Amy Chea: Cambodian American in NYC

Amy Chea was born in Massachusetts and is the daughter of Cambodian refugees. Growing up in primarily white environments, Amy shied away from other Asian Americans and her Asian American identity. As she got older, she realized how isolated this made her feel, and she became interested in learning about and fighting against systemic racism. Currently she works for the Low Income and Investment Fund in NYC and also serves as a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Unified Asian Communities. 

I spoke with Amy about how she kept her identity at bay as a child, why she’s proud to be both Asian and American, and her reactions to anti-Asian racism in the US.

Photo courtesy of Amy Chea

Rebecca: Can you start by introducing yourself and telling me about what you do for work? 

Amy: I work as a Senior Program Officer and Small Business Advisor at the Low Income and Investment Fund in New York City. I run our Early Care and Education program, where we give grants to child care providers, advocate for stronger childcare policies, and discuss the intersection of childcare, racial equity, and gender equity. Recently we’ve been providing emergency grants for COVID and helping childcare providers keep their doors open.  

With my aunt and a few of her colleagues, I also co-founded an organization called Unified Asian Communities (UAC). UAC supports the Asian American community in Maine, where my aunt lives. We help immigrants and Asian Americans with things like translating forms or translating doctors’ appointments, getting COVID-19 vaccinations, and organizing food drives. I’m really excited about our work, and I love being able to give back to the Asian community there. 

Rebecca: How did your family come to the United States? 

Amy: My parents are Cambodian refugees who fled during the Khmer Rouge. Right after the Vietnam War, a dictator came into power. He believed in what he called an “agrarian utopia,” where everyone works on a farm. There's no education, and he murdered anybody that had an education or was a professor, teacher, doctor, or lawyer. If you wore glasses and looked smart, you were eliminated. Cambodia is still struggling today, because of the Khmer Rouge. 

My mom is from the capital city of Phnom Penh, and my dad is from a rural village in Cambodia. They met at a refugee camp in Thailand, where they spent a lot of time before coming to the US. My parents came to Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1981, because of local church sponsors. 

Rebecca: When you were growing up, did your parents talk about their lives in Cambodia? 

Amy: They never really talked about it, and I never asked either. Looking back, it feels selfish that I was afraid to know their stories and their trauma. 

That was a big part of why I kept my own identity at bay for a long time, because if I identified as Cambodian, I would have to reckon with all the horrible things that my parents had gone through. I wanted to separate it and think that that was the past over in Cambodia and now we’re here in America. Especially as a kid, it’s hard knowing that your parents are vulnerable or can be taken advantage of. Now that I’m an adult, I talk to my parents more about their lives in Cambodia and Thailand. 

Rebecca: Can you tell me about your upbringing, especially regarding your Asian American identity? 

Amy: I was raised in a strict Asian household, where sleepovers and boyfriends were completely off limits. My parents would get mad if I went to a birthday party and boys were also there. My parents thought that if I had a boyfriend, I could potentially go down a wrong path and not finish school. I had to get perfect grades, and my parents even paid me for each “A” that I got. I was class president and led some other clubs, and I thought of myself as that typical Asian overachiever. I bought into the model minority myth, and I perpetuated it as I grew up.

As a kid I was allowed to dance and play sports, and that made me feel more American and more normal. I have two older brothers who are eight and nine years older than me, so they were here when my parents were refugees and brand new immigrants. By the time I came along, my parents were settled in the US a bit more, so I had opportunities to be involved with extracurriculars. But I often felt like an outsider in those activities. My parents had to work multiple jobs sometimes, so they couldn’t attend a lot of my sporting events. I would look around in the stands and see everybody else's families, and I’d be embarrassed that my family wasn't like an American family from TV and in the movies.

I grew up in a town that was 96% white. I didn’t meet other Asian kids who weren’t family members until I got to middle school. There's a large Cambodian population in Attleboro. My parents wanted us to have better education opportunities though, so they moved us to a suburb that was more white and affluent. There was plenty of class diversity, but hardly any racial diversity.

I was the first in my family to go to college, and that meant a great deal to my parents. They survived the genocide, and had had their education and dreams stolen from them. They transferred the weight of their dreams onto me. I think that the drive to achieve great things in honor of your parents’ sacrifice is pretty common with Asian American kids. That pressure led me to be fairly successful in school, but was also pretty soul-crushing sometimes. “Good enough” always seemed to be further and further out of reach. The more successful you are, the more you want to keep climbing, and you feel like you’re never good enough. To this day, I still feel like I haven’t done enough.   

Rebecca: When you were growing up, how did you feel about being Asian American? 

Amy: I spent the larger part of my life wishing I wasn’t Asian, because I didn’t want to be so different. From middle school to maybe even college, I would celebrate my heritage at home, but try and hide it in public. I’m also part Chinese, so we would celebrate holidays like Chinese New Year and Cambodian New Year. My mom is the best cook in the world, and I’m so grateful that we get to have that kind of cuisine. In our culture, food is so much more than just eating. I’m getting married soon and my fiancé and I are doing a two day wedding - the Cambodian ceremonies are on one day and the American wedding is on the other. We’re also doing a Chinese tea ceremony this summer. 

