This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight the work of creative student across the UCSB campus. The following creative nonfiction essay won First Place in the prose category.
Where is the Assistance? A First Generation Asian American Family Navigates Employment Insurance
By Yan Lei
“Where are you?” Home.
“How are you?” Good.
These are the responses I give to my dad every time he texts me the same two questions. This conversation happens a maximum of two times every month as I am away from home for college.
Sometimes these responses result in my dad calling me, bringing in another conversation that follows a script:
“Did you eat today?” Yes.
“Did you work today? Yes.
“Are you done with school for the day?” Yes, I am working on homework right now. (This spices up my dull answers.)
“Did you eat today?” Yes. (I note to myself I have already answered this question.) Can I say hi to my siblings? (This is followed by a hi from each of my three younger siblings, passing over the phone to each other as if it was a relay race, eventually returning me to my dad)
“Well, I just wanted to check up on you to see if you’re okay. Remember to eat. Bye.” Bye, thank you.
[end of conversation]
I have a language barrier with my parents. While learning English in primary school, I lost my ability to speak Cantonese, making my language proficiency lower than that of a 5-year-old. This has led to a blandness in our conversations, making every “did you eat already?” a question packed with care.
During the summer of 2020, COVID-19 was worsening, and by then I was only going outdoors for work shifts at the Associated Students Food Bank. The isolation was making me lose my standard coping mechanism of keeping myself busy. I was immobile. I started therapy.
Part of my isolation was the emotional distance between me and my family. My parents and I have an unwritten contract to not share personal struggles. This is common in Asian families, as we view personal problems as a negative reflection of our ancestors and our families.
My father is a stout man with a mustache, known by everyone as someone who always smiles. My mother is shorter than him, a 4’10 quiet woman, but when she talks, it’s loud, always making strangers wonder if she’s mad at me when she’s just asking how many apples she should get for the day.
In one of our phone calls, I expected something that followed the usual script, but instead found a bump in our conversation. My mother unexpectedly slipped in that both she and my dad were unemployed. I caught the detail, and my heart sank. My parents had both worked as chefs at an American restaurant chain in our hometown’s mall. Knowing that restaurants were still open at that time for anything other than dine-ins, I had been comforted by the idea that at least my parents still had a schedule and were able to work. My breathing got deeper and my eyes became watery. I ignored my mom’s third “have you eaten today” and asked, “You and Dad are unemployed?”
They got their hours cut little by little, until eventually there was nothing left.
I was tortured by the truth that my parents were not sheltered from harsh reality. Purposely hidden in a deep dark crevice of my mind, I have an old memory of peeking through my bedroom door into the restroom in front of me. Our family spent the whole day beforehand manically cleaning our two-bedroom apartment after catching the forever-feared notice from our landlord, stating that she would come over tomorrow for an inspection and possible repairs. To my parents, this was read as a threat— that if our apartment was not as spotless as it should be, we would be kicked out.
They were hoarders, a bad habit collected from growing up in post-war poverty. The mindset of scarcity controlled us as we cleaned, buying plastic storage boxes for everything we had to hide to make our apartment look tidier, rather than throwing away or donating any items. At the end of the day, we would stuff these boxes into any crevice we could find in our crowded garage. I hated these days. I was bothered by the intensity of cleaning a place that could never be clean, the annoyance of trying to stick a heavy box into a space where it wouldn’t fit, and the tension looming over my parents for the upcoming day.
Lean, pale, and blonde. Athletic figure. Our landlord was the daughter of our previous landlord, a child of nepotism. From my first baby steps to my current age, I watched her grow from a teenager into a landlord. Not only was her job passed down to her, but also her mother’s impatience and irritability. She was a megalomaniac—a person obsessed with her own power. It is evident that I dislike her, but I believe that my perspective on them is valid.
The apartment complexes that we lived in were nicknamed “Little TJ.” TJ is an acronym for Tijuana, the border town in Mexico closest to us. The majority of residents were Mexican families and our landlord’s whole lineage is white.
The landlords did not adjust to their tenants.
