Welcome to…
Hi, my name is Maicen (Mason) Young. I’m a 28 year old guy who works in SaaS, plays (very casually) sports, loves video games, and is still learning the ins and outs of being a proper “adult” (i.e. I wash clean clothes I was too lazy to fold last laundry cycle and absolutely crush Kraft singles at 3am every once in awhile, but then again what’s the definition of a proper adult anyways?). I am a full Chinese-American and grew up around the Boston area, and have recently taken a larger interest in exploring my cultural background.
Depending on how well you know certain people, their personality traits, etc. you are able to bond over different things with different people. You typically share different jokes and sometimes are able to be vulnerable about different things too. I grew up in a predominantly white environment and naturally most of my friends (still my very best friends to date) were white as a result. As I’ve gotten older and met more people, I’m lucky enough to call people from many different backgrounds my friends and colleagues. I hope you are lucky like that too. Relationships with people of different backgrounds opened me up to talking and learning about new things. Ironically, it wasn’t until my twenties that I got close with more Asian friends and began talking about what we think it means to be Asian in the United States. It’s a pretty loaded question that has many layers to it, especially for someone like me who hadn’t put a lot of thought into it until then. It’s not like I wasn’t aware I was different, or hadn’t faced racism myself (you’ll hear about a few in later posts). It’s also not like my parents didn’t warn me about racism or had to go through their own, much scarier incidents (you’ll probably hear about some of these later too). It’s just something that didn’t get talked about much, and it turns out many Asian folks I talk to feel the same way too. The founding group at The Familiar Feeling noticed a few common threads that seem to pop up when talking about this stuff with people within the Asian community, with the two most common being…
Difficulty finding their voice to express deeper, more personal thoughts and emotions.
A feeling of separation/isolation between the Asian community and other minority groups.
Maybe it’s a media thing where we are portrayed to be a certain way, so we subconsciously try to embody that image. Maybe it’s something within our own community, where we believe certain things without question because making a scene and pushing back against authority is frowned upon. Maybe it’s a legacy mindset from our immigrant ancestors who had to ignore many things if they wanted to have enough money to eat their next meal. Maybe it’s something else, or maybe it’s a combination of all of it. All we know for sure in response is this…
We have a lot of thoughts and a lot of emotions, and are ready to find ways to express ourselves.
Our community has more in common with other groups than is led on, and we want to to find a way to highlight those things.
I’m proud and excited to announce the launch of The Familiar Feeling. We’re currently a collective of Asian-Americans looking to use past experiences, significant events, pop culture, and creative originals to accomplish four main goals:
Finding our voices and develop our expression of self.
Gain perspective for our contributor team and consumers (you!) by pushing our stories to this website.
Build bridges between our communities and other underrepresented groups by highlighting areas of overlap (both good and bad).
Support underrepresented communities and businesses through awareness, volunteering, and financial means.
The initial team is a truly wonderful group of folks I have had the pleasure of getting to know over the past few years. I’ll be posting introductions for each team member within the coming week. We will be dropping content once each week to start, and will increase this flow as we find our regular operating rhythm.
Admittedly, this is my first foray into standing an organization up from the ground, which has been pretty scary. Even scarier as mentioned before, this is the first time I and most of these folks are putting ourselves out there to this degree. It’ll be a collective learning process and I hope you stay along for the ride.
Maicen Young
Founder - The Familiar Feeling
