funding for this program is brought to you by the arts and cultural heritage fund and the citizens of minnesota the twin ports of peta collective came together in the wake of the atlanta mass shootings last march turned to some some tragic news the deadly shootings in atlanta killing at least eight people we felt that we had to do something about it and you know we pulled a visual together in 24 hours and out of that we decided to remain together keep building on that base of organization and so we've created the twin force appeal collective an advocacy group for the asian american community here in the twin ports area [Music] my name is julia chang and i'm the treasurer on the organizing team of the twin ports of peta collective apita stands for asian pacific islander desi american desi stands for people of the south asian diaspora you know the indian continent a suspect is in custody this morning and police across the country are on alert this morning as well fearing the attacks may have targeted the asian community steve osunsami is in atlanta with more as the fbi now gets involved good morning steve that's right michael the fbi is working with local law enforcement here investigating these shootings and while it's not clear what led to these killings it is impossible to ignore that these killings happened at asian businesses like this one directly behind me in atlanta and that most of the victims were asian women we felt we had to respond to the rise in anti-asian hostility that was fueled by the pandemic words matter did you feel gut punch i just said those words you feel a gut punch that we feel when we hear the c word the j word the g word how what you feel when you hear the n word we all felt that we'd been silent too long it was happening too often [Music] we knew that something like that happening in san francisco doesn't isolate us from some sort of micro or macro aggression and what we discovered when we got together and talked about it more is that we all had our own experiences some very overt some much more gentle in how you know they would kind of make fun of you and it's happening to our children too my name is paku li and i'm a hmong american woman living here in duluth i've been here for over 15 years my involvement with the twin ports a peta collective arised out of a need for connecting with other women who looked like me who had similar experiences like me and even though i've been here for a long time it was only in the last two years that i finally connected with a very small group of women who were just meeting socially and when i discovered them i thought wow it's it's the first time i realized that i could start building a community people of diverse asian backgrounds coming together who happen to live in the north land we've all been so isolated living our own lives that i didn't even know that i could have this sort of connection uh and comfort my name is sharon young i've lived in duluth for over 20 years born and raised in minnesota of two chinese immigrants well for me naturally food was always a big part of my life my parents owned a restaurant growing up and so some of our happiest memories as a kid were really around the table and um in my family i cannot assume for all chinese people in my family food was really the language of love and so if you could provide someone with a full belly they knew you spent time and you knew they always left happy and so not everyone is for potlucks for sure but this group definitely is and we we surely enjoy a lot of time together and breaking that pride together the group primarily started more of a as a socializing purpose and then it evolved it involved into something bigger the organization seems like it came out of nowhere but really has been building on a very strong foundation as we continue to meet as our group continued to grow a couple of us have already been working in the field of you know just activism and supporting different initiatives and we thought wow you know wouldn't it be great if we could add some social justice aspect to our work and that's where the discussion started about creating more of an advocacy arm to tpack the members of tpack we multiply each other's strengths you know we have to take some baby steps because we're so new but a lot of it is education a lot of it is going to be awareness a lot of it is going to be us showing up providing insight or presenting to a church group holding a candle at a vigil and most importantly building partnerships last summer christina was the executive director of the duluth art institute asked the tpack group if we would be interested in doing an exhibit here at the depot about the asian american community and it was a little fast and a little bit you know maybe too soon and we didn't have much time to organize as she was talking about last summer in the great hall and then the dai said that they had a cancellation and would we be interested in installing an exhibit here at the john steffel gallery in the balcony and to me that was the perfect space and the perfect timing january through march they said they they had a first quarter 2022 cancellation and could we fill that time and i said that would be great kind of changed my career about 12 years ago and people would ask me how did you go from photography to taxes and i would say i'm still an artist i just changed my medium and so when i applied for this grant it was you know as established regional artist but the medium was community arts organization um i had a lot of experience doing this and i i knew that it would be important for us to create this art exhibit and and it's been it's just been wonderful when i first thought about this show i thought it would be about a sense of displacement and you do see the pain of separation in all of our parents who left their homes and their families of origin the adoptees who were uprooted from their korean culture but as we installed the separate works you know works that we created individually i felt that a greater truth and a deeper joy emerged that we have made a place for ourselves here in this community it came through the courage of our immigrant parents it came from the love of the families that you know parents have for their children children and the parents and it came through the strong friendships that we've developed with each other my name is diane winfang and then this is the tpex group like me like you peace the signature piece i suppose this is part two and part one is