EPISODE 31: THERE’S NO SHAME IN BEING DIFFERENT
SHOW NOTES
Asian Americans grapple with a lot of guilt and shame. During this “Asian American month” where we’re highlighting underrepresented voices, let’s explore guilt and shame as it pertain to two key topics: 1) money, and 2) children with special needs. In Western, specifically American, culture, we’re taught to highlight our talents, to stand out, to speak up. In Asian cultures (specifically in my Chinese/Taiwanese home), we were taught to think about the greater good, to defer to elders, to be quiet and rarely seen.
What happens then when your immigrant parents are constantly struggling with debt, talking about it at home yet not actively seeking help because that would go against saving face? Or, what happens if you become pregnant with a special needs child, but your traditional Asian family believes that bringing her into the world would be a sacrifice against the greater good? Then, what do you do?
We’ll unpack those two topics this week. For today, listen to my experiences with special needs populations and what I’m aiming to teach my child about people with different backgrounds, needs, and abilities.
We also cover:
The movies Forrest Gump, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Rain Man, I Am Sam
San Diego’s TERI organization
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast. I'm your host, Judy Tsuei and together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans, especially breaking through any taboo topics. Like may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today.
So if you listen to the podcast episode where I interviewed therapist Sharon Kwan, she talks about how shame and guilt are the most predominant emotions for Asian Americans in the clients that she works with. And shame is such a big part, obviously of just culture and humanity in general, just look at how popular Bernay Brown's talks are.
But in this week's episode, we're going to be talking about it in a couple of different facets. So one of them is going to be money, and this is going to be a topic that I plan to cover in a lot of future episodes. I think that for me, especially, and you know, part of this podcast, I think, and in writing my memoir, as my book coach has told me is a lot of just personal healing.
It's unpacking a lot of things, and I'm hoping that in my journey of doing that, it hopefully also helps you. But coming from an immigrant family where my parents were constantly in, if not tens of thousands of dollars of debt, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he created this intense scarcity mindset within me.
And also a lot of fear, there was just never this feeling of safety and security. The baseline feeling. And then because of their financial troubles, it exacerbated their problems in the marriage. And, you know, for us as a family. So all of those things played together to create a very unsafe environment growing up.
And then that shame just continued to carry through different elements of my life, where even though I had promised myself, I would never get in debt and I would never, you know, make the same mistakes that I saw my parents make. So then I went out and made. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I did the whole thing, but then as I started to really need to pursue my own healing, I basically took year-long sabbaticals from work to dive into things, be to go pursue the things that actually genuinely made me happy, which included becoming a yoga teacher, becoming a Reiki practitioner.
So my income levels fluctuated tremendously. And I was lucky that I had worked so much that I'd saved enough money that over the next, you know, 10 years of my life until I became pregnant. That I had a good nest egg to sustain me and would continue to take other projects here and there. But when I became married through all of the conditioning that I had had, and the things that I personally believed, whether I picked it up from culture, just inwardly.
I did everything that I could to make my marriage work. And then I found myself in a very similar predicament to what my parents had gone through. So perhaps it was a circular learning lesson for me to have a bunch of compassion and empathy for what my parents had gone through and trying to raise four children and, you know, survive and do the best that they could.
But it was also an opportunity for me to really start to master my money and my relationship with my money and just abundance and what the values around money mean. And I'm still unraveling that and learning as we go. But this upcoming week on Wednesday, I'll be interviewing Anna Yen Kim, and she's a financial expert and entrepreneur and investor, and she also has a daughter with special needs.
So you'll hear in our interview on Wednesday. Stay how that shame can come through in different ways and how to unpack it and different ways to heal, especially coming from a very collectivist culture that has strong beliefs in doing the greater good. And Anna, Anna you'll hear on Wednesday have a very unique connection in how we met when we were both living in Taiwan.
And I feel that we both helped each other through very pivotal times in our lives. But for today's essay, I'm going to explore the story of different experiences that I've had with people with special needs. Um, how I have a deep affinity for this population and just kind of some of the experiences of what I've learned.
So I hope you enjoy today's essay. If there's a special person in the movie, Cindy said to our group of friends, Judy is going to watch it. There were two other Chinese American families that I grew up with. We'd spend holidays together, take road trips together. And it was the only way that my parents felt comfortable with my sister and I having sleepovers, Cindy and Wendy were my age and my younger sister's age.
The other family had two sons, Charlie and Paul, who are also our age. It was only in our family that we had two extra ad-ons my brothers, Matthew and Jonathan, all of these dads were in some sort of construction business. So whenever our families got together, these men had plenty to talk about because the rest of the time they were going to be super reserved.
