Featured Profile: Nora Yasumura

Based on both personal experience and her lengthy trajectory as a social educator interacting with students from elite schools, Nora has a unique perspective on cultural identity and the desperate need for dialogue surrounding Asian-American mental health. Here, she opens up about her revelations through navigating her multiracial background, the challenges she's faced while helping students reclaim their cultures, and potential ways our communities can better represent everyone's mental health journeys.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

1. Tell me a bit about yourself and your cultural identity!

Sure! My name is Nora Yasumura. Identity is always sort of tricky for me in some ways because of my multiracial background. I'm from the United States of America, but my father was Japanese -American and his parents came from Japan in 1918. And on my mom's side, she's German-Armenian and parts of her family actually had left Armenia during the Turkish genocide.

But I also grew up in New York; that's another really big influence in my life. I think people in New York tend to be very direct communicators, but at the same time, I had this Japanese influence where people tend to be less direct and use a lot more body language. So I had all these different elements around me -- a mix of cultures.

Politically, being Asian American is an important part of my identity, partly because my father and his family had all been incarcerated during World War II. He was about seven to ten years old.

2. Can you share a bit about your professional background and what you’re up to currently?

I got a degree in social work, which is a form of counseling. Social workers believe in the importance of examining three levels: the individual, the cultural context surrounding the individual, and the institutions and the policies that impact both of the previous factors. They see these things as interconnected and interdependent.

I worked in traditional counseling for some time but really didn't like the medical model, which I think tended to be geared towards mostly white patients. I was interested in a broader range. So I decided to leave the clinical world and began working at Dartmouth College’s student life office, where I had a lot more freedom to mentor people using my multicultural background and experience. I currently am in Connecticut and live at the Hotchkiss School, a mostly boarding high school.  

3. Do you have any specific experiences or advice on coming to terms with your cultural identity?

For context, a large part of my background has been working with students of Asian (primarily East Asian) descent, who've decided to come to school in the United States. Right now, I'm working with kids in predominantly white middle school in New England. We had many students coming from China or Korea, and people assumed that racial identity wasn’t relevant to them because race wasn’t a big concept in their home countries. But actually, that's not true. Most of them come to the U.S. and are confused by our myriad of cultural and ethnic subtexts. They’re often at a disadvantage because of that.

I think we weren’t preparing students well enough to understand the racial dynamics of identity. Teachers weren’t getting training on it and recognizing that they might have biases. For instance, a lot of students told me they’ve been called the wrong name, or their name is mispronounced. Combine that with them feeling like a “newcomer” in the American culture, and they usually don’t call the teachers out for it. Yet it’s detrimental to their sense of self.

I'm doing a project called “What I Wish My Teachers Understood”, where we create an environment that gives students permission to share their experiences and inform our community about what's actually happening. As someone who has a mixed racial background, it’s easy for me to pick up on nuances or subtle tensions and point them out.

4. What are some important areas of divergence that you've witnessed between different cultures' responses to conversations on mental health and wellbeing?

When I started working at Dartmouth College 25 years ago, there was a lot of stigma around anxiety and depression. These things were seen as character flaws. So the shame around struggling was something that’s across the board, and it’s thankfully getting better. But I think the layering of a culture where mental health isn’t as openly discussed can be hard on students. As a generalization, I think white American students are much more comfortable conversing openly about mental health.

Also, perfectionism in academically rigorous schools can weigh particularly heavily on Asian students, because people feel pressure that their grades reflect not just their own sense of self but their family’s as well. Culturally, they’re raised more in a collectivistic kind of thinking, which adds mental pressure and encourages them to swallow their anxieties instead of open discussions. This often breeds a feeling of unworthiness and a loss of identity, like changing their names into more typical American-sounding ones. There’s a message that in order to belong, Asian students coming to the U.S. need to change a part of themselves; yet doing so disempowers them over time. Some students confessed to me that they lost who they were in order to get to Dartmouth.

What I’m trying to do is to encourage people to talk about their challenges and actively reclaim parts of their cultures. For example, a student at Dartmouth told me that they tried to make kimchi in their sorority but got negative responses from others. They’re used to internalizing those microaggressions on themselves and their backgrounds, but I would invite them to talk through it, to brainstorm ways they can respond. And I really emphasized that those moments were about the other person's lack of awareness, not about their culture and food. Especially during a time without affinity groups, this really had a positive impact on how people saw themselves and the pride they had for their cultures.

5. What does the word advocacy mean to you? How do you think you practice advocacy in your life?

I definitely consider myself an advocate and an activist. For me, an activist is someone who recognizes that there's meaning to uplift and take action. Similarly, advocating for something is often noticing issues yet to be unearthed that are impacting a group of people or a community. So, in my opinion, advocating is more verbal, while activism is focused more on taking action.

I think when I'm advocating, it's raising the needs of students to share with those who are empowered to make a bigger impact. And again, that can be at an individual, cultural, or institutional level of impact. I communicate my observations and the needs that I'm hearing from students as well as my suggestions in terms of solutions.

In the context of Asian American mental health, I do a lot of advocating because, as I said, its whole concept is very under-discussed, both within the Asian community and society in general. That’s a very dangerous setup, because the system can't change if it doesn't know the struggles people are facing.

My advocacy is often expanding the conversation and working cooperatively with other educators to close the knowledge gap so that we can better meet the mental health needs of students at all three levels: individual, cultural, and institutional.