Returning to my old memory of peeking into the restroom in front of me through the crack of my bedroom door: the landlord was welcomed in by my smiling dad. Although she was a thin woman, her steps stomped with demanding weight. She performed her routine inspection, my dad sheepishly following as she made comments. She flicked the lights in our restroom, looked up and noticed that two bulbs out of three lit up. “One of the bulbs is dead,” she noted as she turned around to my dad. He smiled brightly, collected his broken English, and confidently said “Yes… yes I go Home Depot!” In his head, she was asking when he would replace the light bulb. “No,” she interjected. “We have light bulbs in my office that you should use. You have to ask for them.” “Yes, yes! Tomorrow, I go Home Depot,” my dad repeated himself, not understanding her comment.
Our landlord raised her voice, as if speaking in a higher volume would cause someone to instantly learn English. She emphasized again, aggressively, that he could go to her office for light bulbs. Like a scolded child, my dad got flustered, desperately searching for the right way to express himself. He gave up, stared at the floor, and allowed the landlord to continue raising her voice onto him. Her ego overpowered my dad’s, shrinking it with every forcefully emphasized word. She got herself so heated up at the one-sided conversation that she left afterwards.
I wanted to stand up for him. In my perfect world, I would’ve crashed into the restroom conversation with confidence. I would’ve screamed back at my landlord, calling her out for the way she dehumanizes the tenants who sustain her paychecks. But I was scared. I fell into shock, staring through a crack in a door. My body was paralyzed. My head was hazy. I had no control. I couldn’t save my dad. I was a soul trapped in a body that wasn’t synchronized with my thoughts. Somehow, my screams were silent to everyone except myself. My eyes were binoculars and comforting my dad was miles away from my reach.“Tonic immobility,” my third therapist diagnosed for me years after the situation, when I experienced the same hypnotization spell consistently during the unpredictable future of a pandemic. It was a trauma response to the brain’s idea of inescapable danger.
My dad spotted me. I saw how quickly he masked his pain. His smile was sewn onto his face. Of course he was smiling; that was what he was known for. “Wow, what was that all about?” he goofingly said before walking away. His eyes were watery, imprisoning the help his mouth could not ask for.
I sometimes selfishly wish that I stayed as naive as when I was a kid. To me, my dad was a comedic superhero who could cook anything. He worked endless hours as the owner of his own Chinese restaurant, and I would try to stay up for as long as I could to greet him home. Always, he would find me sleeping somewhere near the door and carry me to bed. I would wake up knowing that my dad used his magical superhero powers to get me comfortable.
Now, I’m suffocated by a pillow that mutters to me that my parents are living in the same vain world that I’m in. Their hair is graying with age, their hands tell stories of endless manual work, they complain of their bodies hurting. My dad’s smile lines are strongly indented and my mom’s image is starting to reflect my grandma’s. Time is doing its work on those who I thought were invincible.
At the point that my parents' work hours became nothing, the COVID-19 virus had taken my college life away from me. I was not doing well. My parents were jobless and I was hopeless. This was my last straw.
Trying not to choke on my words, I mentioned unemployment benefits to my parents.
America saw a surge of users of the Employment Development Department (EDD) website during the COVID-19 pandemic. As of February 2021, there were almost 20 million unemployment claims in California. One of every five unemployment claims in the country belonged to a Californian.
My parents had always felt ashamed taking any federal or state assistance, although they are considered low-income. They believed that if they asked for any assistance, they would be indebted to the helper. But now they had no choice. They asked me to help.
My parents had always felt ashamed taking any federal or state assistance, although they are considered low-income. They believed that if they asked for any assistance, they would be indebted to the helper. But now they had no choice. They asked me to help.
I created EDD accounts for both of my parents, sending them a text with their login information. Because my hours from my two jobs had been reduced from the usual 16 hours a week to just six, I decided to apply for unemployment benefits as well. Through applying for my own, I learned how to navigate the white and blue-themed outdated website.
For the first few weeks, I held phone sessions with both of my parents, guiding them through the EDD website. This was not an easy feat with our language barrier. There were points when I realized that I was talking to my parents more than I had in years, as they carefully asked me questions through the phone in broken English or the simplest of Cantonese words.
