I am a first generation Taiwanese American. I love song writing, writing poetry, learning languages, and engaging in social activism in the community. Currently I lead a Racial Reconciliation class in a White Evangelical Christian church in Santa Cruz, CA. Though luckily my class is made up of diverse people in terms of gender, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, which means that these conversations in my class help me to see how multifaceted racial conversations can be. My writing seeks to decolonize the aspects of Taiwanese ethnicity, unveil indigenous austronesian heritage behind Taiwanese culture, and to build a chain of solidarity with people of color.
…I feel like (race) it’s the intersection to a lot of things in American culture. It’d be a shame to change whatever color skin you’ve been born with, so how do you live with it? The tensions with race and ethnicity is that people can feel like they are either, the oppressed, the oppressor, seen or unseen in so many different ways. My work here will be in dialogue with these tensions of race amongst people of color, Asian Americans, and being Taiwanese as well…
-Esther
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