Pray For Our Pastors

PRESENTATION FOR THE US ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY'S ASIAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH CELEBRATION (MAY 2005)

Ever since I was invited by Lena Kim to speak to you, I have been excited about what I was going to say to you. Well, excited and nervous. I am honored and humbled to address such an esteemed group of people. And it is particularly a challenge as a speaker to prepare comments that will resonate with such a diverse group, on such important yet sensitive issues as culture and identity. How to break the ice with such an audience on such a topic?

I’m reminded of an American consultant who was once invited to give a speech in Japan. He sought the advice of a Japanese colleague of his, who advised him, "You have to understand that the Japanese like you to put on a great show of humility, so begin your speech by saying you're not really qualified to be speaking here, you're going to make mistakes, and you want to apologize in advance for any mistakes you make."

The American followed his colleague’s advice and began the speech that way. But to his shock and dismay, the audience erupted into uproarious laughter. He couldn't understand what had just happened, and struggled through the end of his speech.

When he got off the stage, he was met by the head of the Japanese company that invited him. “What just happened,” asked the American. The Japanese manager replied, "Oh, we are so sorry, sir. You have to understand that I had briefed my employees before your speech that Americans always start their speech with a joke, so whatever you said first, I told them they have to laugh."

So hopefully I’ve covered my bases by beginning with an apology and a joke. But seriously, it is an honor and a joy to be here with you this morning. My wife Amy could not be here with me this morning, because she is out furniture shopping. We are preparing our home and our hearts for our first child, a daughter who we will hopefully be traveling to China later this summer to meet and take home. My wife is Caucasian, of Hungarian, Italian, and Polish descent, and I am Taiwanese. We are both US citizens, as will be our daughter.

But she will no doubt wrestle with a sense of dual identity, on a number of levels. As she grows up, she will come to know that her parents are of different ethnicities. She will come to understand that she is adopted, and no doubt struggle with what that means. And what will it mean for her to be an American but to be born in China? To which culture will she feel at home, if either?

I have a feeling that our daughter will become a very thoughtful young woman, because she will have had to wrestle with some significant identity issues by the time her childhood is over. But I am heartened by the fact that she will have a father who understands what it is like to wrestle with a sense of dual identity. And I take seriously this responsibility I will have to help her navigate through her own inner wrestlings.

Some of you, I’m sure, can identify with this sense of dual identity, or as I like to call it, the feeling of being “hyphenated.” Many of us in this room cleave to one culture at home, and one away from home, and are proud of both and identify with both. I consider myself simultaneously Taiwanese and American. I want to retain the heritage, culture, and language of my family. But I also want to embrace new ways and new philosophies on my own. Taiwanese and American. Why can’t I be both?

Some of us in this room are of some religious persuasion, and struggle to know what it looks like to be faithful followers in an increasingly secular society. I myself desire to follow Jesus, and to see the spiritual side of material things and the material side of spiritual things. And in doing so, I’ve been accused of being too secular by the religious folks and too religious by the secular folks. A Christian whose eyes are on heaven but whose heart beats for what’s happening here on earth. Can I be both?

What I want to convey to my daughter is what I want to convey to you this morning. I want to tell you about my upbringing, about how I first clashed with my parents and then sought to bridge the many gaps – cultural, generational, and faith – that kept us from seeing eye to eye. I want to tell you about what I do at work around minority entrepreneurship, and why I do it. And I want to tell you about what it is like today, to be an Asian-American working and living where I do, to add my perspective and my stories to the rich tapestry of perspectives and stories that this entire month has been about.

Let me start with my relationship with my parents. The older I get, the more I appreciate their parenting. I have them to thank for my work ethic, my values, and my education. They say kids, by nature, grow – and that the goal of parenting, then, is just to provide fertile ground for them to do what they will inevitably do, and that is to grow, physically and emotionally and intellectually. And my parents provided me with fertile ground in which to grow. They made sure my childhood would be about playing sports and learning math and loving music. They made sure that I was safe, that I was fed, and that I was loved. And, like a kid should, I grew.

I became a Christian in my teen years. And to the extent that being a Christian meant going to church and making friends with good moral people and not doing bad things, my parents were fine with my newfound faith. But I was never one to do something halfway. As I grew in my faith, I began to realize that there was more to it than just going to church and being a good person. I felt challenged and invited to make it my life, to trade earthly treasures for heavenly ones, and to work for the benefit of others and not for my own honor or gain.

My parents, of course, thought I had lost my mind. And we began to clash. Looking back, I realize that back then I saw our conflict purely in faith terms: we had different beliefs, after all, and that must be why we were disagreeing on major life issues.

I know now that in addition to a faith gap, there was also a cultural and generational gap. My parents immigrated to America in the 1960’s to go to graduate school. Their cultural and generational values were that of highly educated immigrants. Their greatest desire was to work hard and ensure that their children had economic opportunities and financial security. Their view of work was as a vehicle for providing for family, a means to a greater end. Technical careers, and therefore technical educations, were particularly sought after, because they allowed for a maximum of financial reward with a minimum of job risk. Hence the proliferation of highly educated Asian immigrants in professions such as doctor, engineer, and scientist.

