Category: ACAM 320B

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There’s Food at Home

You have to choose. Do you want to be one of them. Or one of us.

Creator:
Haniya Syed (she/her)

So many things stay with us in our memories – the flavour of meals, the aroma of food, the sights and sounds of meal time, and the emotions of being around families and friends. In this cookbook, Haniya shares with you some of her most treasured family recipes that map onto her parents’ migration history, and her experience growing up in a multiracial family set within a society filled with racialization. To complement the amazing recipes, Haniya sprinkles this cookbook with offerings of scrumptious poetry, dashes of mouth-watering food photographs, and heaping portions of heart-warming family pictures. As you read through this cookbook full of amazing recipes set to immense nostalgia and reminiscence, what foods draw out some of your fondest childhood memories – and why?

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How can I learn in a world of color when the text is white?

[H]ealthcare inequities…can be traced back to…the foundational knowledge that future healthcare practitioners are educated on.

Creator:
Ying Jie Li 李颖杰 (she/her)

Guest:
Melody (Chinese heritage, nursing student)

It would be so easy for us to think about health inequities as something situated within clinics and hospitals, especially in terms of the health outcomes. While that is a valid assessment of health inequities, there is much more to these issues. Who are the academics/physicians producing and publishing knowledge? Who are primarily the participants in these medical studies? What demographics is published knowledge based on? What are the identities, perspectives, and experiences of the people serving as frontline medical caregivers? Who are the people who make policy decisions in clinics, hospitals, and government ministries? All of these questions, and many others, colour the health inequities that patients experience. How do we address inequities within the healthcare system when these issues are so systemic? Listen to Ying Jie and her guest tackle these difficult issues, what these issues feel like, and think of what a way forward might look like.

Downloadable file here
Transcript here

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Take care of me when I’m older

[H]ow can filial piety be a double-edged sword in the context of caregivers’ mental health?

Host:
Eunice Lai 黎孝詩 (she/hers)

In this podcast submission, Eunice dives into the concept of filial piety within the context of a Hong Kong Canadian family. In particular, filial piety entails expectations about intergenerational caregiving from someone from a younger generation to someone from an older generation, with common interpretations of it requiring an immense level of self-sacrifice at the expense (or disregard) of one’s own well-being. This kind of caregiver role strain becomes compounded when the caregiver themselves is having to manage other issues and demands on their cognitive capacity on top of caregiving tasks. In Eunice’s case, her father took on a caregiving role for his father; but the stress of that role became exacerbated by her father’s own concerns and emotions surrounding the Hong Kong protests in 2019-2020. How does one navigate such an emotionally difficult situation?

Downloadable file here
Transcript here

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I don’t want being Asian Canadian to be the only thing they know about me

“[T]hat’ll be the day when we really have that freedom.”

Creator:
Kaitlyn Lee (she/hers)

Guest:
Cathy Huynh

Racialized and minoritized individuals involved in the arts often face a dilemma: On the one hand, being minoritized means feeling external pressure to have to tell stories associated with one’s minority group(s). On the other hand, there is an internal desire to tell stories that are true to themselves as an individual, and not to be known only as their minoritized identity. What does freedom from this dilemma mean? Kaitlyn interviews her friend and Vietnamese Canadian filmmaker, Cathy Huynh, to discuss how these opposing pressures play out in the filmmaking process, how they affect her as a filmmaker, and how she reconciles them.

Downloadable file here
Transcript here

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Working in the Global North

[S]tructures like a capitalist and exploitative nation-state will only see people…as just bodies that need to contribute to empowering those in control even further, no matter the cost

Creator:
Divine Reyes

An important aspect of Asian diasporic discussion within a capitalist system is the intersection of labour politics, gender, and racialization. For a long time, the provision of care-taker labour in Canada, whether in terms of medical care or domestic care, has been disproportionately shouldered by racialized women and femmes…particularly those with more complex migration histories because of the broader economic relationship between the Global North and the Global South characterized by one-sided exploitation. In Divine’s interview, her mother speaks about her experience creating and living and exercising agency within a predatory economic system and the difficulties that all of that entails. Have you noticed this kind of intersectional breakdown of care-taker labour around you?

