The entangled juxaposition of the oppressed, hushed and forgotten, misunderstood. The silence of opportunity, venturing into the vulnerability of the shared, complicated analogy, intricate parallel. Inconvenient silence, transparent truth, the solitary affliction.

This is a photo of a honey toast dessert I ordered from Up2You Cafe, a local chain in San Diego. It is located on a street called Convoy, which is the destination for many authentic Asian restaurants and grocery stores, as well as karaoke and other forms of entertainment. This cafe is one of the many places my friends and I meet up to hang out and talk, and we all went there just before we all left for college. My friends and I often bond over food, and this photo also represents my life back home in San Diego, including my friends, the local restaurants, and the thriving Asian community. 

i was doing a late summer photoshoot with my best friend about two weeks before i headed to BMC. the sun beat relentlessly against our arms and faces and the tops of our heads, and the field was bright with dry grass. a DSLR is not the lightest of cameras, and i was ready to go home. but when i bent to pick up my shoes, i found a cluster of small flowers by my bare ankle-- blue and white, half-hidden in the brittle stalks.

just waiting to be found.

I can tell a story about this better in person... But the caption I'll include is "silence is electric"

Role models and role modeling have always been important to me. As I grew up, especially in high school, I found myself latching on to particular people to model behavior for me, people usually a couple of years older than I was. When I came to college, I began to research scholars and academics and see them as role models in the same way. My avatar is a famous South Asian activist and academic, Arundhati Roy, back when she was in her mid-twenties. She has done incredible work for South Asian communities and has inspired me constantly, along with other South Asian academics. I have spent a long time looking for my queer South Asian/poc role models mainly because they are so erased within our white, Western framework of education.

- Alternative Ending by Asaf Hanuka

In the lyrics of The Sound of Silence, Paul Simon writes "... in the naked light I saw ten thousand people, maybe more people talking without speaking[,] people hearing without listening". I interpret it as Paul's criticism of people's numbness, lack of thinking and empathy while communicating with others. Meaningful exchange sometimes does not need any spoken language. For example, artists can show their splendid world through painting (which is in a silent way as shown in the picture I chose).

Every other weekend I’d go into San Francisco with a few best friends. I adored exploring the unknown corners of the foggy city. We’d get off any train stop and walk through a labyrinth of grey skyscrapers and tourists with fanny packs and piers and pretentiously overpriced cafes and cable cars and streets on hills so steep, that the sidewalks were staircases. We’d grab coffee in the Ferry Building, surrounded by a panoramic view of the Bay, or we’d head to lunch in the Mission District, where street art was abundant. I loved going to the MOMA on Thursday nights when I had the time and admission was free. Or maybe I’d go for a walk at Land’s End, and stand on top of Eagle Point, overlooking the vast ocean.

There are some moments at life where you want to put into a little box so preciously that you want to come back and feel the exact same feeling. This picture captures the very moment that I would like to cherish forever and go back to the little box to feel the same excitement, ecstasy and the overwhelming and ineffable joyfulness. I was one of the singers –to be more precise, an alto- at MAVIS, the one and only A Cappella group at my high school. One day, we got a call from the supervisors of “All the King’s Man (AtKM)”, an A Cappella group at King’s College, that they are planning for a concert tour in Korea and would like MAVIS to join them for one of the concerts!