MELISSA HUI
Tell me about yourself.
I was born and raised in Michigan. My dad is from Hong Kong, born and raised in Okinawa. My mom is from Korea and was raised in New York. I have this collision course of the different cultures I grew up with -- a little bit of Cantonese, Japanese, and New Yorker. That made for a weird background growing up in the Midwest.
I have two siblings and they are my biggest co-conspirators in a lot of things. I am the only one in my immediate family that did not go to engineering school. Instead, I went to school for pre-medicine for 3 years on a scholarship in Detroit as a Biology and Anthropology major. The day before my fall term in my junior year, my dad got a heart attack.
That morning, I slept with my phone off and woke up with an ambulance passing by my house. Once I turned on my phone my mom called me saying, “Hey, your dad had a massive heart attack at the track.” Both of my parents are vegetarians and long-distance runners. He was in his early 50’s when this happened. My mom told me to come out there and bring my dad’s insurance card. When I got there, they were trying to cut the gate to get into the track but they couldn’t get to him and the minutes were ticking by. And I remember just thinking, “This isn’t real, my parents are healthy and fine.” I was encountering the mortality of my parents.
They gave him a very small chance of surviving. Clinically, he died twice. Once before they could get to him on the field, and once on the way to the hospital. My mom got re-certified in CPR the week before. They said if she didn’t know what to do, he would’ve passed right there. She saw him go down from cardiac arrest on the track from across the field, administered CPR, and flagged someone down at the tennis courts to call 911. That day they said he had a 5% chance and he will not walk or have any comprehension.
The reason I tell this story is because my dad was the strongest person I knew, and it just shattered my world.
He was a pillar to my family and our community too. He was in a coma for four months, and we found out later he had a stroke and a heart attack at the same time. He came out of it cognizant, but was completely paralyzed and crying to let my mom know, “Don’t let me be a burden.” It was really rough because this happened around the 2008 economic crash, and my mom was commuting 5 hours a day one way to get to work, leaving at 3 in the morning for Indiana to work, went to see my dad, and then returned home to crash. I ended up taking time away from school because my siblings were young, with my sister in college and my brother in middle school. I did not go back to college during my final semester. In 2015, my dad did not come out of it even after going through 3 rounds of neurosurgery. My parents ended up losing their home and my mom had to take care of the three of us.
What did you do to get through that?
So I took a step back and took a job as a UX designer in California. I’ve been out here for 10 years and have had an amazing career in technology. Seeing my siblings wrap up their master’s and engineering degrees let me know it was okay to go back to school. I transferred all my credits to the University of Washington, and the pandemic pushed me back. Now I’m coming up to my last semester. I was trying to manage clients and my own sanity with 2 more classes to finish off so that I could either graduate now or in-person in 2022. It’s crazy knowing that I’m faced with the same thing, but now I have different strength, motivation, and power that’s pushing it. It took me a decade and lots of change to get here, but I’m finally getting there.
All that you’ve gone through, how has that made you stronger and more resilient? Do you feel as if every other inconvenience now is just a minor speed bump in your life?
Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot to be said about one’s capacity to encounter things. When you’ve been stripped down to nothing and all you have is whatever cleverness or resourcefulness you can muster up, you see things in a different light. I know that this is just a speed bump and there’s something on the other side. Recently, I’ve learned to shift out of the victim mentality I used to have. No more, “Why is this happening, what did I do wrong?” Now it’s, “this thing is happening, what can I do in response?”
What role does therapy play in your life, if any?
I didn’t come across therapy until I was older. Some of it is because of the stigma associated with it in the Asian American community. Especially coming from a religious family, where you believe that God will take care of you. I have nothing against that, but there’s a point at which there’s only so much you can do, and it’s okay to ask for help. I don’t think we were allowed to do that sometimes. You know how they say, “Power through it, we’ve gone through worse generationally. Deal with it.” To what end do we push ourselves and suffer? At the time this happened, I didn’t go to therapy, but I had a professor that studied depression, bereavement and dying. I was transcribing her research and making sense of it from a cultural perspective. We have a community, but ultimately they are not responsible for your healing. I’ve had more exposure to approaching healing from an intellectual method versus a spiritual method.
Therapy was a transformative experience for me. It let me know that I don’t always have all the tools or framing to see myself in a different way.
What are some healing methods that worked for you?
Have you heard of the re-parenting process? It’s when you can hear younger versions of yourself whenever you feel a certain emotion or have a response to something. Allowing ourselves to feel secure with our current selves lets us heal and give stability to our younger selves.
Basically, you’re looking at all the splintered versions of your past self and letting them know, “you’re going to heal, all of us, together. I myself may not have all of the answers, but I can see all of you so don’t worry, I won’t let you float off. I’ll scoop you up.” At the moment, we might not have all the answers and we can still feel scared. But we’re doing for our past selves what our parents weren’t able to do and what our environment wasn’t able to provide us. We’re not perfect, and that’s okay.
How do you give strength to others?
Everyone is trying to slap their name on things these days. I only have so much capacity and I’ve scaled back quite a bit. I work with leaders and teams and have burnt myself out like I was flying too close to the sun and God knows I’ve melted off a few feathers. The capacity of strength I have left to give is only for a small collection of people that I stay connected to, and consulting emerging leaders instead of executive leaders. I have a lot of managers that think managing sucks, and I don’t want to make it suck for other people. It’s where I put my joy, my strength, and I hope it has a radiating effect on other people. I feel like society has gained consciousness now during the pandemic.
What kind of advice would you give to someone that has or is going through a setback that was similar to yours?
Take care of yourself. What do you need right now? Know what care looks like, emotional, rest, physical, there’s a lot of things that either preserve energy or bring us energy. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help. We come from a collective society. We have family, friends, a community, and even professional support. It's not that you’ve failed or that you’re weak. Rather, you are taking care of yourself. Sometimes you need to lean on other people, because they are leaning on you.
Explain the metaphor about the asteroid belt that resonated with you?
The asteroid belt is a messy and unpredictable space of big and small rocky feelings and emotions, things that we feel we're not able to navigate, or things that make us want to avoid it all and turn around to go back to our comfort zone. But if we are willing to pilot ourselves into the asteroid belt and move slowly, processing each feeling and emotion, we can exit into the expansive and open space of possibilities on the other side.