By: Vanessa Sison I was a competitive cheerleader for 13 years. Before I go into anything else, a competitive cheerleader is a person (male or female) who joins a team to compete against other cheerleading teams. They perform in cheerleading competitions and divide teams into categories by age group, sex and level. A cheerleader can start from as early as 3 years old and upwards, have all girl teams or co-ed teams (mixed male and female participants) and have a set of rules to govern safely and how difficult a routine can be. They (usually) perform on a sprung floor and to win first place, get scored by sections based…
-
-
Why I Unfollowed My Favorite Instagram Influencers
By: Toslima Khatun **In this article I focus on the South Asian community because it is the one that I belong to, and the one that has affected my decisions. I fully recognise that the issues I write about are more universal but at this moment I do not feel informed enough to speak on behalf or even about anything beyond the immediate sphere I inhabit. Having said due to the content of this particular piece I am going to proceed to unblock everyone given that I feel that it is only fair.** I wrote an article a little while ago about how the #metoo article was instrumental in making…
-
The Dark Side of the Climate
By: Suranthi Fernando Recently the citizens and residents of Singapore, as well as the Strait of Malacca in Malaysia, have been waking up to hazy skies. At first, some may have thought that their eyes were still affected by sleep, or that their glasses had gone foggy, but nope, the skies are no longer as crisp and blue as they were at the start of the year. The lower air quality doesn’t only affect visibility, but also poses the problem of triggering health issues such as asthma, and can even make breathing uncomfortable on days where the smog is particularly heavy. You may be asking why there’s a haze that’s…
-
The Face of Asia
The Face of Asia By: Anishi Patel “Please indicate your ethnicity.” For Asians, the list of possible options generally looks as follows: Asian Asian Indian Pacific Islander Limiting options, for the world’s most ethnically and culturally diverse continent. As someone whose family hails from India, the box I check is obvious, but this list always makes me wonder: what exactly is the face and identity one associates with the “Asian” box? I’m Asian. People from the Philippines, Nepal, and Pakistan, just to name a few, are also Asian. But the face I, much of western society, and most ethnicity-based forms such as the one above generally associate with “Asian”…
-
Yellow
By: Enya Chi During the summer of 2019, I went to a 3-weeks summer camp at Stanford University. It is there that I realized how fortunate I was to be living in America and getting an elite American education. The story unfolds like this: During camp, I met many people from Chinese public high schools where I was exposed to the backwardness and restrictions of the Chinese educational system. One of my friends is from Chengdu, Sichuan, China, a relatively poor province in mainland China. As she described the Chinese public schools in which students are brainwashed every day by Chinese communist/Marxist ideals, and how their curriculum forces a very…
-
Self Portrait
By: Erika Wang Kept in a cardboard box in the attic, filled to the brim with colorful drawings and old report cards, is all of the work from the beginning of my school career. It’s contents are frequently emptied to indulge in nostalgia or revisit old memories. However, there is one piece that is never touched, dust still collecting on the ripped edges of the paper, on the outline of its face. A face I still find difficult to look at. It happened in the early years of my childhood when my teacher—a young woman in her 20’s— assigned all of us young and curious students a project we were…
-
The Good Wife
By: Ammaarah Zayna The Good Wife The good Asian wife is born to be subservient. A mother by nature, she lives her life vicariously through her children, who are academically gifted and charismatic of course. She is pretty – either naturally or by force. Calm and collected; she does not talk back because she knows her place. She maintains the family name at all costs because there is nothing worse in life than gossip. There is always food on the table. The house is always clean. She has one husband whom she loves wholeheartedly. She is happy even when she is unhappy. The word divorce is not known to…
-
An In-Depth Look at the Overall Mental Health of Asian-Americans
By: Srilekha Cherukuvada When I first began researching for this article, I noticed a couple things about the statistics. In charts with age 18 or older Asian Americans, most Asian Americans felt significantly better than non-Hispanic White Americans. There was a smaller trend in people who reported that they had felt worthless or useless. There was a smaller number of people that reported feeling depressed or received prescription medicines for mental illnesses. “Reported” does not mean that they were all truthful. That’s the sad truth about mental health research. You never know for sure if the person was being honest. Were they dramatizing their temporary sadness or were they…
-
A Family Man
By: Srilekha Cherukuvada When he was 16, my grandfather pedaled his beat-up Hero bicycle six miles every day to deliver lunch to his father and his brother, who worked the rice fields outside a small village in Southeastern India. While his father and brother ate curried rice and lamb and such, my grandfather dreamed of greater things than working the rice fields. He dreamed of being a doctor, of helping and healing. The dream never came true. There were too many obstacles, too many landmines, too few opportunities for him in a country that had, for at least 4,000 years, worked overtime to oppress him and others like him.…
-
On Bay Area Academic Culture
By: Anishi Patel For those who are unfamiliar, California’s Silicon Valley is a premier technological hub, and boasts an essential and thriving immigrant community, of which I am a part. We bring Boba tea (so much that the official Cupertino Snapchat geofilter includes a boba cup cartoon), love our Teslas (the Tesla factory tour is virtually a rite of passage), and, as a consequence of our upbringings, raise academic standards throughout the Bay Area. I am the daughter of two Indian-American immigrants who travelled to the U.S. for a better college education and became engineers and business owners. It’s not a unique story for a Bay Area family: 23%…