What It’s Like To Be The Only Asian-American Woman in the U.S. Senate

Senator Mazie Hirono has “first” all over her resume. A Democrat representing Hawaii, she is the first Asian-American woman elected to the United States Senate, the first female senator to represent her state, and the first Buddhist in the Senate. She’s also the first U.S. senator to have been born in Japan.

Hirono immigrated to Hawaii as a little girl because her mother was seeking stability for Mazie and her brother. The children’s father was an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler. They fled him and their homeland on the steerage deck of a cross-Pacific ship. Hirono remembers crying as Yokohama Harbor receded in the distance. She was eight and spoke only Japanese.

Life in Hawaii was a struggle at first. The family slept sideways in a shared bed in the single-room boarding house they rented. Hirono helped support her mother and brother with the money she earned as a cashier in the school lunchroom and with her earnings from an after-school newspaper route.

Eventually, she paid her way through college at the University of Hawaii and law school at Georgetown University. Hirono went on to become a state representative, Hawaii’s lieutenant governor, and a congresswoman. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012.

I caught up with her about what it’s like to be a woman in the U.S. Senate, where inequality still persists, and what it took to get her where she is today. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited and condensed:

What’s your first memory from when you were a little girl of what you wanted to be when you grew up?

At a pretty young age, I wanted to do something with my life that would help people. I’ve been that way for quite a while. I wanted to be a counselor or social worker. That’s one of the reasons I was a psychology major.

How did watching your mother go through what she did affect the way you thought about women and what it takes for a woman to be in control of her own life?

I always saw my mother just making decisions that helped our family. It was much later when I realized how courageous she really was, and I came to understand what a risk-taker she was. That’s very much a part of how I am. I never took a path that was the usual path for someone in my generation. A lot of the women who I went to school with, in those days, it was still the track of becoming a teacher, becoming a nurse. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I didn’t go down that path. I did things that were different than what my classmates were doing. I think that’s really from my mom.

Who else inspired you to do something other than what society expected?

No matter how independent you are, you’re still part of a larger community with sexual stereotyping and everything else that really goes on. The book that really opened my eyes — here I am in college, and that’s when I read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Even if I had such an unusual mother, so independent, I still — there was a part of me thinking, ‘Well, I’m gonna get married and I’m gonna have kids.’

And then I read that book, and literally a lightbulb went on in my head: ‘Why am I thinking this? I’ve never had a male presence in my life, really, so why do I think some guy is going to come along and I’m going to have this traditional life?’ It was at that point I think that I really began to look at my life as something that was probably going to take a different path, and it did.

Hirono and husband Leighton Oshima at the White House Bowling Alley, 2012

There were fewer women in law school during your time at Georgetown. What was that experience like?

Oh, yes. There were maybe 20 percent or fewer. I don’t know that I saw that much of a distinction by the time I was in law school. Definitely, there weren’t 50 percent [women], but at that point, at Georgetown, you’re competing with everyone else. It was a very competitive environment. I wanted to do public interest law. And the reason I selected Georgetown is they had really strong clinical programs, and I was in one of these clinical programs that involved being an advocate.

Fast-forward to being in Congress. Obviously we get more women with each election, which is great.

Yes. It’s really great.

But I’m still curious about some of the nuances — even if it’s something as seemingly small as the women’s bathroom being farther away from the floor.

You should see how it was on the House side. It’s much closer on the Senate side.

What are some of the other things you notice that are different for a woman than for a man, things that people who aren’t in Congress might not be privy to?

I’m pausing because every senator makes a huge difference. Regardless of whether you’re male, female, Republican, or Democrat, every Senate vote counts. From that standpoint, it’s not necessarily something that is a gender issue.

Right. So where it matters most, you’re truly equal.

But clearly, though, with the press, they seem to be really interested in the women of the Senate and when we don’t seem to agree on a path. I’m specifically talking about sexual assault in the military. [New York Democratic Sen.] Kirsten Gillibrand and I — and others — have supported a pretty significant change to the Code of Military Justice. [Missouri Democratic Sen.] Claire McCaskill has a different path. But we all agree that sexual assault in the military should be prevented and there should be prosecutions when these crimes occur. But there’s been a lot of press about why it is that we’re not together. I don’t think that’s an issue very much when men disagree.

It’s a very specific example of how the press still looks at our presence in this environment.

Years ago I found a 1950s article at the Library of Congress about [former congresswoman and Title IX author] Patsy Mink. The lede was something like, ‘the cutest politician you ever saw.’ So, on one hand, you think how far we’ve come, but then you still see coverage that references women leaders’ haircuts and outfits.

Or how petite we are. That sort of thing. You notice that a lot more still with women.

Hillary Clinton and Mazie Hirono

You’re a woman in a legislative body full of men, and you’re also the first Asian-American woman in the Senate. Are you treated differently for one more than for the other?

My being the only [Asian-American] woman here and only the second minority woman ever to be elected to the Senate, I think that says we have a ways to go. When I go home, I talk with the kids in Hawaii and I say, ‘Do you know there’s only one person in the Senate who looks like us?’

They must be shocked. [Ed. note: Asians make up 38 percent of the Hawaii population ; 23 percent of the population identifies as two or more races.]

