This summer, McGill’s Tuesday Night Cafe Theatre, a student-run, anglophone theatre company affiliated with McGill’s English department, screened the short film Where We Were. The film feels reminiscent of the COVID-19 outbreak as the story makes connections between how people process memories of large-scale catastrophes and our current reality. This[Read More…]
Off the Board
The significance of silence
Recently I drove two and a half hours to visit a long-time friend. Coming from different childhood backgrounds, and following similarly disparate pathways of life, our perspectives mesh and reinvigorate in surprising, and rewarding, ways. As my rickety Subaru accelerated its way north along Lake Superior’s rural coastline, we, too,[Read More…]
Stop trying to make ‘cheugy’ happen
On March 30, a TikTok user posted about a made-up word she and her friends use to describe things that encapsulate millennial, girlboss, out-of-style energy: Cheugy. Since then, gen-Z-ers have embraced the term, making TikToks and other social media posts about certain cheugy staples––think minions, millennial pink, graphic T-shirts, Rae[Read More…]
Music as a way of remembering
People listen to music for three distinct purposes: To escape from their thoughts, change their mindset, or use as a narrative medium—something that can speak to one’s physical and mental situation first-hand. There is a time and place for each of these ways of listening to music: I will put[Read More…]
I could sleep wherever I lay my head
During my undergraduate degree, I became a night-owl: The day was occupied by class or work, and I allotted my most academically and socially productive moments to the witching hours. Although I could never predict where I would sleep each night, I always found a place to rest if I[Read More…]
Art imitating art
Photographing wildlife is not only my primary hobby, but my passion. Nothing beats the thrill of finding an animal, the adrenaline of setting up a shot, and the reward of taking a successful picture. When I look at the collection of photographs I have taken, I am awestruck by the[Read More…]
Rediscovering the value of practice
One of my earliest memories is of my mother handing me a cardboard violin and stick and having me bow along to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. As the child of two classical musicians, I started learning music very early—at the age of two. Every day when I came home from[Read More…]
Anti-Asian racism was rampant before COVID-19-related hate
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, incidents of anti-Asian racism across the country have surged. In Montreal, several statues at Quan Am temple were defaced, the main gates of Chinatown were vandalized, and a Korean man walking to a market was stabbed in the city’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood.[Read More…]
The role of analog media in an online world
Last Friday, I listened to Prince by Prince on vinyl while I handwrote a letter to a friend, wandered the streets taking videos on my handheld camcorder, and watched my favourite John Cusack film High Fidelity on VHS. It is 2021, and yet I find that my days are consumed[Read More…]
The bad omens of Fall 2019
We all remember the day we heard about the samosa ban. The news rocked all of our worlds; we had been robbed of our beloved, cheap campus snack. But the ban was not the first of bad news on campus in the Fall of 2019. Reflecting on this particular semester—the[Read More…]
