InBetween, WashU’s annual student-organized pan-Asian mental health conference, was held on April 13. Hosting multiple panels with guests from a variety of backgrounds, I held Q&As with the panelists.

These interviews have been edited for clarity.

Dr. Amynah Pradhan is the Director for the Center of Clinical Pharmacology at Washington University and spoke during the “Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling” panel

SL: Can you tell me about the academic lens of the “bamboo ceiling” and how that manifests for you? 

AP: We’re kind of blessed in STEM academia, because there’s a lot of Asian representation there. But I still think that there is a “bamboo ceiling,” because when it comes to breaking through to leadership roles, that is still a much harder thing for us to do. 

SL: Specific to academia and STEM academia, what sorts of mental-health challenges exist within the field and that especially affect Asians? 

AP: I think the nice thing in STEM, especially in the medical school, is that you do have this connection with things like psychiatry and psychology, so at least there’s an openness, sometimes of having those conversations, but then there’s also a culture of stoicism. And I think that that’s particularly true from an Asian cultural perspective. There’s been a big movement amongst faculty to be educated on that front and to come to know what the language is so that you can ask those questions and then also be able to refer accordingly, because it’s one thing to ask the question someone opened up to you, and it’s another thing to try to help and connect you to resources that might be able to help right. It was maybe one of the positive things that came out of COVID, which was that it forced all of us to sort of understand that we’re all delicate flowers inside that need nurturing, which can only happen on a community level. 

SL: You mentioned your involvement with your religious communities during the panel. Is there some relation, either positive or negative, that you see between religion and mental health?

AP: I think that for people who are religious, their religion or faith can certainly play a positive role in our mental health. Struggles can come up more with people in the community. For example, you can see a lot of intergenerational struggles where maybe younger people might be struggling with their mental health and their parents may not necessarily know how to communicate with that. I think that supersedes religion. I think that it has more to do with cultural background. In the Muslim faith, there’s always been a strong emphasis on holistic values like mental health being part of physical health. In fact, the first psychiatric institutes were opened in Baghdad. Mental health is just part of who we are as people. What we get out of our religious community’s faith can be a force of good, and it’s just a question of surrounding yourself with people who can help you tap into that resource.

SL: What do you think is the benefit of cross-disciplinary advocacy? Do you see a future where your successes can help somebody else in a completely different field? 

AP: Oh, 100% — I think that we are all connected. We don’t even realize sometimes how many shared experiences we have. When the other panelists were talking about negotiation tactics, first of all, it sort of validated some of my own negotiation tactics, but I also learned some new ones from them, so I think that these are conversations that we need to be having across multiple disciplines. We all have shared experiences — we’re not siloed. And when we think we’re siloed, that’s when we actually harm ourselves, because we need to sort of bridge those gaps between us. 

Angel Wang is the Head of Growth at Anise Health, a “culturally responsive mental health platform built by and for the Asian community,” and joined Pradhan in the “Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling” panel.

SL: What does culturally responsive therapy look like? 

AW: It means not seeing individuals as a set of symptoms, not completing an intake form where you just check off diagnoses, but seeing the intersectional identities that people bring to the table with race being one part of how their identity shapes their lived experience. All of our providers are trained and continuously reskilled in understanding the different cultural contexts of people among the South Asian and Southeast Asian and East Asian diaspora. We also integrate therapy and coaching. Sometimes in therapy, you immediately get medication management, but in the Asian community, drug usage is quite stigmatized. So we pair coaches with a therapist so that the therapist helps you look back to understand how you became the person you are today, and the coach helps ask you who you want to be in the future and how you set goals to get there. 

SL: Please tell me what the “bamboo ceiling” means to you and how you’ve seen it manifested in your life.

AW: Breaking the “bamboo ceiling” to me means tapping into and unleashing the power that the Asian community has across all levels in executive leadership positions, in senior middle management positions, and in entry-level analyst positions. When I first joined Meta, I was on Facebook’s elections integrity team. I managed a $90 million account [that] classified political ads for the US elections from 2018 to 2020. In my first year at Facebook, three directors I reported to were fired. All three of them were women of color. Two of them were East Asian women, specifically. One of them had built the entire Trust and Safety Team from zero people to 10,000 people and was replaced by someone who didn’t have as much experience as her, but was not an Asian woman. It made me really question where all of this hard work was going if people who had put in that sweat equity weren’t necessarily being rewarded by senior positions and titles. It made me think a lot about breaking the “bamboo ceiling.” Specifically, what are the behaviors that are rewarded often in non-Asian-dominant work cultures? For example, being bold, speaking frequently during meetings, making strong assertions with little data, speaking unambiguously and confidently about things that maybe you should have taken more time to verify was rewarded in a corporate workplace. Societally, Asian cultures often value things like stability, safety, security, and group protection. So sometimes that is not seen or rewarded in the workplace as much as boldness and risk-taking. 

