I love a drink. I love everything from a room temperature Rivet to a juicy chilled Italian red and everything in between. I especially love how different drinks bring with them different traditions and occasions, and more importantly, bending these rules for a laugh and a surprise.

I wonder how much more different my life would have been if I didn’t have an Anglicised name. My parent’s conscious decision to name me ‘Isabella’, relegating my Vietnamese name to my middle name, speaks to the insidious truth of a society that privileges whiteness: how much more difficult it can be finding a job with a ‘foreign’ sounding name.

Happy new year everyone!! Welcome to 2021. We finally made it. The team and I are incredibly excited for the new year and to share with you some exciting new episodes and initiatives.

Admittedly, I didn’t know what BIPOC meant before the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement this year. Now, the term is almost ubiquitous on social media. It is a term that is meant to be all-inclusive. It is a term that is meant to unite, and it reflects the desire to highlight injustices that affect black people, Indigenous people and people of colour.

When I started work this year, a friend would always remind me to just "let it go". Being a devout advocate for perfection when possible, this advice was impossibly hard to adopt, but has become somewhat of a revelation in both my professional and personal life, and also mirrors elements of the Wabi Sabi philosophy.

I love City Pop with a burning passion. The only adjective you can really use to describe the genre is vibey. However, beyond the dreamy synths and beautiful album art, City Pop also reflects a time in Japan's history when fortune and opportunity felt limitless.

A lot of my childhood and adolescent years revolved around tutoring. French lessons on Thursday. English on Friday. Maths on Saturday. Not to mention the piano classes on Monday, or Vietnamese school on Sunday.

I just finished reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and for the last hour, have been staring into space, reading countless reddit threads and pondering whether or not I should reread it again straight away.

Is it wrong for a white person to wear a qipao - a traditional Chinese dress - to their school formal?

OG followers of the pod may remember me posting about the Youtube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified several months back, but my love for this channel warrants a repost and a full write up/love declaration.

Jacqueline's article speaks to the burden for mixed race people to "prove" their racial allegiances. I have been guilty in the past of asking mixed race people the question "how Asian are you?" in an effort to understand the common ground we share.

“Ricecels”: a play on the term, “incel”, which is used to describe a type of cisgender heterosexual man who considers himself unable to attract women sexually and as a result, becomes a radical misogynist. Except here, “ricecels” refers to the subsection of incels who are Asian men.

A listener reached out over the weekend and shared a story about family tension derived from the decision of placing a grandparent in a nursing home - a faux pas in many Asian cultures.

The Asian woman often lies at the intersection of two great myths. First, the model minority myth, which espouses Asians as a monolith of hard-working people who are sufficiently well-behaved to assimilate. Second, the myth of the subservient and hyper-sexual woman.

The phrase "I'm not like other Asians" has left my mouth on numerous occasions in the hope that these five words will miraculously eliminate the stereotypes and assumptions that others have of me.

The Yang Gang may be over (for now), but the cultural importance of Andrew Yang should not be understated. Ronny Chieng comedically encapsulates the excitement and pure zeal many Asians felt towards Yang, including myself, but he taps into something more deep-rooted: our representation in politics.

In this episode of what new thing Jeff has decided to throw himself into - it's "art" as a means of reflection (the quotation marks are to symbolise mum's thoughts on what I've been doing).

My go-to orders are always an Oolong Milk Tea with Pearls or a Green Tea with Lychee Jelly on warmer days. Most of you reading this will understand that I am referring to bubble tea. This highlights the sheer growth this humble Taiwanese beverage has seen.

Despite rather eating sand than mooncakes (a.k.a the densest food on the planet), my attachment to traditional holidays remains deep, largely due to the responsibility I feel to continue upholding the traditions celebrated by my ancestors and fellow countrymen.

Equity At The Table (EATT) is an easy-to-navigate digital directory inspired by the aphorism that it’s better to “build a longer table, not a higher fence.” EATT features only women/gender non-conforming individuals in/around the food industry and focuses primarily on POC and the LGBTQ community.