Asian Women Navigating Gender and Race Launch New Organization

By Angel Trazo
AsAmNews Intern

Karen Mok and Cassandra Lam met on November 29, 2017 in a New York City coffee shop.

“The date is seared into memory because when we walked away that evening, we’d already resolved that we were going to work together,” Lam told AsAmNews.

Mok and Lam are co-founders of The Cosmos, a community dedicated to connecting and supporting Asian women through transformational leadership retreats, workshops, and events.

The Cosmos launches today in honor of International Women’s Day.

“What does it look like for Asian women to flourish and thrive?” This was the question that prompted the pair of twenty six year olds to create The Cosmos.

“It happened very organically,” Lam reminisced. “We were both just talking about experiences of feeling isolated and misrepresented. There is a myriad of complex topics that we deal with as Asian American women, and we both felt we didn’t have a place to work through these questions.”

“Yeah, Cass tells this story way better than I could. I hope she gives this story at my wedding,” Mok laughed.

Their movement was born on the Internet. Wondering if anyone else pondered that same question, they posted it on Facebook and Instagram. The response was overwhelming. Many other women were eager to come together to tell stories about their Asian identity. 

Though Mok and Lam grew up on opposite sides of the U.S., they had similar experiences of having come to terms with their identities as Asian women.

Mok, whose parents immigrated from Hong Kong, was born and raised in South Carolina where “less than 2% of the population was Asian.”

“I grew up very much rejecting my Asian identity, and I began to learn that this is a common narrative for those who have grown up in isolation from an Asian American community,” Mok explained. “As a preteen, I’d want to ask questions about my Asian American identity, but didn’t have an outlet.”

Meanwhile, Lam grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. Her hometown had a large Asian immigrant community, yet she still lacked a sense of belonging due to the tension between her Vietnamese refugee parents’ values and her own.

“Understanding my Asian identity came from a place of turmoil and conflict,” Lam said. “I spent a lot of my life fighting against my family. I was raised by a very traditional and strict father. I had to fight patriarchy in the world. I had to fight patriarchy in my home. I had to fight against stereotypes of both cultures. It felt like I was constantly fighting, fighting, fighting.”

Like Mok, she initially distanced herself from her Asian identity. “I had this mentality of, ‘Oh, I don’t need the Asian community because they made me feel like I couldn’t achieve what I thought I could,” Lam explained. “However, I realized, this is my family. This is my culture. It’s always going to be a part of me… Being younger, I thought I didn’t need it, but I really do.”

Both women also experienced the pressures of parental expectations and the feelings of imbalance when they strayed from their conventional career paths.

Lam studied Political Science at UCLA in pursuit of law school. “I realized early on that I was not intended to be a doctor or engineer, but I could do law, the other ‘acceptable Asian daughter industry,’” Lam laughed. “Essentially, I had ‘the talk’ with my parents in 2014 where I told them, ‘Hey, that dream of yours isn’t going to happen. I’m going to figure out what I want to do.’ Now, I’m doing Big Data consulting, which has been my gig for the past three years.” On the side, she pursued passion projects such as Akin, an anonymous online storytelling platform.

Mok started out as a Chemical Engineering major at Washington University, St. Louis. “To be honest, my parents were chemical engineering majors, and they told me that there was a ‘certain path toward financial stability’ – their version of the ‘American Dream,’” Mok expressed.  

“There are a lot of us trying to navigate parents’ perceptions, influences and expectations,” Mok explained. “It’s a significant weight that we carry, an ‘intergenerational weight.’” She eventually embarked on a career in International Development and venture capital, as well as gained experience in community organizing for several years.

“Yup, my parents still don’t know what I do,” Mok admitted to The Slant.

Their unconventional journeys led them to that fateful day when they first talked together about their Asian American identity. Since then, they’ve interviewed over 200 Asian American women, planned upcoming events in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and facilitated their first two-day retreat in Seattle.

“Part of my exploration of an Asian woman is to understand which of my values are influenced by my racial identity, and having a space to explore those with that lens on,” Mok explained.

