Episode 130: [Step 5] Embracing Pleasure Without Guilt
In this episode of the F*ck Saving Face podcast, Judy Tsuei discusses the importance of empowering mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and voices of color. She reflects on her successful Kickstarter campaign for her book, emphasizing the need to celebrate achievements.
Judy shares her experiences with AI in her branding and marketing business, highlighting how it aids in personal growth. The conversation delves into breaking taboos surrounding sexuality and self-care, and the significance of intergenerational healing in parenting. Judy aims to foster open dialogue about these topics through her work.
Sound Bites
"Your business is an extension of you."
"We have a birthright to feel good."
Takeaways
Empowerment comes from celebrating our achievements.
AI can enhance creativity and personal growth.
Our businesses reflect our core values and authenticity.
Representation in media is crucial for mental health.
Breaking taboos around sexuality is necessary for self-care.
Intergenerational trauma affects our relationships.
Honest dialogue can heal familial wounds.
Parenting should include open discussions about bodies.
We have the right to feel good about ourselves.
Making personal choices is essential for happiness.
Episode Highlights
00:00 Empowering Voices and Celebrating Success
03:14 Harnessing AI for Personal Growth
05:56 Breaking Taboos: Sexuality and Self-Care
12:09 Intergenerational Healing and Parenting Choices
Links Mentioned:
Judy Tsuei LinkedIn
Judy Tsuei Instagram
Dr. Nina Kaiser, Practice San Francisco
There may be affiliate links included in this blog post.
Pre-order your copy of the book — still time to support the Kickstarter campaign: bit.ly/shamelessbook
Transcript:
Judy Tsuei (00:02.668)
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast where we're empowering mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and voices of color by breaking through taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Make your story beautiful today. This week's episode is an interview and here we are in Spain.
First of all, a huge, huge thank you to everyone who supported my Kickstarter project for my book, How to Disappoint Your Parents in 10 Shameless Steps, a Modern Asian American Guide.
Because of you, we surpassed our stretch goal and we raised a total of $10,837 with 144 backers. We are currently still accepting late pledges, so if you want to help us continue to reach even more of our stretch goals, and you'll see them all listed out on the campaign, click on the link in the show notes, or go to bit.ly forward slash shameless book and you'll be able to do that there.
The big part about this is learning how to pause and celebrate because that is generally not something that I think many of us as women or especially women of color know how to do. We are usually being pulled in many, different directions, being asked to overperform. And I will also tell you that I follow this PR person who I've known and he posted something that he discovered, I think on Reddit or somewhere about these two prompts that you can ask chat GBT.
And now I use AI for my branding and marketing business. I use it to distill a bunch of thoughts. I will take our meeting notes and I will put them into chat GPT to kind of help me pull out key themes. I use it as a team collaborator. So I view it as a team member and I'm able to go back and forth and ask questions and just kind of deepen my creativity in that way. I think the more powerful questions you ask, then the better the answers that you get. Well, this prompt,
so totally wild. It's asking to basically take all of what it knows about you and then to explore how you show up, but then the undercurrent of your fears that are underneath the ways in which you show up. And then it takes the Pareto principle to do that 80-20 split where it's going to focus on the top 20 % of things that I can focus on to create 80 % of the results that I want to see in my life.
Judy Tsuei (02:18.52)
And then to also look at the bottom 20 % to make sure that I understand where I could devote less time. So if you're curious about that prompt, you definitely want to be signed up to my newsletter and then you'll be able to also see it on my blog at judytsway.com and you'll be able to see this remarkable, you can just copy and paste it and it's going to work best if you are using ChatGBT.
A friend of mine asked, you know, I mostly only do things for my business in there. Is it going to work? And because I know her and as I know many female and women founders, your business is an extension of you. Your core values are likely infused into your business. The way that you do marketing for your business, all of that stems from you as a person. It's an extension of the ways that you show up in the world. And especially if you're leading with authenticity and integrity. So I believe that it will give you.
some pretty remarkable results. So if you want that, definitely go to my website and go check that out. More so, one of the things that I had said or that it had told me is that I show up as being authentic and vulnerable and, you know, all about empowering other women, which is all true. And then underneath that, there could be some motivations that are coming from the fear that I am not those things. And
Because of that, one of the things that I can do is to slow down, to really come from that inner knowing as opposed to the outward projection or the outward validation, and then to use that as my compass, to use that as my check and balance of whether or not I want to do this thing, whether this thing is going to be beneficial. And that is one of the things that I am taking and approaching my book with.
that I'm doing this because I want to amplify mental and emotional health. And I'm doing it because it was the resource that I wish that I had growing up. I wish I had seen my lived experiences represented in the media that I consumed in the world that I moved in. I wish that someone had pulled back the curtain so I wouldn't feel so ashamed and alone in all of the things that I was going through. And so the sample chapter that I sent out on my Kickstarter,
Judy Tsuei (04:36.352)
my beautiful friend Brennan, she was like, it's like the chef's kiss. It made you laugh and cry and feel the feelings and all this kind of stuff. And she is a white woman in Texas and she just loved it so much. And I love that she loved it. I love that she felt the feelings about it. And then I love that the people who've read it have told me that it has caused them, even my designer, my designer who helped lay it out, he was like, you know.
