Radical (3 page)

I came away from my time at Martin Luther King with a few things: I witnessed what a great teacher could do. I thought about teaching for the first time. And I was angry that these children came every day to a school with a decrepit playground and a school building that was falling apart.

My father's words rang true, once again. I was lucky.

O
NE DAY, A RUMOR
raced through Maumee Valley's pristine Upper School: one of our classmates was pregnant. Faculty, parents, and students were in shock. Maumee Valley girls didn't get pregnant! Because Maumee Valley girls didn't have sex . . . or so we thought.

Every year Maumee Valley would offer scholarships to students from Robinson Junior High, a school in one of Toledo's poorest neighborhoods. Dede Barnes was on full scholarship at Maumee Valley, and she was pregnant.

Dede and I were not close, but we were acquaintances. We ran with different crowds. I was president of the student council and a very social animal. She kept to herself. We were both good students. At the same time, I was never fully part of the cool crowd, in part because I was Korean. That made me an outsider and often put me in the position of being able to glide between cliques. I became a peacemaker, a bridge.

I gathered a few of my buddies together and said, “Let's throw Dede a baby shower.”

“Are you crazy?” one asked. “How would we do it? Who would come? What purpose would that serve?”

I got the same reaction from some teachers who wanted Dede's problem to quietly go away. I was determined to embrace her and let her know that we accepted her predicament. I can't say that I was bent on making a dramatic statement about race and class. I was neither reflective nor focused enough to arrive at that conclusion. But I did know how it felt to be excluded. The least we could do as a community was alleviate Dede's sense of isolation.

With friends and parents, we reserved a room at a restaurant. People arrived with gifts. We had a great time. Dede beamed.

After Dede left school to have her baby, we never saw her again on campus. We assumed that the school had not invited her back. We also assumed that Dede would become a statistic: a single, teenage mother who dropped out of school and went on welfare. It would be a tragic and cautionary tale of a promising life gone wrong.

Except it didn't.

When I arrived at Wellesley College my freshman year, whom did I run into but Dede! Not only had she made it through high school and continued to achieve, but she did so in such a way that earned her admission to one of the most prestigious colleges in the country.

Seeing Dede buck the system and defy the stereotypes and assumptions changed me. She came from one of the city's roughest neighborhoods. She had all of the odds stacked against her. But through her experience, I began to realize that environment did not determine fate. At least, it didn't
have
to.

I was lucky to be born into my situation. She was unlucky to be born into hers. Did it have to stay that way? Was her fate sealed because of her circumstance? As it turned out, school determined her future possibilities. If kids had the will and the potential, and they had the opportunity to attend schools with good teachers, they could become great successes despite the obstacles.

Dede's story confirmed what I learned from Mary Weiss—that education could make a difference in a child's life, regardless of how she comes to school.

I
F MY COMING-OF-AGE WAS
a gradual but steady change from a shy Korean child to an independent, perhaps bossy teen, I truly left my comfort zone in Saskatchewan.

During my junior year in high school, I worked at a summer camp for kids on a Native American reservation in Canada. I had no idea what to expect. The first morning I woke up, and I couldn't find a plug for my blow-dryer. And the people were laughing at me, because we were in a trailer on the Indian reservation. “Sweetheart,” one said, “there are no plugs to plug in your hair dryer. You can put that thing away for the rest of your trip!”

No hot showers, either.

It was the first time I had seen and experienced abject poverty. Children were living as they might have in the nineteenth century. It was so foreign to me.

Some of my counselor colleagues were foreigners, in fact. I got to know Manny, a German man whose specialty was clowning, so he wore different clown costumes around the reservation. Helen was a Canadian athlete who taught the kids how to play soccer. What could I teach them? I fretted until I came up with something we could do without needing too many supplies (which were in short order): origami.

Every day I set up a table and invited children to make swans that we would string up in trees, or frogs that would jump, or intricate squares we could blow up into spheres. First the young ones would take seats, then the older kids would drift over, and pretty soon I would have a full table. Teaching the kids to make these shapes taught me my first lesson about good instruction—clear instructions. When I told the kids, “Fold the paper in half,” they'd do so somewhat haphazardly. That would cause the figure not to come out correctly. So I had to learn to give really specific directions about making the corners line up and monitor them as they were doing so.

I gravitated to the little ones. Every morning I would lead a small group into the meadow, where we would sit in a circle and play “Doggie, doggie—where's your bone?” One would sit in the center with his or her eyes closed; the rest would pass around a spoon behind their backs. I would call “stop,” and the one in the center would have to guess who had the spoon. They never tired of the game.

After two months I truly believed that I had touched these kids and was having an impact on their lives. I thought I had formed tight bonds with them, that they loved me, that they couldn't wait until I came in the next day, and of course, that they'd miss me desperately when I left. They would remember me fondly as the woman who taught them how to make origami swans one glorious summer.

As camp came to an end, all of us counselors embarked on a weeklong canoe trip. We made our way up to a remote launching point, and then we canoed back to the reservation. We stayed in tents. When we returned from that trip, we had to spend the night at the reservation before we left the next morning for home. I walked through the reservation, hoping to have one last visit with the children on whom I had had such an impact.

“Hey!” I said to one group of kids I'd recognized.

They looked at me as if I were a stranger!

The look on their faces was “Who are you?”

After one week, they didn't remember me. What a wake-up call. Had it not been for the brief layover back on the reservation, I would have left there believing that I had made an impact on these kids' lives. But a week later, not only could they not care less about me, but they didn't even remember who I was.

The message to me was clear—little girl, this is not about you. This is about you coming and doing your little community service and feeling good afterward that you helped the poor little Indian kids. You didn't help them. Their lives suck right now. And it wasn't made any better by you, coming for a few weeks and running a summer program.

