Eleanor Yang

Eleanor would like to acknowledge that she is a settler who currently lives, learns and earns on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Huron-Wendat Peoples. Eleanor’s personal pronouns are she/her.

As a 1.5 generation Hakka-Jamaican, Eleanor is especially interested in diasporic communities. In particular, she is interested in researching the history of the Hakka/Chinese diaspora and their cultural exchange, adaptation, and growth in their places of settlement; more specifically, she is hoping to understand how anti-Asian racism drove the formation of Chinatowns and Chinese associations; how the model minority myth and perpetual foreigner syndrome have impacted the Hakka/Chinese diaspora, especially in times of increasing anti-Asian hate; how intergenerational community building has contributed to cultural exchange, adaptation, and growth; how language and culture have been maintained, or adapted, in various places of settlement; and how the intersections of sexuality, age, gender, class, etc. have impacted the diasporic experience.

Eleanor is currently an active volunteer and Board member of Yarrow Society for Intergenerational Justice, which operates in Vancouver's Chinatown community. She has been volunteering virtually throughout the pandemic with low-income seniors and youth in Chinatown. She is currently paired with a low-income senior, Grace, to provide support and coordinate weekly culturally-specific grocery deliveries. Her aim is to assist in creating a vision of a Chinatown that is intersectional, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-oppressive for all.