“Do what you love. Find your passion and the money will follow.”
In a uniquely American brand of individualism, job choices have become elevated to love affairs, where the “I” takes full credit for both successes and failures. Looking back at the first jobs of three generations of women in my family, though, I see how the choices were never fully our own but rather a kind of kirtan or call and response where the “I” called out for an opportunity and the world responded with a very specific set of options born of enormous forces outside of our control.
My grandmother followed my grandfather to Japan in the mid 1940’s. They had met and married in a Korean expat community in Manchuria and when they were in their early 20’s, he was accepted at a Seminary in Tokyo. Although she had two young children and wanted to stay in her community, everyone told her that if she didn’t go, she’d lose him forever. This was right as the Japanese occupation of Korea was ending. My grandparents had no money and would be in Japan at a time when being Korean meant you were no better than a dog.
Since my grandfather would be at school, my grandmother knew she had to make money to support her family. In 1945, though, policies excluded Koreans from all public or private-sector jobs. The only marketable skill she could think of was cooking; although she had never attended high school nor been to a restaurant, she opened a small “café” in the main room of their apartment. This was her first job. The place had a few tables and she sold one dish: Duk Kuk, a traditional Korean rice cake soup. Her customers were the Koreans who studied at the seminary. The bowls of steaming, savory soup were cheap and the place was always busy.
She’d run back and forth between the bedroom upstairs where her two small children, both under five, entertained themselves, and the restaurant downstairs where she chopped, boiled and cooked. Her younger daughter, my mother, was dying of diphtheria, a potentially fatal bacterial disease. The Japanese doctor said to stop feeding her because there was no use wasting good food on her but instead, my grandmother fed her whatever she wanted. I’m not sure if she did this because she believed in the power of her food to heal or if she indulged my mother so she could enjoy her last few months of life but soon, the color came back into my mother’s cheeks, strengthened by the soups and dishes my grandmother made.
I don’t think my grandmother would have called it work. It was just living. Or maybe all living could be called work. Regardless, she knew that you did whatever was necessary to take care of your family. There was no question of personal passion or the luxury of choice. She made no demands of life. Life made demands of her.
Twenty years later, that little girl who almost died would grow up and travel to a very different country where she’d fall in love with a more modern concept of work. Not the kind of work that requires you to get your hands dirty but the kind of work that men had always gotten to do before her, where you got to leave your home and use your mind to provide for your family.
In America, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 had just passed, eliminating race-based discrimination in immigration quotas. Many Koreans, including my mother, moved to Los Angeles at that time. America was a dream come true for her, providing opportunities she never would have had in Korea.
When she and my father arrived in California in their 20’s, she looked in the Help Wanted ads for her first job while my dad attended law school during the day, thanks to the GI Bill, and fixed televisions at night. She noticed that of all the entry level jobs, computer programmer paid the most. My mother had recently graduated from Ewha University, the top women’s college in Seoul with a degree in English literature; she knew nothing about computers but because she was an immigrant, this new industry was one of the only places she could get a job. Nobody else wanted them.
Her path to becoming a programmer started out with being a keypunch operator, which meant she operated a keyboard machine which punched holes in a card. These holes in the punch cards held pieces of code and when they were fed into a computer, they told it what to do. Because she wanted to be a programmer and get the big salary ($400/month in the late 60’s), she attended a programming class at night in Hollywood.
When I was in elementary school, I remember my parents spending their weekends drawing out flowcharts by hand using triangles, squares, ovals and ellipses to sequence the “if, then” statements in COBOL, one of the first widely used programming languages. There would be piles of scratch paper spread out around the living room as he helped her write programs in what would be my mother’s third language.
As she hit the peak of her career in the 1980’s, traveling the world for Pepsi to design their global computer systems, it was a world she had no background in but for which she was perfectly suited. Often the only woman — and the only Asian — in the room, she broke through that industry’s proverbial glass ceiling, full of pride at having achieved so much more than what she had been taught in her “How to Be a Good Wife” class in college.
When I graduated from college in 1987, decades after my grandmother started her little restaurant in Tokyo, I moved to New York City to find my first job. I knew I wanted to work in television news because I wanted to inform people about the important events of the day. As a biracial young woman with no contacts, pedigree nor a degree from any of the “right schools”, I had no chance of getting a job at ABC News or any of the then three network newsrooms. But the cable industry was just beginning, and jobs were plentiful there. Like my mother, I entered a new industry because it was where I could find a job. From there, I worked my way up — first at MTV, then Lifetime, along with all the other women, minorities, artists, and outsiders who often populated production teams and programming departments at cable networks in those early days of the industry.
Network newsrooms in the late 80’s were run by white men and if I’d been able to get one of those coveted spots as a production assistant, I could have been stuck in that role for a decade getting coffee and picking up dry cleaning for the male producers. Instead, at MTV News in New York, I was sent out with my own crew to interview people for daily news stories which I’d edit at night in one of the edit bays. I was able to go from production assistant to vice-president in six years, a trajectory unheard of at the networks. Although I’d love to take credit for all of this, I can’t. I recognize that if it wasn’t for the birth of an entirely new industry, and a series of first generation female bosses who believed in me, I never would have had the opportunities I had.
Reflecting on the first jobs held by myself, my mother, and my grandmother, I see how we did not fully create our opportunities. We found side doors, and from there, “choices” emerged. Although at the time we may have felt like our choices were our own, I see now — they never were. What do these first jobs say about us? What don’t they say about us? They are a reminder that none of us are truly independent beings. Even disruptors like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are products of our times. There is no escaping our context. Our time and place is a part of our biology, psychology and also our professional lives. As I reflect on these first jobs, I also see more and new opportunities with every generation. It makes me think about the concept of increasing complexity in physics which can give a direction to evolution. This makes me hopeful that new choices will emerge for every new generation to come.
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Previously Published on Medium
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