Luoluo Hong, an activist and educator, wasn't allowed to date until she was 25 years old. She couldn't see a movie until age 21, and her opportunities to socialize with friends were limited.

Since Hong was a young girl growing up in Baltimore, she said her Chinese father and Taiwanese mother discouraged her from being assertive and from voicing her own opinion.

"I felt very isolated from my peers and continued to feel this real divide," Hong said Wednesday night at Cardinal Hall.

But for Hong, now 35, all that has changed.

In her speech titled "Beyond Geisha Girls and Kung Fu Masters," Hong explained to about 90 students how she found her voice and became the first Asian American dean of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"This is certainly not the typical career or life that gets role modeled for Asian Americans," she said.

Hong first became aware of her Asian American identity after entering Amherst College at age 17, where she had the opportunity to bond with other Asian, Latino and Black students, she said.

As she became more interested in her identity, Hong said she took an Asian studies course, watched films and read books about her culture.

"It was a very powerful time to understand the ways I felt ostracized and come to terms with the racism I experienced," Hong said.

At the end of her freshman year, however, she said a sophomore who served as a second tenor in the school's glee club followed her home and sexually assaulted her three times. She later discovered that the student had a fetish for Asian American pornography, she said.

"I felt horribly vilified and dirty and shamed," she said.

After being rejected by both her boyfriend, who lived in Washington D.C. at the time and accused her of cheating, and by peers in the university's Asian American Student Association, she said she felt even more ostracized.

"I was targeted because I was Asian American," Hong said. "I was a safe victim."

She said she soon went to a counselor and was later encouraged to begin the university's first Sexual Assault Awareness Week.

"You could imagine I had 18 to 19 years of being silent, passive, acquiescent, and now I had this dilemma because I was angry," Hong said.

As she became more vocal, Hong also changed her major from biology to physics to math and finally to psychology, which contradicted her parents' career expectations for her to be a doctor or lawyer.

"We need to encourage and embrace and celebrate choosing careers going beyond the holy trinity of business, law and medicine," she said.

Less than 1 percent of CEOs for colleges and universities are Asian, Hong said.

Graduate student Nina Tupy, who is majoring in student affairs in higher education, said she enjoyed listening to Hong's experiences in public education.

"I thought she did a wonderful job," Tupy said. "She was a commanding speaker. She brought a sense of humor to it, which made people comfortable."

Elizabeth Douglass, president of the Asian American Student Association, said she was pleased with the speech and impressed with the student turnout.

"She went cross cultural and talked in a way that made sense to all students," Douglass said.