u/OkReference518

Every Asian American TV show or movie seems to follow the exact same formula: generational trauma, identity crisis, or making the parents into villains. At this point the theme feels repetitive, and honestly kind of toxic.

Just go down the list of every popular Asian media whether it's Beef, Everything everywhere all at once, or Shang Chi. The conflict almost always revolves around trauma tied to being Asian, or parents being controlling, emotionally unavailable, abusive, etc.

And don't get me started with Asian American literature. Every popular book written by an Asian American writers revolves around trauma or the challenges of dating a white guy/girl. I get that these experiences are real for some people, but does this actually reflect the average Asian experience? Everytime I consume this type of media, it feels like reguberated garbage. Worst of all, it makes our whole community look like a bunch of schizo weirdos...

Maybe I have lived a privileged upbringing because I'm an Asian women that grew up dating other Asians. Even though my parents worked from 9am-9pm at their restaurant, they never forgot to love me. I love my parents and although they are not perfect, they raised me in a foreign country where they barely spoke the language. I am eternally grateful for their sacrifice. I can't be the only minority within the Asian community that lived a non-colonized, non-hateful, non-traumatic childhood right? So who is consuming this slop?

How does this even make our community look from the outside? I don't see how it reflects us in any positive light.

Do I just concede to watching K-Dramas for the rest of my life? Compared Asian-Asian media, the quality is honestly 10x. I recently watched Death's Game on Disney Plus and it shits on anything I've watched in the past year.

Working in IT, it’s insane to me how much a compotent manager or director that actually knows how to deal with corporate executives versus the ones that are just yes-men can completely change the trajectory of an IT department. Not just the IT department either, but the company as a whole.

Being able to convince executives with constantly shifting priorities and a mindset focused on reducing costs to still invest in IT, AI, and infrastructure is an insane skill. Whether it’s triggering an emotional response like fear by bringing up competitors spending millions on development, or articulating why certain roles and systems are critical.

Being able to justify expenses using metrics or scarcity too. I once watched my manager keep highlighting how we only had two software developers to manage multiple in-house applications. Yet he just kept bringing it up as a redundancy weakness without explicitly asking for more engineers. Until a year later there was an outage and both of the devs were on vacation. Now we have 4 application support analysts.

Being able to rationally explain complex technical issues in a way tech-illiterate people can actually understand.

Highlighting IT’s contributions to the company by tracking ticket volume by forcing all of us to create tickets for even minor things we help users with.

Purposely hiring help-desk contractors so that all our outsourced staff get shitty survey results from users. Then convincing managers from other departments to complain to finance resulting in us hiring for full-timers

Even playing politics a bit by providing personalized support to important people in HR or management to sway their opinion of the IT department.

I find a lot of this is kind of disgusting and playing politics. This is because shouldn't need to play with this level of politics for higher-ups to be smart enough to understand the value of IT. In the end, I respect how my IT manager and director are able to slime their way into protecting us from cuts, increasing our budget, and generally making the IT department more liked within the company.