The Performance Tax

Why We've Stopped Explaining

Dear Curious Minds,

Are you watching the Winter Olympics? It’s a bit surreal that I was in a similar climate just a couple of weeks ago as I spent the last two days trying to stay hydrated and not get overheated. Thank you for being here, I appreciate you.

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Amazing place and people at Hoani Waititi marae.

I lied during the debrief.

I spent two glorious days at Hoani Waititi marae for a writers table. The room was full of laughter, some tears, and the kind of deep conversation New Zealand usually swerves around like a pothole we’ve all agreed to pretend isn’t there. Nearly double-digit writers, several actors, two film producers with decades of experience, who kept saying, “This isn’t how these usually go.” Apparently the writers made it really hard for the producers to stay in character because we were so surprisingly good at improv, slipping into character with barely a prompt.

During one of the debriefs, I mentioned I’d never done acting before.

Then I took a break, grabbed a tea, and realised: That was a lie.

I act every day.

I impression-manage every single day. Sometimes by the minute. Because I’m constantly sense-checking rooms and calibrating which version of myself to bring. Not in a strategic, Machiavellian way. More like… survival maths you can do even when you are half asleep? What version of me does this person need? What percentage of me can this environment hold? How colour of me is useful here?

For the longest time, I thought everyone did this.

Then an entire room of leadership training course ooked at me, genuinely shocked, and one person said: “That sounds so exhausting.”

Well. Yeah. Welcome to this life.

But here’s what I didn’t say in that moment: it’s not just exhausting. It’s also deliberate. Some people don’t get the full version because they haven’t earnt it. Some rooms don’t deserve our energy and our authenticity. And we’ve learnt to tell the difference.

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The Two Versions

One of the actors was given a prompt that, in the first round, was brilliantly extreme. Wacky. Unfiltered. The kind of character who says the thing everyone didn’t even know could be a thing, but finds incredibly funny because we see the irony.

In the second round, she was different.

I didn’t like it as much. Couldn’t pin down why at first. it wasn’t badly performed, just… flatter. During the debrief, it clicked.

I saw myself in that second version.

The woman who could be spicier, crazier, more unedited but who’s constantly sense-checking the room. Self-censoring. Waiting for her turn. Making sure she doesn’t take up too much space or offend the wrong person at the wrong time.

It’s easy to encourage the second version to be herself. I get that a lot. But that second version isn’t just a passive slump result of oppression. Versions of me had made those choices out of contempt and joy. ‘Ten minutes to go with this lot until I can go home to my cats.’

The first version works perfectly in places where she has social capital. She could be that unfiltered, that funny, because her status as a model minority (doctor) was robust enough to cushion the performance. People could laugh with her because she wasn’t threatening the structure. She was succeeding within it.

I am also that.

I’m white enough to be unapologetically Korean. I can wear Hanbok to a corporate conference to MC the thing in a perfect Kiwi accent, and people will celebrate it as diversity. My friend with a thick Korean accent? She’ll probably choose to blend in with corporate attire, smile politely at bland finger food we’ll both complain about later, and make herself smaller in ways I don’t need to.

So when people say “representation matters” (sure, it can, to a very limited point), what they’re really saying is: we want you visible enough for us to celebrate that we included YOU out of our goodwill, but just to the point that you don’t become disruptive to require actual transformative change for the rest of us.

And when we have the energy, we choose to tell you we see through it.

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Medals, Trauma, and What We’re Not Supposed to See

At that writers’ table, the conversation wound its way to Olympic sports during one of the breaks. Inevitable, given we’re now deep into the coverage that’s flooding our screens and conveniently distracting us from destructive bills passing, violent decisions, and political malice in New Zealand, US and around the globe.

Don’t get me wrong. I love sports. I’m absolutely watching these Olympic Games. But those tangled threads are all the same battle, not separate challenges.

NYT ran a headline this week that said it plainly: “Political talk at Olympics particularly hazardous for the not-yet-mainstream athletes.” There it is. Who gets to speak, who has to stay silent, who’s safe enough to be political, all determined by how well you fit the representation narrative they’re selling.

We started talking about Korea’s particular winning streak in certain sports. Archery, especially. There’s a quote that circulates every four years: “Archery is a sport where athletes from around the world gather to congratulate the Koreans on winning gold.” Because the country won gold medals every single time since 1984. Medal chances also used to be high for judo and wrestling. Lately, it’s shooting.

I half-joked that there’s a pattern here. An uncomfortably long generational trauma of fighting off invasion attempts and colonisation that made us exceptionally good at these particular skills. Goguryeo archers were feared across the East Asian region. Historical records say they could shoot enemies behind them by turning around mid-charge while their horses galloped forward at full speed, hitting their targets with terrifying accuracy.

We laughed. Then someone said we could probably map out what political consequences and oppression are visible in the sports that different nations dominate at the Olympics.

Why is lawn bowling so popular in Samoa? My half-joking theory: it was in the coloniser’s best interest to introduce a less intense, less physically demanding sport. Like, would you really want already physically strong people training in intense, combative disciplines? Rugby still got popular because it’s hard to suppress that entirely, but I’d bet some colonial-era British and German influence pushed lawn bowling as the classy, elite option. The safe one.

