Interview with Michelle the writer
1. What’s your ethnicity and family background?
I’m an ethnic Chinese born in Incheon, South Korea. When I was 9 years old, my family immigrated to the US.
2. How has your immigrant experience shaped your identity and mental health?
Having never really lived in a place where I was a part of the ethnic majority, my immigrant experience is integral to my identity. John Cho spoke out last year about the trauma of immigration and this may sound funny, but it was the first time I’ve heard someone of prominence describe immigration as traumatic and it really made an impression. Immigrating was very traumatic for me as someone who didn’t speak the language, attending a predominantly white school. For kids, immigration often means giving up their childhood the moment your feet touch the soil of your new country. My parents pinned all their dreams on me and depended on me to learn English quickly to serve as their translator, both linguistically and culturally. The pressure can be suffocating. And yet, we’re all just expected to be grateful to have immigrated, to have all these new opportunities. We forget that the two are not mutually exclusive. You can be grateful and still find immigration traumatic. You can be grateful and still miss your old life.
My immigrant experience further shaped by mental health because my parents were unable to support me the same way they would have been able to back in their country of origin. They themselves were not supported. The restaurant industry is infamously challenging on mental health. When they immigrated, they lost their support system as well. They did not trust the system in the US and did not know how to protect me or help me when I began to struggle.
3. Growing up, have you felt that you face more expectations or pressure from your parents to achieve greater success than your peers who are not Asian? How do you think the definition of “success” is different in the East Asian community from other cultural communities?
I recall numerous heart-to-heart conversations with my father where he’d say something along the lines of, “You’re an Asian person in America. You have to work ten times as hard to be as successful as a White person. It’s unfair, but that’s just the way it is. Hard work and education the only way to beat the system that is stacked against us.”
So yes, I felt the expectations all the time. Also, my parents had a relatively comfortable life in Korea. It was a stagnant life with not much room for upward mobility but it was comfortable. My dad was a teacher and my mom was a full-time mom. Immigrating changed everything. My dad became a low ranking cook in kitchens of Chinese restaurants and my mom bussed tables because neither spoke English. They convinced themselves that immigrating was something they had to do for my brother and me, even though there were many other reasons they chose to leave. With the life they gave up, it meant failure was not an option for me or my brother.
As for the definition of “success” in East Asian communities, in my unscientific observation, I feel so much is tied to prestige. My father drilled into me that he wanted me to become someone well-respected, like a doctor, or a lawyer who would later become a judge or a university professor. Prestige and respect were more important than wealth.
I’m a parent now myself and above all, I want my child to grow up happy. I want him to be able to support himself but happiness, health, self-actualization - these are the things I wish for him. If he achieves these things, I would think he is successful, but for my parents, I’m not sure happiness would have fit into their definition of success. They believed that with prestige and wealth, happiness will follow. It was almost afterthought, an unimportant consequence. That is not what I believe.
4. What was your post-secondary experience? What is the most important life lessons you learned during college?
In college, I was formally diagnosed with bipolar I. I’d be struggling since primary school but because I performed so well academically and worked so hard at my parents’ restaurant, everyone overlooked my symptoms, hoping I’d grow out of them. While studying abroad in Beijing in my junior year, I experienced debilitating depression followed by a severe manic episode. Because I was abroad in a program full of people who didn’t know me very well, my symptoms were taken seriously. I was twenty years old. I think of it as a gift now that I was diagnosed relatively early and that I was prescribed medication that has worked well in treating my condition for almost two decades now. Not knowing what was wrong with me was much worse. With a diagnosis and treatment, I regained control, as well as hope for my future.
My college was about three hours from where my parents lived. The distance alone was really healthy for me. I was finally able to become my own person. My parents were conditioned with such a powerful stigma against mental illness that they tried to convince me to stop my medication as soon as I seemed stable again, despite the fact that they’d seen me experience mania and psychosis. They knew my diagnosis and had taken me to the psychiatric hospital themselves after I came back from China, but they feared the stigma more than the illness. I was stubborn and independent enough to take control of my own mental health treatment. There was no way I was going to risk my mental wellbeing, not even for my parents.
In college, I loved not being dependent on my parents for my medical care. I was on scholarship and I could seek help at campus health. If you need help, don’t let your parents stand in the way of it.
5. What do you think are the biggest barriers for our Asian peers to overcome mental challenges?
Speaking from my own experience, I think the biggest barrier for many Asians (who share similar upbringing as me) in overcoming mental health challenges is the misperception that dealing with trauma and seeking help is disloyal to our culture and our families. This is why I strongly emphasize separating trauma from culture. I’m a very proud Asian. I love my heritage. What I do not support is domestic violence. I do not support alcoholism. I do not want to contribute to intergenerational trauma. I believe in healing. I believe in working through our pain so that we don’t pass it down to the next generation. I refuse to feel guilty about taking care of myself, partly because taking care of myself is taking care of my child too.
