By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Mary Chung Hayashi
Once, Mary Chung Hayashi’s good friend and fellow politician, California State Treasurer Fiona Ma, sent Hayashi a picture that made Hayashi both laugh and sigh. It was a picture of Ma wearing a shirt that read, “I’m not Mary.”
“She anticipated that when people came, and both of us were there, they’d mess us up,” Hayashi said.
And it’s not as though there was no precedent. In fact, Ma made the shirt after months and months of fellow politicians regularly mixing up the two women, despite the fact that they look nothing alike.
But the regular mix-up—which still happens to this day—is one of the myriad hurdles rooted in racism and sexism that Hayashi has had to surmount over her decades-long career as a politician and mental health care leader.
Hayashi is also the author of two books. The first, Far from Home: Shattering the Myth of the Model Minority, documents her journey from South Korea to the United States, and her evolution into a leader in the mental healthcare space, many years after her sister’s suicide at 17 years old. It was 1980, and Hayashi was only 12 at the time. Her sister died just six months before the young Hayashi and her family immigrated to Orange County, California. Her family never talked about it, but it was an event that left a deep and lasting imprint and around which much of Hayashi’s mental health advocacy revolves.
The second, recently released book is a series of interviews with 17 women who have gone into politics, entitled, Women in Politics: Breaking Down the Barriers to Achieve True Representation. Hayashi also deliberately included in the book an 18th interview with one man, her mentor: “When we talk about mentorship, we need to include men.”
The book took Hayashi two years to complete. And it is a realistic book, she said. It is not all victory and success. In the course of writing it, two women left their respective political races. One decided that Congress was not where she wanted to be. The other dropped out, because of how negative attack ads were impacting her and her family’s well-being.
And it is striking, Hayashi reflected, just how “behind” women start, when they enter political races.
“When you announce for public office [as a woman], you almost start at a negative,” Hayashi said with a dry laugh.
There are certain things all women who enter politics are subjected to, like the press picking apart exactly what they are wearing, while leaving their male opponent untouched. Whether the press likes a woman’s choice of clothing can impact her electability.
Mary Chung Hayashi
And then there are things that not all women experience, most of which have to do with racist stereotypes of how certain women — in this case, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women — should act. And this she has experienced in spades, both living as a young girl in South Korea, and growing up in the United States.
“Our culture celebrates silence as a strength. We’re raised to be good girls,” Hayashi said. That “good girl training,” as she put it, is about being seen, but not heard. It was in this spirit that her parents expected her to get married and have children with someone “who would take care of me,” even as they supported her brothers’ ambitions to go to college.
But, as luck would have it, Hayashi took a women’s studies course at Cal State Long Beach when she was 19 years old. In truth, she said, she originally thought it was a home economics course. She thought she would be learning how to be a good mother and wife. Instead, she learned about feminist theories, women’s voting rights, and reproductive rights.
“And that,” Hayashi said, “was really the turning point.”
Following this experience, she moved up to the San Francisco Bay area, and joined the Asian Law Caucus, working with the civil rights nonprofit in a part-time administrative position and going to college at night. It was there that her love of advocacy blossomed, and at 26 years old, in 1993, Hayashi started her own nonprofit called the National Asian Women’s Health Organization (NAWHO).
She worked at NAWHO for 10 years, raising millions of dollars to support mental health outreach, tobacco cessation campaigns, and diabetes and cervical cancer awareness amongst AAPI communities. The first ballot measure Hayashi worked on, too, was healthcare related — Proposition 63, the Mental Health Services Act, meant to expand and better mental health care service for Californians. The act also established the Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission (MHSOAC) meant to provide oversight and accountability on issues related to mental health. California voters passed the ballot measure in 2004.
It was this win that inspired Hayashi to run for the California state legislature in 2006. Collecting nominations was no problem. Several notable women, including Tipper Gore and then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris — the current Vice President and a 2024 presidential candidate — endorsed her. It was, instead, her own party that proved to be one of her first stumbling blocks.
Even after seeing all the endorsements Hayashi had collected, Hayashi said, the Democratic Party just looked at her.
“And she said to me — and I’ll never forget it — she said to me, ‘Have you thought about running for something local first?’ … She indicated that she saw that because I didn’t have any experience working for a state legislative office that I wouldn’t be viable — like I wouldn’t know what I was doing,” Hayashi recalled.
