The Time of My Life
Nikki Chen: DEI Consultant – Healing Our Roots LLC
The Time of My Life: What are you doing with the time that others do not have? I hope you choose to have the time of your life.
Bio:
Nicole “Nikki” Chen is the Business Partner for the Office of Equity and Inclusion at the City of Vancouver. Nikki previously spent 8 years working for Stanford Hospital, located in Palo Alto, CA. Nikki’s joyful and infectious presence is known to leave a lasting and meaningful impact, and you walk away from her feeling empowered. Nikki’s current goal is to follow in the footsteps of her mentors Alicia Sojourner and Mel Jones, in becoming a Director of Equity and Inclusion. Once she is done creating an inclusive and equitable space for all, Nikki hopes to retire and own a small farm on the shores of Puerto Viejo Costa Rica.
Links:
Run of Show:
00:00 Introduction to Nicole Chan
00:51 A Life-Changing Question
02:40 Reflecting on Identity and Upbringing
05:06 Motherhood and Legacy
08:42 Facing Racial Discrimination
10:36 Breaking the Cycle of Mental Slavery
12:13 A Vibrational Legacy
Transcript:
Nicole Chan. She is a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a friend. She touches the lives of those around her. She inspires those to do better and to be better. She does it from the heart. She is a person that gravitates with people, whoever is around her. She inspires me as her mother. If I never told her before, I want to tell her now.
She is the wind beneath my wings. You go, baby.
I'm gonna keep it 100. I'm nervous, but you know what? Being here has made me remember to ask the question. What are you doing with the time that I don't have? I spent 18 years of my career working in health care. Nine of those years I spent working in oncology. I worked with patients that either just found out and were diagnosed with cancer, patients that had did anything and everything to try to beat cancer.
And then patients like this woman who had said to me that she has accepted that she was going to die. I'm sitting in the exam room with this patient, and I'm scheduling her final infusion treatment and she stops to say to me, My husband and I are scheduling a trip out of the country. We're going to go to an island.
There's no need to schedule this final infusion. Wow, I say, I've never been outside of the country. That must be a beautiful experience for you to have her response. Well, if I'm going to die. Then I want it to be on my terms. How old are you? She asked me at the time I was 28, I replied, well then why not?
Why haven't you been outside of the country? And that's when she looks me directly in my eyes and says, what are you doing with the time that I don't have these words have rung in my mind every day for the last 11 years? What am I doing with my life? I have time that someone else doesn't have. What am I doing with it?
So, I started at the beginning. And, I think I realized that my inability to live life to the fullest started the day I was born. She's already gonna be black. She's already gonna be a woman. She don't need a name you can't pronounce to go along with it. This is what my grandmother says to my then 16 year old mother as to why she changed my name to Nicole on the birth certificate.
Nicole! I know plenty of white girls named Nicole. She'll be fine with that. This, and many more instances throughout my life, is why I spent the first 28 years of my life thinking I had no choice. Because who I was was already decided for me. I'm black, I'm a woman in a white person's world.
When I was younger, I used to put pants on my head. And when I put these pants on my head, I would pretend that I had long, blonde hair. Because by the age of four, it was already apparent to me that my hair was not the standard of beauty. My grandmother continued to instill in me different things that she felt was necessary for me to know to survive this world.
Hey, don't talk like that. You don't want to sound ghetto. Don't act like that. Don't dress like that. Don't be anything like them. Now, I need you all to do me a big, big favor and understand that my grandmother was not wrong. She loved me. She loved me so much that she taught me anything and everything she thought I needed to know to survive the white world.
But when you have a patient that is looking you in the eye, asking you what you are doing with your life in the time that they don't have, I'm sorry, y'all, but spending it trying to survive the white world is no longer my goal.
Especially now that it is my turn to raise the next generation. As you see my grandmother holding my mother, my mother holding me, and me holding mine. In 2011, I gave birth to my daughter, Olivia. Now, Olivia's biological father is an Irish man. Bald head and a long red beard. So, when my daughter was born with pale skin and brownish red hair, she was the shock of my family.
Um, you didn't have to go through all of this. If you just wanted to adopt a child, you could have told us. We would have still loved her. Is what my grandmother said to me when she came to the hospital to meet Olivia. So, my daughter having white skin and long hair in my mind made her.
So, when other family members would meet her and keep asking this question, it was very apparent there was confusion, but not for me. So, fast forward to Olivia being in the fourth grade, and I pick her up from school, we're driving home, and she says to me, And yeah, because I'm black, she shared with me that she identified as black.
Now, I didn't say this out loud to her, but I said it to myself. What? Um, has she not seen herself? I see her. Um, I would have understood if she said biracial. I would have understood if she said light skinned. I would have even understood if she called herself a white girl. I would have been mad, but I never would have imagined her to say that she was So, um, as time went on, I was slightly confused a little longer and I had a conversation with a friend probably about a week later cause it was still on my mind.
And I sit there with her and talking to her and I say to her, I don't understand why Olivia would identify as black. I'm not understanding this. And thankfully I have very honest friends. My friend says to me, Nikki, she is proud of you. Nikki, she looks at herself and she sees you. Nikki, she loves you.
I was unable to see the love and respect that my daughter had for me because my self esteem was so low and I couldn't see it for myself.
This conversation felt like a slap to my face. It felt like the verbal wake up call I needed. The reality check that this little girl looked at a black woman like me and loved me enough to want to be me.
I continued my journey with figuring out what I'm doing with this life that others don't have. And a part of that is loving me.
So we pick up our family in August 1st, 2011, and we move to from California to Washington. Yeah, I thought so too. And
I'm saying this as the words of a mother within the less than two years that we have been here. My daughter has experienced more racial discrimination than I have. As a light skinned, bi racial black woman than I have in the entire 39 years I have lived as a dark skinned black woman. And the only difference is when we moved.
So guess what? Do better. Be better and know better. From a mama to you.
My daughter has been called the n word while playing middle school basketball. My daughter has been told she can't play with another kid because they're not allowed to play with black kids. And she has felt discriminated against by her teachers, by other students, and other peers, simply because guess what?
This light skinned girl is now the only black one in her class. Do better.
I will no longer allow this cycle to continue, but I can't do it by myself. So as I break this cycle, I need y'all to help me break this cycle.
As I continued down my journey of understanding what it meant to do this work, I came to realize. We as a society have continued to practice something called mental slavery. And here's the breakdown in the definition. Mental slavery is a state of mind where discerning between liberation, AKA freedom and enslavement is twisted, where one becomes trapped by misinformation about self and the world.
So as we tried to figure this out, I told myself, Nikki, You were taught racial discrimination and self hate from a very young age, but you don't have to pass that on.
Every part of me is understanding now that in order to take the next steps on this journey, I can't do it alone. And that is what brought me here to each of you today.
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. And so, if I had the opportunity to sit in that room with that patient again and, Face her as she says to me, I'm going to die. I want to do it on my terms. And what are you doing with the time I don't have? I would sit there and look at her and say, I am creating a vibrational legacy.
I'm creating a vibrational legacy that will live beyond my own existence. That I and my children's children will vibrate at a frequency so high. You will always feel loved, self love. I would thank her. I would say, thank you for sending me on a journey of radical self love of understanding who I am by simply asking me the question, what am I doing with the time that she no longer has?
So guess what I'm doing here today with each of you. I am now bringing the same question to you. What are each of you in this room doing with the time others don't have?
I now take every day and every opportunity and I look myself in the and I say. I'm sorry, Nikki. I'm sorry that we wasted so many years. But today we woke up. Today we are alive. So guess what? Today and every day, we are going to have the time of our life.