East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

By Erin Yoshimura

As I recently prepared to move to the East Coast, I sifted and sorted through piles of old papers eventually coming across a box filled with various employment papers and annual performance reviews. As I read through them, frustrating memories of my struggles in the corporate world —where I often felt misunderstood and out of place  — flooded back, and I began to wonder how much my ethnicity factored into how I was measured and evaluated as an employee.

According to Derald Wing Sue, professor of psychology and education at Columbia University and author of “Overcoming Our Racism,” Asian American stereotypes include: passive, lacks leadership skills, inarticulate, studious, quiet and hardworking. Women are stereotyped as domestic and exotic, men as unassertive and not masculine, good in science and technology, disloyal and sneaky.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the time when a white male manager said, “Erin, you’re just not the good little Japanese girl I thought you were.”

He was right.

I’m exuberant, passionate, loud, outspoken at times and I’m not afraid to show anger.

So, if I don’t fit the expected stereotypical behavior, does that make me bad and/or wrong?

An excerpt from one performance review reads, “Erin is sensitive to sarcasm and passivity, and I am sometimes surprised at the degree of anger and concern that she experiences. I’ve witnessed events that have really bothered her, but which I found to be mildly annoying at most.”

This manager was a white female, so naturally, she wouldn’t be privy to the experience of an Asian American female and how vastly different her world is from mine. What’s scary is how most managers are not trained to step out of their perspective when determining your performance.

I often left performance review meetings feeling like I was being evaluated against someone that I’m not. I would only get positive feedback on my performance when I bent over backward to conform to the norm.

Back then, I felt frustrated, stuck and pigeonholed when I found myself in these situations. Today, I would react differently.

And knowing what I know today, here are some tips I can offer if you find yourself in a similar situation. Ways to sort out pertinent, useful reviews from feedback that’s based on unconscious stereotypes.

Speak your emotional truth in the moment. Whether it’s out loud or to yourself, the emotion will lose its foothold if you let it out, allowing you to use higher reasoning capabilities. You may value stoicism over emotion, but you can’t hide your emotions because they tend to leak out via facial expressions, vocal intonations and body language. And when there’s a mismatch between verbal and non-verbal communication, it leads to mistrust.

It may not always be a good time to express that you’re angry, but try to use less emotionally charged words like uncomfortable, perplexed, dismayed, heated…whatever you’re comfortable with.

I was on a conference call with three women and one man where the man said something that triggered me. I stated in an even tone (OK, maybe a little uneven) that I was very angry with what he had said and went on to explain why. I later asked one of the women for feedback, and she said that although it was clear that I was angry, I was firm and clear.

Get feedback from someone you trust and respect. If you can, get feedback on your interactions from someone who has a similar cultural background as well as someone from a different cultural background and gender. This will give you insight into how others view you and where stereotypes abound.

Ask others to repeat back what they heard you say. This will provide input into whether others hear what you’ve said and if you’re understood. I often don’t get heard in meetings unless I’m angry, so one proactive action for me is to ask others if what I said made sense.

Set personal development goals and work on them daily. For instance, become aware of what triggers you and work on ways of diffusing those internal bombs. I have a problem with sarcasm and hostile humor because in reality it’s communicating contempt. The next time my friend sarcastically says, “Hmmph, now that’s interesting,” I’ll ask what she really means.

Call out the elephant in the room and educate whenever possible. When the male manager made the comment about me “not being a good little Japanese girl,” it was a perfect opportunity for me to ask him how he defines a good little Japanese girl and to remind him that I’m not a little girl, but a woman.

Erin Yoshimura is an emotional intelligence trainer and a certified life coach. She is the founder and Chief Empowerment Officer of Empowerful Changes, http://empowerful.com .

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