National Domestic Violence Awareness Project

profeminist:

“The argument began as soon as Charlie Mai and his brother, Henry, announced their plans to attend a Black Lives Matter protest that evening in D.C. Their father was not having it.

Glenn Mai, a retired FBI agent, had been raised in Dallas by Chinese immigrants who had taught him that he would succeed if he just worked hard.

“Chinese culture is very much about working within the system,” Glenn, 54, said, and during decades in law enforcement, he’d come to believe the system worked.

His son, Charlie, 24, took a different view. “My father deeply believes that everyone has a fair chance, which is just basically untrue,” said Charlie, an artist who fled New York for his family’s home in Northern Virginia because of the pandemic. “It’s very Asian to me, that view that if everyone just works hard, then everything will turn out right for them. I’m definitely a little reactive to that because I think that’s delusional.”

Read the full piece here