So, Now What?

Straddling Cultures, Finding Self

• angela tam • Episode 2

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In this episode, we explore the topic of straddling multiple cultures and multiple sets of expectations. I grew up with my family's ancestral culture, which is a blend of Chinese/Vietnamese values, which is mostly oriented around safety, security and stability (past, present and future). In addition, I've learned to straddle western values of "do what you want", "be creative", "follow your dreams." I've learned to show up with different versions of myself that would maximize a sense of acceptance and belonging with these different groups. 

The problem is that sometimes we don't realize that the values, beliefs, behaviors that we internalize and adopted may or may not be true to our authentic heartfelt values. We are so good with putting on so many masks to impress others, that we forget that we even have any masks on. 

This podcast is for those who can identify with this and want to answer the questions: "Who am I? What do I want? What is really true to me and what have I unknowingly adopted that I want to shed and release?"

If you didn't get a chance to figure out what you truly value and have not been granted the permission to orient your lives around you, consider this to be your permission slip to BE you and DO you. 

Come follow me on instagram @heyangelatam and my newsletter here. Looking forward to adventuring with you! 

Speaker 1:

Hey, welcome back to the podcast. So now what? I am your host, angela Tam, and I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you're here with me to hear more about my stories, my perspectives. I feel really honored that you would even tune into this podcast and I would love to hear more from you. I have a text link where you could send me your feedback and thoughts about my podcast in the show notes, so feel free to click away. In this episode, I'd love to share a little bit about who I am, where I come from, what I do and what brings me to this podcast.

Speaker 1:

My name is Angela. As y'all know, I identify as an early millennial, meaning I was born in the early 1980s. So technically I'm a millennial, but I also feel really identified with Gen X as well. I'm in my early 40s. I have three kids. They're 11, 8, and 3. And I've been married to my partner for almost 17 or 18 years now I've lost count. We're homeschooling. Our kids actually quit his job in order to be the primary parent while I am working full-time, and that's really worked out for us and our kids. Our kids are really enjoying the freedom that comes with their self-directed education.

Speaker 1:

For me, I'm really enjoying really developing out my private practice as a mental health therapist, which I've been practicing for almost 13 years. Since 2013, I started and I work primarily with Asian American therapists who are just opening their private practice, as well as Asian American therapy seekers, both individuals and couples, and individuals are the bread and butter of my work. I started working with individuals, mostly young professionals into their 30s and 40s, but I love working with couples and working through building their relational skills, and something about my immigration story is that my they came here as boat people and plane people. My mom flew here on the plane and my dad was a boat person, and they're both naturalized citizens, which is a huge part of what's unspoken in our family their migration story. I had to really sit them down, sit my mom down and ask her okay, so what is really your story behind, how you came here? And she did not tell me this until I was in high school. I had to like really pull it out of her, and my dad still has not told me his migration story, so I don't know a lot about it, but I heard bits and pieces how he came to the US via Malaysia, via Southeast Asia and then through California, I think, as one of the refugee camps, and then eventually ended up in New York City where the plan was for my whole family to be reunited. My mom has three sisters total including her. My dad has 10 brothers and sisters and they eventually took about 20 years to be reunited and so they settled into New York City.

Speaker 1:

I grew up in New York City and something that I really struggled with growing up was straddling multiple cultures and multiple expectations behind those cultures. My mom had her expectations. My dad had his expectations of what it meant to be a person who would carry out the legacy of our family, who would really live it up to their expectations of being a skilled worker who earned a good amount of money and was very educated and could follow instructions, be obedient to elders and really honor our elders, which meant listening and obeying. And I remember not really talking about sexual identity or my own values and thinking that I had to really go and do that on my own. So I remember late nights on Instant Messenger at that time when I was growing up, was called Aim and I would just have all these little chats with my friend and about our crushes and about what we were doing on the weekends and who we liked and who we were dating and flirting with boys. I just remember that as something that I would do on my own and not with my parents, and then doing that in secret, while really continuing to have some performance management related things with my parents, making sure I was still on their good side, and then going to school and then having a set of expectations that came with being a good student in school and really trying hard to have a sense of acceptance and belonging with my teachers and with my classmates, and that was something that I remember straddling and struggling through.

Speaker 1:

For me, this podcast is really important because I think something that me and my peers which let me know if this is the case for you is we didn't get a chance to really figure out our values. We didn't get a chance to figure out our preferences. We didn't get a chance to figure out our hopes, our desires, our fears. We just were really doing a lot of management of impressions impression management with other people and really figuring out how we could not get on our teacher's bad side or our parents' bad sides folks who are, like me, straddling multiple cultures and, as Shonda Rhimes points first only in different people the first in their families to break some barriers, the only people of color in their social circles or their workplaces. And people who are doing things different, people who are like trying to break cycles in their family and make different patterns or really integrate their own values and their own ways of relating to themselves and to others.

