Category: ACAM 320B

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“Where are you from?”

“Are you a ninja?”

Creator:
Anonymous

If there is one thing that racialized people have to do a lot as they move through society, it is having to explain their own identity, culture, and (presumed) history of migration. “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?” While the person asking the question might not have meant it maliciously, the fact that racialized people disproportionately have to answer this question suggests a fundamentally and systemically different perception that many in society have about racialized people. In particular, this perception involves the insidious assumption that racialized people don’t belong here, or that they can’t possibly be from here. Instead, they really belong there, and must be from there. Take a look at this video and wonder for yourself…when someone experiences these perceptions so often, how does this affect their identity formation? How does this affect the ways in which one might see themselves?

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量太麻烦了 – It’s too much trouble to measure ingredients

The same dish, a slightly different taste every time, but always with the same love, care, and intent on healing

Creator:
Sorella Zhang 张筱媚 (she/her)

Medicine isn’t just about curing diseases and ailments – it can also be able preventing diseases and ailments, and maintaining good health. This kind of perspective about health is characteristic of a various traditional systems of medicine, whether it’s traditional Mongolia, Iranian, Indigenous, or Chinese medicine, amongst others. By seeing medicine as preventative rather than reactive, this allows edible items with medicinal properties to be incorporated into food that can nourish and heal people on a continuous basis. Sorella presents a cookbook filled with recipes involving ingredients that are known to have various medicinal properties in Traditional Chinese Medicine; but it also is filled with a lot of love. The central them is certainly food; but one can see/feel/sense the love and intimate connections that emanate from these recipes. How can we all incorporate traditional medicinal ingredients into our food in a responsible manner?

Click on the following to reveal (first) the cookbook, and (second) the creator’s notes (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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Can’t Use What’s Not There

Can’t Use What’s Not There

Creator:
Ghoncheh Eijadi

When we think about racialized or diasporic individuals establishing a livelihood in Canada, the prototypical conceptualization is an immigrant; but there are many others who do not fall into that group despite also trying to establish a livelihood here. This includes refugees, who often have very different experiences and are subject to very different obstacles from immigrants. Discussions around diasporic health, then needs to include this as well. From this perspective, Ghoncheh writes about IRER groups (Immigrants, Refugees, Ethno-Cultural, and Racialized) and their need for better and more culturally appropriate mental health support. In particular, Ghoncheh tries to outline the issues regarding the underutilization of mental health services among IRER groups, and lays out policy recommendations for how to rectify this issue.

Click on the following to reveal the paper (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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When What’s Available Isn’t Enough

This population of millions in Canada needs immediate attention with culturally-adept solutions to improve their mental health

Creator:
Harleen Kaur Hundal

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated families around the world; but such effects have disproportionately hit certain populations more than others. Internationally, this in differences can be seen in infection/hospitalization/fatality rates across the world. Nationally, this disparity across various social lines, most prominently based on ethnicity. As COVID-19 swept across Canada, each province and territory had to figure out how to best manage this virus, often shutting down who sectors of economic activity while relying on those performing essential services to keep the world running. Unfortunately, zooming into Greater Vancouver, many essential services are visibly and disproportionately reliant on racialized folks, whether this include grocery store workers, truckers, healthcare providers, laundry service providers, meat works, or many others. This places racialized folks at a much greater risk of becoming infected with, or dying from, COVID-19 – including South Asian diaspora. Read Harleen’s impassioned letter to her Member of Parliament, Hon. Carla Qualtrough, as she dissects the racialized impact of the pandemic, and what needs to be done to help the South Asian diasporic community. So what can be done beyond the generic colour-blind health interventions that are already available?

Click on the following to reveal the paper (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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Finding the “Myself”

When was it that I became aware of my drowning?

Author:
Anonymous

CW: suicidal ideation in the author’s statement

Different genders are subject to different societal pressures. The author uses poetry to describe the struggle, the pain, the coping mechanisms, and the realizations he has wrestled with regarding being a Chinese man trying to live up to family expectations. Within a family, we are often many things – we are ourselves with our own aspirations; but we are also a cultural being, and we are children of people with aspirations for us. When these identities clash, it can create an immense burden on the individual in question. These are all issues that the author has had to deal with, all issues that the author has sought escape from. His poem details his pain as he plays one question over and over in his mind: What does it mean to be a man of Chinese heritage?

The Myself

You are a man. Never forget this.
You are Chinese. Never forget this.
You are a child. Never forget this.
You are not yourself. Never forget this.

Their voices, ringing in my head.
It hurt.
It hurt me to realize that I was never acknowledged.
This torturous isolation within a community; the common paradox.
Where could I go?
Those with muffled voices are no better off than those without.
There was no one that could hear me.

Home is where the hatred is.
Hell is where everyone else is.
Is there any escape outside of the bridge?

So I drank.
The nectar that set me free.
I can retreat into the paradise of my mind.
There are no voices left, except for my own.
Just forget.

As I watched everything I ever feared slip away, all I had was Myself left.
Not a single time I had been able to refute this horrible truth.
There was nothing there at all.

I was their child. A construct of their dreams.
I was Chinese. A construct of the millennia of accumulated stories.
I was a man. A construct of systems, societies, and those influential enough to control them.
I was a construct of a structure that needed me to fit my assigned identity.
That was all there was to it.
Do your job.

