By Meriah Nichols
It’s Women’s History Month. We wanted to take a minute and introduce you to a very cool woman with a history, Silvia Yee.
Silvia works here at DREDF but stays largely behind the scenes. It’s rare for most people to get to know her, but get to know her, they should.
Without further ado, please enjoy this short interview with Silvia.
1. What is a photo or image that represents you and your history?
When one of my best friends since middle school got married just shy of 20 yrs. old, I was her maid of honor and therefore attended a bridal shower that her German mother-in-law hosted. One of the “fun” shower games required every attendee to bring an unidentified baby picture of themselves and we were all supposed to go look at the pictures and try to match them with the adults in the room. Out of approximately 25 or so attendees, I was the only one who everyone correctly matched to my baby picture. I was also the only non-white person in the room.
At the time, I was completely shocked by this result. All the baby pictures just looked like babies to me. Some had light hair, some had dark, and some had almost no hair. Some pictures were in color while others were black and white. I had tried to make matches through clues like the age of the picture or a prominent facial feature. I had not found race or ethnicity to be an obvious component of any of the photos.
This photo represents several different things to me. First, it has the indicia of a welcomed baby, the long-awaited girl wrapped in fancy blankets after my mother had, fortunately for me, given birth to two boys in quick succession a decade earlier. Second, it evokes the peculiarity of an apparent mismatch between how I perceived myself and how others perceived me.
I had no doubt that I was Chinese and didn’t wish to be anything else; unlike one of my cousins, I had never dreamed of being blonde and blue-eyed and I enjoyed knowing how to speak a non-English language and (mostly) enjoyed eating Chinese food. On the other hand, all my friends growing up were white, I listened to music composed by predominantly white men (except for jazz), and read books written by mostly white people.
I didn’t think I was white, but I somehow didn’t expect others to notice that I was not white. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about being noticed or set apart for this reason.
Finally, the photo makes me think of the questions that every young person/adult has to deal with to some degree, but that are particularly sharpened and intense for any first/second generation immigrant and/or person of color: What is “me” apart from my appearance and how I am perceived? How much does my family and history shape me and how much do my decisions shape me? How do I even distinguish what my decisions are? What if my upbringing, my education, my cultural milieu, and my intuition give me different answers to these questions?
2. How does your history inform what you do now?
The gaps and discrepancies that occur among self-perception, other-perception, self-consciousness, and the signals receives from others’ words and actions are heavily influenced by culture, social bias, upbringing, and systemic discrimination. I look back and feel that I was profoundly fortunate in many ways. I only recall going on a family vacation once in my entire childhood but I never went hungry or didn’t have a safe place to stay.
Excellent grades were expected but I was also totally free to read whatever I wanted from the library. I experienced racism and hateful comments, but on rare occasions stereotypes worked in my favor (moot court judge to me: “I expected that you would speak really softly but I had no problem hearing you!”).
Whatever ostrich-like tendency I had towards thinking others wouldn’t notice my differences also made me believe my world was rich with choice, even if that might not have been the case. I think especially for children and young adults, the perception of having choice is almost or as critical as having actual choice.
With Women’s History Month, we celebrate the remarkable insight of girls and women who somehow perceived that they should have choice – to marry or not, to have children or not, to hold property, to vote, to be equally supported in pursuing an education, career, or excellence in sports – even after generations of not having it.
I think at its core, my work now is about trying to ensure that people with disabilities have real and realizable choices. A medical diagnosis should not dictate who they are, how they are perceived, their career, their family, or where they can live.
The law is a blunt tool for changing perceptions, but it can sometimes be a successful tool for changing outcomes for individuals and classes of people. And when that is done often enough, it affects perceptions too. In my ideal world, people with disabilities across all races, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and ages will be free to openly acknowledge their disabilities without sacrificing their capacity to have and make life choices. Do I think we’re there? Absolutely not. Do I think we’ll ever get there? I don’t know, but I choose to work toward that goal.
3. What do you focus on carrying with you from your past to your future? – a memory, an inspiration, a value?
I used to think the key to being a “successful woman” was balance: career-family, hard work-self-care, chocolate-other edible things, and so forth.
I think my view has shifted toward valuing capacity and fullness instead.
Balance is an incredibly hard thing to achieve consistently and hold over time. But if I build my capacity for joy or contentment or faith or humility, I can be filled with different things at different times, even when I’m not feeling particularly balanced at all. And I’ll admit, that’s most of the time!
Meriah Hudson Nichols is originally from a sheep ranch in Cloverdale, California, but grew up in countries around the Pacific Basin. She studied education, human resource development, training, and project management and spent over twenty years in careers with connections with her degrees. As a deaf woman, mother of a child with Down syndrome and daughter of a woman with fibromyalgia, she is passionate about disability rights, education and employment. In her spare time she writes, takes photos, paints and travels.
Wonderful! Please realize that: “The Americans with Disabilities Act” really was envisioned for each and every American with one or more disabilities, and anything that you can strive for, you can do. You can accomplish anything, whether right in front of you, the pinnacles of your desires and dreams, or in the stars themselves.