over there at the entrance with the with the name so i'm simply just honored to be able to speak to these works today and to have been able to see these concepts these ideas that we've all been talking about materialize because of this community so we have our tpack logo on one side as well as a logo that we designed for this exhibit which was a yin yang symbol to symbolize like me like you and with the different pieces kind of with their spacing it points the sense that we might seem disconnected but together we are like each other so even with those gaps this makes a meaningful hole so then the next part part two so this is uh origami or paper folding because it's it was only a japanese origami per se also chinese paper folding um that all together looks like our logo which is a grain of rice [Music] a lot of the folds though the paper folds are from people's childhoods i think they folded growing up like the open canoes are ones that julie used to make when she was younger and then the hearts and the fans things like that are ones that i used to make growing up and this idea of boats kind of it matches the concept here in the sense of at least a lot of the southeast asian immigrants the concept of boat people and just kind of speaks to all the histories and stories like my dad came here on a boat after the vietnam war but also the idea of floating being part of a larger sea larger ocean these are my parents my mother is watching my father being cared for by nurses at the hillcrest hospital after he had a stroke and he never really recovered from that um this is the first time that i've shown these images in public when i did these photos i was kind of at the height of my maturity as a photojournalist i had to emotionally disengage a little bit to do these photos but as painful as as it is to look at them 20 years later almost um i'm glad that i recorded it this is a father and daughter that i photographed in fitchburg massachusetts um they are rehearsing laotian traditional dance i am really grateful for the friendship that i have developed with my tpack sisters and it's one of the reasons that i know that we've made homes for ourselves here and that we continue to contribute to the fabric that is america we are dealing with trauma of racism our tools for resisting the heightened anti-asian hostility of the pandemic era are speaking our truth out loud and standing with our bipoc sisters and brothers our collaboration which is lifting each other up along this 10-month journey of putting the show together is what brings cohesion to the individual works of this exhibit this show is more than we ever imagined it could be and we are also grateful and honored to make this gift for our community you know as we were talking about the intent of it what could what components could be part of the exhibit it really came down to showing the community that we have similarities we are interconnected uh in many ways that we're not aware of i am like me but in many ways i'm also like you like me like you is sharing traditions sharing the beauty of culture it's also sharing you know sadness which is something we all experience in different points of our life and and holding what's you know the most treasured traditions that's really something that i think everyone can relate to and that's something that we're trying to show is that we are multi-ethnic as well so you know we come from all all around the globe but we're here in the twin ports and we're choosing to be here we're choosing to to work here to live here to raise our children here to invest here my piece is a diptych which is a collaboration that i did with my dear friend julia chang and so grateful for her artistry and direction so on the left hand side is one of the first pictures that my mother my adoptive mother received when i was in the orphanage and then on the other side is a current picture of me with a longer bang just to let you know it's hard to believe that my story is actually being told in public because it's been such a private journey for myself my journey starts as an involuntary immigrant my beginning in the history is actually unknown for the first three years of my life it's hard to think about not knowing or remembering what happened during that time and so as if my life started when i was adopted not knowing the real truth as well about that piece of my life is is something that i've had to accept over time being surrounded with the other artists and the tpac members and allies has contributed to finally making my story my own it's really contributed to my own healing it's also a story that i want to share and this is also a motivation why i decided to do that is to i wanted to make sure that other korean and transracial adoptees would know that they are not alone we'd share stories after dinner right in these social potlucks and sometimes you wish that other people could just be a fly on the wall and listen and so i think i just really wanted the rest of the world to listen to stories that people are willing to share and understand that we're probably more alike than different i wanted all the kids to take my wife's baby that's my hope is really when people listen to the podcast they might find elements that are completely different from their upbringing but when you come to the end of it you realize i have more in common with that person than not and that that really was my intent so um this is just a compilation of people in the community all different types of people i completely ignored it because that wasn't my name and openness and welcoming of all cultures julie really tells your story and without giving it away in just a few minutes just by her voice you really can feel all the emotions that she went through it as a child and as she comes of age and then into an adult all i know is the adult version but all the things that happened to her made her what she is i was adopted at the age of three and so i landed in the united states in 1971. back then there was nobody that looked like me i don't even know if i had an identity back then people didn't like people that look like me i always talk about my childhood as brutal because it was um you know just being different standing out being called names and so my memories of my childhood are actually i don't have many at all you know i think that's common with people who've experienced trauma so when we talk about violence and hate happened to my parents when they first came here and their experiences