#diaspora'd

please feel free to signal boost this :D thanks friends!!

omg I feel you on this :( my mom’s regional variety of mandarin is pretty intelligible with standard mandarin but I still can’t speak it and wish I could. plus the older my grandparents get, the more they speak in shanghainese, and I can’t understand them, nor can I really find the resources to learn... sigh. #diaspora’d

yeah it seems like she's a cultural symbol but idk, it feels disingenuous to lay claim to her as an atheist agnostic? idk idk.  like canonically guanyin manifests in multiple genders and is venerated with multiple gender presentations and some have said that she's mtf while others interpret her as agender or maybe genderfluid, and like, these are western terms and the scholarly work I looked at seems to be coming from western scholars... so... idk, idk how to interpret guanyin, and even terms like "cis" or "trans" aren't productive here.  all I can tell is that guanyin's gender is... unconventional?  but from a cursory skimming of wikipedia I got the sense that maybe other bodhisattvas can manifest in multiple genders depending on the situation?  but again I don't know like anything about buddhism, so... idk how "unconventional" guanyin's gender is.  like.  I have no idea how to describe guanyin's gender at all

ugh

maybe I can record it or something, they probably wouldn't mind

yessss I HAVE HOPE, now I just need to get off my lazy butt and make this a reality. that's the hard part haha. I'm already at a decent level of chinese but I still can't read novels or newspapers or watch TV dramas and I really need to get there to start getting cultural stuff... but even then I've missed out on the experience of growing up in china, but then again I have my own experience growing up in the US? idk. diaspora'd feels