When I was younger, I wanted to be white like all the other kids in my school. I wasn’t proud of my heritage in front of my friends, and I spent a lot of time trying to prove how white I was. I even straightened my straight Asian hair, because that’s what all the other girls were doing and I wanted to fit in. 

Race was always a huge part of my identity, because I was always one of only a few Asians. There were maybe only ten Asians in my middle school and even fewer Southeast Asians and South Asians. Because of this, I would get called “Asian persuasion” or told I was so pretty and exotic-looking. Kids teased me and said things like “love you long time.” One of my classmates’ mom used to call me “Ling Ling” instead of my actual name. To this day, I don’t know if she did that on purpose or if the other kids convinced her that that was my actual name. Every time she said “Ling Ling,” all the other kids would laugh. I laughed all of these instances off and never stood up for myself. I laughed, because I wanted to be included in the joke even though I was the butt of the joke. 

I never knew how sad these things actually made me feel until a few years ago. I kept a lot of these thoughts in my head, and I never even talked about it with my brothers or cousins. White supremacy has a really powerful way of making you feel lonely and isolated. When I was younger, I purposefully stayed away from other Asian kids, because I was so terrified that I would get made fun of if I was with them. In middle school, I had a classmate of Chinese descent, and everyone would always say that the two of us should date. I hated it, and it was so humiliating. 

In college, the Asian American sorority on campus tried to recruit me, but again, I wanted to avoid being with only other Asians. I never thought to myself that I was actively trying to only be with white people, but that’s what I was doing. There were repeated opportunities for me to be with people who had similar backgrounds as me, but I turned them down.  That made it a lot harder for me to understand my identity, and I felt even further isolated. I should have sought out more people with similar backgrounds as me, but I was afraid to.

Rebecca: How has the way you view your Asian American identity evolved from college until now? 

Amy: I’ve definitely come more into my own and a lot of that had to do with the 2016 election. In 2015, I started thinking about how I identify politically, which I had never really thought about before. I started thinking about how critical race is in this country, and I listened to a lot of what Bernie Sanders said. I was so inspired by it that I went back to grad school, and got my master's in public administration and public policy. I wanted to understand how insidious and systemic racism is in our country. I also wanted to learn more about how our country was founded and what the founders were thinking when they were writing the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. 

I learned a lot and sought out more opportunities at work. I used to work at the Division of Early Childhood Education in New York City, and I was selected to join their Racial Equity Core Team. I’m also on the Social Justice and Racial Equity team at my current job. I've really tried to find ways to do the work myself, but also help other people or organizations do it as well. 

Rebecca: How have recent events such as COVID and the uptick in violence against Asian Americans made you feel and reflect on your identity? 

Amy: Recent events have made me think about how invisible we've always been and how Asians are expected to be docile and blend into the background. A lot of us are survivors and sometimes to survive, you have to keep your head down and do the work without complaint. 

A lot of us are born to families with centuries of trauma, where survival was the only thing that they could strive for, and they passed that down to us. Our elders have long silenced their own pain and grief, because in our culture we deal with pain individually and don’t like to burden everyone else with it. But I think we need to amplify ourselves and share our stories, and I feel a lot more appreciation for my heritage now. I feel a responsibility to speak up and put my Asian body on the line for our elders who can't do that. I also feel a responsibility to address certain topics such as anti-Blackness with my friends, family, and elders. 

We’re asked where we’re from so often, because we’re the perpetual foreigner in this country. Even when 70% of my face is covered by a mask, people still notice my roots first and feel entitled to know where I come from. Now there’s more of a threat that hangs onto those words; it makes me wonder if people feel uncomfortable if I’m Asian, if they want to target me or hurt me, if they wonder if I have COVID-19. 

Hate crimes against Asian Americans in New York City have risen astronomically, and I've been scared to walk around outside since last February. I’m always on guard now. It sucks, because as a woman you’re already like that and now it’s heightened. I’m nervous someone is going to say something to me or throw something at me. I’m even more afraid for my parents when they leave the grocery store, for my grandma when she goes for a walk, and for my aunts and uncles. I can’t be there to help and they likely won’t speak up if anything happens to them. 

People really think of Asians as a monolith and when they think of Asians, they primarily think of East Asians. Once, a young woman on the subway asked me where I’m from and asked if I was Chinese, Japanese, or Asian. 

I’ve even diminished our own people’s issues and played oppression Olympics on myself by wondering why I even bring up Asian issues when Black people are being murdered on the street. I would always put Asian issues off to the side and minimize myself and other Asians. I finally realized that we can do it all and fight for everyone. The common enemy is white supremacy, and the solidarity that we have with Black and brown people is exactly how we get rid of the anti-Asian racism in this country. 

America has a lot of issues, but I love America and I love being an American. That's why I get frustrated when people tell me to go back to my country or call me anti-American for wanting to change the “American way of life.” I want to change things, because I believe and love my country so much. I want us to be able to live up to the ideals that we were founded on.