Hello!
My name is Katie Chan and I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. There, I was nestled with close family and friends in a primarily ethnic Chinese suburban neighborhood where I was sheltered from a lot of the issues our community faced. It was only as I grew older, I began to realize how my second generation Chinese- born Canadian (CBC)- or Asian American- identity has shaped me.
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I am now a sophomore studying Public Policy at the University of Southern California with a passion for advocacy and representation. College has been a time of immense growth and it is where I have become more aware of my race and identity and how it permeates all aspects of life in and outside of USC. It was also at USC where I started to develop a passion for Asian Pacific American topics and grew a keen interest in learning more about the various social and political issues that affect this community.
With this project I hope to help others navigate what it means to be Asian American and to help them learn more about what influences their identity. By no means am I an expert on this topic, most of it comes from personal experience, but I just hope discussing these experiences will resonate with some of those reading.
About the project
What started as just being a final project for a mandatory class at USC, has grown into something I truly cherish and hope to expand upon. As someone who's interest in Asian American issues started in high school and really blossomed in college, it only seemed natural that I explore it further in this way.
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This project has a lot of personal and creative motivation behind it. The personal aspect being my experiences, but also my relationship with my grandmother who only speaks Mandarin and I will delve deeper in this in the interview portion. The process of creating this website served as an introspective journey, learning experience, and also a therapeutic function as I explore this state of being "in between" and what it means.
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I believe that art has the ability to capture feelings and emotions that words aren't able to convey, and this is where the creative aspect steps in. In Grade 11, I started to create art that spoke about my experience losing my mother tongue and feelings of being torn between two worlds and so I really wanted to incorporate art into this project as much as possible. Everything that this underlined in this website is a link to either an article, video, study, personal essay, etc. so it is very interactive in that sense. All the art curated is by Asian American artists and I thought this was important as all the pieces speak to a different part of the Asian American experience from their perspectives, and I tried to include a variety of mediums.
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I hope for the reader to walk linearly through the website, exploring each tab and clicking all the links in order to get the full experience, but most of all I hope the reader is able to take something away from this website- big or small. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I am aware that the term Asian American includes those South Asian and is often times put together with those from the Pacific as well, but for the purposes of this project Asian American will be referring to those with descent from East Asia. This is because I am coming from a place of personal experience and am, therefore, unable to capture the vast and rich diversity of ethnicities that make up Asia. However, I hope in the future I will be able to expand this project to include many other second generation experiences from different ethnicities.