Speaking of classy, elite representation that gets names, the opening ceremony coverage was its own disaster. Italy’s state broadcaster called the San Siro stadium “Stadio Olimpico”, a completely different venue in Rome. Misidentified an Italian actress as Mariah Carey. And when IOC President Kirsty Coventry walked in with Italy’s president, the commentator introduced her as “the president’s daughter.” The president’s daughter.

Not the first female IOC president. Not an Olympic gold medallist. Just… the president’s daughter.

This is what representation-as-progress looks like when you squint. We celebrate the medal count. We get misty-eyed at the anthems. We watch athletes who look like us succeed within a system designed to keep us visible but contained. And even when we’re in charge (literally heading the IOC), we’re still introduced in relation to the men in the room.

And while we’re cheering, we’re not supposed to notice that the sports themselves carry the scars of empire. That excellence in archery or shooting or lawn bowling could very well be an adaptation. It’s what happens when survival requires precision under pressure, when your ancestors had to become exceptionally good at things that kept them alive long enough to pass those skills down. And we are supposed to enjoy it for being given the chance to play.

Representation isn’t the same as liberation. Sometimes it’s just a better camera angle on the same cage.

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The Incremental Lie

This is where Michelle Mijung Kim’s work cuts through the noise. She’s spent years unpacking how the model minority myth isn’t just racist but a wedge. A tool designed to pit marginalised communities against each other, fighting for scraps of visibility while the table itself remains unchanged.

As someone who built a career in DEI consulting, Kim’s now publicly saying this isn’t the time for DEI frameworks. Not because diversity doesn’t matter, but because the frameworks themselves have become the performance. Another way to keep us busy perfecting our pitches, diversifying our panels, and celebrating incremental wins, while power stays exactly where it is.

Representation without redistribution is just better optics.

It’s the lie we’ve been sold on repeat: that change happens slowly, carefully, incrementally. That we need to wait for our turn. Earn our seat. Prove we deserve to be in the room before we can ask why the room is structured this way in the first place.

The revisionists have a version of this lie, too. They say what happened should be left in the past. Move on. Look forward, not back. They say retrospective accountability for past wrongdoing is too complex, too hard, too divisive. That incremental change, however glacial, however inadequate, is still progress, so we should be grateful.

Sure. It’s in the oppressor’s best interest to keep saying that. Fuck that.

We are capable of complex and hard things. We have always done complex and hard things. We’ve managed your contradictions, navigated your systems, survived your violence, and somehow still showed up to work the next day with a smile you didn’t deserve.

Don’t tell us accountability is too complicated when you’ve made us fluent in the complexity of keeping you comfortable.

And so we perform. We bring the version of ourselves that’s palatable enough to be celebrated but not disruptive enough to be taken seriously. We compete for the few seats at tables we didn’t build, with rules we didn’t write, in games designed to exhaust us before we can change them.

This is the false start that keeps repeating. We line up, we bloody lean in, we wait for the gun, and then someone moves the starting line. Again. And we’re told this is progress. This is how it works. Be patient. Your time will come.

A lot of us stopped believing that.

But we don’t always say it out loud anymore. Because you’re not worth the breath.

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What You’ve Earned

The writer’s table was electric because, for two days, we weren’t performing incremental change. We were imagining something else entirely. Something messier, more honest, more uncomfortable than the polished narratives we’re supposed to package for consumption.

I got emotional finetuning my character at one point. Because it touched something raw I’m still learning how to name. That’s a piece for another day.

The debrief in my brain I’ve done so far is that the toned-down version isn’t just about survival; it’s a choice.

Some people don’t deserve our full, colourful, unedited selves. Some rooms aren’t safe enough to hold all of who we are. And when those same rooms tell us to “bring our whole selves to work”, while firing us, demoting us, ostracising us, censoring us, killing us, raping us for being exactly who we are, they’re not offering liberation. They’re demanding more unpaid labour and exploitation. They want more vulnerability they can monetise. They think it’s acceptable to go on extracting and discarding when it’s no longer convenient.

So no. You don’t get the full version. You get what you’ve earned, which is often precisely minimal.

We don’t believe your lie anymore. We don’t believe that representation is the same as power, or that incremental change is progress, or that if we just wait a little longer, tone ourselves down a little more, perform a little harder, that things will shift.

But we give you the silent treatment when you say it.

Not because we’re polite, shy, or insecure. Not because we’re waiting for permission to speak. But because you’re not worth our breath anymore.

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For Those Who Already Know

If you’ve ever walked into a room and immediately started calculating which version of yourself is safe to bring, you already know this.

If you’ve ever been told to “bring your whole self” by people who wouldn’t protect you if you did, you know this too.

If you’ve stopped explaining, stopped educating, stopped performing hope for people who’ve shown you exactly who they are, yeah. You know.

The performance is exhausting. I see you. And we don’t owe anyone the toned-down version. But we sure as hell don’t owe you the real one either.

The silence is a refusal.

And we’re done waiting for your permission to exist.

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