Personal Copy Modeled After Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf’s Caring Cup Initiative.

From seed to cup, our coffee passes through the hands of seasoned farmers, master roasters, and local baristas to find their home in yours. What would ordinarily be an impersonal or industrial process for others is something radically transformative here. See, the secret to our success is simple. We’re just committed to enriching the lives of those who make it possible to do what we do best— which is serving you a tasty brew.

Whether it’s building daycares or providing accessible healthcare to our growers, it cannot be overstated that we value our people. It’s why we’ve implemented our Caring Cup Initiative, a program designed to give back to those who’ve given more than we can even begin to measure.

Between all the hands that have come together to make your drink possible, we’ve found that there’s a mutual love for coffee and strengthening communities, an unbreakable link. It’s what shaped our philosophy that common grounds are what make our coffee a memorable and delicious experience. Once you’ve tasted it, you’d understand too.

Copy for Golden Hippo’s writing exercise: “Write a 500-word email about a healthy habit you have in your life and why you think we should try it. Write it conversationally, in a way that really makes us want to implement it TOMORROW.”

I’ve recently discovered that the best way to practice self-love is to start by killing the self entirely. Now, I’d like to say that I'm fully aware that my advice seems a bit backward… but rest assured, this is no practical joke. I’m living proof that the most radical sort of transformation can only come at the expense of complete destruction.

So, the question of the hour remains: how can we possibly kill ourselves in the pursuit of self-love?

Well, I’ll share a little secret that has recently reshaped the way I view myself:

I simply don’t speak to myself the way I’ve been taught.

While this may not seem such a novel idea, it’s a small habitual practice that can lead to extraordinary results if practiced daily.

See, like most people, I’ve been influenced by society, media, and my social network to think false truths about myself. Whether it’s in my capabilities at work or the contributions I make towards my relationships, there has always existed this dark, nebulous, shadow of a doubt in the back of my mind that questions everything that I do.

Despite my best efforts, that voice has had a great deal of influence on my self-worth.

I’ll admit that it took a lot of time, effort, and a lot of self-realization to unlearn this knee-jerk habit of putting myself down. Eventually, I think I just grew tired of hating myself and I couldn't just do the morning mantras or the nightly meditations anymore. It wasn't enough.

So, I did the next logical thing and I made it a mission to suffocate that defiant voice that permeated my every thought. Subsequently, I put in the work to actively change every negative comment I made about myself into something positive.

I know that sounds difficult and it's possible you're discouraged by this seemingly ordinary secret. But I'll remind you that small steps towards self-actualization will still lead you out of a bad place. And once you start speaking to yourself in a kinder manner, you’ll start seeing the effects of this change in everything you do— in your attitude, your confidence, and your zeal for life.

If it still seems a bit overwhelming, you can easily start this habit by speaking to yourself the way you would with a close friend. Now if you would never ever dream of telling someone close to you that they’re a failure, why should you ever have to accept the same level of abuse?

Maybe you’ll resonate with this, too.

Teachers have long said, "Treat others the way you'd like to be treated," in an attempt to instill the idea of courtesy in us at a young age. I've always liked that thought. It's simple and effective. But I ask you this: what if you reversed that concept?

What if you started treating yourself the way you’d treat others?

What could happen then? Who could you be?

And who in the world could stop you then?

An excerpt from my senior thesis at UCLA on the topic of cultural assimilation.

When I think of my experience growing up, different images unfurl in front of me like a loosening spool of film: Scholastic Book Fairs, pouched chocolate milk, and the vivid, cloudless, baby-blue skies of Southern California. Palm trees, silhouetted by smog and dimming sunlight, bruised, battered knees held together with Hello Kitty bandaids, and gap-toothed grins hanging over crustless sandwiches. But also, as a first-generation Korean-American, there are other kinds of memories— like begging my parents to stock the fridge with Lunchables and Go-gurt because I was too embarrassed to bring over school friends with nothing but rice crackers and seaweed packs to offer them. Looking back, I can see the spoils of assimilation more clearly. I thought that by rejecting the parts of my culture that didn’t seem to serve me, I’d grow closer to becoming a picture perfect, poster-child for the American Dream.

Now that I’m older, I find that I often think about the fabric of society that I’ve been deliberately woven into— and where exactly in this grand design I fit. Unlike the homogenous melting pot that America has always posited itself to be, I see it more as a patchwork quilt, stitched together with the fine thread of immigrant dreams; and as the only American-born child in my family, I can’t help but think of myself as an effacing silk patch in a blanket of vibrant hues and textures. Make no mistake, while silk is widely regarded as a symbol of luxury and beauty, it is a man-made fabric that depends upon the destruction of the silkworms that create it.

Did you know that upon birth, silkworms are only fed mulberry leaves in order to create the finest, highest quality silk? Once they’ve molted several times, the larvae spin a cocoon— the fibers of which are cultivated to produce silk. The entire cocooning process takes about two to three days. It’s a slow process but the transformation itself is a labor of love. And yet, these deliberate, drawn-out proceedings come abruptly to a halt when it is unceremoniously dropped into a pot of boiling water, instantly killing the pupae so that the cocoon can be harvested and unraveled into thread. While it is entirely possible to wait until the silkworm has hatched to then harvest the silk filament, the broken husk of a cocoon does not make for a good batch of silk. Sacrifices are expected to be made at the expense of these silkworms, regarded at once as disposable and valuable, after all.

