Angela Lin 0:17
Today we are continuing our saga in finding Asians who are doing cool shit. And we have a special guest today Anna, who is one said Asian so I will let Anna introduce herself before we get into the meat of the conversation. And you can enjoy yourself and or if you want to lump in our signature, starter question – “but where you really from?” Feel free.
Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)
Anna 0:48
Yes. So I am Anna and I am Vietnamese American. When I am asked where you really from, I try to do that thing where like I mess with the person. And I’m like, oh, like this state. And then I just get more and more specific. Within like the US until like they get frustrated or whatever. Because we both know what’s happening when they asked that question. And I just keep being mean about it. And so it’s it’s like a game of chicken. But when I’m asked that question, my preferred answer eventually, is my parents are from Vietnam. And I say that because it’s super intentional, as and you know, by both of my parents are US citizens. They have been for decades. I think this year marks the year that my mom has lived in the US as long as she lived in Vietnam. Yeah, right. So yes, they, they are Vietnamese, they were born in Vietnam, I carry that culture. But also, I was born here. And so that like really is what they want to know. So without being disingenuous, saying, my parents are from Vietnam, you know, answers their question while, not feeling like a sellout or whatever.
Jesse Lin 2:22
Yeah, it’s very similar. I do like to make people guess a little bit though, because people who try to guess the race are often very, very wrong. And I just like to play with that a little bit. And then and then I also default generally to like, oh, my parents are from Taiwan.
Anna 2:39
Right. And what’s so interesting is, sometimes you don’t even have to ask them to guess before they tell you what they were guessing anyway. So I’m like, you know, they I’m like, oh, my parents are from Vietnam. And they’re like, oh, okay. Because I was thinking, Okay, I’m, thanks for telling me I really did not care. In recent years, I’ve gotten a lot of Pacific Islander, I get that pretty often. But when you ask like Vietnamese people from Vietnam, I always get either like Korean or Chinese. Yeah, starting, like, in my late 20s, I, like, developed a fuller body gained a lot more weight than you know, I had been the first 25 years of my life. And so that made it so that the difference between what Vietnamese people thought of it a Vietnamese woman looked like and what I like, departed much more. So..
Angela Lin 3:41
I feel like there was a common thread of like, we’re not really fully here, and we’re not fully there, either. Yeah. Cool. Well, okay, so now we know where you’re from, what about so what do you do? Because we want to highlight what cool shit you’re doing.
Anna 3:59
Yeah. So I have to preface this with my views are my own and not representative of a politician or employer past or present, blah, blah, blah. So I work in policy, and that means many different things. At first, that was, like analysis, the spreadsheets, I got into mapping. And before my current position, I worked in the US House of Representatives, actually, for the Congresswoman who represented us when we were students at NYU. So while I was working on the Hill, super excited, you would just be like in the hallways like, oh, there’s John Lewis. And like, there’s like Nancy Pelosi, which is super tight, and you know, these buildings have been here forever and so much happens here. But then about June of last year 2019 right? I started working for the state Democratic Party in my home state. And I am the operations manager here. And it’s kind of one of my dream roles, because I’ve always wanted to do the behind the scenes work the non politics of politics. I am not meant to be a spokeswoman for anyone; nobody wants me like, I will just like, say, terrible things, or, you know, just like, people would just tear me apart, I just have have never had a very good filter, or I’ve never been very diplomatic. That’s a good word for it too right? But I am really like, organized and logic driven, and able to problem solve. And so I apply that to my work. And that is different. Over the course of a year or an election cycle, this time of the year is solely focused on get out the vote efforts. I coordinate a lot with our candidates to make sure they are able to get in front of voters rally the troops. And it’s been super weird. Of course, with a pandemic. In a non pandemic year, we would be going all like across the state and knocking on doors and like hauling microphones and signs and all that type of stuff. But it’s not as sexy this year. It’s like me with my Word documents and highlighting and bolding and stuff like that. Crossing items off my checklist. And I would say the other part of it is the events are big events like when we would do fundraisers. I’m like the linens person or like the programs person making sure catering + security. This year, we had national convention that would have been in Milwaukee, that would have been me, our state convention, that was my role too. And so you know, we had spent over a year getting ready for these events did all of this planning just for like in like, April for us to be like, okay, that’s really nice all of those things that we did, let’s like go back to the drawing board and figure out how we’re going to do this virtually.
