themes

last updated: 20200619



parental relationships, relationships to food, Chinese restaurants (their histories, what happens next now that second-generation kids don’t want to run them), the politicization of Asian food, anti-Asian racism, COVID-19 and what that means for Asian people in North America, Asian grocery stores, filial expectations, going (back) to China, Asian friend groups in North America, growing up with vs. without other Asian kids around, East Coast and West Coast Asians (midwest/southern/southwest Asians!) , dimsum, aunties and uncles, weddings, Chinese Traditional Medicine, gentrification, Chinatowns around the world + their histories, choosing safe paths, parental sacrifices, c-pop, relationships with other ethnic groups, Chinese bakeries, Asian representation in mainstream media, the purposeful creation of spaces for the Asian diaspora, dating + relationships, Subtle Asian Traits, Subtle Asian Dating, interracial relationships, Asian girl guilt, yellow fever/fetishization, the convergence of assistive technologies and perceived subservience, talking about feelings with family, non-traditional career paths, the luxury of self actualization, the significance + proliferation of bubble tea shops, refugee existence, immediate shared understanding, Chinese School, Chinese New Year in North America, learning to cook Chinese food, T&T, aging parents, LGBTQ+ experiences, tensions between first-generation Chinese immigrants and kids who grew up here, half- and part-Asian experiences, being overprepared for everything because your parents didn’t have a safety net, relationships to money, American chinese food/Chinese-X fusion, looking back to rich cultural histories / looking to the past to project into the future, intergenerational knowledge/ the visceral desire to understand where you come from / family histories, the explicitness required of communication technologies running up against in-person tacitness, cooking as medicinal knowledge, attempts at self-determination, the burden of representation (ken liu, larissa pham’s words on this) / we are mythologies in the making / juxtaposing a brief diasporic history with the rich history of motherlands, immigrant kids and quarantine, rave culture/electronic music/futurism aesthetics of ravewear, government renderings / approximations of personhood: transliterated surnames / propaganda posters, modern day farmers and relationships to earth, collective care =/= conformity/ defying gods/nature, the kids’ show arthur, animal crossing and chinese-inspired objects, imagining the chinese/asian diaspora to a distributed network (large, dispersed population! to have a shared protocol to interface yet distinct nonetheless), fruit trees, chinese community choirs / youth acapella, tech workers participating in the project of building the future, spacetime, compasses/chopsticks/abacus as cyborg technology, learning Chinese one google translate/Pinyin transliteration at a time, immigrant communities coalescing in religious places regardless of actual religious belief, cousins on the other side of the world, family members in Asia who you’ve never met, overlap with various diasporas (the Chinese-Vietnamese diaspora/the boat people), the “American Dream” in China, dragon boat racing, being first-gen [blank], the chinese vegetables for which i have no english names