Just like the production of silk requires the sacrifice of the silkworms who make the fabric’s existence possible, you could say my existence also depends on the deliberate destruction of my identity. Part of me, like the silkworm’s husk, is not valued by society; and so I must evolve so that I can be unraveled, spooled into fine thread, and pressed into the suffocating blanket of American dreams. I learned early on that becoming part of something bigger than yourself— such as living up to the impossible expectations of immigrant parents— requires killing the part of you that wants to shimmer differently. So, I spent years mimicking the smoothness of silk by choosing to reflect others in my own luster. In my glossy sheen, I kept my family in constant view, but all the years I’ve spent living for them have only distorted their figures into unrecognizable shapes.

From my vantage point now, I can see that while I have become the all-American girl I used to fantasize about as a child, I have lost everything in my journey to become her. It’s strange to think that even though I took the path of least resistance— the path that streamlined assimilation by forgetting how to speak Korean and refusing to share the traditional values of my household— I still feel so deeply lost even all these years later.

Another excerpt from my senior thesis at UCLA on the topic of cultural identity.

When I was young, I had a speech impediment. Though my family never noticed it, I was always slurring through my words and stumbling over ‘th’ and ‘s’ sounds constantly. Considering that I first learned English from my parents, it makes sense that I mimicked their speech patterns and had difficulty grasping basic grammar or pronouncing simple words. In Korean, some sounds in the English language are simply not possible to replicate. So, we make do with what we can. Truth be told, I wasn’t even aware of my speech irregularities until my fifth-grade teacher brought it up in the middle of class. Challenging me to pronounce the word ‘mother’ correctly, she had me repeat myself over and over despite the growing laughter from the rest of the room. Mudder, mudder, mudder?

When I failed to improve, I got sent to a speech therapist— one who would continue to see me for the next four years, even once I started middle school. Whenever I met with the speech therapist, I was either alone or joined by other children of color. I noticed very early on that the majority of the kids our therapist saw did not speak English as their first language. I grew to hate speech therapy. I vividly recall the dreadful sensation of having popsicle sticks forced into my mouth so as to purposefully move my tongue into the proper placement for the ‘s’ sound, and being constantly chastised for saying something incorrectly. I tried everything in my power to avoid being seen by my teacher whether it was hiding in the bathroom or behind my friends when I saw her coming.

Though I am thankful to have now overcome my speech impediments, it is not lost on me at all that a white woman was teaching children of immigrants how to speak English properly. It was also during this time that as I grew more proficient at speaking English, I forgot more of the Korean I spoke at home. At the request of my speech therapist, I was told to speak as much English as I could whenever I had the chance so that I could practice my sounds. Soon enough, I started speaking English at home where I once exclusively spoke Korean. As I grew older, my parents sensed the distance I was creating between myself and my cultural identity, and though they had encouraged me to immerse myself as best as I could in school— they started worrying about who I was becoming.

So, they sent me to Korean school on the weekend to try and retain as much knowledge of the Korean language as I could. Despite my three years attending hangul-hakkyo, which is what we call the program, I still have nothing to show for myself. Having spent so many years aggressively killing any part of me that would signal my difference to others, I lost my mother tongue entirely. Though I’ve taken a few classes and enlisted the help of Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, and Google Translate to help speak to my own mother, even now, I shamefully admit that I can barely understand Korean. While I know that losing your mother tongue is something many children of immigrants experience, knowing this does not lessen the impact of not being able to speak to your parents.

The shame that comes with not being a native Korean speaker is palpable in every social interaction I spend with my family. When my parents discuss something in front of me, I’ll hang on to every syllable, desperate to latch onto something recognizable. Frantically, I’ll spin through the limited amount of Korean vocabulary I have in my linguistic rolodex. And when I can’t understand what’s being said, I’ll lean into the tone of their discussion, and study their expressions with the hope of gleaning more. More than anything else, I can say that I’m only fluent in body language because I’ve had to learn how to discern the meaning behind the things my parents do. A meaningful stroke on the cheek means I’m proud of you. A pat on the head means You did a good job today. A freshly cut fruit platter delivered to the room means I love you. However, when half of every conversation I have with my parents is in my head, there leaves a lot to be lost in translation.

I often wonder if my parents understand me the way I understand them. Because when we sit in silence at dinner, sometimes it just feels like we’re just a bunch of strangers eating together. Do they know I spend my nights dreaming about the children they used to be? Or how lonely it is to fill in the blanks in my head, imagining tender and loving remarks from them like I’m living in a twisted Mad-Libs template? I don’t think I will ever know the answers to these questions. However, I have to put my trust in the fact that some things can be understood without being said aloud— because my existence alone is a testament to my love for them.

Final excerpt from my senior thesis at UCLA.

