INTER/E/VIEWS

When I first met Cherry Lou Sy in Brooklyn through a mutual friend, I was excited because I could count on a single hand the number of times I’ve met someone else of Filipino-Chinese, or Tsinoy, descent. That is, to have a parent who is ethnically Chinese, but born and raised in the Philippines, part of one of the largest overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

I’ve been told I sometimes fall into the trap of writing a story about nothing—not the Seinfeld kind, but the kind of story where a protagonist reflects on their life, interacts lightly with the world, and then comes to an epiphany with mostly just the provocation of one memory crashing against another.