Production 9 Final Project VB

Final Technology Adventure Project

Here is the shareable link to view my documentary: https://drive.google.com/file/d/151h79HKb4VJsdGLhSISwVa0ZTslWkW_L/view?usp=sharing Please do not download it. I may take down the video after a few weeks after the course finishes to maintain the privacy of my family.

For EDUC 5855 Professor and students only.

I decided to do more a social science documentary, looking at the Filipino Canadian community, specifically the dynamics between immigrant parents and Canadian born children within my family. This was a topic that is of interest to me, because I always felt fluid in terms of my identity and what community (Canadian or Filipino) I associated with. Being born in Canada, and only taught by my parents to speak English makes it a barrier or hindrance when I am trying to make connections with other Filipino Canadians that I encounter in my life. Also, being a visible minority, whose first language is English and being heavily immersed in Canadian culture is always an interesting experience for me.

I interviewed 6 people—my dad, my brothers, myself, my mother in law, and my husband. My mother in law and husband are Indian, while my family is ethnically Filipino. I wanted to include their experience because at the end of my documentary I mention that not all experiences are the same, and that my dad’s immigrant experience is not the same for the wider narrative of immigration. From their responses, I was able to analyze it and see how they related to the research that I found. I chose to use iMovie as my technology tool for engaging with this documentary and idea.

This was a really engaging production for me, that I thoroughly enjoyed. I think that even if this is not worthy enough to be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, to me, I feel proud enough of my work that I can say it’s TIFF worthy haha! I think that a project like this can be really enriching in a classroom for any cross-curricular topic such as geography, history, social science, science, mathematics, art, media literacy, language, etc.).

Planning and Proposal 1) Identify the challenge you will be presenting to yourself: the research question/s, methods and modes of inquiry, and creative challenge you will engage (with a brief rationale). Why does it matter to you?

My adventure project is more of a social science documentary. I am interested in looking at the Filipino Canadian community, specifically the dynamics between the immigrant parents and Canadian born children within that family. I'm currently looking for research articles from JSTOR, and ProQuest to ground my thinking. I also want to keep the focus of the experiences within my family as I myself fit this description and my cousins and siblings are in the same boat as me. I aim to look at the differences or similarities in identity formation between the immigrants versus Canadian born members in my family.

This is a topic that is of interest to me, because as a Canadian born member, I always felt fluid in terms of my identity and what community I associate with. For example, there are some moments in my life where I despise the Filipino community and I don’t want to be associated with it all, and other times where I am proud to be part of the community. Additionally, there are moments where I feel ostracized from my own community as I am unable to speak the national language and dialects of the Philippines. Being born in Canada, and only taught by my parents to speak English makes it a barrier or hindrance when I am trying to make connections with other Filipino Canadians that I encounter in my life. Also being a visible minority, whose first language is English and being heavily immersed in Canadian culture is always an interesting experience. I have also taken electives in my undergraduate career, on diaspora which talked a little bit about hybridized identities and feeling like there is no home or place for you.

I also want to try sharing this in a form of a documentary as I have been very interested in the video production process. My younger brother is very skilled and uses Final Cut Pro X to edit his videos and although I am not expecting to create a Tiffany Festival worthy film, since I am an amateur user of iMovie, I am still very interested and excited to make this documentary.

I have looked through various research papers, 4 of which focus on the Filipino immigrant/second generation community, and one is broader because it focuses on the general immigrant and Canadian born experience. Interestingly, as I was reading the articles, I found I disagreed with a lot of the research. For example, one article stated that for Canadian born children, who ended up returning to the Philippines, they felt this sense of being home, though being born and raised in Canada (Pratt, 2003, p. 56). All of the young Filipino Canadian individuals who were interviewed in this article felt unanimous about the Philippines being a homeland that they miss. I have never felt a strong urge to visit my parents’ homeland, but I guess the question might then be, how does visiting your parents’ homeland influence and shape a second generation’s sense of identity? When I was reading the general article on immigrants and second generation children, it mentioned that second generation individuals “struggle with a discourse of national belonging that is flexible enough to exclude them even when they talk, act and live ‘like everyone else’” (Rajiva, 2005, p. 26). I found I agreed more with the statements from this article based on my own experiences in Canada and growing up as a visible minority.

