Intergenerational Storytelling with Chinatown Seniors — with Yulanda Lui and Rachel Lau

Yulanda Lui and Rachel Lau share experiences from the making of the radio documentary series Speak My Language, which highlighted the stories of Chinese-Canadian seniors facing barriers in accessing the BC healthcare system. A project of Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice, the radio pieces were created in collaboration with youth and seniors under the mentorship of project coordinator and lead artist Rachel Lau with the support of Yarrow co-founder Yulanda Lui. This episode is hosted by our Office’s previous Communications Coordinator, Rachel Wong, and touches upon ethical community-based storytelling and accessing healthcare for non-English speakers.Rachel Lau is a community-engaged artist, writer, and radio producer based in what’s colonially known as “Vancouver”. Through audio storytelling, photography, and zine-making, they produce work that grapples with ideas and feelings around resistance, longing, transience, death, and decay. As part of their audio practice, they have produced several narrative radio documentaries focused on the lives of marginalized peoples, including Vancouver’s Chinatown community. More recently, they have expanded their practice into the realm of sound art. Rachel is also a recent graduate of the media studies program at the University of British Columbia, with a minor in Asian Canadian & Asian Migration studies.Yulanda Lui is from Toronto, the territory of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. She graduated from UBC in 2017 with a BA in Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice and a minor in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies. At UBC, she was the primary coordinator of The Pride Collective at UBC, organizing fellow student volunteers to support and improve the health and safety of queer and trans students. In 2018, Yulanda co-founded Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice, a non-profit organization that provides and enables services, advocacy, and education that develop youth and senior leadership and build community power in Vancouver's Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside. Yulanda is a strong believer that relationships are at the core of social change. Starting this fall, Yulanda will be attending the New York University School of Law as a Root-Tilden-Kern public interest scholar. She hopes to use her law degree to continue to empower her communities, to advocate for the rights of marginalized peoples, and to break down barriers to accessing health, education, social support, and justice.