I'm a white man. I didn't grow up in the environment that you grew up in, but for sure I related to everything that you talked about in your sample chapter and it caused me to think about things. And so that's what I'm hoping that this book will do. I'm hoping that it will be an opportunity for discussion, for reflection, for the permission to ask for help, for the permission to advocate for yourself, for the opportunities that you have that you don't have to be afraid to go after.
For this week, we're going to be diving into step five, which in the sample chapter was called Start Watching Porn, Masturbate, Get Your Pelvic Floor Massage. And I'm only going to read you a little bit of this. The sample chapter was shared for the 144 backers of my campaign. And I am excited to continue to share more parts and pieces of this. The sample chapter, if you got the PDF download, is 25 pages. And what's wild is, again, if you follow my newsletter, you would have seen how
I was put in touch with a psychic medium where my grandmother's energy came through and she specifically mentioned pages of my book proposal, specifically segments of those chapters and what she thought about those chapters, which was completely wild. And I'm still, I have the transcript of that call as one of the tabs that are open on my laptop, just to continually remind me that I'm doing this thing that I believe in and that I have someone who loves me unconditionally, even though she's passed and she believes in it too.
and that she wants to see it come see the light of day, as do I. So here we go. My mother demands. I am rubbing my pelvis against the purple carpet of the big room in our house, which also happens to be my parents' bedroom. The quote unquote big room is the largest room in our West Los Angeles home, complete with trendy wooden beams on the ceiling that we later discover are all sorts of wrong when it comes to feng shui. Things always go sideways in the big room. My mother yells at me, what are you doing?
Judy Tsuei (06:54.764)
I stop moving my body. What was I doing? I hold my breath. What are you doing? I don't know. I'm lying on my belly, rubbing my pelvis forward and backward in front of the TV. I like the way it feels. It feels really, really good. Is she mad that I'm watching TV? We aren't supposed to be watching TV on the weekdays, but our Mexican housekeeper Tanya is there, so I thought I could sneak in a little TV since it wasn't really me who was watching. I wait for instructions. Stand up. I quickly push myself up.
Tonya, the wife of one of my father's undocumented immigrant construction company employees, lives with us Monday through Friday, then goes back to her husband and children on Sundays. She has high arched bangs, held in place by aquanet, and darkly penciled eyebrows. She keeps her eyes focused on the soap opera playing on the television screen before us. How could you think to do this? Disgusting. I keep my eyes down. When my parents yell at me, I'm not allowed to look them in the eyes, because if I do, they think that I'm challenging them.
Unless, of course, they tell me to look at them, in which case if I don't, I get in even more trouble. My mother has never seen me do this thing before, but based on her reaction, whatever I'm doing is bad. Tanya hadn't said anything before, even though I had done this once or twice around her. Why hadn't she told me that this was something I wasn't supposed to do? I didn't hear my mother come home. I usually keep my ears on alert because we're not allowed to close the doors in our house, so if I do anything that's a little questionable, I make sure to know how to run and hide. Tanya can't speak Mandarin.
even though she's picked up a few words from my grandmother. They laugh together when she tries to pronounce nigh for milk to feed my youngest brother. This time though, she seems to know exactly what my mother is saying because she starts gathering up the clothes she was folding very quickly. I try to look at Tanya while my mother is yelling at me, but Tanya won't turn her body towards me. She puts the last few items of laundry into the plastic hamper. I want Tanya to put me in the basket and carry me away with her, the way she sometimes puts my youngest brother in it and whisks him up and around, but I know that's silly.
I keep my eyes looking down and catch the sight of Tanya's ankles shuffling quickly out of the room, her blue jeans cuff tight. I imagine her walking as far away as she can to the other side of the house, straight into her own room. I bet she closes the door. She leaves me to my mother. My mother repeats, shaking her head. I won't ever learn the Mandarin word for masturbate. Six months later, I catch my parents having sex in the big room. I wake up from a bad dream and want their help. I'm in fourth grade.
