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Asian American Creative Arts In Action

riksha

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Grandma’s House

As we continue to shelter-in-place, I would spend days and hours reflecting and mourning for a world that may never come back. I would create sketches of both my homeland and Chicago to release stress as I try to find a new “normal.” I think of being confined to our home, wondering how families in other nations are coping, losing business as supplies and customers dwindle, and a sense of loneliness that comes with isolation. Through it all, I still hope and pray that at the end of this, we would become better, to not take for granted all that we had, and to heal.
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Words to Live By

by Kim Fountain

My mother’s favorite question is, “They pay you to talk?” In my sweet 80-year old mother’s tone there are also two comments. One being, “So stupid that this is a job” and the other, “Wow, my child is smart”, but not smart in the sense of what it is I actually say, but in that by talking, I make money.

My mom left school at age twelve to work 15 hour days on her feet. She has never been to a meeting in her life and has never touched a computer beyond dusting it so, for her, my desk job and its meeting after meeting schedule is ridiculous because I can’t point to a final product. I do add in, that now and again, I need to say something of use or I don’t get asked back. By then though, she is off on another subject.

I know that there is not as much difference between us as she might think. It is after all, because of her that I figured out that words, used to trouble and even sometimes rupture power, would eventually carry me toward a sense of purpose.

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Growing Up Shiseido: Chain Stores, Beauty Magazines, and Whitening Cream

by Jane Hseu

My grandfather founded the Taiwanese branch of Shiseido, the high-end Japanese cosmetics company. The family story, told to me by his daughter, my mother, is that during WWII, while Taiwan was under Japanese colonization, my grandfather went to Japan to work, leaving his young wife to take care of their young daughter and his aged parents in the hardships of the Taiwanese countryside. For my grandmother, my mother said, life was bitter. After working at Shiseido in Japan, my grandfather founded Shiseido in Taiwan, Shiseido’s first overseas venture, and became a rich man. There were tens of millions of Taiwanese women to whom he could sell make-up and skin products.

photo credit: Chao-Yan on Upsplash
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Untying Knots

by Chiemi Souen

Jiji’s garage, there,
under the house. The smell
of dirt, mold, moth
balls, and cat shit.

Fingers clinging to the chocolate-brown lattice
under the mint-green house.
Eyes see through the filtered sunlight.

See:
Cardboard boxes filled with old
photos and papers, empty
sake gallon
bottles, bamboo
fishing poles, throw
nets, old garden gloves,
rusty sickles, rubber boots,
tabis, old rice
bags, shoyu cans, empty milk
bottles, a wooden
washboard, and lots of glass
jars filled with nails
and screws.

photo credit: Manuel Sardo Unsplash
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A Girl from Zanzibar, a Guy from Goa, and that Chap (from) Mercury

by R. Benedito Ferrão

I had finally arrived, but the start of this journey of a lifetime had already begun badly. Journeying from the metropole – London – to the once colonial periphery – Nairobi – I had made it, but my suitcase hadn’t. In it were the hand-written notes from the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis and a copy of the book that that chapter was based on: Roger King’s A Girl from Zanzibar, published in 2002 and set in the 1980s. As I explained to the travel insurance company, no, I hadn’t typed up any of those notes and, no, I couldn’t reconstruct a year’s worth of work from memory. Perhaps it was the perfect postcolonial metaphor – the loss of a suitcase full of words between the empire writing back and a subaltern trying to speak.

photo credit: Alejandro Luengo Upsplash

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