Angela Lin 7:25
So it sounds like you do like 30 jobs in one. And like some of those things, I’m like, okay, okay, I can see like Asian parents getting part of what you do have, like, you know, there’s like organization, there’s like problem solving. But politics isn’t like, traditional career path that Asian immigrants, especially immigrant parents, right, who, like come here to start a new life, are imagining that their kids will end up choosing how did your parents feel when you were like, I’m going down this path? And like, how supportive are they of you currently?
Anna 8:06
Yeah, my parents were and are very typical of Asian parents in some ways, but not in others. So my dad is physically and mentally disabled, but like my whole life, and so he doesn’t work. And my mom, she raised us three kids on multiple low paying jobs at any point in time minimum wage worker The only thing she ever wanted from her three kids was for all of us to graduate from college, which we did. So much happiness there. And really, she did not care if we started studied underwater basket weaving, if we like film, or like witchcraft, whatever, she’s like, you’re going to get this degree, because I wasn’t able to go to school at all, she was not able to go to school at all. So she’s like, as long as you’re a good person, and you get this degree. And, you know, she worries about, you know, her kids, whether they’re happy, whether they’re like, able to take care of themselves and like, have resources as long as like, she just doesn’t want us to struggle the way we did growing up. And so, in that way, she’s super supportive. But what makes my parents very characteristically Asian, however, is they have no idea what I do. You know, like, for a long time, many, like at least two years, my dad continued to tell people that I was a teacher, which is fine, you’re just fine. You do that because it’s a very revered occupation. And I’m like, okay, whatever sticks. And now he’s kind of like she works in an office is he tells other Asian people and other Asian were like, okay, okay. Sometimes they say like, you work, they work. She works for the government. But yeah, that’s, that’s the weird part. And what’s really telling and has been, like, monumental in the last few years is my mom has been eligible to vote since like 1988, or whatever. She only voted for the first time in 2018.
Angela Lin 10:24
What?
Anna 10:25
Yeah. Thinking about this very important conversation of like Asians and politics, we know that our politics are so different, like between ethnic groups, but also within ethnic groups, when I was trying to engage with like Vietnamese American voters in actually Orange County…
Angela Lin 10:44
Garden Grove?
Anna 10:47
Yes, don’t even I was I was a worker for the Democratic Party to get out the vote in Orange County specifically, you know, I was trying to learn the vocabulary related to voting Democrat, Republican, candidate. How do you, you say these words in Vietnamese, when the motherland is literally a communist country? They do not vote. How do you say the word ballot? Okay. So that’s, that’s super challenging, too. So my, my parents didn’t have that context growing up. It’s not like they ever went to a polling booth. It’s not like they really like have this belief that my vote will be respected by these government politicians.
Angela Lin 11:30
Wow.
Jesse Lin 11:31
That is like one of the reasons I feel like a lot of people commonly Don’t think about as to why the voter turnout amongst Asians and younger people like, well, let’s just talk about like older generation Asians first, is pretty low, because they just in some countries, like they’re immigrating from places where they’re just not accustomed to it, right. Like, it doesn’t exist. But I’m wondering, as you work through, you know, with the party, like if you’ve noticed any other reasons that might not be so obvious that like, discourage older Asians, or Asian immigrants from turning out and getting to vote?
Anna 12:06
Yeah. So I am a weird person in that I love paperwork, and bureaucracy, like I see it as like, yeah, like, let’s, let’s do this, you think you can keep me away with your forms? Oh, you’ve got another thing coming. I absolutely understand that there are people that feel the absolute opposite that as, as soon as they know that there are forms to be filed things mail or fax, they’re like, that doesn’t exist, I’m not dealing with that. And so I think that that’s part of it. With some older Asian voters of, you know, you have to either like show up at this date and time with these documents. And the chances are, it’s not going to be in a language that’s accessible to you. Like some states are better at this than others. But there are no states that are great at this. So if you have received your voter guide yet, or if you’ve looked at it, like those things are massive, someone that’s in California can be at the polling booth for like, an hour, just voting, voting, voting. So the voter guide is enormous. A candidate however, has to pay extra money like $500 to get that in Spanish should come standard. Yeah. So if you’re just like running for like, city council, or whatever, you got to pay $500 to get it in Spanish, let alone right, Vietnamese, or, like an indigenous language to Central America. That’s not a thing. So if you’re looking at okay, there’s all of this like, tiny little text, and I need to pick one and the only way I can differentiate these is this, like enormous book in boring English. Why I am I even going to…why would I even try? I can’t imagine. So that’s a huge barrier as well. But when I was working for the California Democrats in Orange County, I learned that a big issue that was happening with the Asian community is their ballots were being rejected at a higher rate than other voters, because their signatures didn’t match, like whatever they their signature look like when they got their driver’s license or when they registered, right. So what happens when when that bounces back is someone’s like, gonna look at it and be like, oh, this doesn’t look like the same signature. They’ll get a letter in the mail. And just like, imagine, like your grandma or your aunt or whatever, they get this letter in the mail and it’s like, like something about voting ballot, blah, blah, blah, like and they’re like what? you’re not going to go through that slash, they may or may not understand what that says. Yeah, yeah. So just so many hoops to jump through and not at all an accommodating system.