I think ultimately, I am interested in looking at the immigrant’s experience arriving and living in Canada, and how their experiences, values, and circumstances influenced the identities of their Canadian born children. I suppose my working research question are, how much do we really understand about the cultural and social experiences of the children of immigrants? and do children of immigrants feel like they are truly Canadian, although they have their Canadian citizenship and birthright to being Canadian?

2) What technology tools will you will use to produce your project (what are you going to create? how? what media tools will you use?).

I think that the best way for me to showcase these research questions would be to make a documentary on iMovie. The documentary is a good tool that will illustrate my familial experiences as I will be interviewing my aunts, uncles, parents, siblings, and cousins, and asking them questions about their hybridized identity as a Filipino Canadian from the perspective of an immigrant and Canadian born member of the family. The interview will be a way for me to gather data, where I will analyze their responses and see how they relate to the research I found. Once I review the clips, I will have to decide in what order I will present them, as well as whether I will include cut scenes, videos and/or images from external sources, etc.

3) Production Plan: Brief sketch or script indicating how you will get this project done (action-plan, next steps, what you need to learn, a schedule/timeline for completion).

I need to do more research and read more articles on the experiences of immigrants and children of immigrants to gain a wider scope of this broad and varying topic. I know that each person will have different experiences based on the circumstances of their families, the support system available to them, and many other factors.

I will also have to schedule a few days with my family to gain some insight and do interviews with my family members. Which I will hope to complete in late February/early March so that I can start to put together my documentary by early March. I plan on finishing my documentary for the last class so that I can edit it and touch it up a few more times before the due date.

Questions to ask immigrant family members: • Was moving to Canada what you had expected, and did you have any regrets once you moved? Please explain. • What was your experience like raising a family and working two jobs (morning and overnight shifts)? o Did you bring lola (grandma) and lolo (grandpa) to Canada to help raise your children? • What was the hardest thing about raising your children in Canada? o Did you fear that your children would not have the same values that children in the Philippines have?  E.g. respect your elders, behave and be disciplined, etc. • What do you like to do for leisure?

Questions to ask Canadian born family members: • Have you ever felt your parents try to impose their culture on you? What was that experience like? • Have you ever felt a longing to return to the Philippines or to have an association with the Filipino people? o If you have visited the Philippines more recently, has the trip influenced and shaped your identity as a hybridized Filipino-Canadian? • What influenced you to get into the academic and career path you chose? • What do you think your parents like to do for leisure and what do you like to do for leisure? • Are there any Filipino cultural values or traditions that you hold onto or reject? Please list as many and explain them. • Do you have a sense of Filipino pride?

Questions to ask Tim and his mom: • Was moving to Canada what you had expected, and did you have any regrets once you moved? Please explain. o What was the experience like moving to a new country being a single mom? o How have you been able to adjust your life in Canada? o What was the experience like moving to a new country being raised in a family-oriented household and knowing everyone, to not knowing anyone in this new country?

Script

Toronto is one of the most diverse cities next to Vancouver, and Montreal as newcomers arrived since 1991 (Siemiatycki & Isin, 1997, p. 74). It not only is a home to a high proportion of immigrants, but the immigrants that come to Canada come from diverse ethnocultural and class backgrounds and settle in parts of the city that make it diverse (Siemiatycki & Isin, 1997, p. 77). As a Canadian born child of two parents who immigrated to Canada from the Philippines, I wanted to explore how the experiences of my parents influenced the experience of a hybridized Filipino-Canadian youth, being myself, my siblings and perhaps my cousins.

During the interview, my dad brings up an interesting point that I found was recurring in multiple research articles in regard to immigrant parents and their idea of who should be supervising their children. There were multiple factors to why it was better for family members to take care of their children, and that includes expense as childcare is not affordable for many people in the working class, as well as not trusting their child to be under the care of anyone else but family members (for safety reasons) (Heinonen, 1996, pp. 213-214).

While my dad mentioned lots of hardships and changes that he had to overcome and accept, I will shift the focus now to the perspective of the second generation. In the upcoming clip, my brothers and I talk about the effects of our parents imposing their Filipino culture or values on us.

