Dear Mom and Dad,

Thanks for taking time out of your day to talk with me. I came out to you three years ago, and since then, I’ve come home many times. Each time, the three of us gather together in private exactly once to be able to to talk about the things that matter most to us, and it always happens at the end of my visit. This time, I’m glad we’ve been talking throughout my stay about those important topics. I know it’s hard because we don’t agree on most things. But I think it’s necessary. More than anything, I want a family that feels united. I want Julia, who is 11 now, to grow up in a household that respects each other’s beliefs and actions—not one that is fighting an ideological war. I want my grandparents, who live with you now, to enjoy peace and warmth with their big family in their old age. I think this is a goal we can agree on.

We talk a lot about values in our family. I want to start by sharing some of mine.

Perhaps the strongest one—and the one that stands out from the values of people you regularly interact with—is my deep-seated desire to protect and empower people who are disadvantaged by the system we live in. I grew up Chinese in a mostly white society. Even in preschool, I remember that the other kids made fun of me and wouldn’t play with me, because I was different from them. I didn’t think about race too much during my K-12 education, because you placed me in school districts where there were many Asian-Americans. But in college, I became friends with more kinds of people than ever before, and I began to understand where I stood as a person of yellow skin in this country. The racism on campus was subtle, but almost always there. I saw how much harder Asian people had to try, how much more attractive they had to be, how much richer they needed to be in order to succeed socially. It became clear to me that there were always quotas for Asians—from eating clubs to investment banking internships—and that competition often turned Asian-Americans against each other. I saw how hard it was for my Asian male friends to attract girlfriends, compared to their white counterparts. I saw how much power white people had on campus and in the world, and I began to notice how much easier it was for other white people to access that power.

Meanwhile, I also got to know Latino people, Black people, Muslim people, and people from low income families for the first time. I had friends whose parents cried when they got accepted to Stanford because they didn’t think they could afford it. I had classmates who were the children of undocumented (illegal) immigrants and some who themselves were undocumented. I had classmates who covered their hair with headscarves. I became aware of the systemic racism that started with the colonization of this land and continues to today. For example, in this country, illegal drug usage is the same across all races—a ridiculous number of healthy white people I know have done illegal drugs—but you are many times more likely to be arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses if you are Black or Latino. My black friends’ parents have gotten stopped by the police multiple times just because they are black. Latino people get comments from people in public who assume they’re Mexican illegal immigrants. A black Princeton friend of mine was often told by his friends in high school that black people are less intelligent.

These things don’t just happen to imaginary people that don’t have anything to do with us. This kind of racism has happened to people I know. It happens to Princeton professors. It happens to Latino doctors who people assume to be nurses. It happens to Princeton-educated black men who can’t walk down the sidewalk at night without white women crossing the street to avoid them. Being black or latino in this country means that every step of the way, people assume the worst in you and treat you like you are worth less than they are. And as the well-documented police killings of black men this past year have shown, sometimes, you die because of it.

During college and after college, I also began to realize how disadvantaged women are in our society. They are told they are bad at intellectual pursuits, they are discouraged from taking on leadership positions, they are discriminated against in their careers, and they are often treated as sexual objects in the media and in real life. A close female friend of mine came crying to me one day because one of our mutual friends, a straight man who often made crude jokes about women, had tried to force himself on her near her dorm room. She stayed for the rest of the week on a friend’s couch so that she could avoid him. At the same time, surveys were being conducted that showed that one in five women are sexually assaulted on campus. At Facebook, I learned from my colleagues just how hard it was to be a woman product manager or engineer—people on campus assumed they did human resources or marketing, their peers assumed they had no technical knowledge, and people interrupted them constantly in a way that they did not do to their male peers. These are some of the smartest, kindest, and most competent leaders I know. The bias is not always intentional, but it is present.

Lastly, I grew up gay in a society, a church, and a family that demonized gayness and expected me to repress my ability to love. I knew I was attracted to other guys before I was thirteen. I didn’t understand it, and it didn’t really occur to me that the way I sometimes felt about guys was the same thing as “being gay”. I tried dating girls in high school, but they quickly realized I had no real interest in them. The first person I dated seriously was also a girl, but I just couldn’t feel the same way about her that she felt about me. In college, I developed feelings for somebody for the first time, and it was a man who could not return my feelings. I told nobody, not even him. For over a year, it was common for me to have weeks where I cried every other night. I cried because I did not think anybody I cared about would ever truly love me; because nobody understood me; because I thought I was inherently defective and immoral. Lastly, and importantly, I knew that it would be a devastating loss to you two, my parents. I had just absorbed so much self-hatred from my upbringing that I did not think I could ever be happy. At Princeton, I grew cold and distant from people so that I didn’t have to acknowledge the gayness and deep sadness inside of me.

