love to do, mentoring hip hop/rap, pop artists who share the same vision of a better place for the world through music. I have been turned down by white songwriters, white, black producers who didn't think I had what it takes to be succesful in music. One even turned down my request to write me a recommendation to join the Recording's Academy because she didn't think I could write a song. I didn't mind. I kept on searching for the right mentor and producers to work with. Believe me when I say this, in the world of billions of people somewhere in a little corner of the world, someone will be willing to help you realize your vision but it only happens when you're persistent and keep at it. After 19 months of joining Urban Fu$e, my vision to unite the world (I do mean the world because Urban Fu$e is truly an effort to show the world how artists from 4 different continents can work and collab with one another to create something extraordinary regardless of our different skin colors, languages and cultures) has slowly solidified. The amazing thing is that the entire album #2 entitled DLW 2 was produced, mixed and mastered by someone who didn't speak English well enough yet who could get things done to my liking by just using google translate texting. That is to show the world we need not speak the same language in order to get things done right. All we need is compassion, empathy, and everything falls into its place. While the world out there is looting, burning, fighting over race and argue about our differences, we're Urban Fu$e, white, black, yellow, Latino, in here working together, making something so unique that unites the similarities we all possess. We are a testament to growing into the best version of ourselves by overcoming obstacles despite systematic injustice and discrimination against us and our vision.

In conclusion, we all want to be treated like decent human beings, respect one another, resolve our differences in a civil manner without infringing upon the other person's personal property and family. One would agree that all humans have flaws. No one is perfect. We all have made mistakes in our past, some big, some small. If as a species we continue to dwell on past hurt mistakes, we will never be able to move forward and make progress. History has proven again and again, the way to move forward is not by focusing on our differences but focusing on our similarities, what we have in common and build upon that for a deeper understanding and empathy for one another. Unfortunately, it is very evident that current leadership from all four corners of the USA hasn't seen that as a solution to our very diversed views and life philosophies. Perhaps, once and for all, business leaders should start stepping up and taking a look at your current organization and asking yourself: is my organization a true reflection of the world where race and economic disparities have nothing to do with its goal of helping each and every one within the organization to be the best version of themselves for years to come? Perhaps, it's time for the parents to ask ourselves: am I educating my children to bring the best out of them daily? Perhaps, it's time for public educators to ask yourself: does the current model of education bring the very best out of each and every student in my classroom?

Only when we in our role as a business leader, a mother, a father, a teacher answer that question will we be able to heal the hurts from the past.