After ending every phone call, I felt desolate. My parents probably felt embarrassed by the fact that they had to ask their daughter to help, but also glad that they had someone to fall back on. I felt my eyes get glossy after calls, feeling the trauma of unspoken words between us.
Even with trials of leading my parents through phone sessions or tutorials with photos and texts, they were conflicted when using the website. Even with all the people relying on EDD, the website was so old that it was barely accessible.
EDD was an extremely frustrating website to navigate, as San Francisco Assembly Member David Chiu told the local news. He said EDD was “a program in place since 1978 that's still using 1978 methods.” 1978 was 44 years ago. Since the website was already known as a horrible setup to get around, it was completely impossible for a non-English speaker to use. It was not created with an awareness of the ever-growing populations of different ethnicities in America. According to Chiu, 7 million Californians speak a language primarily other than English, and while the majority of those folks are Spanish speakers, 2.4 million of them speak a language other than Spanish or English.
When I navigated the website, I saw the available language options included Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, and more. However, this was not enough to make the website easier to use. I knew that it just changed the language, not the structure of the website. It would often break down, suggesting that users come back in a couple of hours, sometimes taking days to get back on track. Chiu said the site “has a history of computer glitches and other technical issues dating back nearly 20 years.”
I have always been attracted to technology and see myself as a flexible person who can troubleshoot through issues. Yet, even I had trouble using the EDD website. I knew I had to complete my parents’ EDD application. Every two weeks, my dad would call me on the phone, relaying the numbers of how much he made a specific week, how many hours he worked, and when was the last date he worked in two weeks. After that, he would do the same for my mother’s information. Eventually, I became a robot for inputting the data. They got used to the process as well, knowing what question followed next.
Days after inputting the numbers into the site, my parents would call me asking for updates on whether they had received their payment. There were times when I felt like EDD tested my patience. Sometimes I would check on the history of their payments and discover that their status stayed on “pending” for longer than usual. This was due to the EDD’s suspicion of fraud, as California believes that it has lost $20 billion to fraud as of October 2021. In my parent’s first “pending” statement, I had sent in their documents of identification and received their payments late.
I was bothered that it came late, knowing that my parents and three siblings depended on my parents’ unemployment payment as their source of income for rent and basic needs.
Looking at pictures of the EDD website to refresh my memory to write this, I feel sick to my stomach. Sometimes— most of the time—these payment statuses became my personal hell. This meant that any other status that wasn’t “paid” would require me to call the EDD phone number. I tried using the EDD online customer service form and tried sending emails but would never get a response. The best option was to call.
The EDD phone customer service is hands-down the most difficult call line to get into. The phone lines were always jammed. The sound of my call being immediately rejected is one of the only noises that can make me feel disgusted, tense, and queasy at the same time. “We are currently receiving more calls than we can answer and are unable to assist you at this time. Please try again later,” a nonchalant feminine voice states after a few beeps. The call immediately ends. I would hear this sound about 30+ more times before I would give up on trying to call.
Once in a blue moon, I got lucky when trying to get myself into the call line, quickly clicking the call button right after my previous call ended. Usually, I ended up frustrated, updating my confused parents that I would try to call again the next day.
Through researching, the only viable support system with answers that I found for EDD was not the EDD’s FAQ website, but the Reddit forum r/EDD. This consisted of other bothered EDD users, sharing tips and assistance whenever they could in a system that did not offer them any. I discovered that if I called earlier, I might be able to get through to the call line. I also read up that there was a specific phone number that was slightly easier to reach, but not guaranteed. For days after any status that was not “paid,” which was often, I would set up an alarm to wake up early in the morning. Call lines opened at 8 a.m.
I set up my alarms.
6:50 a.m. - For my brain to wake up, I know I will snooze on it.
7:10 a.m. - Hopefully I wake up.
7:20 a.m. - In case I don’t wake up.
7:30 a.m. - By this point, I am annoyed and awake.
7:58 a.m.- Anxiously staring at the time, so I could click the call button as soon as it hits 8 a.m..
If I got into the phone lines, I would wait for hours with my phone on speaker, continuing life in the background. If I didn’t, I would turn on the same alarms again for the next day in hopes that I would have better luck.