I’ve been told multiple times before that I’m a walking, breathing, and living Twinkie: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. While I should have taken more offense to this when I was younger, I have to admit that I used to get some sort of thrill from hearing it. It was like all the years I had spent trying to become somebody other than myself had come to fruition. I was validated, affirmed in this newfound identity, and it was a relief to be on the far left of the social spectrum. Among the white friends who found my jet black hair and narrow eyes ‘exotic’, I felt safe and accepted, and I trusted them to take care of me. But how could I have known then what I know now? That while I felt seen for the first time in my life, I was only being seen as a glittering accessory to a carefully curated ensemble. A jade ring to match the other stolen artifacts that hang on the crooked claws of colonialism.

Being a Twinkie was like social currency, it allowed me to navigate through school effortlessly, passing through the hands of eager friends who found my lowly existence novel and noteworthy. I reveled in the fact that I suddenly had value. However, to nobody’s surprise, I was the token Asian friend in almost every friend group of mine before college. Still, I accepted my place in the shadows graciously, always thinking of how I could just have easily been a FOB in a different circumstance— a term widely used to describe those who are ‘fresh off the boat’ or foreign to America.

Most people would consider my mother a FOB despite the fact that she’s been a naturalized citizen for over twenty years. It’s the fact that my mother doesn’t know English that distinctly puts her in that category. Her inability to learn the language spoken here translates across to others as a refusal to conform. Twenty-four years of living here and I’ve since come to learn that some Americans feel threatened by this behavior because it specifically reads as insolence. Confusing my mother’s innocence with chosen ignorance, these angry voices hiss at her in the aisles of supermarkets, Speak English. I can hear this phrase so strongly in my mind that it feels as if it’s been permanently branded into the soft tissue of my brain.

As a natural people-pleaser at heart, I would get incredibly anxious traveling anywhere with my mother because I was afraid of getting caught in the crossfire. Torn between sticking up for my mother or for the people I desperately wanted approval from, I wanted to throw my hands up and wave a white flag every single time we stumbled into one of these situations. I’m just like you, I wanted to telepathically send this message to every hostile stranger we came across, I’m not like her.

I’ll never be like her.

With my mother’s meek and gentle disposition, she really is the perfect Korean woman. She’s reserved, obedient, and deferential to the men in our family. Like a porcelain doll, she waits on my father and brothers diligently, her eyes seemingly always peering into theirs in search of approval. Despite the fact that she’s an incredibly accomplished career woman, I used to think less of her for the role she played at home as the domestic housewife. I saw her softness as weakness. Resentment, anger, and frustration would swirl in the pit of my stomach every time I would watch her slave away at the feet of our family. Part of me wanted to liberate my mother, to help free her from the shackles she had voluntarily given herself up to, whereas the other part of me wanted to let her be torn apart by the circling vultures I grew up with.

How I grew to think of my mother as my rival, I don’t really know. I suppose that when you live with somebody who embodies everything you should aspire to be in life— beautiful, quiet, and content with living in the background— maybe it’s natural for you to grow to hate the comparison. You learn to resent the never-ending comments of disapproval from your family that spin in the background of your thoughts like a broken record. So, in the only ways I knew how, I’d try to get even with my mother for making my life so much more difficult than it needed to be. I’d let my anger with her blur my vision, allowing myself to confuse hostile strangers for people I needed validation from, and I’d allow my silence to become the wedge that I resolved to break between us.

Looking back, I now can’t see myself as anything other than a traitor to my mother.

Where I should have spoken up for her at her most defenseless moments, I instead ironed my lips shut thinking that this would somehow be a learning moment for her. That if I let the men she fought so hard to impress rip her apart, she’d come to understand me more. In some twisted way, I found myself on the side of the oppressors, those who would never have accepted me for who I really am anyway, and I saw my mother as the enemy— a foreigner that I needed to help force into assimilation. I had done it so well myself.

Yet, how I missed the fact that I, too, was seeking approval from somewhere other than myself, I don’t know. I am my mother’s daughter after all.

So, now when I think about all the times I hated my mother for things that were out of her control, I’m flooded with guilt. It’s easy to forget that she’s only the product of her own upbringing too. The older version of myself can finally accept that all the parts of her that I saw as weak were actually the parts of her that I loved most. The softness I used to resent was actually the only reprieve I had from the cruel and cold environment of our home. After being verbally beat down into the lowest points in my life, I’d always drag myself into the embrace of my mother, desperately seeking protection from the men in my family who thought I was nothing more than a disappointment. She’d swaddle me up in that warmth, buoying me up in that unconditional love that I never really understood, and she’d reassure me that I wasn’t a disappointment.

I was special. I was her treasure.

That's why she gave me the Korean name Jinju. I was her pearl.

It’s difficult for me to accept that I used to consider my mother as lesser than when she was more than anything I could ever aspire to be. I can wholly accept this fact now without any ounce of resentment. I understand that my mother was never really my rival after all. With her selfless attitude and unflinching loyalty to the people she loves most, she’s always been a role model for me, and I can only hope that as I continue to grow in my life— I can learn how to shed the past versions of myself, peel away at my core, and become the gift I know my mother sees me as.