Now, I know it seems rather cynical for me to include that clip with my dad, kind of like I’m taunting the immigrant experience. But I don’t want this documentary to reduce the immigrant experience to one that is not full of struggles and hardships. In fact, I acknowledge that these experiences are not easy, but challenging to overcome. What I do want to shed light on instead, is on the experiences of the second-generation subjects like myself and my family members—these are the stories that are not represented or talked about compared to the experiences of immigrants. In one of the research articles, the author so eloquently says, “If you are a visible minority, you will always be a permanent outsider to the Canadian nation…If we continue to assume that racism in Canadian society is always related to the problem of “newcomers” then we are effectively ignoring the presence and experiences of many people who were born and have grown up in Canada and yet continue to struggle with issues of racism and exclusion. Second generation subjects have to struggle with a discourse of national belonging that is flexible enough to exclude them even when they talk, act and live ‘like everyone else’” (Rajiva, 2005, p. 26).

Throughout this documentary, I wanted to share my dad’s experience as an immigrant, as well as shed light on the struggles that second generation individuals also face. I wanted to show how second generation individuals are always negotiating our identities and feelings of belonging as we are in-between cultural identities and experiences since we are not actually part of our parents’ past cultural landscapes, but neither are we completely ever part of the Canadian mainstream (Rajiva, 2005, pp. 26-27). This story, however, is true for my family and myself, but the wider story of immigration and even second generational belonging and identity is extremely complex. Leggo writes that, “any story we tell will always be a fragment of the complex and wide-ranging experiences that each of us lives daily in our bodies and imaginations, the experiences we live daily in interconnections with family, colleagues, and community. So, my story might not be true for another second generation. Maybe they do have a longing to go back to their parent’s or their homeland and once they had that opportunity, they feel empowered. And my dad’s story might not be applicable to all immigrants—perhaps some immigrants moved to this foreign land and found the transition easier. Take for example, my mother in-law and my husband. Both of them immigrated to Canada from India in 2004.

Thus, we can see that while there are similarities to the stories of immigrants and second-generation individuals, the experiences and stories can also be quite different. Yet these stories are so valuable and valid as they speak to the personal journey that each person lived through and continues to walk every day. I’ve looked into the personal narratives of my dad, my mother in-law, and my husband to speak to the wider narrative of the immigrant experience and struggles, and I’ve also looked into the personal narratives of my brothers and I, to shed light on the wider narrative of the second generational struggles.

These stories, while they are personal narratives to my family, are not the whole story either. For example, Tim’s whole experience on immigration cannot be told in 3 minutes, nor can my story be told within 5 minutes, as we are all continuously on this experiential journey where our feelings towards Canada may change, and our identities may or may not be shifting.

References

Doerr-Stevens, C. (2017). Embracing the Messiness of Research: Documentary Video Composing as Embodied, Critical Media Literacy. English Journal, 106(3), 56.

Filipino? canadian? striking a balance. (2012, Mar 03). Winnipeg Free PressRetrieved from http://ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/925847973?accountid=15182

Heinonen, T. (1996). Connecting Family Resilience and Culture: Recreation and Leisure among Filipino-Canadians. Philippine Sociological Review, 44(1/4), 210-221. Retrieved February 3, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/41853682

Kelly, P. (2014). Understanding intergenerational social mobility: Filipino youth in canada. (). Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Retrieved from Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database Retrieved from http://ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/docview/1507828175?accountid=15182

Leggo, C. (2004). Narrative Inquiry: Honouring the Complexity of the Stories We Live, Brock Educational Journal, 14(1).

Life of a Narrow Aisle Forklift Driver. (2015). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Bd5oxK73A

Nguyen, D., & Tang, K. (2018, November 27). Some distant cousin or family friend's son/daughter is always being trotted out as a paragon of perfection that you're falling short of. Retrieved February 9, 2020, from https://www.buzzfeed.com/daozers/27-signs-you-were-raised-by-asian-immigrant-parents?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharecopy&sub=0_1069609#1069609

Pratt, G. (2003). Between homes: Displacement and belonging for second-generation Filipino-Canadian youths. BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly, (140), 41-68.

Rajiva, M. (2005). Bridging the generation gap: Exploring the differences between immigrant parents and their Canadian-born children. Canadian Issues, 25.

Siemiatycki, M., & Isin, E. F. (1997). Immigration, diversity and urban citizenship in Toronto. Canadian Journal of Regional Science, 20(1, 2), 73-102.

Try not to cry challenge ✪ Emotional videos that will make you cry #4. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyA8Bq_ioT8 (2019, June 12). Retrieved February 10, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gApLZyA3BGA

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