^{[ DESCRIPTION ]}             American Born Chinese is a visual exploration of my experience growing up as a second-generation Chinese-American. This set of visual experiments explores and investigates what it means to be Asian in today’s America through personal memories and experiments expressed through iterative form-making. Through a process of researching, making, and reflecting, this project attempts to work through complex topics such as language barriers, migration, and representation in an effort to reclaim my racial identity. My work as a designer is inherently experimental and process based, and I attempt to communicate and represent the ephemeral experiences that so many children of immigrants face, in order to reconcile with that part of me in search for a sense of belonging in how I fit into the larger Chinese-American diaspora.

This degree project is many things, but at its core it’s about inner healing, rediscovering who I am and how I fit into this complicated world, a new found appreciation for my cultural heritage, an opportunity to reconnect with the other half of me that I chose to repress for the last two decades, and a greater understanding of the immigrant experience.