If we ever went out to dinner as a family, just our immediate family, my father would be sure to have the Chinese newspaper there. And while we were all eating, he'd just be reading the newspaper in the restaurant. Having these two other families was the closest that I ever felt to having some sort of normalized American family experience, where we get together for special occasions and celebrate holidays together.
And we'd have that kind of familiar closeness that seemed to come so easily for my white counterpart friends. These kids who I'd grown up with since the fourth grade knew that I was the bleeding heart in the bunch. I loved the movie, Forrest Gump. I loved What's eating Gilbert grape. I loved Rain Man. I even loved that terrible Sean Penn movie.
I Am Sam later when I became a yoga teacher in my early thirties, I started the soul of yoga is karma yoga program. As part of helping our teachers in training, get their required teaching hours. They can now offer their time to teach classes to populations in need. I reached out to hospice facilities, to homeless and domestic abuse shelters to special needs facilities.
My friend Lindsay would end up going to work with patients and caregivers in hospice. My friend, Jen wife would end up teaching the adult male population of a special needs facility in San Diego called TERI. These men would show up at the studio guarded. They'd have differing physical speech and mental abilities.
Their support staff would stay in the room. As the teacher gently showed them a series of yoga asanas. By the end of the class, the men would have softened. They would have become more open to touch. If the instructor asked to do a physical adjustment, Once the director of the organization told me that when their men were bused back to their facility, he'd witnessed that in the midst of peak tensions and frustrations, sometimes these men would catch themselves and tell themselves to do their yoga breath.
One of these men loved skateboarding. They had no idea that their regular teacher was married to the first skateboarder ever to appear on the cover of ESPN magazine. Jen told me that she asked her husband to surprise them in class one day when she was teaching. This story, hearing how much Jen loved teaching these men.
This almost made me cry and I rarely cry for anything after I graduated from college because I was a first-generation Chinese American student. I didn't know what studying abroad was. Everything in my life seemed to be figured out in hindsight, as I had to navigate the world without positive adult influences guiding me along.
So when I graduated and realized that all of my other friends had taken time to go study abroad in Amsterdam, France, England, I wanted to take that time to, I had begun working full-time at a high-tech ad agency in San Jose. And after about a year, I asked to take a sabbatical. They happily agreed as long as I would come back.
And I realized now how luxurious it was to be able to have a full-time salary, to be able to take a break. And to know that I had a job to come back to. I spent two months backpacking through England, France, Switzerland, Prague, Rome, Germany, Italy, and more. I experimented with breaking up with my boyfriend back home.
I crushed hard on my friend, Richard, who was volunteering with me at skylarks in Nottingham England. A vacation home for individuals with special needs. Richard was Vietnamese American. This was the first time that he had traveled outside of the U S and he was cute. He was a few years older than me. My sister's age, we're on this international flight together.
He, with his best friend Tam and all of us meeting another American girl, Bianca, we were all in the same program. Getting ready to volunteer with skylarks. When we arrived, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into the volunteer program. We signed up with, turned out to be a bit of a sham, taking our money to place us in a program that we would discover would have been free.
If we had simply bought the plane ticket to go over to India. And every week at skylarks, we were assigned a guest and we, you are responsible for them from the second they woke up to the minute they went to bed because they were on vacation. Sometimes they didn't go to bed until 2:00 AM, and then we'd have to wake up at 6:00 AM the next day.
Richard Tim Bianca. And I had absolutely no training. The other volunteers at Skylarks were local nurses from Nottingham hospitals. They were trying to become professionals. We were trying to explore the world. Some of the guests were in wheelchairs. Some of them had neurological conditions. All of them had special needs.
We would never have been allowed to do the things that we had to do for them in the states, without signing all sorts of clearances and legal releases. Every morning, we got up, went to our guests room, help them get dressed. We brought them to the dining room. We got them their food and help feed them. We took them to the bathroom.
We took them on day trips, walked around with them, help them buy what they wanted or rolled cigarettes from scratch in the evenings. There was a bar on the premises. So we drank with them. We laughed, we listened to music. We bathed them. We did whatever it is that they needed for the six days that they were there.
And then we had Sundays off during one of those weeks, I was assigned a guest who also happened to be named Richard. He had later stage multiple sclerosis. When I sat next to him, one of his legs would shake uncontrollably. I learned that if I gently placed my hand on his knee, it would stop. I loved his energy.
He was probably in his mid forties, closely shaved head, thin frame. He was married. He was a father. He told me I wanted my wife and daughter to go on a trip without worrying about me. So I asked them to send me here so they could go on vacation. The first morning I went to greet him after his first night's day, he told me I woke up in the middle of the night and realized she's a girl.