My generation is different. As the second generation, and the first born in the US, we value more highly things like prestige and power and influence. We desire to make a difference. And while our parents were more apt to cluster themselves with others of their country of origin, we are more comfortable building pan-Asian alliances, and reaching beyond Asians to other ethnic groups for our political, commercial, and social networks.

To be sure, you could explain my career trajectory solely in faith terms. My Christian values certainly influence my desire to give back, to effect social change, and to work for racial reconciliation. But I think that would be an incomplete analysis of my life decisions. My choices and my values, like my conflicts with my parents, are better explained as an intertwining of faith, cultural, and generational influences.

Let’s hold that thought so I can tell you a little bit about what I do, and then we’ll come back to this point about how my perspective as an Asian-American and as a second-generationer flavors my life choices. Since I graduated from the Wharton School of Business in 1995, I’ve worked for one organization, The Enterprise Center in West Philadelphia. It’s been an incredible ten years, and I am proud of what I do and who we are as an organization.

You can boil our work down to three words: accelerating minority entrepreneurship. For an organization that barely has a $1 million budget, we do a lot: we run an award-winning youth entrepreneurship program, three separate training courses, a business development center contract with the federal government, a capital corporation that administers three loan funds, a real estate development corporation, and a global consulting and replication division. We operate a 35,000 square foot facility, have a dozen business tenants, and host 50-60 major events per year. And everything we do is about accelerating minority entrepreneurship.

But while we have never wavered from that mission, in the past year or so, we have undergone some significant changes in direction and focus. Circa late 2003, we were correctly termed a business incubator, a place that nurtures businesses to self-sufficiency. We provided startup ventures with facility resources, business advice, and an all-inclusive environment that was about helping businesses survive and thrive. We incubated about 15-20 businesses at a time, and worked with them for a period of 3-5 years, during which they might grow from one to two employees and $100,000 in annual sales to 10-15 employees and $1 million in annual sales.

At least that was the goal. But two things kept getting in the way. One was financial: to provide such a comprehensive program was pretty expensive for us. In fact, for every dollar we were spending on our clients, we were charging them about twenty cents. We were fortunate in the mid-1990’s to have good relationships with a handful of key foundations and corporations from which we could find that other eighty cents. But when the stock market took a nosedive earlier this decade, that source of money began to dry up, leaving us with a hard-to-sustain business model.

But our adjustments over the last year or so have not been just about financial pressures. The other thing we were noticing when we were running our business incubator was that we were pretty good at growing businesses from $100,000 in annual sales to about $800,000, but we struggled mightily at helping these entrepreneurs get over the $1 million hump. We began to suspect that we there were some programmatic flaws that we would have to address if we wanted to help get these businesses over $1 million in annual sales.

Specifically, we began to identify some areas in which minority entrepreneurs needed support in order to break through the $1 million level. We identified four, which all conveniently happen to start with the letter “C.” First is capital. This is well-documented: minorities struggle to obtain sufficient capital to grow their businesses. You can go from $100,000 to $800,000 by scraping together funds from various sources. But if you want to play with the big boys above $1 million, you need that larger infusion of cash. So we knew we needed to help our businesses get capital.

The second “C” is contracts. It is also well-documented that minorities have had shockingly low participation rates in large private sector and public sector contracts. And again, when you’re first getting started, anybody who wants to pay is a customer. But if you want to grow to scale, you can’t just cobble together a bunch of little contracts; you need the big contracts. So we knew we had to help our clients identify, compete for, and then win these large procurements.

The third “C” is consultants. This one is a little less publicized. But think about it for a moment. When you are first getting started, there are now quite a few places you can go for free or cheap help. SBDC, WORC, SBA: there’s a whole alphabet soup’s worth of places where you can get free or low-cost consulting services. Not to be snobby, but when you’re looking to approach and pass the $1 million threshold in annual sales, that help might be too basic for you. But the next tier of consulting help might charge you $70 an hour, $90 an hour, $150 an hour. And you might not be able to afford that. So we knew we had to figure out a way to get our clients high-end consulting help at affordable rates.

The fourth and final “C” is community. This one is a holdover from our incubator days. For all the great resources and coaching we made available to our clients, oftentimes the greatest value they derived from our program was not from us but from each other. Entrepreneurs are, well, entrepreneurial; and our entrepreneurs, because they shared a common facility, were constantly networking – in the hallways, at the water cooler, and even in the restrooms. Among other collaborations, they swapped market information, linked up on jobs, and pooled their purchasing power. We knew this kind of entrepreneurial fraternity would be vital for businesses trying to break through the $1 million mark, so we had to figure out how to foster it.

In early 2004, we bid for and received the designation from the US Department of Commerce to be the Minority Business Development Center for the state of Pennsylvania. And since then, this has been our vehicle for testing and implementing some of our findings. We are constantly hustling to help our clients connect to opportunities for capital and contracts. We have developed an in-network of consulting partners who we can refer our clients to, and for whom we can subsidize the cost of the engagement through the federal contract, so that the consultants get their regular rate and the businesses pay a reasonable fee. And we are fostering community amongst our clients through CEO roundtables, organized trips to the White House, and the development of a “PA-50” designation for the fastest growing minority businesses in the state.

