Merging Boundaries: Our Transnational World.

Merging Boundaries: Our Transnational World Can Be Found Here

Today is Feb 2nd, and the deadline of the project just approached and past. I am sitting here going through all the articles I got and have done so for the last five hours, which is really nothing if I take into account all the time I put in the last three months looking for writers, working with them, and trying to work out what it was that I was doing.

I always knew it was something to do with post-modernism, post-structuralism, and that the way we view race, nationalities and culture are completely outdated as there are many people like myself where those things are multiple, merged, appropriated into one being, making each of us individual, unique.

If we exist, if one body and mind can encompass so many things at once, then those supposedly monolithic ideals are simply constructions of economy and society and well on its way to having to reinvent itself.

And I always wanted to capture that spirit in Glutter, and I thought it would be interesting to make this a space where other anomalies, other people whose existence challenge those old skool ideas have a space to speak in a collective.

Should be fun, should be easy, ask a few people to write, throw it on, and we have a mini time capsule of what was in the minds of those existing the first few years of this millennium, when air travel, global media, immigration, movement of people are pretty every day events for far more people than ever before.

What I didn’t expect was how much hard work it was going to be. Real trench work both in my mind and with the site. I didn’t expect to have the response I did, and I didn’t expect to have about 20 articles to deal with and more on the way. I didn’t expect it all to be so heart felt and at times brutally honest, even if that’s what I asked for.

What I have in my hard drive at this moment is exactly what I was hoping to achieve (except it is bigger, better and more thoughtful than I could dare envision) which was a lot of people talking about some of the grander issues I touch upon but could never as one writer encompass all those ideas.

I feel responsible to everyone who took that time to write, to put down their personal stories for nothing, not recognition, not money, for someone they mostly do not know well, half way around the world.

Even though I am about to start asking why I did this to myself, as I stare at the hours of work ahead, as I have come to the conclusion these pieces needs a site of its own, a tomb dedicated to it although I will post each one on Glutter as well. But I am not complaining. I am just very overwhelmed both with gratitude, fear, and wondering how to put this collection together and present it in the most meaningful way possible.

So far on the top off my head, I have people writing about their feelings of displacement as a non Chinese person growing up in Hong Kong. People talking about how that race/culture/nationality does not define them, but who they are as a person which do.

-One writer talks about her feelings and experience growing up with her father as a CIA agent, yet she feels ashamed of Bush and some other Americans.

-A woman tells what it’s like to be half Pakistani and Half Indian but a whole Hong Kong person.

-A religious quote to explain why an American is working towards human rights in China.

-Someone from Europe tells us how the media informed his mind as a global citizen even if he’s lived in the same country all his life.

-A man of Mexican/Japanese decent who relates to black culture and the reasons for that.

-Two white Australians discuss whiteness, one in terms of Racism found in Australia, one from a perspective of a white ‘minority”.

-A personal story of an American teacher in Korea and an encounter with an old man in a library.

-A young woman who struggles between HK and Sydney and where to live?

-A Japanese-American woman talk about moving to America in her childhood.

-How one young man found his interest in China through a book from his aunt.

-Another young woman retells the story of her immigrant parents from China.

-An Adult Grandchild of the Asian Diaspora discuss how she views Asia and her home country from an even more intimate perspective.

On the way (I hope) are a few piece on the Middle East: one from Iraq, one from an Israeli who resides in Honduras, and one from an Iranian American friend of mine talking about the passing of her grandfather recently. Maybe an interview with a Japanese band trying to break into the western market. As well as a man who is born in the west Indies, lived many places and now resides in London. A piece by a son of an African missionary and his experience with Arabic poems. An Ameri-Asian man talks of Akido and his grandmother. A Sri-Lankan woman who just had a mixed race baby. A Japanese women returns from America. Four Children of the Chinese Diaspora muses about what Hong Kong means to them from all parts. A European Immigrant in the US who is dating a non-Chinese person in Hong Kong and the difficulties she has encountered, as well as her partner who I have no idea what he’s going to write. I hope I have not missed a single person on the list.

For so long, I didn’t know what to call this issue, series, collection: The Identities Series? All Mixed Up? Voices from a Multicultural World? Children of Diaspora? In Search of Who We Are? Race and Passports are Rubbish? Cultural Identities of Global Citizenship? The Voices of Globalization? One Planet, One Body, Many Things?

In the end, I realized what this is: it is a testament to the merging boundaries in the world we live in, and that’s how it should be named.

Glutter Presents:

Merging Boundaries:

Our Transnational World.

Coming soon… and thank you.