Intercultural Collaborations

Towards Understanding I have a feeling that we are all bound. It’s the same moon we gaze at. The same sun that gives us all light and life. I want to try to understand everyone. I don’t know if it’s possible. But I want to walk in that direction. I wonder where the line stands between accepting there are multiple ways of living and admitting that some ways are wrong. Aren’t there universal morals that should give us the mind to discern? Or can we use culture as an excuse for everything? When I go to a new place tomorrow I open my hand. You drop in a grain of your life and I get to see a little. I follow you. When in Rome , do as the Romans do. People across the world have been talking about the same thing for years upon years. In Chinese, there is a similar expression: 入 乡随俗 (Rù xiāng suí sú). An idiom meaning when you enter a town, follow the customs. It’s a way to understand and experience the life of another; while simultaneously keeping the order of wha...

Mia Corazon Aureus’s piece of creative non-fiction predominantly uses dialogue to capture the life story of Titang, a Pilipino foreign domestic worker living in Singapore while she paints her nails. Family, resilience and stigma are central to the story. The more we get into the story, the deeper we get into the Titang’s suffering and the more we can understand her endurance and resilience. It ends on a hopeful note, circling back to the beginning. We begin with her cleaning her nails, and end with the finished product: “We high five.  Her aquamarine-painted nails shimmer in the orange sunlight” – a bright, warm, hopeful image. Titang’s portrayal is commendable, not only is she defined as a live-in maid with a myriad amount of tasks to do, working for her family back home in the Philippines ; but there is more beneath this layer. Through the dialogue and the narrator’s reflections we see that Titang is an adopted child, has her own story, has made a life for herself ...