(In)visible Me
Evelyn is a 21-year-old Chinese American student whose experiences during college and COVID-19 gave her knowledge and power. Her story is about finding support networks that helped her embrace herself.
Evelyn's Story
Do you remember being scared of something for the first time? Why was it scary? Was it going to cause you harm? Was it because you didn’t know what would happen?
In 2019, I went to my first concert and accidentally brought my pepper spray. To no one’s surprise, it got taken away from me. I didn’t bother buying another one for a while because they’re expensive and I didn’t care enough. Then in 2020, COVID hits. Anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise, and I felt like I was getting stared at more often by strangers. I felt very uncomfortable and unsafe. I was constantly watching my back, and I needed to order some pepper spray.
It was the first time that I felt scared to be an Asian American. I felt that fear before because I’m a woman but had never felt that fear because of my race. Just walking around campus, I was constantly checking for threats and watching my back. They’re coming, I thought. They’re coming for us.
Black people might feel this way a lot of the time, especially with police around. To feel that fear for the first time just for my skin color?! Terrifying. I couldn’t believe people have felt this way for their entire lives.
At the end of the school year, I sought therapy for the first time through the university’s counseling services. I was having a terrible year (probably as most people were) but this was the first time my anxiety got really bad. Nothing was okay, and I needed help coping with all the fear and tension inside of me. At the initial intake, a white woman interviewed me about what brought me to therapy. I mentioned a lot of things going on in my life: virtual school, isolation, homesickness, adjustment issues, disappointment with how college was going… I only briefly mentioned the race stuff going on with Asian Americans. Immediately, they stuck me with a counselor who was supposedly a specialist on race. I felt weirdly racialized in a way that I didn’t want to be. Of all the issues I was dealing with, it was like all of them were reduced to a race thing. Honestly, it was really frustrating! I felt like my anxiety was made invisible, overshadowed by the fact that I was Asian American.
They paired me with a counselor who happened to be Black and male. Sorry not sorry, but I couldn’t spurt out my out my feelings to a man. It was not going to happen! On top of that, we never even talked about race. Maybe it was because the race issues for Black and Asian people are quite different, but the topic of race never came up. I wish they had given me a counselor who shared my identities and could understand me as a whole person. But with this therapist, I felt a bit belittled. Like I was just some anxious teenage girl that was freaking out. He would tell me to do breathing exercises, go on a walk, and meditate, but these methods weren’t working for me.
I only went to a couple of sessions, and then I quit. Besides not liking the therapist, the access and availability of the school’s counseling services were so confusing. I didn’t learn good ways to manage my anxiety, nor did my fears go away. I just sat with a lot of fear for a long time.
Two years passed. The fear of being attacked waned with the prevalence of COVID-19, but my anxiety got really bad again. I was going to be a senior in college and like, holy crap! My life was changing. I was going to be graduating… What was I going to do with my life? I got a new therapist via an online therapy app, who I loved. It cost more than the university counseling but at least she was someone who fit what I needed. She understood me as human—a full human with a full life and experiences, a story, and a reality. She acknowledged that I shouldn’t be reduced to anything or any specific part of my identity. I wanted to be whole, and she saw me as whole. I was finally empathetically understood.
About Evelyn
Evelyn is a fourth-year pre-med student who is studying sociology. In her free time, she likes to rock climb and travel, cook fusion foods, and spend time with her close-knit friends. She grew up in a wealthy, mostly white suburb, though the specific neighborhood where she lived had a large Chinese-American community. Her parents were part of the first generation of students to go to college after the Cultural Revolution in China. Evelyn’s dad was from rural China, where he was known as a hometown hero for making it to the big city. Evelyn’s mom was from metropolitan Shanghai. They immigrated to the U.S. with bachelor’s degrees, a desire to get out of China, and the promise of the American Dream.
In school, Evelyn’s classes repeatedly taught American history, which often retold the same narratives of white American forefathers and American greatness. Evelyn was expected to get good grades and was put into “gifted and talented” programs, along with all the other Asian American kids. She was expected to attend an Ivy League school for college, although she never wanted something so white and wealthy and gross.
Evelyn decided to attend a large state school in her home state. She went to multicultural student orientation and fell in love with seeing a college campus full of people of color. It was horribly jarring when all of the white students moved in, so Evelyn involved herself in the Multicultural Pre-Med Student Organization. She spent a lot of her time learning to work with people from a variety of backgrounds, and the best part was that they all shared the same goal—to increase diversity in medicine.
While Evelyn began building a community around her that cared about diversity, she also began building an intellectual understanding of race that would forever change how she viewed herself and the world around her. The catalyst? Sociology. The study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society. It would be the key that unlocked answers for Evelyn to make sense of why 80% of Americans stay in the same social class they’re born into or why the model minority myth isn’t real.
Three years into college, she took her first course on race and racism where she learned that the disadvantages Asians faced are often erased and that they’re always seen as foreigners, never able to be truly American. That is how racism works against Asian Americans. Asians are pitted against Black and Latine people and used to perpetuate the idea of the American Dream. If you work hard, you can achieve anything.
It started to make sense. The U.S. allowing her parents to immigrate was a part of the larger system to keep white people at the top and everyone else at the bottom. It started to make sense how educational tracks were all part of a system to maintain wealth and opportunity for some and not others. It also started to make sense that her feelings of wanting to be white and less Asian when she was younger were driven by a culture that praised whiteness above everyone else. She understood the breadth of the consequences of structural racism and was motivated by the unfairness she saw in the world.
As a future physician, Evelyn recognizes that it’s going to be her job to support her patients’ health and that racism plays into that. There is so much out there that she doesn’t know and hasn’t experienced, but that’s part of the responsibility—to learn about what else is going on in the world and work to change the system.
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