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Clinton, on Lake Erie east of Toledo. They asked me to be the manager. Their daughter Jennifer ran the business on the family side. We hired sixteen teenagers, opened for the summer season, and business was good. Connie came by often to make sure all was going well.
    One particularly hot day I asked four of the girls to clean out the trash cans, which were smelly and gross. One of the girls, a cute one with swagger because she was the leader of the pack, declined. Connie already didn’t like her.
    â€œWhat are you going to do about it?” Connie asked.
    â€œI don’t know. What should I do about it?” I responded.
    â€œFire her!” she said. “You have to send a message.”
    I had never fired anyone before. And I had definitely never “sent a message” to anyone. I was a little scared, but I knew I couldn’t show any hesitation or weakness. I would have to follow Grumpy’s lead. I did what I was told and fired her.
    The girl threw a hissy fit. She looked around at the other workers. Her eyes pleaded for solidarity. There was a moment of silence. I looked around at the other girls.
    â€œAnyone else have a problem?” I asked.
    No one replied. Instead, they walked outside to clean the trash cans. They got the message, and I learned a useful lesson: firing people never feels good, but there are times when you have to show an employee the door.
    I HAD HAD MY own taste of rejection.
    When it came time to apply for college, my first choices were Princeton, Brown, and Harvard. I applied to all three. The responses: no, no, and no.
    The only two schools that I got into were Wellesley College and University of Miami, Ohio.
    My boyfriend, Adam, was going to the University of Cincinnati, which is very close to Miami, and they offered me a scholarship. I told my folks that I was going there. My parents basically said, “Abso-freakin-lutely not. You are going to Wellesley. All-girls school, we’re good.”
    So there you had it. I was going to Wellesley. At the time I didn’t fully appreciate the all-women’s environment and transferred to Cornell after my freshman year. I think my parents assumed that at an Ivy League institution, where they had always dreamed of sending their kids, I would get a staid, conservative education. They were wrong.
    When I got to Ithaca, New York, I was overwhelmed by the size of the school. I felt like I was getting lost and realized I had to find a niche, a community. So two friends—Heidi Moon and Jenny Hahn—and I formed RAW, short for “Radical Asian Women.” We designed a little sign with a yellow fist. But I still had no idea why I would have reason to be a radical, until I took a few specific classes.
    Asian American History was a shock. I had thought that Asians were the model minority, different but in some ways better than white Americans. The course taught me that Asians had faced harsh discrimination building the railroads, that many had come over as indentured servants, that Japanese and other Asians had been essentially jailed in camps during World War II. It was all new to me.
    That triggered my radical Asian woman phase, in which I didn’t like white people, since they were the oppressors. Call it the next stage in my breaking away from the submissive Korean woman that my mother had hoped to create. I took courses in African American history too, which deepened my sensitivity to discrimination.
    I landed a work-study job with an organization called Peer Educators in Human Relations, or PEHR. It was a pretty unusual program. Our job was to go out onto campus and conduct peer facilitations and trainings of other students in bigotry and oppression.
    Before we could go out and train anybody, we had to go through the training ourselves. So I went through this life-changing set of training sessions where people got right in my face and essentially said, “Little Asian girl, let me tell you why you’re