By Ethen Lieser
“A good thing can’t last forever.” So goes an old adage. And that inexorable truth was nailed to the bone when the dot-com economy plummeted like American hearts whenever they heard “hanging chads” for the umpteenth time during the presidential election. But while the general public was able to recover from that political fiasco relatively unscathed, dot-com moguls are still trying to pull out the bear-market bait-hook lodged in their wallets, security and dreams.
Within the last four quarters, many Asian American dot-com workers have been sacked or were made to hear the “Happy Trails” layoff tune. Last month, San Jose-based Yahoo! cut 12 percent of its workforce. Charles Chariya, a producer at Yahoo! for about a year, lost a “cubbie mate” colleague but was fortunate to hold onto his job. Still, the 25-year-old Vanderbilt University graduate had some tense moments during the layoffs.
“We didn’t know who was going to be cut … yes, I was definitely worried,” Chariya said.
For young dot-commers who once owned stratosphere-high stocks and a colored-coded collection of Jaguars, the underlying issue isn’t missing that paycheck every week — it’s their ability to be resilient through failure. Through dreams. Through egos. And especially with workers of Asian descent, the No. 1 failure is when they can’t see a smile on their parents’ faces.
“Though this is mainly a stress issue … it also depends on how close these people are to the quote-unquote traditional Asian values,” said David Matsumoto, a psychology professor at San Francisco State University. “There seems to be more personal responsibility to alleviate the problem because people of Asian backgrounds identify with their jobs more than others.”
That’s where career consulting firms comes in. The firms’ mission is to stimulate their clients’ self-esteem because most tend to believe it is their fault.
“Self-esteem and confidence are definitely the first areas we work on,” said Libby Pannwitt, a career coach who, for the past eight years, has run the Work Life Design Group in San Carlos, Calif.
Added to that, the pressures of being the “savior” of the family — felt by many recent immigrants in search of financial security — can sometimes be overwhelming.
Pannwitt recalled some years ago how she consulted a Korean American who was laid off. Though she wasn’t able to follow up on the story completely, the man went back to Korea depressed and almost took his own life, she said. “I guess it was a sense of shame in facing his family,” said Pannwitt, trying to reason why he would do such a thing. “Luckily, I haven’t had a case like that since.”
With the exponential growth of layoffs, Pannwitt has seen a considerable influx of clients seeking her guidance. But according to Pannwitt, she never had a large Asian American clientele. “I don’t have a lot of Asian Americans in my practice, partly because that population doesn’t seem to seek out help very often. I see that from the point of personal pride.”
Deepali, 22, who didn’t want to release her last name, worked at a San Jose e-commerce software company for three months before being laid off due to lack of funding. Like the Asian American clients of Pannwitt, Deepali also felt the need to please her parents.
“I felt a little depressed during the first week or two,” she said. “First thing I thought about when I got laid off wasn’t ‘What am I going to do?’ but ‘What are my parents going to think?’”
However, Deepali, without the help of consulting firms, has come to terms with the business aspects of her career. “I know it’s not my fault,” she says. Deepali, who just graduated from U.C. Berkeley in December, recalled how while she was still in college, the dot-com field shot up like an “Old Faithful” without any hint of comedown in sight.
“I was in college during the big boom and today, it has become so different, whereas before I was getting almost 300 to 400 emails a week for interview calls and I wasn’t able to keep up with it,” she said. “Now, I’m just happy to get one e-mail back from the hundreds that I send out.”
That’s something many are wishing for right now.
Reach Ethen Lieser at elieser@asianweek.com. |
