'I'm a software engineer by day and an exotic dancer by night. This is my truth.'

Yiling Chen is a software engineer by day, and an exotic dancer by night. Here, she writes about breaking the stereotype, and the best compliment she’s ever received.

I am shy at heart. Talking to strangers is a daunting task for me. By working at a night club I inadvertently created a situation which pushes me to talk to people.

So I have talked to a lot of people, all kinds of people, people I would have never talked to outside of this unique setting.

Usually, I find ways to learn about their life. Occasionally, they are interested in mine.

For the first couple of times I was inquired about my personal life, I gave BS answers:

“I quit my biology research job. I am working as a contractor for a tech company. My job doesn’t pay well, and I am looking for a new opportunity. In the meantime, I’m doing this to make ends meet.”

I stopped lying when a friend asked me the simplest yet extremely powerful question: “why?”

Looking back, I cringe a little every time I think about why I lied.

I lied because I didn’t want people to think I was crazy. I know if I told the truth, the first question they’ll ask me is “why on earth are you here?”

Culture has influenced us to have such a narrow-minded thinking when it comes to exotic dancing. I didn’t expect anyone to believe that the only reason I was there was to “explore and to have fun.”

However, by lying, I fed exactly into the stereotype.

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So I decided to tear down my shield of lie, be vulnerable, and share my truth.

In doing so, I am breaking a stereotype for people. A few nights ago, someone paid me the most sincere praise I have ever received.

I had just finished dancing on stage when two guys whom I was 90 per cent sure were Silicon Valley software engineers walked onto the floor and sat down. I thought to myself, I could probably hold a decent conversation with them.

I walked up to them and introduced myself. Let’s call them Tom and Brady.

I started the conversation with the generic opener: “what brought you here tonight?”

Eventually the conversation shifted to work, and Tom asked me if I do anything outside of this.

I must have caught them off-guard when I said I was a full-stack software engineer. Because then they both looked at me and each other wide-eyed. They were even more bewildered when they asked which school I went to, giving me the opportunity to add in the MIT card.

From a later conversation with Tom, I found out that Brady did not believe me at first. It made sense because the next thing Brady asked me was:

“How would you find whether there is a loop in a linked list.”

This is an algorithm question every single software engineer had heard. Of course I knew the answer. I must have lifted any doubts they had when I told them the “two pointers — fast runner/slow runner” solution.

Immediately following my answer, Brady asked me, as I predicted he would, “why are you here?”

As I talked to him about algorithm and software, I could tell he was becoming more and more impressed.

Before he left, he said to me:

“You are really smart! Like really smart! And you are really sexy!”

“We need more people like you.”

Tom later said to me that they don’t see women like me everyday, let alone at a club, and that it’s really awesome.

I’m breaking a stereotype for them: a smart, educated, ambitious, beautiful woman who wants to dance at a night club “just to gain life experiences and to have fun.”

Even though it feels rewarding to be a person who can challenge other people’s long-held stereotypes and beliefs, it’s not an easy task. It’s not anywhere near close to easy for me to gather the courage and pursue this esoteric curiosity. It’s not close to easy for me to quell the feelings of anxiety and fear.

However, I’m doing this, I’m putting myself out there because I truly believe that stereotype and stigma hinder society from moving forward.

We are not doing ourselves justice, and we are not doing each other justice when we become so inflexible in our thoughts that we can’t accept new ideas.

I hope you find the courage to pursue what makes you happy, no matter how esoteric it might be. I hope you find the courage to rise above what you fear others might think. Because guess what? We need more people like you.

This article originally appeared on Medium, and has been republished with full permission. 

For more from Yiling, follow her blog or on Twitter.