SL: What’s the difference between tokenism and DEI? How should you advocate for yourself such that the roles you’re in don’t make you a token? 

AW: Listening to that discomfort if you feel like you’re being placed into a role that’s just a film or marketing system or statistic or some sort of stereotype, and if it’s not an authentic representation of your genuine lived experiences is important. Finding the courage to say you don’t want to do that role given. We should feel okay pushing back on that and reclaiming our narrative and telling the stories about our Asian American experiences that better represent us.

SL: What sorts of fields do we see a lot of progress in, and which sorts of fields tend to be even more behind in this sort of progress, and what do you think is responsible for these trends? 

AW: Areas that tend to be older like oil, energy, infrastructure, and telecom, are often places where the senior leadership tends to be north of 60 and non-Asian. That tends to be areas where the conversation around empowering the Asian community feels a little outdated, including things about how a lot of DEI initiatives don’t include Asians because they’re not seen as needed resources. I worked at TikTok and Twitter. They have DEI satisfied in terms of hiring early stages in the pipeline, but they still have a lot of work in terms of inclusion. Tech does a really good job of talking about the importance of DEI, therefore trying to hire more people from underrepresented backgrounds, but there’s still more work to be done in terms of getting them into leadership positions. 

SL: You mentioned that Asian Americans tend to peak in middle management. Is this trend the same across all industries, and how do you think Asian Americans can improve representation in the upper levels? 

AW: One thing is to acknowledge and value different types of leadership. Different qualities such as being thoughtful, being active listeners, not making rash decisions, being able to plan across longer timelines should also be evaluated and rewarded. Externally, there’s more work to be done in valuing non-traditional forms of leadership. For the Asian community itself, one thing is building some more self-awareness and choosing when and how you want to choose to show up. Do I want to do some things like speaking up during meetings or asking a question, or do I feel like it doesn’t actually properly represent me? 

Carrie Zhang is the founder of Asian Mental Health Project and spoke on a panel called “Queerness and Asian Identity.”

SL: I wrote down this quote from you: “Perfect daughter, perfect wife, perfect mother.” Can you tell me how this concept relates to Asian identity and queerness? 

CZ: When you’re in a society that often is homophobic, you challenge the traditional paths that are paved out for you. The path that I felt was laid out for me was that I had to embody these perfect roles. When I look at my life now, coming into my queer identity, what I thought would mean I had a successful life isn’t necessarily what is going to make me happy or allow me to live authentically in my own self. 

SL: Tell me about your process of self-discovery and how your Asian identity fits into that.

CZ: There was a bit of fear that living authentically as myself as a queer person meant a bit of sacrifice, because the safety that the roles I was confined in wouldn’t be there. Breaking through that and coming into my identity has challenged how I view my life. Being a queer woman, it’s scary to know that the path that I thought was paved out is not going to be the path that I’m taking, but it’s also very exciting to live more expansively. 

SL: How do you, in your work, address the intersection of queerness and Asian identity?

CZ: From a mental-health lens, identity and queerness are parts of us and part of our identity. Identity intersects with how we process our own mental health. In the work for Asian Mental Health Project, we want to create spaces to explore what queer identity means for each person, because it could mean very different things for very different individuals.  Community Care is one of the key components of Asian Mental Health Project. We have this group called Queer Asian Mental Health Club, and it’s an open way for queer Asian folks to gather and to discuss topics that have impacted the intersections of our lives. It’s interesting. It feels like such a paradox to understand our identity. We also need to understand how we got here, how we became the way that we are, and that is through understanding our immediate communities, our systems, and our histories. 

SL: What advice do you have for someone integrating queerness and their Asian identity together? 

CZ: I think the biggest piece of advice is to be gentle with yourself. I feel like there are a lot of expectations and roles and things and labels of how you should or should not be. Queerness is the expansion of love, and I think that is a journey that we all need to understand for ourselves. My main piece of advice is to be gentle and exploratory. The world may pass on a lot of judgment, but you do not have to be in a position to judge yourself. 

Eli Stone is a TikToker and Instagrammer who participated in the panel “Masculinity and Asian Identity.”

SL: Tell me a bit about your life.

ES: I was adopted as a baby to a loving family in Denver, Colorado. I had four adopted siblings. It was a very Christian household. I had a weird collegiate experience. Basically, in high school, I did this program called concurrent enrollment. By the time I graduated high school, I had a two-year degree. Then, I took a gap year and eventually ended up in Los Angeles.

SL: What is it like being an influencer? What sort of content are you dealing with? 

