I rounded the corner to a bustling group of women. I was joining them for a ‘Vision Board’ event, organized by the ‘Bay Area Women’s Empowerment Salon,’ a group my friend Deanna co-founded to bring together women to support one another.
I looked for a familiar face. The girls seemed like they knew each other well, and I regretted not bringing a friend. This kind of social gathering is always more comfortable with company.
I spotted Deanna next to two other girls, sitting with her leg propped up on a chair – she had just gotten knee surgery. She was flipping through a magazine, looking for pictures to cut and paste onto her vision board. Her gaze was only half-heartedly fixed on the page, as she was more content listening to her two friends chattering away about their own visions.
Her face lit up with a warm smile when she recognized me. She jumped up to greet me, not letting the weight of the large cast wrapped around her entire leg get in her way. She introduced me to her friends, Melody and Carishma, and asked me to grab some materials and take a seat. I felt at ease. I let out a sigh of relief, sunk into my chair, and dove in to a magazine myself.
Deanna and I first met at ZS, my current employer and Deanna’s former. For the longest time, Deanna was just a friendly face in the office, someone I was introduced to thanks to my frequent trips to the kitchen for coffee and leftover lunch. Last year, Deanna sent out an email to women at ZS advertising an upcoming event she was hosting. This was the first time I learned about the Bay Area Women’s Empowerment Salon, or, as it is affectionately shortened, the Salon.
I was encouraged, through Deanna’s outreach, to participate in some of the activities held by the Salon, including the Vision Boarding event. I was inspired by Deanna’s passion and willingness to act. I asked her if she would be willing to talk to me about her group, and she was kind enough to meet me at a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to tell me her story.
Deanna grew up in Arcadia, L.A., a fairly homogenous suburb of Asian families. Her own family had emigrated from China to California. Her parents met in the U.S., married, and had kids, two daughters—Deanna and her sister. She seems grateful for the struggles her parents went through to get to a place of stability and comfort, but recognizes that when growing up in a community with a largely immigrant population, there were certain expectations. Success meant playing a musical instrument or taking extra classes, while, of course, maintaining excellent grades at school. These things would take you to a good college, which led to a good job, preferably in something prestigious like law or medicine. It wasn’t until she enrolled in an all-girls high school, Westridge School, that Deanna started really thinking about the concept of diversity and inclusion. She recalls an exercise at a Student Diversity Leadership conference where she stood side by side with 100 students, holding hands and touching shoulders. As a prompter read out instructions, students were supposed to step forward or backward if the situation applied to them. Take two steps forward if your parents had a college education. Take one step back if you are a minority. As the exercise continued, she watched as her peers moved in opposing directions, desperately trying to hold on to each other, but eventually letting go as the space between them grew.
“It became a very visual exercise of all these experiences I never would have known about,” she recalls. “You got to see how hard it is for some people starting off based on where they came from. It was really eye-opening.”
In college, Deanna joined a sorority, immersing herself in a community of all-women. She was able to have conversations with friends about feminism and the “bullshit” in society. She walked out of college with a group of 4 to 5 women who call themselves #TheMatriarchy. They keep in touch even today, getting together on Google Hangouts every once in a while. I didn’t ask Deanna what she and her friends talk about, but I’d like to think these days they’re still talking about society’s bullshit, plotting to manifest change and revolutionize the world.
On January 21, 2017, following Trump’s inauguration, women and men all over the world marched together in what is considered the largest single-day protest in US history. Deanna and her Salon co-founder, Austen, were both at the march last year in San Francisco. Together, they marched for gender equality, for LGBTQ rights, racial equality, healthcare reform, and so much more. They held their words high in the air for all to read.
Deanna and Austen felt energized. They wanted to maintain this momentum, and foster a tight-knit community of women who could discuss these important issues, and further the movement. “We had this amazing feeling of wow, women are so powerful,” Deanna says. “It’s so amazing to come out here together. We’re having this dialogue and putting our energy into something that hopefully lifts all of us together at the same time.”
This was the start of the Women’s Empowerment Salon.
Deanna and I talked about the very first event the Salon hosted. It was a negotiations workshop, led by Austen’s sister Cameron. We talked about the lessons she learned from that day, lessons she was able to use later when negotiating for salaries at her new company. We talked about feminism in the workplace, which, Deanna says, requires women to lean in and keep pushing for change. A year after its conception, Deanna is happy with how the Salon turned out. She continues to organize monthly events, most recently a ‘Personal Finances 101’ workshop tailored to a female audience. She isn’t looking to expand and become a large, very externally successful organization with thousands of members. Girls in Tech, Expat Women, and other organizations similarly aim to bring women together, but oftentimes it may feel like you’re walking in to an event, taking a pamphlet, and walking out without really making a connection. She says becoming a thousand-person group would take away from the intimate connection you form in a small community. Deanna doesn’t want that.
Rapid Fire Questions
Inspiration? Every single badass person I meet, especially women.
Best advice you’ve received? If you want something, manifest the shit out of it.
One thing you learned the hard way? For every single thing in life, you’ve got to really work for it. There’s no sitting and being lucky and having opportunities being presented to you.
Best decision of your life? I have made the conscious decision to invest time in a community of people that I really enjoy and appreciate – a community of a lot of dancers centered on this house. How do you unwind? I grab a cup of coffee.
Your secret talent? I can be really high energy sometimes and excitable, and it’s fun to help give a boost of energy towards people around me.
Your mentors? My mother. And my sorority big, Anna, who got me up on my feet for starting my career.
Talking to Deanna about the force of women and her excitement and readiness to create something, or “manifest it,” as she often said, had me on the edge of my seat. There’s a magnetic quality to someone when they talk vividly about their passions. You naturally lean in a bit, to soak up their energy and optimism. You let the sound of the chaos in the background fade away.
I posed a hypothetical question to Deanna: if she could direct a documentary to create awareness about something, what would it be?
She paused, chuckled after a moment. I gave her some time to think about her response. We sat in silence, a silence that did not feel uncomfortable.
“I would like to create a documentary that focused a lot on the commonality of how we are as people. I would try to highlight the different challenges people face, and share it in a way where you feel it emotionally.”
Deanna’s passion lies in the power of story and emotions to help foster an understanding between human beings. Through the Salon, through her interactions with others, Deanna has created a safe space for those around her, a space in which they can let their guard down and express themselves freely.
If you want to make change happen, I would make like Deanna and “manifest the shit out of it.”
1 A vision board is a collection of pictures and images pieced together carefully on a large poster board. They’re meant to help you visualize your goals.