Let’s start from the beginning.
I’m the youngest daughter of a Taiwanese immigrant and a refugee from the Vietnam War. I was born in Washington, DC, and grew up nearby in Maryland, with short stints in Barbados and Taiwan, both when I was too young to remember.
On November 29, 1997, I was in fourth grade. It was a Sunday, and I was getting ready to go back to school after the Thanksgiving break. I had not only celebrated Thanksgiving with my mom, dad, and three siblings, but my dad’s forty-ninth birthday had been the day before, on November 28.
My mom had a business trip to Taiwan planned the next day, so my dad, one of my brothers, my sister, and I piled into our Toyota Camry to see her off to the airport.
When we were on our way home, my dad lost control of the car, which flew across the empty lanes of the highway. The last thing I remember was some greenery on the side of the road. Luckily, no other cars were involved.
When I regained consciousness, I was in a helicopter on my way to Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. I had broken my femur and tibia in my left leg and had acquired a severe nerve injury in my right arm, known as a traumatic brachial plexus injury (TBPI), a type of paralysis.
My dad passed away as a result of the accident. At nine years old, I was mostly in shock and didn’t know how to process everything. No one really offered me guidance, either. I lived at the hospital for three weeks, with a cast that covered almost the entirety of my left leg, and moved about in a manual wheelchair, my right arm limp in a sling.
I spent a long time after his death feeling angry. No one else I knew at the time had lost a parent. My mom also didn’t really want me to talk about him, perhaps influenced by her own cultural upbringing and views around death. It would take me almost twenty-five years, on a 2020 trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, to remember the gifts that my dad had given me and forgive him. In many ways, I still miss him, and part of the reason why I’ve dedicated this book to him is so that he’s remembered.
On that November day, my body, my family, and my life changed. I describe the events surrounding the car accident now as multiple layers of grief: loss of a loved one, loss of the way my right arm used to be, and loss of childhood innocence.
I call this sort of scenario a disability origin story. It’s the story of when our disability happened, whether it was congenital (from birth), an accident, cancer, or something that emerged over the course of our lives.
I’m reminded of a quotation from Brené Brown: “Our stories are not meant for everyone. Hearing them is a privilege, and we should always ask ourselves this before we share: ‘Who has earned the right to hear my story?’”1
Thing is, we don’t owe anyone our disability stories. Some of our disabilities may be a result of traumatic events that we don’t want to revisit or relive. As the daughter of Asian immigrants, I internalized that I should not share anything that might seem shameful for fear that it might make my family look bad. Through the lens of this East Asian culture, death in the family, disability, and the car accident were all examples of such things. For twelve years after the accident, it became my shameful secret. I wore long sleeves year-round to “hide” my arm and told everyone my dad was away on a trip.
A lot of the people I grew up with didn’t know what had happened to my dad. It sucked to not be able to talk about him. They also assumed that my arm injury was from birth. Two decades later, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a mental health–related disability. I suspect that not talking about the car accident exacerbated my mental health in a way that became PTSD.
So, then, why am I sharing my story when I don’t owe it to anyone?
We all have varying levels of comfort around how much we share. Part of why I’m so open about my disability story is that I remember what it felt like not to honor my truth. For twelve years, I felt like I was operating as a shell of myself, keeping track of all of the lies. Now, I want to take control of and reclaim my narrative rather than let others make assumptions. As Emily Ladau says so eloquently, “If we want the world to be accessible to the disability community, then let’s make the ideas and the experiences surrounding disability more accessible to the world.”2 But just because I’m open about my disability story doesn’t mean that every disabled person is—or that they have to be.
When I was a senior in high school in 2005, I wrote a letter to my guidance counselor titled “It’s Time.” We were beginning the college application process, and I had begun reflecting on what life after high school might look like. I shared my hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the future. I also wrote about how maybe one day I’d write a book.
That dream stayed in the letter for many years afterward.
There was not only a massive amount of imposter syndrome—me, a writer?—but also the logistics of it all. At the age of nine, I had to learn how to write with my non-dominant hand—not because I wanted to but because I had to. Becoming disabled impacted the way I wrote and the way I typed. And while I initially thought it would diminish my voice on the page, I would later find out that that wasn’t the case.
Now, I’m reflecting on my unconventional journey: from the way my literary agent reached out rather than me pitching him to using speech-to-text technology in drafting my proposal. It was all similar to how I’ve navigated daily life with a paralyzed arm in a two-armed world—different but creative and, most importantly, presented in a way that works for me.
So how did I get here, from twelve years of silence to telling my story on global stages at TED and the World Economic Forum in Davos, across social media, and within the pages of this book?
Accidentally.
I didn’t set out to be a disability advocate.
