Category: Multimedia

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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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