Dear Cosmos Community,
WE DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!
Okay, back to regularly sized font for the rest of this care package, but I want you to know how grateful Cassandra and I are for your support. Without you, we wouldn’t be here today. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to keep serving Asian women in America.
Help us reach our stretch goal of $35,000 by the end of February, and Cassandra and I won’t have to take a 30% salary cut to keep going this year. This means I can pay for groceries, take the subway, and buy women’s products at CVS without worrying that I won’t have enough for rent this month. It would make a big, big difference in our mental health :)
Community Events
Thank you to everyone who’s offered to donate proceeds from their events to our GoFundMe!
Ease into No with Your Voice, a virtual workshop with Relationship & Boundary Coach Phuong Thao Nguyen
Thurs Feb 9 | 5pm PT | 8 pm ET
Feeling frustrated with your auto-yes response, yet terrified of saying no? You are not alone. As children of immigrant parents, we were conditioned to only say yes while no was removed from our everyday language and sometimes shamed & punished. In this workshop, we'll get to know the primal brain and nervous system responses and what's possible. You will be guided in a live practice to ease into saying no with your voice.
TO RSVP: Make a donation (suggested amount $11-$33) to The Cosmos GoFundMe then send me a screenshot of your donation to phuongthao@theuncagedpath.com to receive the Zoom link to this event!
Make a donation of ANY amount and unlock sliding scale 1:1 coaching with Relationship & Boundary Coach Phuong Thao Nguyen
Make a donation of *any* amount to our GoFundMe to unlock sliding scale pricing for 1:1 coaching sessions with Relationship & Boundary Coach Phuong Thao Nguyen! Only 5 slots available, and you choose your sliding scale price, starting at $55.
In a 1:1 session, Phuong Thao will support you in exploring ways to work with their minds and bodies together to get unstuck from habitual ways of coping. She’s a great fit for those looking for a top-down (mindset) and bottom-up (body-based) approach with a sprinkle of playfulness and pleasure to healing!
Possible topics include, but are not limited to: boundaries, gently exploring emotions that have been repressed, how to move through conflict, rupture and repair, easing into saying & receiving no without taking it personally, cultivating self trust, navigating life transitions and big decisions from an embodied place.
To unlock your sliding scale pricing: Email phuongthao@theuncagedpath.com with a screenshot of your donation to book! Limited to 5 spots, first come first serve!
Loose Lab presents AAPI Night Market (San Diego)
Thurs Feb 24 | 630-10pm ET | 3167 Gallery
We’re celebrating the Year of the Tiger by dedicating this night to learning about and celebrating our AAPI community’s cultural roots and background through food, art, music and more!
RSVP: $4 entry fee. A portion of the proceeds will be donated The Cosmos GoFundMe!
Community Stories
A new section where I’ll share stories submitted from the community! Since creating The Cosmos four years ago, we’ve seen how much our community needs more stories, from more people across the vast and beautiful Asian diaspora. This is our effort to see and support those stories.
These first six stories were each awarded $109 to support their story projects through The Cosmos Care Fund. This funding comes from paid subscriptions to this newsletter!! Become a paid subscriber today so we can continue to support storytellers in our community :)
Sunehra S.
I am a low-income Bangladeshi, queer student at Yale. Back in October, my friends and I organized the Black Asian Trans Power Rally in New Haven in solidarity against the triple occupation of New Haven by the NHPD, YPD, and Hamden police. While reviewing our chants with our volunteers there was discomfort around the phrase "sex work is work," which was something also seen after the Atlanta shootings. We are trying to organize a series of events (a pole dancing event, a chai fundraising table with the SWAN's harm reduction truck available behind it, etc.) and create educational resources with the Sex Workers Alliance Network in New Haven to centralize sex workers' voices, destigmatize and decriminalize their work, and emphasize that BIPOC, Trans, Queer, and collective liberation does not exist without sex workers; we cannot wait for brutality to take action. Personally, my queerness has often been deemed a product of the Western environment, which is not true and is a myth perpetuated by imperialism; these events are also about reclaiming our sexuality as our own.
Dena I.
My short film, A Thousand Years Apart, is about a closeted lesbian Indonesian Muslim teen who tries to summon her older brother and first queer elder from the afterlife as she struggles to combat community surveillance, queerphobia within her Indonesian Muslim community, and growing up low income in Queens, NYC. Filmmaking and storytelling have always been mediums for me to preserve my loved ones beyond memory and navigate uncertainties as a queer Indonesian Muslim. As someone who lost my older cousin and first queer elder to suicide, I struggled with how community surveillance hindered my ability to properly grieve because of the pressure to save face. A Thousand Years Apart is my way to properly navigate that grief. Historically, queer Indonesian cinema became censored after 2008, and I want to create something that honors that legacy of Indonesian film while leaning into diasporic perspectives.
Lan N.
Imagine 10 queer, trans Viets planting ancestral plants - bitter melon, fat chayote, luscious perilla, and woody birds eye chili . Then, my father, a Vietnamese boy scout leader, teaches us all knots to to tie together recently hand-felled bamboo. We laugh, sweat, dig, and exchange earth knowledge in Vietlish. This $100 goes to buy basic gardening supplies to make this vision come true, right on a small ranch in the Bay Area, California.
Delaney H.
I am conducting an interview with the curators (Kayla Tange and Hailey Loman) and artists of the “Private Practices: AAPI Artists and Sex Workers” collection at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive to deepen the discourse around the experiences of AAPI women and sex workers that exploded last year following the racially motivated shootings in three Atlanta spas in March 2021. The piece will be published in X-TRA (L.A.-based contemporary art publication) in spring 2022. Of central concern to the interview are the ways that contemporary performance art intersects with sex work practices, and the ways in which archiving institutions can shape the histories of these communities by implementing institutional practices informed by sex workers’ organizing knowledge and networks of care. The artists and I aim to shift attention away from the abstract category of “AAPI sex workers” that flattens our lives into a monolith, and instead conduct a more granular discussion grounded in the concrete, individual bodies and diverse experiences of the artists/sex workers whose artwork is included in the collection. I am seeking funds to compensate monetarily the artists/sex workers I interview.
June P.
I'm writing a fantasy novel that features a Khmer American woman as its protagonist, in a world inspired directly by Southeast Asian peoples, cultures, and landscapes. My protagonist, like me, has always struggled to find belonging wherever she goes, until she realizes the feeling of belonging isn't found, it's created. I don't often see this sort of representation in media - I love speculative fiction, yet I'm always searching for a book to speak directly to me in more ways than one. I am creating this epic story featuring radical love, queerness, and abolitionist themes so that others like me (and even people who are not like me) can read it one day and know that stories like this have a place in the sci-fi/fantasy genre.
Anonymous
Being Nepalese-American, there are very few notable figures, especially females, from Nepal. There is still only a very bare minimum awareness of the country as a whole, outside of Mount Everest, the Buddha, and Tenzing Norgay. I would love to create a presence for Nepal/Nepalese women and really obscure minority women overall. I have an idea to create a podcast and/or blog highlighting Obscure Minority Girls (OMG) to bring awareness to their cultures and real issues and struggles that plague their countries, and bring life to their beautiful rich culture.