I Always Thought Representation Mattered for Other People. Not Me.

There’s a moment most of us have where representation stops being a talking point and starts being personal. Mine happened in a used bookstore. Of all places.

The Model Minority Thing

I didn’t learn the term “model minority” until a few years ago, when a resident at Emory said it to me like it was obvious. I asked what she meant. Once she explained it, it clicked.

Asian folks tend to pass easily. We look different, but we still get let into rooms other minorities often don’t.

I grew up like that. I’m half Filipino, half Caucasian, and honestly, I’d forget I looked different until someone reminded me. “Where are you from?” No, where are you really from? I’d say Alabama. That was always true. It was never the answer they wanted.

The Bookstore

Last weekend I took my daughter Olivia to a bookstore we’d been wanting to check out. She can lose an entire day in a cheesy romance novel, and I respect that completely.

While she checked out, I got to talking with the woman at the register. I told her my problem: I can’t get through a paper book anymore. I fall asleep too fast. I need something to grab me from page one. With vacation coming up, I wanted a real book in my hands, not another audiobook.

She asked if I wanted a recommendation. I said sure.

She told me about a book she’d just read and couldn’t put down. She had no idea I was Filipino when she said it, but the author was Filipino too. She mentioned her partner is Korean, and that it mattered to her to carry books that reflect lives outside the default.

I hadn’t thought about that. Every romance novel I’d ever picked up, and I’d never once noticed who was missing from the page.

There’s something to lived experience. To a story that actually knows you. I think about this every time I recommend Ali Wong’s Dear Girls, which is often. I expected to laugh. I did. But it also gutted me, because half of what she wrote about were things I’d lived and never once connected to being Asian American, until she said it out loud.

By the time the bookstore owner handed me It’s Different This Time, I hadn’t read a single page and I was already sold.

The Moment I Almost Gave My Company Away

Representation has done this to me before.

In 2021, I’d basically stepped back from my company, Lybbie. Post-COVID, I figured my inventor phase was over. Then Emory offered to sponsor me into UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck accelerator. I didn’t even know what an accelerator was. I said yes for the free classes.

I couldn’t move to California. I had a mortgage and what felt like a thousand children. So I joined virtually, with one real goal: find someone else to be CEO so I could go back to doctoring and teaching.

I did not want to run a company.

Then I logged onto a call and looked around. Women. A lot of them. Women who looked like me, in every shade. I hadn’t known that was possible until I was sitting in that room.

One of the program leads asked me what I needed. I told her, plainly: I need a real CEO. Someone with a Rolodex who can raise money. Nobody’s going to trust a doctor, or a woman, to run this.

She stopped me cold. “Who told you that? You believe that?”

I had never once questioned it. Me. A supposedly empowered Asian American Southern woman, and I’d swallowed that belief whole without blinking.

It was the first time anyone had challenged the idea that I, specifically, wasn’t the right person for my own company. And it flipped something. It wasn’t just that I could run it. I was the right person to run it. I knew it better than anyone alive. And I was looking at a room full of proof that people like me did this all the time.

I came back from SkyDeck different. But it took seeing it in someone else first, before I believed it about myself.

What I Wish I’d Known Sooner

• You don’t have to look like everyone else in the room to belong in it.

• Representation isn’t inspiration. It’s permission.

• The belief that you’re not “the type” to lead, invent, or write is rarely yours. It was handed to you, and it can be handed back.

• Being the only one in the room isn’t proof you don’t belong. It’s usually proof the room hasn’t caught up yet.

• Good people avoid rooms that were never built to welcome them. That’s not a them problem. That’s a room problem.

I used to think representation was a nice idea for someone else’s story. Turns out it’s been rewriting mine the whole time. One bookstore. One accelerator cohort. One flyer for a writing retreat, tucked near the register, that I almost didn’t stop to read.