Speaker 1:

This is a podcast for y'all who are may not have known that y'all have been doing performance management or impression management, but really want to start orienting your lives to your own values and to really just curate what it means, to define your own way of living out what success means to you, instead of going by what others want to mold you by. And for me it is so important, I think, to share that struggle of reorienting our North Stars from what other people want us to be to really being curious about what we want. And so this is for all of the folks out there who didn't even know that their North Star was oriented towards what other people wanted and now want to start to shift to really living out our own values and what is important to us, even if it rubs other people the wrong way and that's so tricky right, because we spent our lives really trying hard not to ruffle any feathers, really trying hard to make sure everyone is happy at the expense of ourselves and really sometimes numbing our own connection to ourselves. And so, at the end of the day, I want to invite you to ask yourselves what do I want, what matters most to me, and what standards or whose standards have I been living by that I thought were my own, but now I'm questioning is it my own own? And so this podcast is for you. If you grew up in a value system that valued traditional success and binary thinking and like non-hesitant obedience and really wanting to shift that to taking a pause and following your own compass, your own desires, and really questioning everything about what you know to be reality, which means we do question okay, are my values or what I've conditioned to believe is important to me?

Speaker 1:

For me, I became a mental health professional in my late 20s, early 30s. I went to grad school and then I started my internships, practicums and then my own private practice, and at the same time I birthed my firstborn, and so I noticed, as I was birthing my private practice and birthing my first child, that there was a huge lack of representation in the parenting world and a huge lack of representation in the counseling world. It wasn't until I, in the recent years, started noticing more Asian, american voices, pan-asian voices, that could speak to this topic of straddling multiple cultures, straddling multiple sets of expectations and going to school in a very Eurocentric environment, reading very Eurocentric books, being taught by white professors, as some Asian and Black professors I had. Here and there, I've learned that I really need to customize this journey on my own because there isn't that customization done for me where I could really hear my stories, represented, hear. People like me who are straddling multiple cultures really share about their life experiences. So I'm hoping that through this podcast that I could shed light on my experiences, that through this podcast that could shed light on my experiences, knowing that they are my own and they don't represent everyone that considers themselves Asian. But I hope that it could cause you to feel like you are not alone in this journey of straddling multiple expectations that comes from so many different directions and that you have me to do that with and hopefully you'll discover that you have so much more community than me.

Speaker 1:

Something else that I will talk about my podcast is how I am parenting my children and how it wildly disappoints my parents and their styles or, more specifically, my mom and my mother-in-law, and how I'm really working through holding capacity for my style, my values, but also really tolerating, holding the tolerance for others who are very disappointed or seemingly disappointed in the way I parent, and that's something that I also want to be transparent about. Like, I'm working through a lot of these things in real time. And'm working through a lot of these things in real time and I'll process a lot of these things in real time with you as I'm learning and growing. Another theme that I'll cover is that I notice that in a lot of our experiences as pan-Asian folks or folks of the Asian diaspora, the impact of our parents and how they parented us will be different. Like my, we are not a monolith. Everyone has a different story about how they are parented, and I will share a little bit about the impact of the way that I've been parented and how it shows up in my daily life and this is something that I work through with my clients all the time is, family of origin that we were born into is not something that we have chosen.

Speaker 1:

We don't choose who we are born into. But we do choose. We can choose how we respond to them as adults and what we do with what we've been given as adults, as adults, and what we do with what we've been given as adults. So I have been dealt a different hand of cards than others and I'm really trying right now to be grateful for my family and to really see how they've given me so many gifts, as well as what seems like burdens, and for a long period of time I really only focused on those burdens, but I am starting to see that they've given me so many gifts and I'll share some of that with you and also about the intergenerational negative impacts that they've had and how it might show up in my workplace fear of our lives and the relationships that are in.

Speaker 1:

It can be an opportunity to learn about our growth areas and by that, when I notice that somebody is bringing up some feelings inside of me some activation, some annoyance, some frustration, some impatience excavation, some annoyance, some frustration, some impatience I really see that as an opportunity to say, hey, what is going on inside of me that rubs me the wrong way so much?

Speaker 1:

And outside of thinking about how this person is so annoying or what this person is doing is so fucked up.

Speaker 1:

I'm really going to take an opportunity to invite both of us, me included, to take a look at it as a growing opportunity and more information that shows us areas that we need to, that I need to grow in and learn from, and so I will be bringing that into and seeing every relationship as a portal for healing that sheds light on what is unresolved in my life.

Speaker 1:

So that is something I find really important and I will be covering. Also Hope that this podcast allows you to show up for yourself with a little bit more compassion, a little bit more gentleness for yourself and others compassion, a little bit more gentleness for yourself and others and I hope that it will encourage you to have a sense of familiarity and awareness of your own stories and perhaps feel more ownership over your biggest fan, and I am rooting for you and I'm also on this journey with you as someone who's also growing in their self-discovery and in their love for myself and for others. I look forward to seeing you soon in our next podcast and please stay tuned. Please rate and subscribe this podcast so that more people can have access to it, and I'll see you next week. Bye.