“Bring More People Along On the Journey”

You have an incredible network, you’re an adviser to numerous companies, both public and private. You’re also on the advisory councils of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, as well as the Asian American Foundation. How important are external alliances and partnerships? How have they advanced your vision and your organizational goals?

Oh, tremendously important, tremendously important. I talked a lot about climbing that second mountain, for us, for our people, people that look like you, people that look like me. And you can’t do it alone. Nor can you do it in a singular fashion. You need to bring literally as many people along as humanly possible to get to the top of that mountain. They’re going to support you, they’re going to give you tools, they’re going to give you tips and tricks of how to navigate. But at the same time, you, yourself are going to get experience from being on those organizations, that then you can pass that information down to the next version of you.

And that’s really what it’s about for me. It’s about making sure those alliances are dual pronged in their help. They could help me advance, but they could also help me bring more people along. And I think the more that I go external and I bridge more people together, and I am more of the connector point, the more people will realize, again, what has always driven our community has always been an insular point of view, we’ve always stuck to ourselves.

I didn’t grow up like that. Most of my friends were Jewish and white. And so I’ve always had a perspective that I don’t necessarily need to just stick to my own in an effort to get what I need done, in an effort to make change. I need to bring literally as many people along as possible. And that’s why I didn’t write what I wrote in an Asian newsletter, or an Asian media publication. I wrote it in Adweek, which is a predominantly white subscriber base.

And you wrote about your concerns about the rise in anti-Asian violence.

And the lack of support, honestly, from the marketing community at that time, to support our community – especially after a summer of Black Lives Matter, right? And I was frustrated. And so I just made a call out to my community saying, “Listen, you know me, you know who I am, you see my face all over the place. I’ve won awards for you, for decades. Support me now. Support me now.”

And so I think that, I think for me, at least, it’s to bring more people along, cross the boundaries of being insular and make sure that you’re having a network effect with your own personal life, too. And so that’s why it’s so important for me to be on those boards, because I need to remind them, don’t be insular, go ask for other industry’s perspective, go ask for more help, bring more people that don’t look like us along on the journey, and you’ll see how powerful we can be.

Because, again, if we don’t do that, what we’re going through as a community right now, we will look back and say that was a great moment in time. If we do bring more people along, we will say it started with a moment, but now it’s a movement. And that’s what I need to convey to everybody, like this is a movement. This is not a moment in time. This movement is going to continue on. We’re not going back. We’re not going to be silent anymore. And you’re starting to see a rise of new leaders come up and say, “No, we’re good, like, we’re done with this. We’re going to change this now forever.”