Third Culture: Taste Menu

Senior Thesis Project at Emily Carr University

Culture through the lens of tradition, family, food, and nostalgia.

Throughout my thesis project, I aimed to showcase the Chinese Canadian experience through my own lens and also inspired by the stories of those of the community and around me. Like many individuals growing up in the midst of two cultures, I have been confused in my own identity. With cultural differences between myself and my Caucasian peers when it came to family values, traditions, and especially food, the traits I used to reject I have now come to accept and appreciate. When we fuse two elements together, often created is a fusion — however in the context of my project, I define it as a third culture. Through this project, I aimed to pay tribute to those who went through the same experiences I did, and to help others going through this identity crisis to ultimately cherish their roots.

With the understanding of various individuals’ diverse upbringings, came the opportunity to tell these stories through visual design. This opened up the chance for myself to explore my identity and these long-running, rich historical and cultural stories. The borders of the Chinese culture are limitless, so in terms of time I realistically chose to focus on one aspect, food, which is the biggest thing that brings families and communities together within the Chinese culture. It’s been an extremely eye-opening and humbling experience delving into this side of my identity in the last year of my undergrad, but also especially hard going through it during a global pandemic. With so much more left to uncover and unpack, I believe that there are still tons of questions that this project left to be answered. Going forward, I want to continue to seek ways to visually communicate aspects of the Chinese Canadian identity.