Performing artists share personal reflections on racism on StopAsianHate website
Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo coordinates Canada-wide project to mark Asian Heritage Month
A screen shot of just some of the artists taking part in the StopAsianHate project this year.
IN A SERIES of new first-person responses to this year’s StopAsianHate campaign, playwright Ins Choi meditates on the power of storytelling and humour—and the difficulty of speaking up when you witness racism. Vancouver actor Raugi Yu details what it feels like to audition for a role as the only Asian actor amid a “sea of middle aged white actors”. And actor Agnes Tong recalls playing the lead of Sleeping Beauty at the Globe Theatre, and the joy she felt when a five-year-old Asian girl expressed her joy at realizing the princess would look like her.
Those are just a few of the Canada-wide personal stories from people in the performing arts marking Asian Heritage Month. They’re part of a project that Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo is coordinating via the website StopAsianHate.ca starting today. The goal is to fight anti-Asian racism by sharing “our voices, our faces, and our perspectives”, says Boca artistic director Sherry J Yoon.
Boca del Lupo’s Sherry J Yoon. Photo by Farah-Nosh
“It’s been quite moving—I felt how generous people were with their stories and how profoundly astute people are,” Yoon tells Stir. “It is a difficult thing to talk about and not one we’re encouraged to do publicly. This is why we haven’t really come together as a community until now. You’ll hear the ‘model minority’, where you’ve got to be quiet and do well, and quite frankly, you’re encouraged to work in isolation because you don’t want to cause any ripples.”
“The community gathering comments and sharing stories is a way to be positive during a challenging time,” Yoon adds. “We’ve made the initiative about a community-building initiative. But we need to continue to find creative ways to stop Asian hate.”
The website includes videos, photos, and written messages from Vancouver actor-playwright Hiro Kanagawa, Theatre Calgary artistic director Stafford Arima, Nightswimming producer Gloria Mok, and Bard on the Beach executive director Claire Sakaki.
It’s an expansion of a project that began during flareups of anti-Asian hate during the pandemic. In March, BC’s Human Rights Commissioner released a report of the rise of hate in BC during COVID lockdowns, and found police-reported hate crimes targeting Asian citizens rose 482 percent between 2019 and 2020. (Among the recommendations are more training on hate crimes for police and more teaching and learning about racism in schools.)
Yoon helped lead the first StopAsianHate initiative in May 2021, spurred by news of the rise in hate crimes here and shaken by coverage of the shooting that spring of eight people in Atlanta, most of them Asian women. The poster campaign featured the numerous faces of performing arts movers and shakers of Asian descent from across Canada. That show of force has evolved this year to feature the personal stories and reflections, most in black-and-white video accounts.
“The first year was really about galvanizing the community nationally and finding each other as a community,” Yoon, a theatre creator, curator and director, says. “The more I try to understand and meet my community of Asian Canadians, the one thing I realize is we’re all really different. We’re housed together in this way because of the country we live in, and I thought an accumulation of hearing people’s stories would be very powerful….I felt that seeing these different stories in the way that people wanted to tell them would have a cumulative effect. In that coming together you start seeing the accumulation of common threads, but we’ve definitely had different experiences—and I just really wanted to make that story element stand out.”
Yoon invites people who identify as an Asian Canadian artist to join the campaign by completing the form here to share your face and a message. "It's launching during Asian Heritage month but it's not really ending," Yoon says. "It's an ongoing ability for people to submit—to fill this container."
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