So many people bundle trauma and culture. All my life I’ve been told I have to accept corporal punishment because it’s part of my culture. That’s bullshit. Abuse is not part of the culture. It certainly was not the secret to my success. I can love my parents and still call out parts of my upbringing that I don’t agree with, that I wish had been different. I can love them and disagree with them. I can love them and still seek help for my mental health.
Seeking help is not shameful, nor is it wrong. It’s actually the most right thing you can do for yourself. The stigma against needing help for mental health is so prevalent, it can be quite a daunting obstacle. But seeking help is an act of empowerment and independence, not weakness. I wish everyone knew that.
6. What advice would you like to give our East Asian peers who are struggling with self-identity or mental challenges?
The pain and suffering are not permanent. It can feel like it. Your struggles can feel like a life sentence. Your problems may seem impossible to overcome, but it’s not. Especially, when we’re in our late teens to early twenties, I personally felt everything more intensely. That will change. As I sought help and learned to manage my issues, and put some distance between me and my triggers, everything improved. The biggest challenge is to not lose hope. And remember that you are not alone in your struggles. Go to campus health, seek out support groups, talk to friends you trust. Don’t be ashamed.
My best friend in high school suffered from panic attacks and insomnia at the same time I was suffering from depression, mania, and severe anxiety. We talked to each other every day about what to wear and who we had crushes on, but somehow we never knew about our deep internal struggles until I began writing about mental health and she reached out to me twenty years later. I’m so regretful of the time lost. We could have been so much more supportive of each other during those darkest hours, but we were separately hidden in shame and stigma and as a result, we each felt alone, we each isolated ourselves. It didn’t have to be like that.
7. What is your current profession and how did you decide to pursue this career path？
I’m now a full-time writer and mental health advocate. In January 2019, I quit the coveted corporate manager job I worked years working toward. Though I was successful in my role, I couldn’t hide such a big part of myself any longer. I wanted to be a mental health advocate and speak out about stigma, which I experienced all the time when for example, colleagues talked about someone acting bipolar because they were being unreasonable. I had hidden my diagnosis for nearly two decades and I couldn’t do it any longer. I needed to admit what I am in order to advocate for myself.
I was miserable at my job and wondered why I was trying so hard to do it. An epiphany hit me that I was still trying to please my father, even though I’d believed I was far past that kind of thinking. Gaining this awareness allowed me to liberate myself. I did not need to impress anyone but myself. I decided for the first time to go after my own dreams. I decided to write.
8. We know that you are an active mental health advocate, what motivated you to take the lead on addressing this topic in the global community?
For so long, I was deeply ashamed about living with a severe mental illness. I was carrying quite a lot of internalized stigma. “I’m not like ‘those people,’” I told myself. But the more I hid, the smaller I shrank, the more I drowned in shame. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I sought out a support group at NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness). There, I found others experiencing much of the same challenges as I was. By sharing regularly with people with varying severity of conditions, my internalized stigma melted away as I witness the beauty and brilliance within everyone in my group. After a couple of months attending the group, I became a co-facilitator. Attending training for this further educated me on the importance of advocacy and fighting stigma. It has been a journey, but once I was on the path, there was no turning back. I realized that I had become the person I desperately wanted to find when I was a newly diagnosed 20-year-old. I wanted to find anyone who could show me by example that a good life was possible with bipolar disorder. This became my personal mission, to re-write the narrative on mental illness and to prove to those struggling that a happy life is well within reach.
9. Are there any misconceptions about mental health that you have seen in our Asian community? What positive changes do you hope to see in our community, and how do you plan to help achieve that?
A big misconception about mental health is that it’s not real. There’s so much denial, denial, denial. When our parents and grandparents survived famine, war, and the like, it can be incomprehensible that the later generations would struggle with mental health, but it is a reality. There is a misconception that the people struggling are just being dramatic, or even that their parents weren't strict enough and therefore they are spoiled. None of this is true. Mental health conditions need to be treated just like physical health conditions.
Another big misconception is the fear of psychotropic drugs. Many Asian countries have steep penalties around illegal drugs and there is deep fear around drug addiction. My parents were deeply afraid that I’d become a drug addict when I began taking medication. There’s a great Youtube video by Le Ke Tai Tai that is in both Mandarin and English (the English part starts in the second half) which explains not only the difference but how and why medications can be helpful.
My plan is to share my story with as many people as possible to change the misconception that all people with mental illness are destructive and doomed to fail.
10. What positive impact do you hope Project T.E.A. to carry out in the long-term? And if possible, how would you like to support this vision?
I wish Project T.E.A. all the best in its mission to end the stigma around mental illness. We are very much aligned on this and I’d love to help work together to achieve this mission.
For Our Readers:
Michelle is now a full-time writer and active mental health advocate in our community.
Follow Michelle's journey on livingwellhappily.org and @michelleyangwriter on Instagram.