[Weekly Updates] April 12th, 2020

Been playing Minecraft all day everyday. Cabin fever is getting real. Anyway, here's our update of the week.

ABOUT THE CHANNEL

• Script for our next episode is finished and will be uploaded tomorrow. As decided by your vote, we'll be talking about Ip Man 4, and how it writes racism.
• The original script was approaching 17 minutes long. To keep the video concise, I deleted a big part of it, where I shared my personal experience with racism, and how it stack up to the writing in Ip Man 4.
• I think I'll release that part in the next update if anyone is interested.
• Also, our channel is nearing the 100k subscribers mark. For a channel under 2 years old, that's is incredible. Heck, it's incredible for any channel. This is exciting. Thank you all for being here!

ABOUT LIFE

• Yeah, there's no media update this week. I mean I watched My Spy, and 1995's Jumanji this week, but I don't have much to share about them.
• Instead, I discovered this film that I have yet to watch: Go Back to China (2019)
• According to the synopsis, it's a film about a spoiled second generation immigrant girl who blew her trust fund. Her family send her to back to China, basically for her to learn a lesson.
• For many, the title is plain and simple: It's a command from the protagonist's parent, but also an exciting promise of a foreign adventure.
• But for immigrants like me, and I believe many other second/third generation immigrants... The title has a much more negative connotation.
• I have heard that phrase directed at me more times than I can count, in both English and French, from total strangers, mostly when I was still in high school.
• As I enter university, the phrase gradually disappeared. I used to think it was because we live in a society where overt racism is over. It sounds stupid now, but at the time when Obama was first elected, it really did feel like racists had lost, and the world is ready for progress.
• With hindsight, now I know it's most likely because I grew up to have a face of a serial killer.

• Director Emily Ting wrote and directed the film. She is an immigrant herself, born in Taiwan, grew up in Los Angeles. The film is supposedly semi-autobiographical. Which caught me by surprised. Because I did not expect someone to see China as a place to "go back to".
• It's like Anna May Wong, an Asian American actress who where constantly told to go back to China.
• She did, for a trip, and Chinese people instantly realizes she's American.
• Writing the script about Ip Man 4 made me think about this topic a lot, as you can see.

• That is, until I came across a comment in Reddit, talking about our channel.
• The poster is a second generation immigrant. Not sure which country they are born in.
• They explained that, before our channel came to the scene, they have no entry to catch up with Chinese culture. At least not in an easily accessible way.
• It's that simple. I did not realize, how much people actually still find themselves tied to their roots. And I mean that in the best way possible.
• I remember the day I obtained my Canadian Citizenship, the judge told us not to abandoned our culture, but to spread it in our new homeland.
• My view on things may be soured by racists spouting insults. To this day, I have this inherent bias to interpret things as "I'm being excluded". And believe me, that is a big problem. People still comment under our "Asians in Hollywood" episode, asking why John Cho can't go back to Korea for a career. Many simply don't see Asian-Americans as Americans.

• But if Emily Ting's film is any indication...
• Maybe things are better than I thought.

Well, that got heavy. I hope you don't mind me being a bit more emotional than usual. And if you don't agree with my view and think I'm a snowflake, don't worry. I don't fully agree with myself either. That's why there's a comment section down below.

Anyway, I'm going to do a little bit more edit on the script, and I'll see you this Thursday with a new episode.