Along the way, we are adjusting to the changes this contract is bringing. Our old incubator model, after all, was about housing 15-20 businesses, mostly local to Philadelphia and mostly African or African-American, for a three- to five-year period. Our new model means that our clients are geographically diffuse, further along in size and sophistication, and much more ethnically diverse.

In fact, one of the more interesting aspects of our organization now is the simultaneous outreach to non-immigrant minorities (i.e. African-Americans) and immigrant minorities (i.e. Africans, Latinos, and Asians). We are up for the challenges involved when you add in new cultures and new languages, but we can do better. We are building relationships with key people and organizations around the city and across the state, but we need to continue to add to what we are already doing locally, particularly in the Asian and Latino communities. We are improving in having more languages and cultures represented on our staff and board. And we are working to make our business resources and marketing materials accessible to people for whom English is not their dominant language. But we can do better.

Along the way, I have considered my own personal perspective on this work, and have found it interesting to see how I am received in various settings. For example, I am not always ready when I speak to non-Asians who assume that my agenda is solely about Asian business formation. Nor am I always prepared when I speak to Asians who wonder why my agenda is not solely about Asian business formation.

Given my line of work and where I live and work, it is not uncommon for me to find myself in settings in which I am not only the only Asian in the room, but the only Asian with whom the others in the room have had any meaningful interaction. Unfortunately, sometimes this leads to comments that are ignorant or even offensive. I have been called “Bruce Lee,” even though I don’t look anything like him and don’t know kung-fu. I have been asked if I’m related to the kind Korean couple that runs the corner store down the street, as if all Asians were somehow part of one really large family. And I have also had my language ridiculed and my culture insulted by people whose only other Asian points of reference are mass media caricatures like William Hung from American Idol or the sinister Taiwanese bad guy on Alias.

I believe that Asian-Americans have an important role to play in work like what I do at The Enterprise Center and in neighborhoods like where I live in West Philadelphia. If entrepreneurship is the engine of our national economy, and if we are fast becoming a “majority-minority” country, particularly on the coasts and in the big cities, then accelerating minority entrepreneurship is of utmost importance. And if cities lead, in terms of economics and sociology and culture, then what happens there matters a great deal.

And in both areas, I believe Asian-Americans have an important role to play. For we have a unique position in the racial stratosphere. We are able to relate to the African-American plight of being seen as “different” in mainstream circles, and of being racially profiled and stereotyped accordingly. With Latino-Americans, we can understand the challenge of speaking one language at home and another outside the home. With other Asian-Americans, of course, we can find solidarity on issues specific to Asians in America, like the “model minority” and “perpetual foreigner” stereotypes. And with all minority groups, we can empathize about the struggles of being a minority in America, and wrestle together over such issues as “passing,” “assimilation vs. multi-culturalism,” and what it means to identify oneself as hyphenated – fully American and yet having strong ties to a particular country of origin.

These inter-ethnic bridges, when combined with other assets we have, like family and social networks and academic and professional resources, position us to play a distinct and important role in accelerating minority entrepreneurship in urban settings. But only if we act.

“To whom more has been given, more is expected.” It is a Biblical theme, but one to which I believe all people should hold themselves, regardless of their individual creed. For Asian-Americans like me, who are well-educated and bi-cultural, we have been given much in the way of material and educational resources, for which we ought to be thankful.

But with those resources come opportunities and responsibilities. To build bridges, to be a voice for other groups and not just our own, and to together form a pan-Asian identity that gives us the strength in numbers that will help all sub-groups within – Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Filipino, Taiwanese, and so on.

This concept of looking beyond the self to enrich those around is one I hope to pass on to my daughter, and one I hope you will also take to heart. Strong family values and high quality education have been invested in us. We can hole up comfortably in our own familial and ethnic enclaves. We can physically separate ourselves from others in the never-ending quest for safety, for identity, for home. We can avoid meaningful, authentic relationships with others different from us, deciding that while our stereotypes may be incorrect, we’ll hold on to them because they help us make sense of our world.

Or we can use our voice and our access to do good in ways for which we are uniquely positioned. We can embrace our hyphenated state – spiritual and secular, Asian and American, work responsibilities and family obligations – and do good works, even at the cost of being misunderstood or underappreciated. And we can ask ourselves – and this is a quote I strive to live by every day – “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?” -- and we can decide that the highest enrichment of our own souls is in enriching and strengthening others, and we can devote our careers and our lives to this cause.

The conclusion I have drawn, from my perspective as a second-generation Asian-American living and working in West Philadelphia, is to enrich my soul in this way. I fall short daily. But I try again each new day. And, for the sake of our city, for the sake of racial reconciliation, and for the sake of a better world, I hope that regardless of your own individual perspective, you will reach the same conclusion, and join with me and try again each new day. Thank you.