Blind and Asian, she felt ‘invisible.’ How this Sacramento woman is now breaking barriers
As a child visiting her extended family in Hong Kong, Priscilla Yeung recalls the harmful superstition her grandmother held about her blindness.
“My grandma would leave me at home ... and take all the cousins out and I couldn’t come out because she’d say if my cane touched another person’s cane, they’d become blind,” Yeung said, who has optic nerve atrophy that became more pronounced as a teenager. “I felt invisible a lot of times.”
It’s an upbringing that created a specter of shame that haunted Yeung for years, even when she joined the Society for the Blind as a volunteer in college. A Meadowview resident who’s lived in Sacramento for 20 years and now serves as the organization’s senior impact project manager, Yeung said it’s the stigma perpetuated by her culture and upbringing that remains difficult to shake.
“I was helping people go through their own journey,” she said, but she herself struggled to come to terms with her resistance to speaking out and embracing the complicated relationship between her culture and her blindness.
That changed last year, when the coronavirus pandemic first took hold, and Asians and Asian Americans began to experience waves of violence and abuse. One report this summer from the state attorney general’s office found that hate crimes against Asian Americans in California spiked by 107% in 2020.
Yeung had been working with a group of older Asian adults who were blind prior to the pandemic, teaching them how to travel with a cane safely. People who had been scared to leave their homes were “working through some of that, getting out more.”
But as incidents of anti-Asian violence began to occur more frequently when the pandemic began, she found many were terrified once again — this time because they feared they would be attacked for their identity and that their vision loss may make them easy targets.
“That hit home,” she said. “All that sort of made me think about myself and what I can do.”
She started to appear in videos, such as a campaign with Disability Rights California to share the challenges Asian American and Pacific Islander women with disabilities face, and an Amtrak commercial on its expanding services across California. She shared her story at the National Federation of the Blind convention this year, and was interviewed for an ABC10 piece on the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Blindness Awareness Month may be over, Yeung said, but the work is every day. She’s now committed to embracing all facets of her past and identity, and helping others champion their own experiences.
“Our cultural misconceptions keep us hidden and not saying things,” she said. “The only way of being able to start to make some small changes ... and not be afraid of what people think of us, is to be willing to share and listen and learn.”
The family of her husband, who is also Asian, initially didn’t approve of Yeung marrying him. They believed her husband would be “doomed to a life of caregiving,” she said.
“They didn’t take the chance to get to know me or examine their own cultural biases,” she said.
Over time, Yeung’s mother-in-law has become more open to her, especially after the birth of her son. Little gestures, such as giving lucky red envelopes to her grandchildren, demonstrated that Yeung’s mother-in-law was “working through her stuff.” She now sees parallels between her husband’s family’s growing acceptance, and her own journey toward embracing her vision loss.
“We’re all on our individual journey to understanding ourselves and the people we interact with, and we just have to give one another grace to do so,” she said.