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Queerness and Multiculturalism

[T]hey can bridge the intersections of their identity to find self happiness.

Creator:
Shih-wei Wang 王詩薇

Whenever race is discussed, there is often an implicit heteronormativity that pervades those discussions. Shih-wei’s paper complements another paper in this collection (by Clover Lee) by centring the representation of queer Asians. Unlike Clover’s paper, however, Shih-wei focuses on the experiences of queer Asians as portrayed through literature. In doing so, she breaks down the social construction of a “queer Asian diasporic identity” by reflecting on all the different ways in which such an identity is constructed within the context of a Eurocentric and heteronormative hegemony. As you read through Shih-wei’s paper, if you embody a queer Asian diasporic identity, do her reflections resonate with you?

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Invisible Queerness

Being queer and Asian is “a very powerful identity.”

Creator:
Clover Lee (she/they)

Mainstream discussions around diversity and representation often revolve around culture/race/ethnicity; but it’s obvious that an intersectional approach is needed to better address and understand people’s experiences. What happens when race and queerness intersect? What kinds of experiences do they have that might be different from those who aren’t queer? In Clover’s paper, she explores the experiences of queer Asians in Vancouver to illustrate the power of such an intersectional identity, and also the challenges of embodying this intersectional identity while navigating an LGBTQIA+ space that is very White-centric, as well as domestic spaces that are very heteronormative. While it is challenging to have to navigate these spaces and deal with discrimination in multiple forms in numerous spaces, the people featured in Clover’s paper are resolute in their pride for their identity.

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A Tale of Two Vases

Creator:
Amalee Truong (she/her)

A common experience among minoritized artists is the internal struggle associated with creating art that is traditional to their culture. For example, a Chinese Canadian artist might want to showcase Chinese styles in their art because that is what best represents them; however, the question of whether one is “enough” of that minoritized culture to even use that style often comes up. It makes them question whether they have the credibility to use such cultural styles, and whether they would be seen as merely appropriating a style that they don’t have enough credibility to use. And does using that style create the perception that their usage signals representation? This all creates additional pressures on the artist to do a really good job, lest their potential failure reflects poorly on their entire community. With all of these pressures, though, it is still imperative that minoritized artists push forward and create a style that is their own. Dive into Amalee’s thought process as she discusses similar struggles while creating two ceramic vases to represent her and her brother. If you were in a similar position, how would you reconcile the need for representation with the worries about being too much of an imposter to engage in representation?

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Planting a Seed

Ruolee holds the seed, like how Ah-ma held her hands. “I know it will grow now. It certainly will.”

Creator:
Maya Wu 吳妤蕎 (she/her)

Leaving a home to set up a new home elsewhere is as much a source of excitement as it is a source of sorrow. We often end up in a double-bind of experiencing sadness for leaving behind people we love and cherish, and also struggling with the loneliness of social isolation and cultural adjustment in a new environment. This is especially difficult for children who, while culturally and linguistically adjusting, also end up shouldering the domestic load of being the liaison between their families and the outside world. And sometimes, all it takes is that one serendipitous encounter with that one individual who helps change perspectives, provides assurances, and gives confidence to the immigrant child to know how to find a niche for themselves in this new cultural environment. If you had been in a similar situation, who was that one person for you – or perhaps it was a group of people? And what changes occurred as a result of that encounter? Read through Maya’s beautifully illustrated story of just such an encounter and I dare you to not feel like smiling at the end.

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Trapped in Space

I look toward the moonlight but I become increasingly frustrated over being in situations beyond my control that poses barriers in my assimilation to mainstream culture.

Creator:
Jiro Luat (he/him)

Moving to a new country isn’t as simple as merely moving bodies across physical spaces. Children who move during their formative years have to navigate the difficult psychological space of reconciling different emerging identities, and families have to manage a difficult relational space because it often splits up parents, creating astronaut families. All of this will strain relationships between parents, and between children and their parents. For Jiro, these issues deeply affected him and his development, and he masterfully showcases this process and his thoughts with a beautiful dance performance. Watch the video below and the accompanying statement to get a good glimpse of what this experience was/is like for him. If you had to move to a completely different cultural environment, and had to adjust while also navigating fraying relationships with other family members, what would that feel like?

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