Tag: cultural identity

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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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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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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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“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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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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Where is “Home?”

But what if home no longer accepts you?

Artist:
Meriwether Morris (they/them)

The idea of belongingness and home can often be an elusive one for diasporic folks. There is the oft-repeated and clichéd trope of existing in a liminal space, frustrated by being simultaneously both and neither. It being a cliché, though, does not stop it from being true. Compounding this struggle is the additional frustration of not knowing how to react when disaster strikes in one’s “heritage home” – does being away from that “home” automatically make one less? Does being away from the crisis take away one’s ability to claim to be? All of this comes down to the diaspora wondering about their obligations and belongingness. All of this is to say, for many in the Asian diaspora, one of the primary questions is, “Where is home?”

Click on the following to reveal the comic and subsequent 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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