Interactive Twine story featuring my original art and poetry accompanied personal narrative.
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In my Digital Storytelling in Education class for my Digital Media: Education MA at UCL, we were instructed to produce a story, on Twinery which is a platform that is quite accessible financially, socially, and technically given the open source, free nature of it. The modes and affordances provided by the branching narratives allow for an interactive form of digital literature in between "Choose Your Own Adventure" books and video games. Twine is quite empowering for those who come from marginalized identities to process trauma and explore stories that are often silenced or censored in the larger publishing industry.
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For the overarching concept of my twine, I considered: How can I create something that reduces the emotional labor of explaining racial trauma and fetishization?
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The Pathways:
The starting pathway and title of the piece "Asian women are so special" is a line that sparked a lot of my reflexive thinking about racialized sexism and fetishization for my undergraduate thesis on Asian American sexual literacies. For the purposes of this story, I wanted the line that came from an ignorant place to be turned on its head by the end of the narrative to assert "Asian women are so special" as a fact: that each and every individual is important and deserving of love and remembrance, not just a stereotype or statistic.

The other pathways create loops of lived experiences and memories that are intended to mimic the repetitive mundane experience of living life, going to work, and trying to function in capitalist society with the constant bombardments and disruptions of traumatic news and casual racism all the while trying to carve out time for fun, community, and joy in the spaces between.

The Text:
The stylizations of text serve as motifs throughout the piece, such as the shaking yellow italicized "read the news/headline" directives demanding attention or the magenta pink used for joyful experiences with friends (echoing the bright Barbie aesthetic of chasing temporary reprieve in girlhood, femininity, and queerness). The flashing of "question sexuality" evokes the experience of a persistent question or inner dialogue that will not be ignored, regardless of how one might try. A similar function operates in the slower blink of the line "feel depressed" as something that is slow, bubbling, and inevitable. I used strikethroughs and blur effects sparingly to indicate details or memories from my life that I sometimes wish I could forget. 

The Poetry:
Writing offers an emotional catharsis that is not always readily facilitated by other forms of speaking and communication. Over the years, I have accummulated a sizable running document of poems I have written to process events, feelings, and memories, which I integrated snippets of to represent the stories that are not represented in media coverage, the opportunity for the oppressed to speak from their own voice and lived experience.

The Image:
For the grounding image of the website, I used fragments from one of my previous paintings throughout the different pathways to visually represent how POC are often reduced to and consumed in parts. The only opportunity the reader has to see the full face of the portrait, to see and take in the woman's full likeness, is on the "ending" page of the story "Asian women are so special."


Click here to download and read the story.
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