Sam Lee is the editor of Woven, an independent publication covering Asian American culture, food, career, and identity. Sam writes about the experiences of the 24 million Asian Americans whose stories are too often relegated to footnotes in mainstream media. Follow Woven on X @readwoven and Instagram @thewovenmag.
Asian Americans leaving big tech has become a recognizable pattern. The career arc of many Asian American professionals in technology follows a recognizable pattern. Strong academic credentials lead to a position at a large technology company. Years of strong performance lead to senior individual contributor roles. And then, at some point in their 30s or…
The Asian American wealth gap is one of the most poorly understood features of this community’s economic life. The statistics on Asian American income are some of the most misleading numbers in American demographic data. Asian Americans have the highest median household income of any racial group in the United States. This fact is cited…
Asian American founders have built some of the most consequential companies of the current era. The list of Asian American founders who have built large companies is long enough now that it should have long since complicated the model minority myth’s vision of Asian Americans as employees, not leaders. Jensen Huang built Nvidia into one…
Talking to Asian parents about money is one of the most consistently difficult conversations in Asian American family life. Money is not a taboo subject in most Asian households — it’s a constant subject. Salaries are asked about directly. Rent and home prices are discussed openly. The cost of everything, from groceries to college tuition…
The rise of boba bubble tea from underground Asian American staple to mainstream phenomenon happened faster than almost anyone predicted. Bubble tea was invented in Taiwan in the 1980s — depending on which origin story you believe, either at Chun Shui Tang teahouse in Taichung, where a product development manager named Lin Hsiu Hui mixed…
Second generation Asian American cooking has its own signature: a weeknight fried rice finished with fish sauce and chili crisp, a pasta tossed with miso butter. There’s a dish that appears, in some variation, in the kitchens of second-generation Asian Americans across the country. It doesn’t have a name. It’s the thing you make on…
Japanese Korean Chinese BBQ are three completely different culinary traditions that share almost nothing beyond the concept of meat and fire. Ask someone who’s only been to one kind what “Asian BBQ” is and they’ll describe what they know. Ask someone who’s been to all three and they’ll tell you the question doesn’t really work…
The Asian American independent voter is a growing reality that defies easy categorization. For decades, Asian Americans were treated as a monolithic voting bloc — first assumed to lean Republican due to small-business ownership and social conservatism, then reliably Democratic after the 1990s. Neither assumption was ever quite right. And today, as the Asian American…
Asian American leaving religion is happening across communities — quietly, incrementally, often invisibly. Asian Americans leaving their parents’ religions rarely do it dramatically. The conversation usually doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small defections — skipping the service, not correcting someone who assumes you still practice, giving vague answers when relatives ask about…
Asian American mental health is a crisis hiding in plain sight. Asian Americans have the lowest rates of mental health service utilization of any racial group in the United States. This is not because Asian Americans have fewer mental health needs — the data suggests the opposite. It is because of a specific set of…
Saving face Asian American culture imposes a specific burden that is rarely named directly. For Asian Americans, saving face is not just a social norm — it is a moral framework and, often, an invisible tax. There is no exact English translation for “saving face.” The closest approximation is something like “preserving one’s dignity in…
The model minority myth is most often encountered as a compliment. Asian Americans are hardworking, they’re told. Academically successful. Quiet, law-abiding, professionally accomplished. The model minority. What’s the problem? The problem, it turns out, is everything — and it starts with where the myth came from, which has almost nothing to do with Asian Americans…