Most of the days that required me to desperately search for answers on how to work with the website or how to enter the difficult phone lines would cause me to cry from discouragement.
Even with unemployment benefits, my parents weren’t getting enough money to consistently pay rent and were asking to borrow money from my aunt and grandma, without my knowledge. One day, I offered to help my parents pay rent and they took it. I knew something was wrong at this point, as my parents went above and beyond to never take anything from me, viewing what I possess as things that I have “earned” —even when I would pressure them to take it.
Two months later, I decided to take a gap year and return home. As the eldest daughter in my immigrant Asian family, I returned to my position in language brokering. Having parents who didn’t speak English in America caused me to grow up as their translator, IT tech, and other intermediary jobs. I matured too fast for a girl who just wanted to spend time in the worlds of High School Musical, Hannah Montana, and the Jonas Brothers.
Shortly after I moved back into my parents’ small apartment, my mother got a message that she was suspected of fraud, once again. EDD implemented a new way to verify your identity at the time with a website named ID.me. ID.me used facial recognition to connect a face to an official document. This “technological advancement” ended up in a huge frustration for my mother and me as we endlessly tried to have the “video selfie” of ID.me recognize my mother’s face as her own. We were both angry at the software. It was uncomfortable, given my mother’s level of technology and her privacy. She has always hated cameras and there I was, shoving the front camera at her face. It felt invasive, as if I was slowly turning her front camera 360 degrees all over her face. Multiple times. We were not the type of people to show resentment, but at the end of getting her identity verified, we did not talk for a while. We both needed a break. Thankfully, this isn’t a requirement anymore, but it has been noted that the website’s “Biometric data, like the facial geometry produced from a user's selfie, may be kept for years after a user closes their account.” In a time of vulnerability and need for financial help, our privacy was never their priority.
California’s Legislative Analyst's Office identified 1.1 million claims as potentially fraudulent. EDD stopped payments for these claims. Workers were not notified ahead of time. To reopen their accounts, workers had to verify their identity using ID.me or their accounts would be closed permanently. Ultimately, more than half of the claims (600,000) that were flagged as fraudulent were confirmed as legitimate. My mother was one of these individuals. I believe that if I hadn’t been physically with her, she wouldn’t have been able to figure out the facial recognition technology of ID.me.
Although it was tiring at times, I knew that during a time of anti-Asian sentiments and financial insecurity, I would choose to be my parent’s personal EDD assistant rather than escaping into the daydream of my beach college town.
Getting into this position did not mean that I was good at it. I was confused, but not as confused as my parents, which made me the best help they could get with the website.
My family was supported by these unemployment benefits, but the process was degrading. The world was exhausting. We have survived an entire pandemic—losing 6.05 million lives to it so far. We were worried that the items we bought, the places we once loved, and the neighbors we would be around would bring us danger. We were isolated and conflicted. We barely made enough money to survive. We did not need another stressor like the EDD website.
Technology naturally has no morality. It doesn’t recognize a growing mental health crisis and the anxieties of a looming virus. The EDD website had one goal: analyze data and spit out numbers in return.
Somehow through the process, we were dehumanized into those digits.
The site saw us as a reflection of themselves, a coded combination of numbers and letters. The truth is that we mirror the same vitality of the designers and staff behind the site. But our stories were lost and our needs disregarded.
The ease of technology is a double-edged sword. Networks of shared information complete our thirst for knowledge, yet we have become desensitized to numbers.
On March 1, 2022 alone there were 1,933 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.
“That’s not that many compared to the total of 988,000!” I think while looking at case count statistics. I instantly choose to compare data. I forget to mourn. One thousand and nine hundered and thirty three friends, strangers, and family members lost. One thousand and nine hundred and thirty three individuals with unique personalities and laughs had disappeared. I am guilty of diminishing a life into a number the same way I blame the Unemployment Development Department for doing. Yet I recognize that it can only be improved with compassion and research into the communities that are being served.
Yan Lei is a fourth-year UCSB student majoring in Environmental Studies and minoring in Asian American Studies and Professional Writing. She also provided the illustrations that accompany the essay.