Angela Lin 15:13
Radical thought that that’s not that radical. I’m sure everyone has thought this before. But like, given all the things that are broken in the way that our current voting system is set up, like what is the biggest roadblock do you think for like, making it honestly just easier for everyone to vote in terms of like digitizing the vote, like that would make translation so much easier that would make like – well, I guess there’s access issues if people don’t have in, you know, Internet access, but like, for a large part of the population, at least it would make it so that like, the barrier to entry is lower, so that you don’t have to, like physically go anywhere and like you don’t get this huge packet. Like, what is up? Why are we not like innovating here?
Anna 16:03
Yeah, I mean, really, we aren’t even at the place yet where we need to innovate. We’re at the place where just the foundational low lying fruit we haven’t figured out. Like in the next two weeks I’m gonna tell you now you’re gonna see a lot about ballot drop boxes in the news and because like Texas right now, per county, like a judge ruled you can only have one per county, one dropbox to serve all of Houston and all others cities and towns in whatever county. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? So like low lying fruit is? Get these dropboxes is out there, like so. If someone doesn’t have money for a stamp, you know, you can drop it in a dropbox. But also beyond that, like, you should be able to mail this without postage, which is just like some states they only have been introducing that in recent elections. Right?
Angela Lin 17:05
Oh, my God, I did not know that.
Jesse Lin 17:07
Does the ballot in California not require postage.
Angela Lin 17:09
No, it says no postage, if mailed in the US.
Jesse Lin 17:12
I had to pay for a stamp
Angela Lin 17:13
New York?!
Jesse Lin 17:15
It didn’t say it was free. Like usually it’ll say exactly what you said. Right? It didn’t say that on my thing. So I was like, I will put a stamp on it just to be safe.
Anna 17:24
It’s I only read this last night, it’s still federal law that it has to make it to like where it’s going to be counted. But in that case, the county elections office has to pay for it, which is, you know, support the USPS. But like, you know, just that’s another barrier, right? That if I didn’t tell Jesse that just now and you know, he’s like, I don’t have a stamp. Because really, I know so many young people that don’t have stamps on them ever..
Who carries stamps, like you have to go out of your way.
Jesse Lin 17:53
Girl what is a stamp. Someone’s gonna be asking that sooner or later.
Anna 17:58
Yep. So it’s like those, like automatic voter registration would be another one. Some states have it so that, like, when you come of age, or when you take your driver’s test, or you get your license, boom, you’re automatically registered. But also, you know, if you’re going to have like, a voting system, where it’s like not absentee, and you have to go to a polling place, federal holiday, you know. Otherwise, like, you have to take time off of work or whatever, or, and if you do take time off of work, it might be unpaid. Voter id that’s like, trash. You know. And again, picking on Texas, like a, you know, they’re not even like the worst, there are states that are worse than Texas. But you can register to vote with your like, gun toting license or whatever. But you cannot register to vote with your college ID last I heard, so that type of stuff, like people in the black community are less likely to have formal identification than like other racial groups. And so if you just don’t have like a driver’s license, or whatever, I guess I don’t get to register to vote. And so there’s just also so many other attacks on voting as well. And so that’s a whole nother issue that’s more and more salient with each passing day, unfortunately.
Jesse Lin 19:30
Yeah, I honestly never thought about the ID thing until like, a couple years ago, when NYC started releasing the city ID and one of my friends got it and I was like, why did you get this? She was like, I don’t have a driver’s license. I never learned how to drive. So like, I didn’t have a license to transfer to New York. So I basically have no like, Id that I can carry on me at all times. So she got it, but it was like I – it’s something I think as you mentioned, that’s like so foundational that like nobody is really thinking about like In terms of getting people access.
Angela Lin 20:01
I’ve literally never thought about it till just now.
Anna 20:08
And that’s such a New York thing, not having a driver’s license that blew my mind.
Angela Lin 20:11
But like, does she go to bars? You need an ID though. Most of my New York friends don’t have a driver’s license, but they have a state ID for the purpose of drinking.
