Category: Multimedia

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Because I Love You

Dahil mahal kita.

Creator:
Sara Laderas (She/her)

One very common experience among Filipino (both home and diasporic) communities is the presence of children living in the Philippines, and the absence of their parents around them, instead being Overseas Foreign Workers (OFWs) in different places around the world such as Canada, the UK, and the UAE. This kind of family arrangement can create immense friction between family members, resentment amongst children who long for their parents, and unsafe social situations for such workers as they become precariously employed overseas with no safety nets to protect them. These stories don’t make it to mainstream consciousness in Western societies; but that lack of exposure belies the extent to which Filipinos (again, both at home and in the diaspora) are affected by this OFW industry. There is a good chance that, in your day-to-day interactions, whether it’s with a nurse, a care-aide, a hospitality staff, or some other professional, you’ve come across an OFW who has a child and other family members waiting for them in the Philippines. I invite you to consider what life circumstances might compel you to take on this risky and difficult journey like them, and how this might impact you.





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Vegetarianism Through a Buddhist Lens

You’re just doing it because that’s what’s trendy among White people.

Creator:
Isabel Huang (She/her)

Dietary choices are often hugely personal, sometimes existing at the intersection of cultural identity, religious identity, and religiosity (among other dimensions). Whereas vegetarianism is an important way of life for many people who follow Buddhism, Sikhi, Hinduism, and other religions in many Asian cultures (particularly in East and South Asian cultures), vegetarianism has sometimes been associated with privilege and Whiteness in Western societies. This can create a conundrum for Asian diaspora growing up in Western societies where practicing vegetarianism for religious reasons may have those reasons be invisibilized, and instead be seen as secular Westernized Asians. Follow Isabel as she reflects on her experience being vegetarian as an East Asian, contemplating her cultural identity, her connections to her cultural community, and the secularization and commercialization of Eastern religious ideas for a Western market. What has been your relationship with your dietary choices, and what led you to eat food the way that you do?

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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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“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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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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