Cultural Traditions
Check out some cultural traditions important to some members of the Pacific Ties staff, and how we manage to keep in touch with our roots at UCLA.
The Impact of “Turning Red”
Disney’s “Turning Red” is one of the first mainstream movies that follows characters of Asian descent and goes through the cultural beliefs of the main character, a Chinese Canadian girl who must deal with her family’s connection with giant red pandas. “Turning Red” has broken barriers in talking about topics such as puberty and intergenerational…
Library Voices: The Significance of Language
Three years ago in my high school classroom, I watched as a college student mocked an entire language in the halls of my future university. My 11th-grade teacher projected the video for the whole class to see, the audio loud enough that the words rang through our minds. We talked about the way she condensed…
COVID-19: 2 Years Later
One of the first articles I read from Pacific Ties Newsmagazine was the Roundtable Talk: Coronavirus, published in April 2020. I read it later that year when I was admitted to UCLA, exploring the ways UCLA’s publications addressed the pandemic and comparing others’ experiences to my own. Looking over the words of the Pacific Ties…
Education
I slept on every ride to Chinese school, and every ride back. It was part of a weekly routine, a well-remembered Saturday morning sequence. Tumbling into the car and watching the rolling hills pass the window, the burnt-black trees on the roadside after the wildfires. Drifting in and out, feeling the freeway pass beneath the…
Upriver
There is something strangely sad about watching cars drive away, especially ones you know well. It is that feeling of an almost-loss, like you are teetering at the edge of the realization that the car is too far away to call back. Soon, it will turn the corner and you will no longer be able…