In June of 2019 I found out I was pregnant. Thrilled, as I always wanted to be a parent. It was a beautiful nine months of wonder, excitement and planning. Wondering all the ways I could explore the arts and creativity with my little one. Excited to learn from my child and expose them to various creative experiences, planning how I might incorporate the arts into our daily practice as mother and child. So many thoughts, so many preconceived notions of how the arts would continue to be a river, creating buoyancy and movement into this new chapter of my life. Never a fear or doubt of how to keep the arts present in my upcoming new life — they had always been, as an artist is who I am.
Read moreBRIDGING: The (Anti)Imperial (De)Assimilation of Time
In working to reconnect with my culture in recent years, one of the greatest difficulties I’ve come up against is time. Re-syncing myself with ancestral time seems foreign, laborious, and distant–incompatible with the functions of the capitalist, colonial, white Christian supremacist clock.
Read moreBRIDGING: The Journey of Asking Questions
Some of the biggest struggles I face in studying music education in college revolve around how the spaces I am creating are leaving out certain groups and individuals. I kept thinking about what I was doing to help make it more inclusive, which led me to be really interested in questioning the process of ‘typical’ music-making.
Read moreBRIDGING: Creative Collective Connection
“I’ll get to it later,” a common phrase we are all too familiar with, but one I was consistently defaulting upon since November 2021 with release of Slover Linett’s report, A Place to be Heard, a Space to Feel Held, in collaboration with La Placa Cohen and Yancey Consulting. Shortly after, the buildup continued when they released a second report in January 2022, Rethinking Relevance, Rebuilding Engagement.
Read moreBRIDGING: How Do We Begin With Collective Care?
This is not an essay about bridging in relation to my work; but rather an approach to connection in relation to my identity.
This writing is part of my processing of the past several years and a reflection of my own identity, grounded by an intersubjective lens into other people’s perceptions of me. I do not tell many people this story, because I have come to expect that my words will be misunderstood and that I will only be blamed for mistakes I made. Writing it on my terms has required my active participation in the cycle of learning, unlearning, and relearning where I have been and, reframing what I mistook for mistakes in the past as choices I made with the tools I had available to me. This is my way of sharing what bridging is from my perspective as a Chinese-Jewish Queer Disabled woman living, and not truly fitting in, in the Western world.
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