Jesse Lin 20:23
You know, I might be wrong, it might have been that she got like a, like a state ID identity card instead of NYC one but it was like not a driver’s license. But it’s like the first time that I’ve seen that, because we grew up in California, where everyone drives. Everyone has to have a license basically. So, um, aside from the realities of what you’re working with, right now, what are like, what are like, the favorite parts of what you do now? And like, how did you fall into it?
Anna 20:52
Politics has always been something that I knew was incredibly important. Like, don’t talk to me about the mitochondria of a cell, I could care less, I really could care less, because you know, what is important? You know, the fact that my like, grandparents and all of us, we have to drive an hour plus on the weekends to get to the immigration office, and like, why do these family members like have a green card, whereas like, we don’t, and just like that kind of BS, or, you know, going to really struggling schools, or, you know, my, my siblings and I were all Headstart kids free lunch every year, we went to school. And so I knew how important it was because I saw the direct impact and consequences in just like multiple times throughout my day. So I kind of I always knew I wanted to work in policy in some way, but I always knew I was not going to be a politician. And and so that’s where the I didn’t know that this existed kind of comes into play. You know, having grown up in like, the just like the section eight housing, the really rough part of my hometown, like, I remember being asked, like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I would say, like, hairdresser, not particularly because I wanted to be a hairdresser. But because I had never met a PhD before, I had never met a lawyer before. I had never met an accountant before, like my family, my family, like didn’t make enough money to file taxes. Like, what I wouldn’t even know what a CPA was. And so it was like, I wanted to be a hairdresser. I wanted to be a firefighter. And so you cannot be what you cannot see. And so it wasn’t until I got to college, that I was like, oh, there are people who work in policy, who aren’t politicians, okay. And then like, oh, there’s such thing as education policy. And then there’s people that like, are just like, really, really bookish and nerdy. And that’s their job is to be really smart about policy and tell people that they should do this, like, yes, that is me. And so how I ended up here with like, doing the non politics of politics, and doing the behind the scenes work is just eventually orbiting what it was that I wanted to do for long enough that eventually I landed here. What I like about my work is, I think that what I do, has, like, direct consequences on people’s lives, you know, and you know, like that, that kind of goes back to like, why I said when I was a little kid, right, I was passionate about politics is like this is important. I still feel like I’m contributing towards these super, super, like, critical, unjust aspects in serving, like marginalized people that I didn’t see served growing up.
Angela Lin 24:02
I really liked what you said about you can’t be what you can’t see. So going along with that, like, once this world did open up to you, and you like had a better idea of all the different career paths that you could take within the world of policy, or grander politics, right? Like, like, I don’t know, what’s under the hood in terms of like government, employment. So are there a lot of Asians that work in policy and like, do you see people that you’re like, oh, I like I feel represented, or I feel like I’m gonna be embraced because I see people who look like me, like, how much of that exists?
Anna 24:44
Yeah, it’s tough. We’re pretty few and far between. and, you know, I could even go so far to say that like, it’s, there’s a gender aspect to that makes all of this even more challenging. So I want to talk about like Congress and how this plays out there of you know, people of color are very, very underrepresented in the halls of Congress. The problem is even worse, even more disgusting. When you look at the people who work for the members of Congress, my goodness, it’s only been in the last like, three, four years that they even started collecting data on, like, the racial composition of these staff. And I swear, there are senate offices, there are like committee offices where upwards of 95% of the staff is white. And it’s just like, how is it that you know, these people that make such consequential decisions that affect people of color that affect people who aren’t white men just aren’t even in the room, like, not even a little bit for like, many, many years? And, you know, that’s not something that gets a lot of either, like attention, or people aren’t aware of it? Because why would you be and like, even if you want it to be aware of it, like they only started, you know, recording and publishing this information recently. And the you know, it’s like the senate diversity initiative and the house diversity initiative. This data, they even break it down by senior staff, because look, don’t count your intern, you don’t even pay them. Right. You can’t say you have an intern of color and like, oh, yeah, we’re so diverse. Haha. No. So yeah, like, that’s, that’s the unfortunate next step is like, just because you see something that you can be doesn’t mean, they’re gonna welcome you. Doesn’t mean they’re reading for you. And, you know, it’s there, there are consequences to our government, not reflecting the people that they serve. Just, I remember working in Congress, and you know, our member of Congress, like represented parts of three boroughs of New York City had been in office for decades, and no part of their website was available in a language other than English, you know what I mean? And like, people reach out to this member of Congress for like, you’re supposed to call them for if you have issues with the post office, you’re supposed to call them, if you have issues with like immigration, you’re supposed to call them like they – this is a representative democracy. They’re supposed to be your voice in Congress. But if you go to the website, it’s like, oh, go over here for a flag request, go over here to like, you know, contact me for this or whatever. And it’s like, mmm no, come on, y’all, you just need a Google drop down. That’s all you got to do. Why? So just if you know, all of the staff in your office are from the Northeast, private school educated way, upper middle income, then they’re not going to think about whether or not this website is in a language other than English and how that looks and what it takes to get it in a language other than English for sure.