More than a decade after the car accident, I was invited to speak on a student panel about disability as part of a half-day event at Georgetown University called Accessing Difference: New Politics and Pedagogies of Disability. It was October 22, 2009.
I took a seat at the front of a conference room along with two of my fellow classmates. I had never spoken about this topic before, and I felt like my heart was beating out of my chest. I was so nervous. When it came time to introduce myself, through tears, I shared the story of the car accident publicly for the first time.
A few things also happened before October 22, 2009, that led to what felt like a watershed moment for me and my advocacy journey.
When I was a freshman at Georgetown, in 2007, I cocreated a Taiwanese American club with a few classmates. When we first decided to start the club, we were told by another organization, the Chinese Student Alliance, that there wasn’t a need for a Taiwanese club. We persevered, and until my junior year, I was part of the leadership team. Cofounding the Taiwanese American club introduced me to pride, culture, and community in a part of my identity that I had thought I had to erase in order to assimilate. As I write, the club is still active. From this experience, I learned what it was like to start a community group. Starting a Taiwanese American club gave me the confidence that it was possible to start a disability club.
I had a summer internship in investment banking at Goldman Sachs after my junior year. Each week, we received performance feedback from a recruiter. A few weeks in, I remember leaving my session feeling a little low because I was having a tough summer and making a lot of small mistakes in tasks. Sending calendar invitations was the bane of my existence, and I couldn’t seem to get them right. Those small mistakes were reflected in my feedback. As a perfectionist at the time (though I feel that I am currently in recovery), I was being extra hard on myself. The Goldman recruiter, Jenny, had known me for a few years, since one of the schools she covered was Georgetown. She said, “Tiffany, you deserved your place here. You don’t need to have a chip on your shoulder.”
I call this a gentle callout. Jenny’s comment pushed me to start thinking critically about the ways in which I thought I wasn’t operating at my full potential. Because I had internalized society’s views and the media portrayal of disabled people that said we could not measure up, I had set the bar too high for myself, wanting to prove them wrong.
In August 2009, at the start of my senior year, now with a full-time offer to return to Goldman, I decided to apply for a Fulbright research fellowship in China, where I had studied abroad. In my research on China, I came across a statement that students there needed to be physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy in order to pursue their education.3 I was curious about how this requirement would impact the educational outcomes of the students who had become physically disabled during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. Putting together the proposal for the fellowship was strenuous and required several letters of recommendation. Prior to asking for these letters, to help guide my professors, I shared my personal statement, which included my personal story and connection to disability. One told me that while he knew my topic might be controversial, he thought I was the best person to pursue it, given my personal experience with disability.
Spoiler: I didn’t get the fellowship, but the process made me realize that there was value in my experience as a disabled person.
Also in August 2009, I was a resident assistant, and we went through a diversity training exercise called The Big 8, where we were asked to cut slices of a pie based on how important different aspects of our identity were to us. The slices represented race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, religion/spirituality, nationality, and socioeconomic status.
Being a woman was a big part of my pie. My Taiwanese identity had become prominent since creating the Taiwanese American club. Being disabled made up almost half of my pie.
I looked over at my neighbor and saw that being non-disabled was the thinnest sliver of his pie. I realized that if you’re not disabled or not affected by disability, you don’t really think about it. However, I thought about not being able to use my disabled arm on an almost daily basis.
An idea of creating a disability club sparked in me. Today, some of you might recognize me from Diversability, the disability-centered community business with more than eighty thousand members that we’ve built over the years to elevate disability pride, build disability power, and advance disability leadership. Back in 2009, Diversability started as the first student-run disability club at Georgetown University. Diversability continued as an active club until 2014, and in 2019, a new student club called the Georgetown Disability Alliance would continue this work.
After I graduated, I went on to work at Goldman Sachs, where I was actively involved in the firm’s disability employee resource group (ERG). In my final year at the firm, I joined the investment banking campus recruiting team, which helped me understand what companies were thinking about when they recruited talent from underrepresented backgrounds.
After I left Goldman, I joined Bloomberg Television. During my off hours, I cofounded its disability ERG, pitching its creation to Bloomberg’s chief diversity officer. At the time, Bloomberg was in the nascent stages of forming its ERGs, and having met the leaders of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) ERG, I knew there was an opportunity to bring my knowledge of disability communities to the company.
I left after a year to join the media network REVOLT and put my finance hat back on, working directly with REVOLT’s chief financial officer as its director of business development. At a Black-owned company, I witnessed that it was possible to build a company that was racially and gender diverse. In 2018, the company was 67 percent Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) with over 60 percent women in senior leadership.