How could I come to terms with such a reality?
The decision was easy.
I returned to my refuge of half-empty bottles.

\

When was it that I became aware of my drowning?

When I realized that there was nowhere else to hide.

Only two places to find resolution; within yourself, or with God.

There are days where I have chosen God.

There are days where I have chosen to pick up the shattered glass and try to make something out of it.

\

Do you know where I found my paradise?
A horrible twist of irony.

.

The phrase my name was based on:
“”
“Everyone under the sky is happy.”

Funnily enough, the truth was always with me. This prescription of mine.

You know what?
I chose to live up to it.
Not everyone, mind you.
Everyone under my sky.
As much as I can do.
I’m not a hero by any means; I often find that I am the antagonist of my own stories.

That’s fine.
We all do our best.

Where exactly do I wish for this legacy of mine to endure?

Perhaps, in the journals of my friends?

Click on the following to reveal the author’s statement (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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“I don’t feel like I am desirable”

[G]ay Asian men must get their membership ‘approved’ when white gay men do not.

Author:
Nathan Bawaan

Nathan writes about the experiences of Asian Gay and Bisexual Men (GBM) and men who have sex with men (MSM), and the struggles that they often have to deal with – systemic racism within LGBTQ+ communities, the resulting internalized racism, and how both impact their mental health. As Nathan explains, Asian GBM and MSM exist in a system in which they sometimes reject their own ethnic identities and idealize Whiteness (and particularly White gayness), often out of a desire to fit into LGBTQ+ spaces. This piece dovetails nicely with Tiffany Ou’s animation about the stripping down of the fight for queer liberation into effectively a gay White man’s struggle. Nathan points out that this kind of self-loathing, to the point of not recognizing oneself as being desirable, presents particularly difficult mental health challenges for Asian GBM and MSM – with extremely concerning physical health implications, too. How, then, can Asian GBM MSM find community within LGBTQ+ spaces, or must they create their own?

Click on the following to reveal the paper (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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Dear Hon. David Eby

Cultural competence is an essential asset for healthcare providers

Author:
Elisha Fu 傅羽佳

When your community is faced with a problem, it can be hard to know how to even begin to address and tackle it. Leveraging her own experiences, Elisha decided to take on the issue of the underutilization of mental health support services among Asian Canadian communities with this draft letter to her Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), the Honourable David Eby. In this letter, Elisha discusses the scope of the problem at hand, and the devastating impact it can have on Asian disapora in Canada. Through her research, she proposes several important recommendations that the government should consider to ensure that there is sufficient culturally safe mental health resources that Asian diasporic communities can feel comfortable accessing. If you are faced with a similar problem affecting your community, what would you say to your MLA or Member of Parliament?

Click on the following to reveal the paper (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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Thresholding

“So, what did nice conservative gay white men do? They sell a community that liberated them down the river” – Sylvia Rivera

Artist:
Tiffany Ou 欧倩怡 (she/her)

Queerness. Queerness is an identity, and it’s also a way of existing. Queerness, though, isn’t just about being queer. What many boil down to a single point of discourse is actually a complex interplay of multiple identities and intersectionalities at the same time. Tiffany’s illustration/animation shows the viewer a simple yet effective visual representation of how cultural and historical discourse often oversimplifies the richness of queerness into a single issue. In the context of a society with lots of societal defaults, the erasure of the richness of queerness and the diversity among queer folks fighting for liberation often converges into the image of a struggle for White cisgender gay men’s recognition. What implications does this have for racialized queer folks fighting (/who fought) for liberation, and what more needs to be done?

Click on the following to reveal the artist’s statement (Note: PDF viewer not compatible with some mobile platforms; but it is available for download or to view via mobile PDF viewers)

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Disney, WTF!?

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, it is extremely racist!

Creator:
Simi Di Paula
Davin Kim 김다빈

Who would have guessed that Disney would have a history of racist portrayals of Asian characters? (spoilers: me) Follow Simi and Davin’s eye-catching presentation about the numerous examples of Disney’s terrible portrayals of Asian characters, from something as explicit as caricatured speech of some unseen Japanese character in the 40s, to something more subtle like who does and doesn’t have accents in the 90s. They go through the psychology of why representation is important, and how representation (and the lack thereof) affects people’s health. In watching their presentation, I invite you to think – are things better now? If so, in what ways are they better? And if not, what needs to change?

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Lost in Language

Growing up in Canada my whole life, I didn’t know [the Japanese language or Japanese traditions], and I felt a sense of shame.

Creator:
Miranda (Kimiko) Tsuyuki (she/her)

Trauma isn’t something that just one person experiences – it’s something that a whole community can experience. This kind of trauma can even have intergenerational effects that ripple through time. The Canadian government is no stranger to inflicting this kind of pain given its historical and ongoing genocidal actions against Indigenous people. While on a much smaller scale, Japanese Canadian communities along the west coast were forced to reckon with its own collective trauma. The Japanese internment during World War 2 ripped families apart, forcibly extricated citizens from their homes, confiscated citizens’ property, and even forcefully repatriated Japanese Canadians back to Japan despite it being a completely foreign land to many affected people. This led many Japanese Canadians to make the difficult choice of eschewing their own culture in hopes that future descendants would not be subject to such painful and humiliating discrimination. So how does one living amidst all of this find their way back?

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