#language-barrier

#language-barrier

Nicole Chi Amen, a Costa Rican woman of Chinese descent, has always been on the outside looking in. The opening scene of her moving debut feature replicates this predicament visually: her face pressed against a metal barricade, she looks through a hole in the opaque facade with interest. The camera is observing, too, and the sight of a house being torn down gradually comes into view. This was once the home of her maternal grandmother, a Guangdong native.

Some basic facts about the shooting are publicly available and not in dispute. Rodriguez, a 31-year-old husband and father from Santa Ana, was fatally shot by two Santa Ana police officers on Dec. 1, 2024, near the spot of what is now his makeshift memorial. His widow says Rodriguez struggled with his mental health, and that in recent years his problems had become severe enough that at the time of his death he was living with his mother, away from their family, at her request.

Yanfeng Ge clung to a photograph of his beloved brother, 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge, in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday braving both the bitter wind and suffering the weight of an insurmountable loss at the hands of ICE. Chaofeng Ge, a Chinese native and Queens resident, perished inside the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, an ICE detention center in Pennsylvania, in August. Yet, three months later, his family says federal officials still have not communicated with them regarding the details of his death.

I wish I could sit, but if I do, someone may try to take my place, or think that I'm cutting the line,

[He's been] very loud straight away,

I remember my mother exactly as I saw her for the first time: wearing a blue, azure suit, a white shirt, black heels, and dark brown mid-length hair curled with a bold red lip.

Growing up in a Taiwanese American community made me feel American but also left me feeling disconnected from my cultural roots, especially my Mandarin language skills.