Christopher Tse | Reclaiming Voice: Silence, Identity, and the Asian Diaspora

For the second episode in Tune Up Your Warrior’s three-episode Season 4 opener for AAPI Heritage Month, Jenny sits down with Christopher Tse for a powerful conversation about silence, identity, diaspora, and reclaiming voice.Christopher Tse is an educator, organizer, and writer based in Whitehorse, Yukon. According to the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, he has spent 15 years working alongside community leaders on decolonization, environmental justice, migrant advocacy, and structural racism. He is also a former runner-up at the Poetry Slam World Cup and teaches social work at the University of Victoria. Together, Jenny and Christopher explore how silence has functioned in Asian communities as both a survival strategy and a form of resistance, how the model minority myth has reinforced expectations of quietness and compliance, and why the Asian diaspora cannot be treated as a monolith. They also talk about art as resistance, storytelling as truth-telling, and the tension between assimilation and solidarity. We close the episode through the spirit of Eyes Open, Chris' widely shared anti-Asian racism PSA/poem written and narrated for Asian Heritage Month. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGQtaCyp8f8 This episode is personal, thoughtful, and deeply relevant for anyone who has ever felt the tension between belonging and authenticity, between adaptation and erasure, and between inherited silence and reclaimed voice.