A few months ago I made the classic young Millennial move of “graduating from college and leaving home for a big city”. And not just any city, New York City. The place I dreamed to one day live in, the concrete jungle that would make my every wish come true, the place I could be 100-percent me. I’m still telling my 22-year-old self that this fantasy is now my reality, but like any good fairytale, there’s a...
A conversation that I had with a friend while traveling back from NYC to school in Ithaca really struck me. We talked about assimilation, the process that immigrants go through when they come to America. Assimilation is a word that I’m sure that most have heard of. It refers to the slow but inevitable homogenization that mainstream American culture imposes on immigrants. My friend and I are both Asian-American, stuck between the culture of America...
I’m going to contribute another article as to why Dolce & Gabbana’s “The Great Show” was evil, but I don’t want to repeat the obvious reasons. By now, we all know the big three: 1.) It shows Chinese people as ill-cultured buffoons 2.) There’s a not-so-subtle tiny dick joke and 3.) The Chinese narrator seems to intentionally mispronounce the label in a mocking accent. Add Gabbana’s unhinged racist Instagram rants and even the least-woke Western-society...
Since my last post, I have been addressed with questions and comments about my Asian identity, or lack thereof. It then struck me, that for the past two decades, I have lived in a privileged, white bubble—albeit bordered with fifty shades of racism—far away from anything slightly resembling an Asian community. Being pushed to a sudden exit, and being in need of a clean slate, I indulged in a twenty-year-long whitewashed wanderlust. Well, perhaps not...
Without risk of cultural appropriation or misrepresentation or just being plain offensive. Diversity is a buzzword we all may at some point encounter. I have written from white, mixed and Asian people’s viewpoints and can say I am fairly comfortable now. My published stories or novels have a mixture of different cultures and it is something that I grew up and am familiar with because I was born and raised trilingual in an urban environment...
