Dion Lim admits that she got into journalism for the wrong reason.
“Can I be totally honest with you?” Lim, the Emmy Award-winning journalist, asked a theater of teenagers on September 19th. “The reason why I wanted to get into journalism in the beginning was because there was a crush that I had on a boy.”
Lim was one of four panel speakers during the Trailblazer panel at the 1990 Institute’s second annual Roots & Wings Youth Symposium, held at the College of San Mateo. The free daylong event was aimed at Asian American youth (ages 14 to 21), along with parents and educators. During the panel, the speakers discussed their shared experiences as immigrants and Asian Americans.
The panelists — entrepreneurs, politicians, journalists and executives — spoke about growing up as immigrants and children of immigrants, and about learning to be confident leaders in their communities.
Lim, whose father was a chemist, explained that she was never great at history, math, or science, but discovered that she was a good storyteller.
“You can succeed in the world without having the best grades,” she said.
Having spent years working in TV news—most recently at ABC7 San Francisco—Lim covered anti-Asian violence during the pandemic.
“I remember waking up and being bombarded with images and stories of bloody elders, people who were beaten in the streets,” Lim said.
She received death threats herself—eventually causing her mother to email her to stop because she told Lim she was “making us look bad.” Lim later left her 20-year career to write her book, “Amplify: My Fight for Asian America.”
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Deb Liu, the former CEO of Ancestry and co-founder of Ember, grew up in a small town in South Carolina.
“We joked that there’s one Asian family in every town,” she said.
She recalled she was frequently told by strangers on the street to “go back where she came from,” despite the fact that Liu was born in New York.
Liu said she responded by trying to make herself smaller. If people didn’t notice her, she reasoned, they couldn’t shout at her family in the street. She kept her head down and focused on school, where she excelled at math.
“If I just put my head down and I work really hard, I can earn my way out of here,” she said she remembered thinking.
For a while, it worked.
“In engineering school, you never had to talk,” Liu said.
That changed when she became a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and, for the first time, missed the top performance rating. When she protested that her work was strong, a partner told her that in client service, “it’s not just the quality of your work, it’s actually the relationship with the client.”
At Stanford Business School, the issue was even more apparent; 30 to 50% of a grade was based on participation. Although she was initially worried, Liu said she pushed herself to speak in every class at least once, a strategy she calls ‘strategic extroversion’. With enough practice, speaking eventually became a natural part of who Liu is.
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Evan Low is the president and CEO of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, a political action committee with the goal of increasing LGBTQ+ representation in public office, and a former California assemblymember. He opened with a show of hands, asking how many students loved politics, and then how many planned to run for office. While many hands went up initially, none stayed up.
Low became the youngest openly gay Asian American mayor in the country as mayor of Campbell. He explained that while Asian Americans make up close to a majority in several Bay Area counties, they remain underrepresented in government. Even as a fourth-generation Californian, voters would ask him, “Where are you really from?”.
“There is no cavalry coming,” Low said. He told the students how political consultants would write off Asian Pacific Islander voters as ‘statistically insignificant’ due to low turnout. He emphasized the need to vote, and, in his own experience, the power of even a single vote: his 2024 congressional primary ended in an exact tie for second place.
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Among the symposium’s in-kind sponsors was a familiar name for Bay Area students and tea-drinkers. Boba Guys started in 2011, co-founded by current CEO Andrew Chau, who explained that the idea was simple.
“I just like boba,” Chau explained. “It sounds random,” he admitted, but explained that he wanted better ingredients, and a brand that “felt more like me.”
Chau explained how representation was part of the company from the start.
“In 2011, boba was not in everyday malls. It wasn’t in the media. It wasn’t in pop culture,” he said. He credits much of the rise of boba in popular culture to chains like Boba Guys.
He acknowledged that critics see the chain as a watered-down version of their culture. Chau explains, however, that every culture needs an entry point. “There’s always going to have to be a beachhead,” Chau said. Customers who may have just wanted to try boba are introduced to flavors like Korean Banana milk, Ube, and chrysanthemum.
“You have to start with something accessible, make it relevant, and then over time you get deeper and deeper cuts,” Chau said.
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The panel’s moderator, Caroline Pan, came from North Carolina, where she currently lives. Pan, the vice chair of the 1990 Institute’s board, joined in the summer of 2024.
She said that the institute’s “dual mission” drew her in. One half aims to build “more constructive relationships between the U.S. and China”, effectively demystifying China to the general American public. The other aim focuses on advocacy for education and empowerment of Asian American youth.
Pan grew up in the U.S. as a child of immigrants, then moved to China in 2005 with Intel and spent 13 years there as an expatriate, also working for Hewlett Packard during that time.
Pan said the institute stands out among Asian American groups for its focus on youth. With the symposium only in its second year, the board is weighing whether to expand it.
“There are people that want to continue building this community and continue helping the next generation to be successful,” Pan said. “So stay tuned.”
