Abstract
I write this response to James Kyung-Jin Lee’s work Pedagogies of Woundedness not as a theologian or an academic, but as a nearly-lifelong Anglican/Episcopalian Asian American layperson with a 20-year career as a lay professional followed by another 15 years in law studies and solo practice in trusts and estates. Lee has done a great service to the intersected fields of study around medicine, health and healing, Asian American studies, and pastoral care by surveying and summarizing the literature at the crossroads of these disciplines. As none of them are in my own academic or professional expertise, I will reflect on my own journey and experiences as they were stimulated by my reading, supplemented by current research and trends relating to Asian Americans in legal education and law practice today.
According to the American Bar Association, in 2020 2 percent of U.S. lawyers were Asian, a fraction of Asian Americans in the general population at 5.9 percent. 1 The year in which I enrolled in law school, 2008, turned out to be a near-peak year of Asian American enrollments, a trend which has ebbed significantly, most recently receding to levels in the mid-1990s. 2 Even though the number of Asian American lawyers has increased greatly, tripling from the number in the early 2000s (including representing the largest minority group in large law firms today), Asian Americans have not advanced to visible leadership roles in law firms, government, or the judiciary in proportion to their presence in the law profession overall. Some call it a “bamboo ceiling,” others attribute the dearth of equity partner promotions to the lack of business being brought into firms, but many agree that the number of mentors is few with many more Asian Americans entering the profession than aging out as the steep increase in enrollments has bolstered the overall numbers of Asian American lawyers still in service, further narrowing the small proportion of experienced mentors.
My choice of trusts and estates as a focus for my law practice was shaped in large part by my own retail experience of my late mother’s own estate planner, who was also Chinese American. By her very careful selection process, she found someone who spoke Cantonese, had a certified public accountant credential, and was also a specialist who graduated from Fordham, his qualifications made a perfect bilingual business card. Even with all of those prerequisites ticked off, I found this person lacking in compassion guiding us through the probate process and while he got the business done, I knew for myself that I had better bedside manner and during our engagement committed myself to sometime learning this discipline and be able to serve others.
At that moment I had no idea that I would be starting a trajectory in just over a year that would land me in law school at age 41 and discovering my capacity to complete a program of study while working part-time over 4 years. I commuted via public transportation several days a week for 4 to 5 hours a day which allowed plenty of time to do my reading, and being a non-traditional student put me out of the mainstream of student life. I participated in student organizations as I was able, including the Asian Pacific-Islander Law Student Association, which I found to be more focused on social and professional networking, as well as OUTLaw, the organization for LGBTQ students. Being much older than the other members in both of these groups made me an outsider, and to a certain extent being gay in the Asian American group and an Asian American in the LGBTQ group accentuated a feeling of aloneness even while I did what I could to participate as meaningfully as possible. While I applied my energies with purpose and focus to my studies and took advantage of what my law school had to offer, I found it difficult to find mentorship. In part, I unwittingly found myself fulfilling an expectation of the model minority myth of being able to go it alone without much in the way of collegial support, though in concept Hofstra Law School made its best effort to offer it.
Before the term intersectionality was conceived and had come into widespread use, back in the 1980s in my teenage years, I would describe myself in church and secular peer circles as a “minority-of-a-minority-of-a-minority.” In spite of this experience, I could still recognize the yearnings of those who were drawn to the pan-Asian law students’ organization in the context of a colorblind, yet racialized environment. This environment was and continues to be dominated by an upper-middle class white male standard of behavior whether in the classroom or employment recruitment, and the model minority image working in law school of Asian Americans is one of obedient “workhorses” who are not afraid of long hours working passively without complaint but also not as creative as others. Even when, scholastically speaking, Asian American students are on par with others, microaggressions can come out in their biased treatment by professors and peers make for a racialized environment. Having my surname mispronounced, being called by someone else’s name, or an assumption of innate intelligence are all examples of slights that can erode one’s confidence or ability to excel or feel a sense of belonging.
Yung-Yi Diana Pan describes in her work Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School how racialization, the assumption of cultural affinity based on phenotype, occurs at the same time as professional socialization in law school. Through firsthand experience of panethnic student organization meetings and interviews with students from Asian American and Latino backgrounds, Pan maps out the contours of a colorblind landscape that minimizes the relevance of racism, normalizes systemic racism, and inhibits expressions of emotion or personal experiences in the service of a neutrality of “just reporting the facts.” Even though Asian Americans are so diverse as a group, the lessons taught and learned in law school have the paradoxical effect of driving Asian Americans together. 3
In spite of my experience in law school, I found in going directly into solo trusts and estates practice as a second-career attorney that I was able to tap into my social networks including The Episcopal Church, school and university connections, and even make use of my somewhat limited Cantonese-speaking skills (at the level of a child speaking with a grandparent embellished with precise legal terminology). While I don’t specifically market my practice as serving Chinese Americans, I do have more than a few clients from that community, the cases which have brought most satisfaction to me were ones where I was effective at serving multiple generations of the same family at once, acting as the hinge person to help clients find clarity in their wishes and communications with one another. By offering my clients the legal safeguards and options that they need to make advance decisions in preparation for disability and death, I am able to accompany them through different stages of that journey, which has been a privilege. Reading Pedagogies of Woundedness opened my eyes to some of the corollary experiences in medical education and the world of health care, I appreciate the opportunity to engage in such an interdisciplinary inquiry through this roundtable.