Angela Lin 28:12
How much do you think of that is like this boys club kind of situation versus like, Asians don’t think about this kind of career path? Like I kind of feel like it’s both probably.
Anna 28:29
Yeah, it’s both. And maybe if you had asked me before I worked in Congress, I would have said, it’s a little bit more balanced, the two contributing reasons there. But having worked in Congress, now I know that it’s a lot more because of how exclusionary and exclusive politics can be. So you if you want to work on the Hill, generally, you have to work as an unpaid, unpaid zero paid intern for many, many months until you become a underpaid staff assistant. And when you are an underpaid staff assist, and you are required to own a car to drive your member of your boss around your member of Congress around. And so it’s like, how do you think I saved up for this car and gas and in like, insurance when you haven’t been paying me for a year, and let alone if I have like student loans, whatever. And everyone knows, like DC super expensive to live there. And so even if it isn’t like nepotism, like outright nepotism, it’s stuff like that. Or, you know, yeah, I’ve seen the it where, you know, oh, the this person is a huge funder to this member of Congress and so, like, just go ahead and give Tommy like, a, an internship blah blah blah. And yeah, so a lot of people will say, oh, these people aren’t applying. Like, I wonder why that is because my parents can’t like, underwrite me living in DC for, like, with no income for, like 18 months. Yeah, maybe that’s why they’re not applying.
Angela Lin 30:16
Okay, well, on that happy note, let’s push into something fun, we’re gonna transition into our closing fortune cookie section because we like to end on a sweet treat. Since it is very clear that you are very passionate about what you do, and you’ve done a lot of really important work, we want to ask you, what is the initiative that you’ve pushed that you’re like most proud of?
Anna 30:41
I was pretty proud of, like getting that website translated. And, you know, it took a really long time for me to you know, I had been working on the Hill probably, like six plus months at that point. And I kid you not, it could not have been from like, a Monday to the, like two Fridays later, like a paycheck period, it could not have taken me longer than that, to get a Google drop down bar on the website. And like find someone working on the Hill, who would translate content for free, it did not take longer than that. I’m like, y’all, I just got here, it took me like, some clearly could have done this a really, really long time ago. So in any job, sometimes you don’t get to see the fruits of your labor in a super tangible way. That would be one of them. While I may not be like a governor or something like that, there are places where, you know, I can do that thing where I’m like, hey, what about this? What about? Like, what if we had our website in blah blah blah? Just, you know, making my voice heard there. Because one of the many reasons why, like lack of representation is terrible is because you know, someone that doesn’t have experiences similar to ours, just they’re not going to think about, like this issue in a certain way. Or just think about you know, how something could or should be done differently. So yeah, just kind of being the squeaky the squeaky wheel. And because maybe like we’re so behind where we need to be in representative politics. Right now I’m like, able to see the progress pretty quickly sometimes.
Jesse Lin 32:32
I think that’s really cool what you said, because I feel like a lot of people are fixated on. I mean, most people are usually fixated on the larger things that people are doing in the government, right, like you’re talking about your like top billing things. But I know I do and many other people do forget, like, there are like huge swathes of people doing like other work that may not be as visible as cool or as flashy, but it’s still like, just as much needed and necessary for other people to get what they need.
Anna 33:02
Yeah, something I had to remember also working in Congress is like incremental change is still change. And you can’t – I think this was Cory Booker that said this – you can’t let your inability to do everything keep you from doing something.
Angela Lin 33:19
Well, if you enjoy this episode, or you have feedback, or you have questions for Anna, write us in. Tell us where you’re from@gmail.com the “YOU’RE” is Y-O-U-R-E. We’d love to hear what you think about our Asian doing cool shit from today.
Jesse Lin 33:36
Awesome. And thank you, Anna, for joining us. This was a really fun conversation.
Angela Lin 33:40
Yeah, super fun
Jesse Lin 33:43
And see you next week again for a new episode.