The inclusion of racial and cultural exploration in their mission is one aspect which sets them apart from other women-focused groups. Both believe that racial identity is central to their lived experiences as Asian American women, yet this intersection has not been studied extensively.

“The intersection of Asian and Woman is something very understated. And there isn’t a lot of research about the barriers to parity that we’re facing,” Mok explained. “One issue is mental health. Asian American have (one of the) highest suicide among minority groups ( second only to Native Americans) Asian American women are also the least likely to be promoted as executives (in the tech industry) based on an eight year longitudinal study ”

While part of the conversation is about navigating one’s cultural background, another is how race impacts contemporary Asian American women.

“This isn’t like the bamboo ceiling that our immigrant parents inherited. This a problem relevant now. Ultimately, what these statistics show is that Asian women are facing a double whammy of barriers, of being both Asian and a woman.”

“When I first heard about these statistics from Ascend, I asked, ‘What resources are available for us? For millennials? For Gen Z? For young Asian Americans?’” Mok explained. “Their reply was, ‘Well, we don’t really have anything like that right now.’”

“To be told that was very indicative to me that no one was going to create the solution for us. That’s where my motivation comes from. We actually have power and agency as Asian women to really understand the problems our population faces, and to create a space to resolve and work on them. Especially given the assumption of our demographic that we are silent, we need to voice who we are,” Mok expressed.

A large part of The Cosmos is to reach Asian women through conversations.

Through conversations, they aim to instill a sense of community magic. “Community magic is this feeling of — one of our retreat attendees put it best — ‘effortless sisterhood,’” Mok said. “And the moment [our attendee] said it, the room was like, ‘Yes, that’s it.’”

“It’s this feeling that you’re supported by everyone else in the room. This feeling that you can dream big and say crazy things and push at really difficult aspects of your life, because you feel that you have your sisters literally holding your shoulders, and holding your arms. It’s really about you just knowing you have unconditional support.”

Woohee Kim, a Korean International student who served as president of OASIS, The Organization of Asian Sisters in Solidarity, is thrilled about the launch of The Cosmos, highlighting importance of inclusivity. “If you’re thinking about Asian identity and female identity, we must also think about each person’s multitude of intersectional identities.”

“Our design process is based on the experience of being an Asian woman,” Mok explained. “But we can relate our values — our eight pillars— to other groups and identities.”

“For us, ‘woman’ is just the most encapsulating and inclusive way to welcome trans, gender nonconforming, gender non-binary, two-spirited folks – anybody along the LGBTQIA spectrum – we’re not going to exclude anybody,” Lam elaborated. “We are acknowledging that labels aren’t perfect, but what we can do is create a strong perspective. We’re always questioning who is at the table. That’s really important to us.”

In addition to sparking introspective, transformative conversations, The Cosmos believes in using their members’ multifaceted skillset to support Asian women, and hopes to encourage others to join them in collaborative empowerment.

“One thing we want to do for The Cosmos is to create events for Asian women by Asian women. We want to reach out to creators, entrepreneurs, activists — anyone who is accessible, real women who have expertise and passion for knowledge and sharing. We care a lot about meeting normal women who have something special she wants to share. She should have a community to do that and feel supported,”Lam explained.

“We don’t believe in free work. We truly believe in Asian women, so that means we need to put our money where our mouths are,” Lam said. “We want to help out women who might be daunted by producing an event on their own through a revenue share.”

The Cosmos hopes to raise $10,000 by May 1st in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Donations would fund Asian women-led workshops, creative projects, and scholarships. Funding will also be used to produce high quality media content in order to reach women who live outside of present retreat regions: SF, LA, and NY.

“I felt isolated every single day of my life, for eighteen years, growing up in South Carolina. So my promise to myself was that one day, I’d create something that keeps anyone from ever feeling this level of isolation and self-rejection,” Mok expressed. “I want every single Asian woman on this planet to know that there’s a home for them, and that they don’t need to feel alone. That’s my big dream.”

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