Privilege is a Gift and a Responsibility
I was born in the United States of America. And I grew up in one of the most affluent towns in the U.S., where the average annual household income is over $300,000. The average home costs $1 million. And people either drive a BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, or Range Rover. Growing up, our path was to go to the best universities and climb the ladder at the top corporations in the world. Our parents went to Ivy League schools and held executive positions. In school it was expected to be smart and do well, and travel and do volunteer work. Life was safe and gated, and everyone expected only the best. 97% of the town was white. I was 1 of two Asian people in my class, one of them being adopted. I did not know I was Chinese until I was 4 years old. And much of my childhood was a whitewashed American dream.
My parents grew up in New York City. My father grew up in the Lower East Side before it was gentrified and safe. And my mother grew up in the Bronx, when it was lower-middle working class and filled with immigrants from different countries. My mother went to an all girls catholic school because it offered better, free education, and my father went to the Bronx School of Science. My parents both went to Columbia University. My father was an electrical engineer for one of the largest U.S. aerospace and military technology companies. He held a patent for U.S. aerospace radar systems and worked on developing the first drone plane for U.S. military defense.
My grandparents came to the U.S. as immigrants before the age of 20. My paternal grandfather arrived to the U.S. as a teenager without family, money, nor a higher education. He worked hard his whole life and received a purple heart in World War II. He was a reserved and incredibly stoic man. I always sensed he had great intelligence and reserves of inner strength that served his family but not his ambition. My paternal grandmother was quiet and reserved. She felt afraid of the outside world and mostly kept to herself to avoid contact with strangers. As a child she had watched her own mother die as they fled from the Japanese in China. My maternal grandmother arrived in the U.S. on her own with my young mother in tow at the age of 20, unable to speak English. This is a woman who stayed in developing communist China to complete her education when she had an opportunity to leave. Despite having papers she found a way to smuggle herself out of communist China in the bottom of a boat to Hong Kong at the age of 16. In the U.S., she was widowed with 3 children, and ran her own laundry business. She was known for always speaking her mind, bossing people around, and winning strangers over. She was a model of strength and what it means to be an ‘enduring woman.’
It would be fair to say that my family lineage came from poverty and little opportunity. My family did not have influence nor affluence. But what I did inherit from my family, on both sides, were incredible qualities of intelligence, resilience, determination, grit and strength. I come from a family of immigrants and survivors—people who dared to better themselves. We have an inherent quality of hard work that makes it possible to improve the condition for every following generation.
It is my grandparents and parents that gifted me with the opportunity of privilege. My upbringing was very different than my parents’ and grandparents’. I grew up in Greenwich Village and an affluent suburb outside of NYC. My peers and my environment reflected a 1% bubble, in which everyone expected the best. I was afforded a higher quality of education, high standards and examples to live by, and access to more resources and opportunities. I was able to pursue hobbies and perform at Carnegie Hall when I was 16. I was able to work for some of the top companies in various industries, and make six figures by the age of 27. I lived in a highly desirable zip code, drove a luxury car, and had a high ranking job title. On paper, and by society’s standards, it reflected the American dream. In just three generations, my family line went from poverty to wealth. We achieved all of this through our hard work, intelligence, strength and resilience.
But in my generation, I was afforded privilege. Everything I could want in the American dream of wealth was within my reach if I continued to pursue it. The difference is that I had the privilege to throw it all away.
For a long time, I oftentimes felt guilty for having that privilege. Knowing what my grandparents endured, knowing that my reality is a 1% bubble, knowing how the rest of the world lives. Especially when I traveled to different parts of the world seeing the dramatic disparity in economic wealth and living conditions. Although now I know economic wealth is not everything, in many ways they’re actually wealthier than we are in love. But what I felt most guilty about, was not knowing what to do with my privilege. At the time it felt like a burden. The heaviest weight of responsibility to honor this gift and use it for good. Perhaps I know deep down that privilege is not free. It does not come without its costs.
Privilege is a gift and it is a responsibility.
People want to enjoy all of the perks of privilege without any of the responsibility. People abuse privilege and use it to better only themselves out of greed instead of using it to also better the world.
I believe, in the creation of wealth and privilege, there are costs and there are sacrifices. My great-grandparents and grandparents had to uproot at a young age and leave behind their homeland of China. And in many ways this uprooting was quite traumatic for them. They had to put all of their hardships aside and assimilate in a new world—polar opposite in culture and beliefs. They started at the bottom. They faced overt racism and discrimination. They didn’t initially speak the language nor had higher education or University degrees. They had little money and family connections. Building a life on their own in a place that was unwelcoming was probably really hard. They grew up in households of survival. My grandparents and parents did not know personal freedom and fulfillment. They knew duty to provide. And there wasn’t a lot of nurturing and room for emotions. We learned to worry about the future and never look back to the past. It hardened us in a way that created a lot of pain and suffering internally. We learned to be stoic and suffer quietly and independently. I only knew how to climb the mountain even when hurting.
Despite having reached higher altitudes, I was not happy. I was dragging the weights of my ancestral past and trauma behind me with every step and every climb. I believed that my only option was to keep going. And eventually, I collapsed. I never realized what I was carrying until I went through my awakening and did some ancestral work. Even though I never directly experienced what they went through, I still felt it and carried it heavily in my heart and body. Memories of their pain ran through my veins. It hardened my heart. And it bled out in my tears. The burden that younger generations can feel is very real. They feel the pressure to carry the torch and continue the work, but they also yearn to break free and define their own path. So much of our emotional traumas come from our own experiences but also we absorb the traumas of our family lineage. We literally carry them in order to one day hopefully heal them.
When a generation reaches a certain comfort level of economic wealth, the job has been completed. The main focus is no longer on creating more wealth. The focus is tending to what has been lost and wounded in the process of generating wealth. What else needs to be looked after for your overall health and well-being, beyond money and resources? How can you better the conditions for yourself and following generations, emotionally and spiritually? Having privilege does not entitle a person to reap the benefits of our ancestors out of comfort and apathy; it requires one to continue the work of bettering the conditions for future generations. How can you use your privilege to challenge the status quo and better yourself and the world?
The work for children of privilege is to heal what was lost in the process so that we can create a healthier and a more emotionally stable world for future generations. I believe future generations should not grow up in a planet full of hurting, lost people inflicting harm on each other and our natural home we call Earth. Providing for our children is not just about providing for them physically and financially, it is also providing for them emotionally and spiritually. I realize now, having privilege allows me to give to myself and future children the gift to dream and pursue our own happiness on our own terms. So they know what it feels like to be a strong and powerful person on the inside, without the validation and money to prove they are. Privilege enables us to have options and choices, with the responsibility to choose wisely and nobly to create a healthier world.