While I was at REVOLT, itching to find a way to connect to the disability community, I relaunched and incorporated Diversability. Our earliest supporters were my colleagues at REVOLT. We started by hosting panel events and fireside chats in New York City. Our first event happened in a packed room of over seventy attendees, making me realize that there was a desire to create spaces for disabled people to gather and to build a stage for our voices. We then started hosting events in seven other cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, with support from Meta’s Community Accelerator Program, we made all of our programming virtual and increased our digital footprint and community fourfold. Today, we see ourselves as the mostly virtual disability ERG for the world—one that exists outside a company.
At the same time, I started noticing that friends and people I’d meet in real life or on social media kept asking the same questions.
“How can I be a better ally to disabled people?”
“How can we get disabled employees to self-identify?”
“How can we get disabled employees to join our disability ERG?”
I have never been the biggest fan of disability etiquette trainings. I say this a lot throughout the book: the disability community is not a monolith. But I started having more conversations with friends, doing podcasts, and engaging with corporate partners about where we could begin to talk about disability inclusion and allyship. And I started thinking more about what it would look like to move from a disability-negative culture to a disability-positive one, phrases I have adapted from the sex-positive movement.
In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, many of us who were non-Black were trying to figure out how to support our Black peers. I was confronted with the ways in which I had upheld white supremacy in my own life. I read How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. My friend Nicole Cardoza started The Anti-Racism Daily newsletter, which grew to over 300,000 subscribers in three years. In the years that followed, anti-Asian racism rose due to misinformation about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of this elevated my consciousness that I needed to do more than not be racist. I needed to be anti-racist.
As companies made statements about racial equity, I tried to better understand intersectionality in the context of anti-racism. Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to highlight the ways in which different aspects of our identity create a compounded experience of oppression.4 As a disabled Asian woman, I sit at the intersection of ableism, racism, and misogyny.
In December 2020, I started The Anti-Ableism Series on TikTok, a video series highlighting the different ways we can be better allies to disabled people. There are so many ways that ableism shows up in our society, from not including captions in videos and building entrances that don’t have step-free access to asking disabled people intrusive questions about our bodies and medical history. I wanted to create a digestible tool that people could use to start their own journey to becoming anti-ableist. The series currently has over two hundred videos with more than five million views.
The Anti-Ableist Manifesto was born out of that series and from talks I’ve given over the years to answer the aforementioned questions.
I came across an Instagram post from the United Nations entity for gender equality and the empowerment of women (UN Women) in 2020 that said, “Ending discrimination starts with self-reflection.”5 This has been the guiding phrase for my work and this book, because in order to know where we’re going, we need to know where we’re coming from. The work is as much about what you do as about what you value and how you think. To that end, you’ll find prompts and reflection questions at the end of every chapter as you embark on this journey from self-reflection toward action. Consider these a version of the “gentle callout” that Jenny did for me, to guide you to a deeper understanding.
The book is divided into three sections organized through a framework called “Me, We, Us.” It starts with your individual journey and ends with how we can come together as a collective to create systemic change. I was introduced years ago to this framework, which was influenced by a storytelling framework called public narrative,6 developed by Harvard professor Marshall Ganz as a way of looking at how we can make impact and change as individuals, in our communities, and in the world.
Whether you are a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professional or part of the disability community, a friend or family member of a disabled person, or just someone who wants to learn more, I hope this book provides you with the guidance to show up with more care and compassion for yourself and each other. The fact is, we live in an ableist society that influences the way we think, behave, live, and treat others. We’re all impacted by ableism, whether we realize it or not. If we’re fortunate to live the full extent of our lives, we’ll all end up disabled. We’ll also learn that many of the innovations that benefit disabled people, such as curb cuts, audiobooks, electric toothbrushes, and remote work, also benefit all of us. This book is for all of us.
This book isn’t all-encompassing; it can’t be. I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who was born in the United States to immigrant parents, who acquired my disability at a young age, who was raised in a single-parent household, and who had the privilege to attend a private university and work in the corporate world. One thing I’ve had to learn is that I will not be able to single-handedly dismantle the system of oppression that is ableism. But we can take steps toward doing that together.
Throughout this book, I’ve made a decision to include a variety of stories from disabled people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and opinions. As many of us say, “Once you’ve met one disabled person, you’ve met one disabled person.” My goal is to add color and share some of the challenges and triumphs that come with living with a disability in an ableist society. Though these stories may look different for everyone, when taken together, they provide a powerful and compelling picture of the disability community. And no matter how diverse or different these stories are, remember that we’re all connected through our common humanity. I hope these stories will help to make our experiences more accessible to you and serve as a call for you to embrace the authenticity of your own. I hope this can be one resource in a choir of other disabled voices and resources that will help shape your perspectives.
Learning is never about shame, so I’m grateful that you showed up so we can all learn together. Thank you for being here and joining me on the journey to becoming anti-ableist.