So Hayashi asked the chair whether she had asked Hayashi’s opponent — a white male county fire chief, who also had no experience in a state legislative office — the same question. The chair never replied.
While Hayashi won the race, becoming the first Korean American woman to hold a seat in the California State Assembly, she remembers her opponent targeting her for her race, saying things like, “I’m the only candidate who was born and raised here.” (“What is that? Why is that a qualification?” Hayashi pointed out in her interview with the Northwest Asian Weekly.)
She found herself constantly having to prove herself in a way her opponent did not, rolling out her long resume ahead of her, every time she entered a room.
She also faced a double-standard: As a leader, she was expected to speak with authority. As a Korean American woman, she was expected to be silent and submissive, in keeping with the racist “model minority” stereotype to which many AAPI folks, especially women, are subjected.
Mary Chung Hayashi
“Asian women in particular, we’re expected to be submissive and grateful, and we are penalized when we present as a counter to that stereotype,” Hayashi said. “During my campaign, and during my tenure in the State assembly, people sometimes described me as ‘aggressive,’ and very competitive. And, you know, campaigns are very competitive.”
It was here that her fellow politicians would constantly mix up her and Ma. In addition to looking nothing like Hayashi, Ma is of Chinese, not South Korean, descent.
While Hayashi said she laughed it off, it’s not as though misidentification didn’t take its toll on her. In addition to the fact that public perception of a person heavily determines whether a person makes it in the field of politics, repeated misidentification of one person for another can eventually take a toll on a person’s mental health.
“When I think back to those days, it does make me feel a little sad,” Hayashi reflected. “‘Wow. How did I manage that?’ It was so often that it happened.”
Even after she left office in late 2012, Hayashi continued to feel and see the significantly higher hills she and her fellow women politicians had to climb, and how difficult it was for young women to find themselves in powerful leadership roles. It’s part of what moved her to write her most recent book — and, in doing so, to help break down “the imagination barrier” which keeps voters from seeing women and Women of Color in elected offices that are historically male-dominated.
“I wanted, also, for women to see that you don’t have to be dictated by your family background, or your ethnicity or immigration status. Because if I can do this, so can you. I was taught to never ask for money from strangers. And that’s exactly what I had to do to run for office,” Hayashi said. “A lot of us overcome those cultural barriers so that we can serve and we can pursue our dreams.”
Now, two years and countless hours of research later, Hayashi’s perspective on women in politics has changed — as has her own perception of where she herself stands in the world. She doesn’t feel so isolated in her experiences anymore.
“My exposure to these positive women role models and the research really helps me deal with those experiences a little bit better, just personally,” Hayashi said. “I’m not really alone. These implicit biases that hold women back — this is happening everywhere. … But with courage, persistence, and a strong belief in your voice, there’s nothing you can’t do. I write in my book that seeing more women in positions of power is a game changer. And just by talking about these other women’s experiences, it really breaks down those unconscious biases.”
Hayashi said that Kamala Harris’s current run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination is momentous in and of itself, and that Harris has already done something big: She’s helped to further break down that imagination barrier.
“Political scientists call this a role model — the fact that you can’t be what you can’t see. And just the fact that she is soon to be the Democratic nominee for president is incredible, because … a lot of voters cannot imagine seeing women of color, in particular, doing these kinds of jobs,” Hayashi said. “I’m really excited because, this phenomenon called unconscious bias — the best way to break that down is by not only not only helping her get the nomination for the for the Democratic Party, but making sure she succeeds, because when she becomes the president, it allows the voters to re envision what women of color can be.
Harris’s run and potential win could help what Hayashi still sees. She shared a brief anecdote about a group of high schoolers to whom she gave a talk about going into politics, and her own struggles. They were all young women of color. At the beginning of the talk, she asked how many wanted to go into politics. Two students raised their hands. When she was finished speaking, she asked again whether anyone wanted to go into politics.
One lone student raised their hand.
Hayashi was dismayed. But almost every single young person who came up to her after her talk to get their books signed privately confided in her that they wanted to run for office. They were simply too afraid of their peers’ and parents’ reactions.
“They just worry about saying that because that’s not something that parents encourage them to think about or do,” Hayashi said. “We’re not supposed to be ambitious.”