Judy Tsuei (09:19.916)
My parents' door is slightly ajar. I can hear the quiet murmur of the television. Since my siblings and I aren't allowed to watch TV on the weekdays, I think they're being a little hypocritical. The light of the television emanates from the room and widens as I push the door open a little bit more. It makes no sound on the carpet as it swings inwards. There, on their queen-size bed parallel to the TV, my father is having sex with my mother, going to town, missionary style. My mother's gaze looks past me towards the TV.
Her short black hair moves in response to the rhythm of my father's pulses. She looks dead, comatose, completely uninterested. Everything is covered in a pale blue hue. I walk in. Whatever sound my nine-year-old body makes finally gets their attention. My father leaps off my mother and quickly covers himself with a comforter. Somewagada, my mother asks, startled, what's wrong? I had a bad dream, say, pretending to be blurry-eyed so they won't realize how much I've seen. I could have turned around. I had enough time before they saw me. I could have gone back to bed.
When I realized what they were doing and they never would have known I was there, it could have been my secret, but I don't want to carry any more things I shouldn't know about. My body begins to move forward. Sama, my mother says. She turns her head up diagonally towards me. I'm walking towards their bed, towards my semi-naked father, towards my mother pulling her long cotton nightgown down towards her ankles under the covers. My mother hates being touched. I crawl into bed beside her. I curl my body to face her. I do this as though this is a normal thing to do.
as though my parents are like those American parents I catch every now and again on Growing Pains or Small World or Life Goes On. Parents who obviously overtly care. Parents who comfort their kids when they are disappointed about a school test grade or a baseball game they lost. But I have never done this before. We do not do this in my family. Sandwiched under the shared blankets now, their bodies freeze. They don't know what to do. I close my eyes. I pretend to sleep. I will not leave their bed even though I actually want to.
I've committed. This is it. I stay right there in between them, awkwardly, until morning. I don't remember who gets up to turn off the TV. My parents frequently tell me I am the rebellious one, that I am the one who keeps making all the mistakes. 你那么自私, my mother says. You are so selfish, becomes the chorus to our conversations. She often starts or finishes her dialogue with me by telling me that everything about my presence is wrong. 我不知道我为什么生你 I don't know why I gave birth to you.
Judy Tsuei (11:43.478)
She doesn't say this to my younger sister who is just like her. She doesn't say this to my younger brother, the first son of the family. And she definitely won't say this to the baby, nine years my junior, with his adorable dimpled cheeks and good nature, who I, like everyone else, love so much. She only says this to me. When she busted me for rubbing myself against the carpet, my mother made me feel like feeling good in my own body was inherently wrong too, just as much as my simply being in the world.
When I catch my parents having sex, I see that pleasure isn't part of her vocabulary. She knows what obligation is. That's clear to me, even in fourth grade, just as much as it's obvious how opposite we are. Maybe her version of staying safe, of teaching me as a mother, especially in the company of men, is to remind me that life is hard and don't expect to feel good about it. That night, I wonder if she realizes that closing doors is just as much about keeping out what you don't want as keeping in what you do.
So that is a bit of my chapter about step five, which is focused on breaking the taboos around sexuality and self care and even pleasure and knowing that we have a birthright to feel good and that we don't need to feel guilty about it. And it's something that I've purposely aimed to shift in my parenting with my own daughter, where we call her body parts by the names that they are. And she definitely did the same things that I did when I was little.
and we make sure she has the privacy to have her space and do what she wants to do and to know what's healthy and what I saw on a parenting site once and the difference between a secret and privacy and knowing what is healthy to keep to oneself and what is unhealthy when being asked to keep it to yourself. So I hope that when my book comes out,
that it will provide opportunities for more honest and open dialogue. And on a very meta level, that even though the whole book is about disappointing parents, that ultimately maybe they will feel proud to have raised individuals who are actively working to heal intergenerational trauma and interpersonal relationships in order to live well in all the ways. All right, next week.
Judy Tsuei (14:03.48)
We will be diving into step six, which is getting pregnant on purpose before getting married, living in a van, getting divorced, and making life choices that suit you, not because you're trying to fit into the societal norms. Wishing you the very best, and I'll see you next week.
Judy Tsuei (14:22.594)
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you'd like to support me and this show, please go to iTunes and leave your review. It means so much to me and it'll help others find this podcast. I'll catch you in the next episode. And if you'd like to stay in touch between now and then, please visit wildheartedwords.com and sign up for my weekly newsletter. I've had people share with me that it's the best thing to arrive in their inbox all week. Aloha.
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Keywords: Asian American, mental health, emotional health, breaking taboos, self-care, sexuality, intergenerational trauma, parenting, AI, personal growth
