Survivors

May is Asian-American Heritage Month, so Yahoo had a guest speaker come in today. The speaker was Yul Kwon, the Korean who won the Survivor – Cook Islands reality show last year. Kwon spoke about two causes:

1) First, he spoke about his movement to provide Asian-American kids with a role models who go beyond the stereotypes that Asians have endured in this country. He spoke of his youth on the east coast, and how he realized that there were few people on TV that “looked like him”, and for the few that did, they were only portrayed as Kung Fu experts or some role where they couldn’t speak English. H spoke about the disparity in corporate America between leadership and Asian representation.

He went on to speak about how he used Survivor as a platform to represent Asians in a positive light. For those of you that didn’t watch that show, he certainly demonstrated that there is more to Asians than Kung Fu and bad English.

I was amused by his comments about the expectations that Asian parents have on their children and how the culture frowns on those that call attention to themselves. I heard many things that reminded me of my upbringing, but those things resonated.

He also spoke about while Asians are quick to distribute recognition for their successes, they are just as quick to assume responsibility for the failures of a greater team. All of these things struck a chord in my professional life. I “grew up” professionally early in my career in an environment that promoted “team” successes. I still think there are benefits of this approach, but I’ve also seen how self promotion can benefit the individual.

His point was that some of these cultural approaches have not served Asians well in American business culture. These are things that today’s Asian-American professional must work to balance professionally. It’s not to say that either approach is right or wrong, but that there must be some balance in how they are applied.

2) The second cause he spoke about was actually pretty timely (at least for me). His second cause was to get more minorities to register for the National Bone Marrow Registry. He told a story of how his childhood friend died of Leukemia when they college roommates at Stanford.

While Caucasians have a 70% chance of finding a suitable marrow donor in the United States, minorities have a significantly lower match rate. Because of his notoriety from Survivor, he serves as a spokesman for the fight to get minorities registered.

This was timely because of the fight my friend Lars is going through right now. I’ve documented Lars’ fight several times here, but it’s really hit a head this week.

Lars contracted a fungal infection in his sinuses a couple of weeks ago, so he was forced to undergo surgery on Friday to remove the infection, because his immune system has been ravaged by the Leukemia.

For more information on Lars’ situation, please read http://marrowdonor.blogspot.com/ We are actively trying to find blood donors in the Houston area, so that the hospital he’s at can process the blood for white blood cells. Lars needs these to fend off the infection. His situation is dire.

It was difficult to hear the story of Yul’s childhood friend, so we rally around our friend Lars in an attempt to help him win his battle. I got to listen to one Survivor talk about a fight that we all want Lars to win, so that he to may also be a survivor.