Posts tagged "identity"
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Merantau Cino
A scan of a film photo of a wooden table in Tretes, Indonesia with light coming in through the window, making it a very atmospheric picture Tretes, Indonesia (link to some photos I took I have been struggling with my feelings on and about immigration. Some time in mid 2023, a woman at a bus stop in San Francisco…
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Wives and Lives
Some thoughts on being a gaysian immigrant to California A scan of a black and white photograph of some Chinese calligraphy writing on a wall in a Chinese restaurant in Oakland, California Two weeks ago, I helped to plan and organize a Lunar New Year dinner for 120 queer and trans Asian people. It's a tradition that…
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So This Is the New Year
Dream of the Noughties # It feels like we all just woke up from a collective dream. The dream of the '10s, where we gave our content, perhaps even our personalities, away for free to Facebook. No longer. Not only have I cut that toxic company out of my life, I have also started thinking about how web 1.0 got it right:…
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Fresh Off The Boat
When I first moved to America nine months ago, I was perplexed by a never-ending list of things. They were not the 'big' ones, like having to learn a scary new language. We already spoke English. We'd seen enough movies. Our accents, we were told, were non-existent! You sound Californian!!! You have no accent! (Didn't…
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Swatow
When my people speak of who we are and where we come from We do not say, China. When my relatives reclaim our collective past, Those words—China—dance on our lips, foreign. We do not say China. We do not say China at all. Instead, we are the people of the coast. We are the subjects of the Tang Dynasty. We are the…
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To the Mountain
Going to the mountain. In all of my 29 years, my grandparents had been such a big part of my life that I could have never conceived of a life without them. Like the 1128-episode TV serials they watched, Ah Gong and Ah Ma just went on and on. In the background, their voices blended in with the voices of the Chinese TV…
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Don't Lugi Be Happy
In peninsular Southeast Asia there is a word of Malay origin, bastardized by Chinese pronunciation that perhaps best describes the prevalent mindset of the middle class in everything from career to politics: lugi. More than the losing of face and the losing of status, our collective great fear is the fear of losing…
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#iamsingaporean
Singapore Skyline I am a Singaporean who lives in a series of hash tags. They are: #iamchinese my race, my ethnicity, a language I speak, "mother tongue" classes I struggled with and the colour of my skin #iamasian a vague identity I hold; ‘one of them' in the tribes of Northeast India and I am ‘one of us'…
8 posts tagged "identity"