Understand the roots of invisibility and create fairer practices to eliminate it. Strengthen your workforce through real connection. Create more inclusive practices that acknowledge the experiences of your diverse team. Alter your workplace culture in a way that maximizes everyone’s potential.

What Is “Toxic Invisibility”?

Not only are Asian Americans rendered invisible by others through racism and xenophobia, but we also internalize that invisibility through guilt and shame, creating a dual, ‘toxic’ invisibility that permeates our entire lives, following us wherever we go. To overcome this, Asian Americans require both institutional change and internal change at the same time.

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My Services

I offer corporate solutions in the form of workshops, storytelling series, and consultation to empower Asian Americans and their allies with the agency to overcome Toxic Invisibility and to transform themselves, their workplaces, and society at large.

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Tools for Structural Change

Solutions must go beyond pledges, slogans, and initiatives. Cultural ‘sensitivity’ is not enough. We need the knowledge and the agency to transform the internal structures of our organizations. Change is not going to happen on its own, we need actual tools to make it happen.

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asian workers feel the least included of all groups surveyed:

Asian Americans are the least likely to receive mental health services:

Asian Americans are extremely underrepresented in elected office:

While 9% of the professional workforce in the US identifies as Asian, only 2% of CEOs do. Such under-representation in leadership is the norm across industries, even in the tech sector: In Silicon Valley, Asian Americans comprise the largest cohort (47%) of entry-level, non-managerial employees with a college degree or higher (“professionals”), but they are only half as likely as white men and white women to hold positions within two reporting levels of the CEO (“executives”).

Despite being the least likely group to receive mental health services, over 16% of the Asian American community (over 3 million people) reported having a mental illness in 2021. Suicide was the leading cause of death among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, ages 10 to 19 and the second leading cause of death among those ages 20-34. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have disproportionately experienced a rise in mental health challenges, partly due to the increase in anti-Asian racial discrimination.

Even in states with high AAPI concentrations like New York, Nevada, and California, the AAPI community is drastically under-represented in office. In fact, Hawaii is the only state whose share of AAPI elected leaders is nearly equivalent to its AAPI population share.

AAPI erasure is especially stark in the criminal justice sector. While over-policing and excessive deportation are major issues for segments of the AAPI community, the total number of AAPI elected prosecutors across the country is six, and of more than 3,000 county sheriffs, only two are AAPI.

Strategies for Radical Visibility

Healing

Being rendered invisible sends AAPIs into a fight or flight stress response. Being trapped in this physiological chain reaction is damaging to the mind and body. AAPIs (and marginalized groups in general) need psychological and therapeutic tools to regulate our nervous systems, and we must be given the space and resources to put those tools into practice, especially in stressful work environments.

Featured in workshops:

• Overcoming Toxic Invisibility

• Altering the Narrative

Storytelling

The next step on the healing journey involves altering the narratives we tell ourselves internally and the ones we speak to others externally. This requires using the craft of storytelling to our advantage both psychologically and in communication with those that surround us. By becoming gifted storytellers, we can change minds.

Featured in workshops:

• Overcoming Toxic Invisibility

• Altering the Narrative

• Storytelling for Success

Cultural Shift

Once we have tools for healing and for communicating our narratives, the final step is to work together with our communities to alter the oppressive structures around us and replace them with ones that allow us to be seen and heard. This requires a deep understanding of ourselves, our cultures, and the process of structural change, or what I call “cultural synthesis”.

Featured in workshops:

• Overcoming Toxic Invisibility

• Asian American Renaissance