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.

Some justify this move as a way to decentre “Chinese dominance,” to make space and show solidarity with Indigenous, Black, or other racialized communities.

But what does making space for others actually mean? What does solidarity with others look like in practice?

Why must solidarity begin and end with the invisibilization or suppression of one’s own culture in order to be in communion with another’s?

When I was younger, as a settler on unceded Indigenous land, I thought I understood what colonization and decolonization meant. I was sympathetic to the injustices Indigenous peoples had experienced, and to what it meant for their culture to be erased.

But I actually didn’t understand.

I didn’t truly know until I saw my own culture, my childhood, the very root of my identity, being erased in front of my eyes in Chinatown. As if someone were taking an aggressive eraser to rub out the colours, the people, the memories, and replace them with the black and white blotches of gentrification.

And then I knew. I knew in my body, fundamentally what cultural erasure means, and what it feels like to have a place torn from you even though it’s incomparable to what Indigenous people faced and continue to face today.

I remember having a call with an urban Indigenous youth who sat on the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Council with me. I said to her: “I now understand. I really understand your anger and rage, and I have deep admiration for the patience of your people.”

Then together, we advocated for cultural sustainability at the City and pushed back against institutional arts leaders who insinuated that community-based cultural expression from communities like ours could never meet the bar of “artistic excellence.”

A decade later, I attended a gathering at Whey-ah-Wichen (Cates Park), hosted by the Sacred Trust Initiative of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation to protest the Trans Mountain pipeline. I mustered the courage to speak with a Tsleil-Waututh organizer, author, and spiritual leader to thank him for his memoir It Stops Here!, which was not only a powerful story of resistance, but also a deep reflection on being Tsleil-Waututh, the people of the inlet. I had first learned about his book through the City of Vancouver Book Award, where the book I contributed to, White Riot, about the anti-Asian race riots, was nominated alongside his.

Like an admiring book fan, I shook his hand and thanked him for his words, words that so clearly embodied his culture that resonated with me and how I related to mine.

He said something I won’t forget: “You know, after the Book Award, I realized I didn’t know a lot about your people. So I did some research and found out that your people and my people went through a lot of injustices at the hands of the same people. But our people were also in community with each other and helped each other. I have cousins who are mixed Indigenous and Chinese.”

That small moment of exchange was a quiet understanding of our ancestors’ suffering, but also their shared resilience. It was a quiet solidarity, a mutual offering of culture between two people who had come to understand their own identities deeply enough to recognize and honour each other’s.

Cultural allyship starts with an interrogation of one’s own culture, of your place in it, and your relationship with it. Without that foundation, how can you truly understand what other people’s culture means? One that is not yours, and not yours to embody?

How would you know, deep in your soul, what it means to reclaim culture from erasure, or to feel the fragility of a heritage slipping away without generational care? 

How can you understand what it means to reclaim a language if you haven’t tried to reclaim your own? 

How can you grasp the wisdom of learning from elders and stewarding their knowledge if you haven’t asked your own to teach you? 

How can you appreciate the power of healing medicines from another culture if you don’t know how your own culture heals? 

How can you have genuine dialogue with people from outside your community about culture, when you’ve hardly had dialogue with people within your own culture?

You don’t. You can’t. You won’t.

But that hasn’t stopped some people in the Chinese diaspora who often haven’t done this work from performing the perfect ally.

The contradiction is that this allyship often comes with conditions. Organizers recentre themselves through performances designed to demonstrate how good, progressive, or selfless they are in the name of diversity and solidarity. A Chinese diaspora film screening might invite non-Chinese racialized speakers to comment, but the Chinese organizers still moderate the discussion and take the credit. A cultural organization may host an event to platform another group’s culture, but they still hold the mic, introduce the event, promote their brand, and walk away with the recognition and the funding.

This isn’t solidarity. It’s hollow allyship that’s dressed up as neo-multiculturalism for the corporate DEI era, where solidarity means checking boxes, counting how many different types of people of colour are on stage, then patting yourself on the back at the end of the day.

If people truly want to decentre their culture to platform others, do it without spectacle. Turn off the mic. Redirect funds. Reallocate resources. Let others lead and do the work on their terms. Do it quietly, without performance or expectation of applause.

If this makes you uncomfortable, then it might be worth asking: who is your allyship ultimately serving?

Solidarity through culture begins by reaching inward into your own roots, language, and people. This doesn’t mean you can’t support other cultural communities. You can, and you should. But if you want to help stop someone else’s culture from being erased, stop erasing your own.

Because cultural allyship without self-rootedness is not just empty. It risks becoming extractive, self-serving, and performative. Solidarity doesn’t ask you to disappear, it asks you to show up whole.