Eventually, I told a few of my close friends, who were supportive and kind. Little by little, I started to accept myself. I saw that there were people in the world that didn’t consider gayness to be wrong - gay people were just different. I became aware that where were plenty of gay men in the US who had come out and lived happy lives with the people they loved.

Do you know the history of the gay community in the US? Before gay men started congregating in big cities like New York or San Francisco, I imagine many of them felt very alone and lived in shame. Once pockets of gay men started forming in urban areas, they started to create their own communities. They were happy and well, and then the AIDS epidemic hit. Imagine you’re a gay man during  era: you’ve lived your whole life in repression because of who you desire and love. One day, you discover a community of people just like you who finally understand you and give you hope for happiness and self-worth. They become your family. Then one by one, they fall ill and die, without warning and without pattern. People start to suspect it’s spread through sex. You start to see your body and others’ as carriers of death. The love that united your community becomes the cause of its extinction—and its hope turns to fear and guilt. In between the funerals of your best friends, you struggle to come to terms with your own death. Meanwhile, news agencies refuse to report on the phenomenon. Policy-makers deny its existence. Funding sources withhold money for research that could save the lives of everybody you love. In fact, anti-retroviral drugs shown to be effective against HIV were being researched and distributed in other countries. But nobody would do anything about it here. And you know it’s because people think you are less than human and that you deserved to die.

All these people wanted was to be able to live their lives: to be healthy, to do well in their jobs, to be loved and to love others. They just wanted a chance at happiness. Was that too much to ask?

The gay community and their supporters fought for the people they loved. They had nothing to lose, and they had everything to lose. So they fearlessly spoke up. They took pride in their identity. They called their distant family, put their faces in the newspaper, and shouted in the streets. They were dying, but they wouldn’t go without a fight. Eventually, AIDS spread to straight people and the mainstream finally started caring. Nowadays, people living with HIV have life expectancies similar to HIV-negative people, as long as they’re treated early.

These days, being gay doesn’t mean you’ll get AIDS. It doesn’t mean you won’t find love. And in many parts of the country, it doesn’t mean people will hate you for who you are. Now that I have come out and lived in San Francisco, I have realized how much more productive and creative I can be when I don’t feel guilty about the thoughts I have. I’m stronger, happier, and more loving because I’m in an environment that accepts me for who I am.

This is why I celebrate people who are different, not tell them they have to conform. As long as they are not hurting me, their differences add new perspective and color to my world—I would never want to regulate how they dress, speak, or act, because I know how it feels to be told that.

Because I know personally what it feels like to be oppressed because of unchangeable aspects of who I am, I support other people who are subject to systematic disadvantage. It doesn’t matter that I am not Black or Latino or Muslim or a woman or the child of an illegal immigrant. Discrimination and hate spreads like an illness, and it doesn’t stop at one group. There is a famous poem about how German citizens allowed the Nazi party to rise to power:


“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

This is happening already in Trump’s world. His election has let many people think it is okay to hurt others because they think those people are inferior. People have posted signs in Arlington, Virginia calling Asian Americans “Job Stealing Ching Chongs” and telling them to go back to “Communist Land”. People have said “Now that Trump is president, we’re gonna beat you chinks up and send you back to China!” Teachers across the country report that hateful language toward their non-white students has increased. A 10 year old girl was taken home from school because a boy grabbed her vagina during school saying, “If the president can do it, so can I.” These stories are not isolated - they’re happening all over the country and state governments have issued statements indicating that reports of bias-based attacked have risen since Trump’s election. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, a neo-Nazi white nationalist conference was held inside a federal office building, where people used Nazi salutes to hail Trump, and the keynote speaker suggested Jews were not human and recited Nazi propaganda in the original german. The speaker said, “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” This is the same movement whose most prominent news platform, Breitbart News, was led by Trump’s campaign chairman and now a senior advisor and chief strategist of his administration. Trump’s victory has  emboldened his supporters to terrorize the people they don’t understand. It is one critical reason I denounced Trump, and now that he has won, it is not something I will tolerate under his presidency.

The election is over, but my fight to empower oppressed people will never stop. More than anything, the results from Nov 8th have woken me up. I used to assume other people would take care of the world for me. But I’ve realized that is simply not true. I must step up, put in time, and engage if I want the future to be one worth living in. I wish I could turn back time to create a world in which my friends and I didn’t grow up feeling less worthy than others because of who we loved, our gender, or the color of our skin. It’s too late for that now, so we’ll do the next best thing: we’ll create that world for our children.

Thank you for listening.

Your son,