Perspectives

Why Is the Nobel Peace Prize So Gendered?

The former Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, was named the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her struggle for democracy against the authoritarian Maduro regime....

Temporal or Spatial? What Chinatown Means Across Generations

I once spoke with a Chinese elder in Interior BC, who had a popular Chinese restaurant in Nelson before the millennium. I asked if he considered it part of Nelson’s former Chinatown. He immediately said, “No."...

The Framing Fallacy of Privately Owned Public Spaces: How Developers Reframe Opposition Before the Fight Even Begins

I had always thought that the last round of fighting Beedie over 105 Keefer in 2023 after the BC Supreme Court ruling was the final round of procedural battles at City Hall. It turns out I was wrong...

Activism Tip 103: Theory of Change

Every campaign has a different context, dynamic, and goal. Not every strategy or tactic should be used in every instance. Sometimes, even if the same tactic is used across campaigns, it may serve different purposes...

A Spontaneous Protest

Shutting down Beedie’s open house for 105 Keefer/570 Columbia on October 1, 2025 at the Chinese Cultural Centre Museum and Archives building...

When Hakka Erasure Meets Reclamation

Cultural erasure often happens slowly, invisibly, unconsciously. One story forgotten. A drumbeat unremembered. A word vanished into amnesia. A food lost to assimilation...

We’ve Become Withdrawn

“The lens of resistance is no longer there…it just feels like it’s trying to be ‘nice’.” “If only our Chinatown youth were as sharp and radical.” “That Chinese Canadian youth art show was just…emotional self-gratification.” Something has shifted in Chinese diasporic organizing in Canada. Things feel nicer, more polite, more self-serving, more psychologized, more about individualized feelings than political or structural change...

氏

A poem about Chinese women without names.

Lions Deserve To Be Lions. Dragons Deserve To Be Dragons: On Racism in Public Archives

What we regard as truth in public memory can be so arbitrary sometimes. A small error in an archival description can turn a celebratory parade into a funeral, a lion into a dragon, a dragon into a lion. A slight error in someone’s name can erase their traces and the people around them from history, as if they never existed and can never be found...

To Diaspora: Reject Big C Culture

“You shouldn’t use the word ‘sustainability’,” the city councillor known for championing environmental sustainability warned. I replied, “Why? Cultural sustainability is about ensuring that people’s ways of life, identities, heritage, language, and its manifestations such as through the arts can sustain.” She snapped back: “Do you want sexism to sustain? Racism to sustain?”...

Witnessing July 1, More Than A Century Later

A poem reflecting on Humiliation Day on July 1, 2025.

Re-examining the Legacy of Chinese Canadian “Pioneers”

The Chinese Canadian Museum recently opened a new gift shop called 1889 Trading Co 貿易公司. The name commemorates the year Yip Sang 葉連生 (字來饒, 號春田), the celebrated Chinese merchant, built the Wing Sang 永生 building to house his store, business headquarters, and eventually his family home. Today, that building houses the museum celebrating Chinese Canadian history...

On Professionalism in the Messiness of Community Organizing

Too often, professionalism is treated as optional in community organizing. As if organizing in community and having overlapping relationships inside and outside organizations means the standards of a “real workplace” no longer matter...

Heritage Isn’t Privilege. Settler Fluency Is.

I’m the first fluent English speaker in my family. The first college graduate. The first to navigate white settler society on my own terms. As a second-generation Chinese diasporic person, I straddled two worlds: my family’s cultural world and the larger English-speaking society around me...

On Cultural Erasure

A poem on cultural erasure.

The Injustice of Peace in Diaspora Communities

Peace doesn’t necessarily mean justice. Justice doesn’t always lead to peace. We see this again and again from geopolitics to local community meetings. Conflict, war, devastation, followed by “negotiated” solutions. Peacebuilding is prioritized while justice-seeking is sidelined...

They’d Rather Smash the Mirror and Pollute the Water Than See Their Own Reflection

One of the most useful and memorable courses I took during my medical lab science undergrad was one on teaching. As part of it, we had to teach a full lesson to our peers, which was video recorded for review. But here’s the twist: the professors weren’t the ones reviewing the recordings. Our peers were...

Cultural Allyship without Self-Rootedness is Empty

There’s a recent phenomenon in Chinese diaspora social justice spaces that keeps showing up: a persistent rush to decentre Chineseness in order to be the perfect ally to every other cultural group considered more marginalized. Platforms that begin with the goal of celebrating and reclaiming Chinese culture often shift into showcasing every other cultural community, except Chineseness, as though true allyship requires self-erasure...

Saying No Is Governance

Non-profit governance boards. Some say governance boards are frivolous and useless, since the real direction comes from staff. Others argue they’re disconnected from the communities they’re meant to serve, because staff does all the groundwork. Some see boards as existing to support the operational leader, doing whatever that person wants, protecting them whenever needed. Others view them as capacity fillers, stepping in to do work staff can’t or won’t take on...

Reflections on Justice as an Aesthetic

I’m a STEM girly. My mode of operating is: doing, observing, thinking, referencing, interpreting, then putting what I see and know into words and frameworks that inform my worldview. Also known as the scientific method. I started community organizing and service because I wanted to solve problems that were existential to me. And I’m half-decent at solving problems. So when I stumbled into the social justice organizing space, I thought theory and practice were supposed to align. I thought if it’s named, it must be real. But I was fooled...

Reflections on Community Organizing and Power

One of the most common and dangerous mistakes in community organizing is confusing the personal with the institutional. Once you’re part of an organization that manages a resourced budget, employs staff, and holds material power and influence over vulnerable populations and smaller groups, you are no longer acting as just an individual. You represent an institution. Your words, actions, and decisions carry institutional weight, especially when you hold leadership roles. You wield institutional power...