Yeah, when I put it that way. Because they look around and they see the cosmopolitan backgrounds that everybody has. And I say, ‘I am the only person who looks like us.’ And they invariably look at each other. And I say, ‘That’s why we need to do a lot more.’

So what advice do you give to young people — particularly young women — who aspire to public service or elected office?

We need to get everybody in the pipeline in the local races. The local political arena is where it started for me, and I think that is still the case, especially for women. We need to get a lot more women into the pipeline… in the political arena as well as in the private sector.

You see the Fortune 500 companies, you see the boards. [Ed. note: Less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs .] They have to pay attention, otherwise they are not going to get the kind of diversity that’s representative of our country.

How do you think women can better support each other? For instance, I’m not aspiring to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but I still want to see more women in those roles. What can I do?

Well, awareness helps. And to feel that they make a difference.

Women in Hawaii, they need to vote. I definitely think that we can improve the voting rates of women in Hawaii. So, education and awareness.

I think it’s important for women to realize that their daughters, particularly, can aspire to a lot of different things — like robotics. The kids in Hawaii really like it and I’ve talked to kids from elementary school on up.

Especially the elementary and middle-school kids, I ask them, ‘If it weren’t for robotics, would you think about going into engineering?’ And they say no! So a lot of times, kids learn by doing. And then they realize, ‘Oh, I can do this.’ So those kinds of opportunities are really important, particularly for the girls.

This interview was originally published on Medium and is produced as part of The Only Woman in the Room collection by LadyBits .

Buddha, the “Way”, and Christ: The Clash of Religions or Muddling of Beliefs?

In China’s long history, religious views have been a traditional mix of Buddhism (the religion imported from India), Taoism (a school of religious and philosophical ideas started by the sage Lao Zi), and Confucianism (the ethical and sociopolitical teaching originating from the prestigious scholar Confucius).

As early as the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), the emperor Wu managed to combine the three ideas into one ruling doctrine: the Unification of Three Religions (三教合一). People were trained in this ruling doctrine both in academic teachings and through their daily life; inevitably, this belief system led to conflicts due to the three different sources it absorbed.

In the 2,000 years after the Han Dynasty, Chinese people, shaped by their hybrid beliefs and frequently encountering new dogmas like Communism and Maoism, prove to be quite capable of embracing and adapting to a highly inclusive and multicultural – yet more or less contradictory – ideology.

Buddhism had a significant amount of influence the lives of the Chinese: a famous Chinese poem “Spring of the South” (江南春绝句) by Du Mu (杜牧) has the lines, The four hundred and eighty temples of the South Dynasty, / How many terraces are in misty cold rains? (南朝四百八十寺，

多少楼台烟雨中). Confucianism, as well, has an indisputable impact in Chinese moral standards: modern codes governing the behaviors of a country, society, and person were developed from Confucian classics. Both Buddhism and Taoism are compatible with Confucianism, a benign worldview with a focus on harmony and uniformity.

From the late 19th- to the early 20th-century, Protestant missionaries entered China through rampant Western colonial activities in the country’s northern coast. They built churches and set up relief charities and schools for children to disperse the gospel of Christianity. Many Chinese village women were converted and trained by missionaries so they could help to preach the new religion in their own dialects. These Chinese women, called “Bible women” by country people, walked on their tiny bound feet into villages and spread the ideas to other peasants. Thus, in such backward conditions, Protestantism grew vigorously among Chinese villages, especially on the southeast coast of China. The multi-rooted Chinese beliefs system became even more complex.

Protestantism seems a little “foreign”, but it’s not unpopular because it represents, to many, the “advanced” Western civilization. Blame it on cultural imperialism: in my childhood, I perceived Christian spiritual leaders only as fair-skinned, golden-haired, and elegant images that I gleaned from watching and reading Western media. In comparison, with Buddhism, one often sees the scenarios of elderly women, some of them illiterate, kneeling before a golden Buddha statue and murmuring prayers with incense.

So how do other Chinese actually deal with these varied and often contradictory ideas?

From my observation, their behavior tends to be ambivalent. For example, unlike those who are born into Muslim families, whose family lineage and traditions tend to determine their religious beliefs for life, many Han people have had too many choices. (Or, sometimes, during the years of the Cultural Revolution, deadly choices.) While the ruling Communist Party is atheist, it allows the presence of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism in the country.

My aunt was a Buddhist from her youth to her forties, probably because her mother has been a pious Buddhist for over fifty years; yet, both of them believe in fengshui (风水), the philosophical Taoist concept. While my grandmother conducts Buddhist rituals, she also believes in ghosts and deities. A few years ago, a friend of my aunt persuaded her to convert to Christianity. They went to a local church together, and my aunt started to read the Bible; she still holds a belief in Taoist fengshui and still keeps a jade ornament of the Buddha. In her case and others, it seems perfectly natural for modern Chinese to have all of these religions present in their lives.

In my opinion, Chinese individuals are culturally acceptable to foreign religions, though it might take a long time to convince them in a new belief. Over time, Protestant idea was localized and absorbed by domestic cultures into China. Whether it – or something else – becomes a more compatible part of the Chinese beliefs system, remains to be seen.