You're not even a blip on the radar in their lives. It was humbling.

I
GOT MY FIRST
glimpse of the importance of being humble in the workplace during my summers working at Grumpy's, a deli near the Toledo Zoo. I started in 1988, after my junior year in high school, the year that China loaned pandas to the Toledo Zoo. It was pandemonium.

Jeff Horn and his wife, Connie, owned and managed Grumpy's. Jeff named his sandwich shop as a warning for customers. If you were looking for good food, this was the place for you. If what you were searching for was a feel-good lunch spot, not so much. Jeff screamed at customers, and he wouldn't hesitate to fire employees. During the first summer I worked for him, he opened his “annex” by the zoo. He started off with about twenty employees. By the end of the summer, I was one of only two left. I did it by keeping my mouth shut and my head down, and working my butt off. Grumpy and I got along.

Jeff's mind-set when it came to employees was simple. “I have to make money, and I can't sit around and let the ineptness of minimum-wage workers make me less successful.”

Translation: He would fire you in a heartbeat.

I can't tell you how many salad makers I lived through. One woman finished making a bowl of tuna salad but neglected to scrape off every ounce of tuna from the spoon. Grumpy saw her dump the spoon in the sink.

“You're fired!” he screamed.

Come in late? Don't bother coming in at all.

“You're fired!”

Bad attitude? There was room for only one of those.

Bye-bye.

My sophomore year in college, when I was nineteen, Jeff and Connie opened a Grumpy's in Port Clinton, on Lake Erie east of Toledo. They asked me to be the manager. Their daughter Jennifer ran the business on the family side. We hired sixteen teenagers, opened for the summer season, and business was good. Connie came by often to make sure all was going well.

One particularly hot day I asked four of the girls to clean out the trash cans, which were smelly and gross. One of the girls, a cute one with swagger because she was the leader of the pack, declined. Connie already didn't like her.

“What are you going to do about it?” Connie asked.

“I don't know. What
should
I do about it?” I responded.

“Fire her!” she said. “You have to send a message.”

I had never fired anyone before. And I had definitely never “sent a message” to anyone. I was a little scared, but I knew I couldn't show any hesitation or weakness. I would have to follow Grumpy's lead. I did what I was told and fired her.

The girl threw a hissy fit. She looked around at the other workers. Her eyes pleaded for solidarity. There was a moment of silence. I looked around at the other girls.

“Anyone else have a problem?” I asked.

No one replied. Instead, they walked outside to clean the trash cans. They got the message, and I learned a useful lesson: firing people never feels good, but there are times when you have to show an employee the door.

I
HAD HAD MY
own taste of rejection.

When it came time to apply for college, my first choices were Princeton, Brown, and Harvard. I applied to all three. The responses: no, no, and no.

The only two schools that I got into were Wellesley College and University of Miami, Ohio.

My boyfriend, Adam, was going to the University of Cincinnati, which is very close to Miami, and they offered me a scholarship. I told my folks that I was going there. My parents basically said, “Abso-freakin-lutely not. You are going to Wellesley. All-girls school, we're good.”

So there you had it. I was going to Wellesley. At the time I didn't fully appreciate the all-women's environment and transferred to Cornell after my freshman year. I think my parents assumed that at an Ivy League institution, where they had always dreamed of sending their kids, I would get a staid, conservative education. They were wrong.

When I got to Ithaca, New York, I was overwhelmed by the size of the school. I felt like I was getting lost and realized I had to find a niche, a community. So two friends—Heidi Moon and Jenny Hahn—and I formed RAW, short for “Radical Asian Women.” We designed a little sign with a yellow fist. But I still had no idea why I would have reason to be a radical, until I took a few specific classes.

Asian American History was a shock. I had thought that Asians were the model minority, different but in some ways better than white Americans. The course taught me that Asians had faced harsh discrimination building the railroads, that many had come over as indentured servants, that Japanese and other Asians had been essentially jailed in camps during World War II. It was all new to me.

That triggered my radical Asian woman phase, in which I didn't like white people, since they were the oppressors. Call it the next stage in my breaking away from the submissive Korean woman that my mother had hoped to create. I took courses in African American history too, which deepened my sensitivity to discrimination.

I landed a work-study job with an organization called Peer Educators in Human Relations, or PEHR. It was a pretty unusual program. Our job was to go out onto campus and conduct peer facilitations and trainings of other students in bigotry and oppression.

Before we could go out and train anybody, we had to go through the training ourselves. So I went through this life-changing set of training sessions where people got right in my face and essentially said, “Little Asian girl, let me tell you why you're always trying to make nice. Because you are scared of facing confrontation. If you want to really be who you are, you need to stop this charade of trying to make people feel good all the time. You're just fitting into the mold of what an Asian woman is supposed to do. Break the mold!”

I had yet another awakening. I vowed, “I am not doing that anymore.”

I wasn't the only student going through changes. There was a group of us who went through the training: some radical black people, some really radical Latino and gay students, and then a few radical lesbians—and me.

There were a few painful moments. I used to do things like say the word
chicks
, and the lesbians in the group would just rip into me. “We are
not
weak, little, helpless, cute animals. We're
women
!” they'd yell. And I'd say, “I got it, I got it. Sorry!”

But Inza Rhee's good little Asian girl still had her place. During the day I was the radical student, but at night I would work at a Japanese restaurant. I'd put on this kimono and be the nice, cute, subservient Asian woman so that I could get a lot of tips. The owner came up to me one night and said, “I've got to tell you, in eighteen years of running this restaurant, you are the best waitress I ever had!” I played the part well.