of racism happened to me as well into adulthood um and now it's happening to my children so you talk about inter generational trauma that's the example of how trauma carries over because we haven't changed how we think about other people we think about other people as others as foreigners or as people who don't belong and so that racism perpetuates because somewhere along the way we have to stop we have to do better we have to teach our children better we have to you know use our humanity our intelligence to really learn from each other so that we can stop this harm and stop the trauma because we we see the violence we see the death that comes out of this and that's not the kind of world i want to live in it's not the kind of world i want my children to live in we don't want to be invisible we contribute a lot to this community through our employment our civic participation our volunteer work and our children go to school here we really want to contribute to this community i was adopted when i was a baby and i've lived in duluth ever since i started my jewelry business about a year ago and i named it soul and stone so for my birthplace and stone the name of my son and also because i use stones in my jewelry the three pieces that i have in the show are copper electroformed which is a process of fusing copper onto another medium it really got me thinking about my identity and the feelings that i have around being asian and being adopted and it's taken a lot of courage to open up and be vulnerable um but thankfully now i have this um this web of other people and artists that have similar experiences and stories um and i'm just so grateful to be in this show [Music] dahi kim and matthew kashmir they weren't able to be with us but they also have a film called the big happiness that's also part of the exhibit he on the left is talking with another crying adoptee when they when she was in korea and the picture on the right is dinner table conversation with her adoptive parents so many of her experiences were familiar to mine when i watched the film last summer and it highlights dahi's personal exploration of adoption identity and color blindness growing up in a trans-racial family my name is aya kawaguchi i was born in japan and moved to duluth in 2005 because of my husband's job so i have been producing mainly paintings and drawings and my works are based on the idea of updating the landscape or scenery so in japanese dictionary the simple definition of the word landscape also includes both physical scene as well as psychological integration with harmonious nature so in this exhibition you can see four watercolor paintings and two glass paintings most images are from the nature in blues when i hiked party nature center or some other places and at these places i take pictures kind of randomly and then try to transform an original photograph into a more personal and meaningful state but i want to explain why this was really important to me my mother who immigrated from china and hong kong she grew up in hong kong she as an older adult traveled to china by herself she went back as an adult as a tourist and she brought back this this cross stitch pattern with the beads she said well i want you to just do something with it and she gave it to me it took me almost three years to finish this um one it's it's it's almost more challenging to do because it's one color and it's very monotonous but i realized every time every bead every bead that i sewed on i thought of her i thought about her experience i thought about her when she was a child she was working sweatshops she did this to get out of poverty she that's how she became a seamstress she was so poor as a child laborer and here she travels back and brings me back this simple embroidery and so i had to finish it i had to complete it i had it custom framed and i gave it back to her and this is traditionally hanging on her mantel and i feel like i could at least do this for my mother and so she has really given me the gift of great fortune which is what really this means so i wanted to share this with everybody [Music] that outfit was made by my mother when i was a teenager and the goal was that you know she wanted to make something for me from her hands instead of being store-bought it was meant to be a gift for when i moved away from the house and got married and something that i treasure and will always have with me i think that that trauma of losing your country giving everything up to hopefully find a better life you know that that stays with you because you feel like you're losing a part of your soul part of your spirit um behind and i see that a lot especially in the elders who grew up there it's the only home they ever knew it's the only language they spoke and then to be thrust into a completely different environment with a completely new language more technology than they're ever used to i think that trauma always stays with you some people are able to be resilient and find a way to adapt to american culture others are not and you can see it you can see it in them because it's very hard for them to adjust to the traffic the noise the the people the language um they don't know how they fit in and i think that's a that's a really hard way to live if you don't know where you really fit in and you've got people who are transitioning and transforming around you but yet you are kind of stuck in the same place it's as an elder it's very hard really learning about the history understanding what really happened it helps me heal a little bit more but if you if you don't really understand then how can you heal you know for me it really is about finding that truth for me most of them my memories are here in the united states being told you're going to go to church and then you're going to go to preschool and then you're going to go to sunday school having no clue what it was that i was doing or learning no clue what i was eating but i i was told i had to do it so i did it and my parents were told you know you should go to church and so they went to church i think many among people felt more free in their country even though they were a minority group they felt they could live a much freer life i know even my parents who are approaching 80 they always talk about you know the home country with this longing of wanting to return of the way things were of some you know simplicity of life of just not having to explain themselves or just feeling like they belong somewhere [Music] [Music] you