He was concerned about my helping to bathe him and seeing him naked. He thought it would make me uncomfortable. I'm okay with it. If you are. I told him I was 21. Thankfully there was a large Scottish man who was generally the helper of the facility and he had a broke so thick for the life of me. I could not understand him.
I called him that morning to help me lift Richard out of the bed because I wasn't strong enough to do it alone. So we both helped him move with a pull-up bar in the shower. As I soaped his body and helped him get ready for the day. All three of us worked together to help Richard shower with ease and grace and dignity.
I learned how to roll paper cigarettes for Richard. He showed me how with this little tin device and I got really good at it. I learned what his favorite beer was I'm and to go to the bar and order it for him. I took him for walks around the beautiful neighborhood in Nottingham with its lush, greenery and horses in the pasture.
This place that Robin hood was famed for. On the last day of Richard stay, I gave him my address and asked him to keep in touch. He did, by the time that I returned back to the states, he would write me in a shaky hand with letters filled with sentences that I could barely read. I wrote back to him each time.
Then one day, one of the letters got sent back to me, addressee, unknown. I was heartbroken. I wondered if he had died. My friend, Richard had to also say goodbye to his guests as well. A brown haired, sweet man with round glasses in a wheelchair. I still have a photo of the two of them together on that last day.
I remember that Richard cried. This is how close we got to these guests. Each of them with the biggest hearts we'd ever encountered, despite their challenges or whatever life had dealt to them, they were filled with such a welcoming love. I have always had a soft spot for people with special needs. I feel like there is an innocence untouched by our world within them.
I feel like sometimes they're the underdog and I know what that feels like to be misunderstood, to not be able to clearly convey what it is that you need or to not have all of your needs easily met. I feel like these individuals know something more of a truth about life than we will ever have the privilege to know.
I feel like when we allow ourselves to be around people with differences, We learned to speak about hard things. We learned to understand that we don't all have to be perfect to be loved the way that I had learned growing up in my household, my traditional Chinese household. And that told me that I had to get a pluses to be accepted because perfect.
Honestly, doesn't exist anyway. Sometimes my daughter and I will see a homeless person when we're driving. And she asked me to roll down the window to offer them food. I've learned to keep snacks in my glove compartment, just in case she's asked if we could pack brown bag lunches and we've driven around our neighborhood in San Diego, giving them away once outside of a popular doughnut shop in Oceanside, there was a homeless person who also seemed to be suffering from mental illness.
When my daughter asked, we talked about why he might be behaving the way that he was. She wanted to give him some money. I said that she could try if she wanted, but that sometimes people don't want to receive that kind of help. And that's okay. She walked over to him, offered him the change in her coin, pouch.
He held out his hand, took the money, then shook his head. No, and give the money back to her. She came back to me. We talked about it some more and I suggested that if she wanted, she could simply leave the change nearby because maybe he would change his mind or maybe someone else would need it to. I don't know how to approach these harder topics about people with differences, people going through hard times.
And sometimes I really struggle with the words, but I do my best to approach it in ways that aren't shameful. The more that I can have the words, the more than I can teach my daughter how to have the words. And hopefully we can all start having conversations that are much more honest and authentic. We don't ever fully know someone else's story.
And I know there's a saying that if you did, you would be so much more compassionate and filled with so much less judgment because the truth is that we are all vulnerable in some way. That's what makes us human in this week's episode. As we interview Anna Yan, Kim, I hope that you will walk away with a different understanding of what it's like to have to make hard decisions when there are outside voices, around you telling you a different belief, and then what it's like to have a child with special needs.
I'll tell you in advance that this is a special episode for me because Anna was there for me at the lowest point of my marriage. When we had finally done excited to separate and get divorced. And I was also there for her when she had to go through some really difficult decisions for her second pregnancy.
I will be the first to acknowledge that I don't have all the answers and that I am a human being, trying to figure everything else. So just the same as you are. So I hope that throughout the journey, if you've been listening to this podcast, it's really helped to open up your eyes, give you some words to have conversations that you may not normally have had and to reflect on ways that you can also heal.
Because I believe that when we all heal ourselves, We genuinely do help heal the world and that hurt people, hurt people so we can stop that cycle from happening. If this episode speaks to you, please do go rate and review the podcast on iTunes or wherever it is that you're listening. It truly does help other people find it.
And my goal is that we will all feel less alone in this world. If we just can see more of that shared humanity. And if there are any topics or conversations that you'd like to hear more of, please do email me at hello at fuck saving face. That's fuck saving face without the you. All of your feedback means so much to me.
And I'm really grateful for all of the thoughts and the sharing that so many of you have opened up to with me about, so thank you for that. And I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday.
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