Curate, connect, and discover
I am scared .
I am a young queer girl.
I don’t have much of a community, only two people who are also LGBT+ and three or four more who are even slightly liberal. Only the former know I actually am panromantic.
I long to be in the sun, to know in the future I could have a girlfriend, or even just be open, but that longing makes me cautious.
I feel I must temper my argumentative side, make myself likable, and yet still try to hold all those around me accountable and challenge their preconceived notions. I want, when they think back on me, them not to feel revilement or fear I may have been deceiving them. I try to compliment all the other girls in my grade but I fear if I truly say how aesthetically beautiful I feel they all are, they will look back and see me as perverse or fear I had a crush on them and not understand I see them as beautiful in the same way I see the mountains and the trees. Rather than understanding I had hoped for them to see themselves as an innately beautiful part of the beautiful universe or even just to slightly improve their abysmal self esteem, they might look back and see “corruption” in my words.
I don’t know why I even fear it.
I fear how I see those around me not understand the necessity of queer rights and one of my own best friends wrinkling her nose in disgust every time a queer character even appears.
I feel helpless to explain how the eradication of trans rights in not only a sign of the tragic repeating of history to come but isolated from that simply a slap in the face, more harmful to my community and to feminism than I can properly articulate.
I feel like I’m drowning when I check the comments on a video of an explaination of the difference between WGM and GM in chess. Dread haunts like the reaper as I see the large number of replies, each with people claiming the very existence of the WGM title is either unnecessary or proves how women are inherently inferior at chess, lacking any nuance on history.
I dispare as the community online I am forced to view from afar, sipping and skimming, attempts to repeat the same patterns that threaten to or try to rip our spaces in half.
I am wrecked with terror at the prospect of not being able to escape for college to another country. Gnashing at my heels as I run from the disintegration of my country is the fear that every place I look to is headed in the same direction, that no progress will ever truly be made as some proudly stuff cotton into their ears and put megaphones to their uninformed words.
I am young but I do not feel young. I fear I will never feel old and I fear what will become of me and my friends if I do reach past 55.
I am afraid
But even as the storms now wash away the footprints I follow, laborious, repeated efforts will carve a path into the dirt.
The commodification of Asian culture
I'm definitely not the only one who has noticed the way that asian culture has been appropriated, rebranded, changed and sold in a watered down more "digestable" way. Atleast here in America, so many pieces of cultures have been turned into a trend that is completely removed from its original history. It's not even just asian culture it's the culture of every marginalized group (the queer, trans, indigenous, hispanic and black communities) that has been impacted by this phenomenon.
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A few years ago there was a big boom in ube products. Ube is a purple yam from the philipines that is in many Filipino dishes. Ube has so much cultural significance in Filipino culture as it has been used for hundreds of years but suddenly you would see ube flavors in stores like trader joes and in dozens of dessert shops who didn't bother to make traditional filipino deserts but would add the ube to oreos, cupcakes, brownies and other American desserts.
Now there is nothing wrong with using ube in non-Filipino desserts but the issue is the profiting off of the culture without giving credit to or appreciating where it's from.
It is sanitizing the culture in a way that is digestible for, let's face it, white people. God forbid they have to eat ensaymada so let's just sell then ube doughnuts instead.
The amount of times I've seen people assume that ube is Japanese drives me mad because not only does it show how much ube has been removed from its origins, it shows how the ignorance of Americans lead them to see Asia as simply just China, Japan and South Korea.
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Around 2020/2021 boba tea went viral on tiktok. Before you knew it there were boba shops everywhere. It was and still is super popular and is considered a trendy "gen-z" drink. It has been completely removed from its history and boba enjoyers in the west couldn't even tell you what the boba pearls are or where the drink is from. Just like ube, I've seen most people assume that boba tea is from Japan.
Boba tea originated in Taiwan during the 1980s and the chewy pearls that make it unique are tapioca pearls made of cassava root as a cheap alternative to sago pearls.
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I could go on and on and in depth into countless other examples like matcha,Buddhist iconography,bindi, yoga and so much more. People just pick and choose what they like about asian cultures, sanitize and repackage it, then profit off of it. All while continuing to oppress and silence the minorities they steal from.
To be honest I don't see this improving. For this to stop it would take people actually caring about cultures and practices outside of their worldview enough to do the research. It would take people have curious enough minds to question what is being sold to them and why. Is it someone trying to share their culture with others or is it a corporation trying to profit off of a culture they couldn't give less of a shit about?