ES: This has been my dream job since I was 13. I became obsessed with YouTube. Being homeschooled, my teacher had printouts handed to us, and you had to figure out how to do it, so I went to YouTube. Casey Neistat and Ryan Higa were popular. I wanted to do that. But I never felt confident — I was too anxious. In 2019 when I started, it was right before COVID hit, and I started as a thirst trap. I thirst-trapped and did comedy to 10,000 followers on TikTok. 

SL: The panel was about masculinity and Asian identity. What was your experience in the intersection of these two areas?

ES: Oh, bro, it was genuinely very difficult. For instance, I discovered porn, but then I didn’t even know how to masturbate, because I was sheltered to that extent. Funnily enough, I learned from a Christian book. That’s sort of how my experience has been overall. I’ve recently decided that I’m finally done trying to make videos that I think people want, and I’m gonna start making videos that I want, instead. 

SL: As an adoptee, tell me how you stay in contact with your culture — both the one that you were born with and the one that you were adopted into.

ES: It was just very polarizing growing up. It wasn’t so much the adoption, but it played a large part. Growing up, you just always subconsciously felt in debt as soon as you were self-aware enough to realize what adoption was. Everyone acted like our parents are absolute angels [for adopting us], and my parents are great. It was just hard with no representation in Colorado. How I did it was by hanging out with more Asians purposely. My parents took us to these Korean camps every year, took us to a Korean Church, which ended up being how I made my initial Asian friends. By spending so much time with them, understanding their family dynamic, talking to them a lot, and trying to understand what’s up in their life, I learned this whole other side of being Asian. Now it’s this weird in-between where I didn’t see my very distinct two perspectives. But at this point, we are our own spectrum or a brand new spectrum that cannot be defined, cannot be grouped, and that’s what we need. 

SL: Can you tell me what you like seeing out there? What do you think are positive trends? What do you think are negative trends, in terms of mental health? 

ES: A negative trend gaining traction is one that makes people feel less alone, but that is perpetuating the problem? That is the worst thing — when it’s just extremely sad, vulnerable things that no one can really respond to because comments aren’t the same. 

SL: What do you think about the online discourse about masculinity, particularly recently with some figures like Andrew Tate?

ES: I don’t think Andrew Tate’s audiences are very mature people. I think a lot of the people who follow him are young, impressionable guys who haven’t quite explored and are insecure and going through a lot. I don’t mind them that much because they’re gonna exist anyway, but they’re doing such a poor job that the fact that everyone knows they are controversial means that their actual core mission is prone to not succeed. It’s this cycle where they’re polarizing and then they go into obscurity. I don’t view that content as hurtful. The harsh reality is people like him have always existed, and he’s just the latest iteration. In my five years of making content surrounding emotions, I have never once been deemed as controversial. With the two different types of content interacting, inevitably and eventually, my sort of content segment will continue to grow because people resonate with it, and Andrew Tate will be stuck there forever. They fall off, and then someone replaces them. It’s a circle. And this type of content grows with you. 

Dr. Jacob Chacko is the executive director of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion and director of Dialogue Across Difference at WashU. Chacko also participated in “Masculinity and Asian Identity.”

SL: In the intersection of masculinity and Asian identity, what sorts of unique challenges do you see being presented to Asian men? 

JC: Staring at a lot of stereotypes coming out of the sense of fear. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Act was created through Yellow Peril, those laborers coming from China who were recruited to work on the railroads. So there were rumors spread around about the community. You see, things nowadays like the desexualization of Asian men, especially where East Asian men in particular are more feminized in media. They’re not what the Eurocentric aesthetic of what a male figure should be. 

SL: How should Asian males meet other people with different values related to masculinity and move towards healthy masculinity? How can men who are raised on the idea of being a provider grow together with men who place emphasis on rugged independence and individualism?

JC: You’re born in a particular culture and are raised around the values and cultures of that culture, but a lot of idea formation around identity and perspective is taught and socialized in a school. They clash. College is an experience where a lot of that either gets affirmed, challenged, or questioned. For me, it’s really an opportunity for folks to figure it out for themselves. Whilst society portrays what the spectrum of masculinity and femininity is, it means different things for different folks. It isn’t always and shouldn’t [always] be experienced in a binary, and oftentimes, we’re stuck in this binary way of thought — of how things should exist — and that’s not the case.

SL: You mentioned ways in which you try to challenge the status quo in your workplace through attire. How can someone effectively challenge status quo’s in meaningful ways?

JC: I think little things like that add up and make a big change. For me, I really push against traditional understandings of professionalism. Supposedly, you need to be in a suit and tie to get work done. Absolutely not. Right now, my team has a lot of programs that we do. We’re having panels, and we’re lifting things. We’re lugging things across campus. I want my team to be comfortable. Cultural attire can also be professional. I’ll bring in my cultural attire, and then wear [it] in ways that challenge what masculinity is.