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Growing up in one of the only non-White, non-native English speaking single-parent homes in a predominately White, middle class suburban neighborhood, I couldn’t afford to devote time to getting to know my family’s history. Sadly, it made it easier for me to outgrow that past and blend in as a means of survival—just as my parents and my parents’ parents had to.

My family is from a small rural village in Vietnam (Binh Dinh, Nghia Binh) where both of my parents were seen and treated as outsiders because of their darker skin tone, curly, nappy hair, and children of mixed races. Their only focus in Vietnam was to survive while not being noticed. Living through the social shaming within their village, then emigrating to America as refugees because of the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1988/American Homecoming Act of 1988, they continued to receive strong messaging from others around them that they were not good enough and did not belong. Needing to shed their culture and identity was essential, yet again, to their survival.

Knowing that my parents needed to continually reject and suppress their own multicultural identities, not only to be accepted but to survive, I begin to understand where some of the unspoken expectations and rules to silence my voice for my fellow White colleagues and to blend in comes from. For as long as I can recall, leaning into what made me different wasn’t something I had permission to do unless it came with the qualifier of “exotic” or “beautiful.” The examples that I had growing up of having to reject one’s multicultural identities conflated with the stereotypes of how Asian folks behaved and carried themselves in public— “model minority,” meek and mild-mannered—laid the foundation for how I was to express myself.

My initial efforts to step into spaces that would begin my journey in finding my multicultural identity left me in a very familiar place of sitting back and listening as I anxiously stayed in my head asking the questions of “would my stories and experiences fit in?” and “are they the right kind of racialized traumas as my fellow BIPOC colleagues?”