5 Office Politics Tips for Asian American Men - Pt. 2
By Tom Kagy | 12 Nov, 2025

America's stereotyping of Asian men adds wrinkles to the usual nuisance of office politics.

You want us to throw away hundreds of dollars worth of letterhead?," asked Ron who had taken the helm as managing partner.  "Can't we just fix the next batch?"

The KBFT partners took the time to discuss the issue and vote.  By 3 to 2 (with one partner away) they decided the error wasn't worth wasting that batch of letterhead.  The next day I resigned, recognizing that my stand had likely cost me much of the partners' goodwill toward me.

To this day I have only fond and positivbe memories of KBFT's charismatic young partners, and continue to see them as models of fairness, kindness and collegiality in their treatment of me, a young man with a big ego who had yet to acquire professional polish and judgment.  I sometimes think of them when dealing with my own employee issues, even now when I am considerably older and more experienced than they were as my employers.

3.  Don't Be Attractive.

This may sound facetious, but don't be attractive if you want to avoid office politics.  Attractive people are gossip magnets.  Little incidents that would normally pass unremarked for most become white-hot topics of gossip and judgment if the subject happens to be attractive.  

That same sad social psychology inspires endless clickbait about actors, singers, models and athletes.  Most items are exaggerations or distortions of meaningless incidents.  But the stories let people revel in the subject's glamour and sex appeal and while passing judgement from the safety of their own obscurity.  

This rule is doubly, or maybe triply, true for Asian American men.  American society assigns certain permissible qualities to each minority, good and bad.  We're supposed to be smart, hard-working and successful, but meek and speak with a nearly unintelligible accent.  Being attractive, assertive and articulate aren't permitted us.  That would be like taking more than our fair share of the candy, perhaps violating the unspoken rules calculated to preserve socioeconomic balance.  Of course there's nothing in writing stating this, but over the past four generations this attitude has infused into the American media and society.  Violators must pay an equalizing penalty.  

During a first-week lunch with fellow new associates at ADH, the big downtown firm I joined after leaving KBFT, a gossipy colleague revealed that a secretary named Jan had proclaimed her attraction to me.  Given that I was married and Jan was living with a man with whom she had a child, that intelligence seemed inconsequential, and I dismissed it with a flippant comment.  Perhaps still under the influence of KBFT culture, I may have been more candid than was the norm at a conservative old-line downtown defense firm like ADH.  

I later learned that my comment had been reported back to Jan who took it as an insult and became an active source of negative gossip about me.  One involved a firm cocktail reception for new associates in which my conversation with the wife of a young partner had apparently received inordinate attention and become transmogrified into a tale of romantic intrigue and jealousy. 

The attention only intensified when I was assigned a pretty young blonde secretary who had recently graduated from secretarial school.  I split Sandy's time with a female associate who quickly lost patience with her typos and filing errors.  After a few weeks I was called to the office of the firm's operations director, an attractive fortyish brunette dogged by constant rumors of liaisons with senior partners.  

She told me that the female associate wanted Sandy fired and asked my opinion.  It was true that her lack of experience made Sandy less efficient.  But I could see that she was making a real effort and felt it would be unfair to fire her before she had had time to adapt to our work.  Within a couple of weeks the female associate's complaints became intense enough to force the operations director's hand prematurely, and she was assigned a different secretary, leaving Sandy to focus on my work.  It seemed to me a good way to give her more time to work on improvement. 

One of the duties of a legal secretary was to keep case files updated with the constant stream of correspondence and pleadings (litigation-related documents).  At any given time perhaps a dozen or more of the more active files were spread out on the floor of my office beside my desk.  Most secretaries routinely carried those files out to update them at their own desks in the common area outside our offices.  

Being young and ingenuous, Sandy had a habit of coming into my office each afternoon with the stack of papers and sitting on the floor to update the files.  If I happened to be in the office, I would be working at my desk while she did the file updates.  The office door was always kept open but that cozy scene apparently didn't go unnoticed, especially by Jan and the other secretaries who worked in one of the nearby secretarial bays.  A few weeks later, without further consultation with me, Sandy was fired even as her work quality had been steadily improving.  

That intensified the rumors that had continued to swirl around me and grew to encompass everything I did, including what I had for lunch (nothing smelly, mind you) and the way I lined my timesheets to exclude bathroom and coffee breaks from the series of 6-minute increments assigned to each case billing file.  

I later learned at a performance review by a female partner named Martha that some partners felt I wasn't billing sufficient time for various routine litigation tasks, thereby reducing the value of each case file to the billing partner.  An anonymous cartoon was circulated showing me eating a sandwich with large plastic page clips protruding from it.  Alan, a bald owlish senior partner in his late fifties, got reliable laughs for his "dead on" impersonation of me, according to Gerry, one of the partners who regularly assigned me cases.

It was clear that many at ADH would much rather talk about me than with me.  I didn't mind.  It limited random garrulity to a small subset of the many casual encounters unavoidable in the halls and coffee rooms of a big firm.  The less time spent chatting, the earlier I could leave to make the congested drive home to the westside.

In case you're wondering, yes, it is anomalous for a big firm of nearly two hundred lawyers to focus so much attention on a junior associate.  At the time I ascribed it to being the firm's sole Asian male though I had been told a Chinese American attorney had worked there briefly before leaving to join the US Attorney's office.  In retrospect, the feverish gossip I inspired was probably due to the clash between my very un-meek personality and the comforting (for them, not us) stereotypes assigned us Asian males, fortunately, a situation to which I had become acclimated since adolescence.  Had I never experienced it, the impact would likely have been greater.