As I dig deeper into my identity, my ancestry, my roots, my adopted homeland, and this complicated world we live in, I am also becoming much more critical and yes, “woke”, than I have ever been.

I am coming to grips with my role and responsibility as an immigrant settler on Turtle Island — as someone who has benefitted and continues to benefit from colonial violence on this land.

I am coming to grips with my own privilege as a middle-class Filipina-Canadian whose parents entered this country through the Skilled Worker program with familial support already in place here for years — and who therefore had numerous advantages ahead of so many newcomers in this country (an apartment, a steady household income, a solid support system — just to name a few.)

I am coming to grips with how this country has been good to me and my family, but has not been so good to so many others in my own community, and to all other marginalized communities.

I am coming to grips with the systems of oppression, the inequality, the inequity, and the injustice that permeate so many levels and spaces of this country.

The seed of this idea was born in the fall of 2015 at Toronto’s Feminist Art Conference when I attended a powerhouse panel about (the lack of) diversity in Canadian literature. The panel was stacked with writers of colour with tons of experience to share about the publishing industry. I listened to these panelists - all writers of color - talk about the difficulties they faced in getting their work published, simply because their stories did not conform to the "Canadian narrative”. Either that or their stories were not "ethnic" enough.

As a writer and as a woman of colour, this deeply unsettled me.

As I’ve opened up about this to people of different ethnicities, I’ve learned that I’m not alone in navigating this ambiguous in-between place. That flash of recognition and connection whenever I described my entanglement of contradictions was like a surge of electricity that fuelled me each time. And so I’ve actively sought out more stories to better understand what it means to be a person with a hyphenated identity. Slowly but surely, I am finding a language for what has been lying inside me all these years.

That’s why I’ve decided to create Living Hyphen — an intimate journal that explores the experiences of hyphenated Canadians. Through short stories, photography, poetry, and illustrations, we uncover what it means to be a part of a diaspora. We examine life in between cultures, as individuals who call Canada home but with roots in different, often faraway places.