Tag: family

Black Lightning Actress Chantal Thuy: The F.A.D. Interview

On By Feminist Asian Dad1 Comment

Hers isn’t a household name yet, but actress Chantal Thuy’s growing body of artistic work will undoubtedly win her many more fans soon. Among her various projects, she has a recurring role on The CW’s Black Lightning, DC Comics’ first ever TV show centered on an African American superhero. 

Chantal plays bartender, bookstore staffer, and comic book geek Grace Choi, a bisexual Asian American woman who has a budding romance with one of the title character’s two daughters, a medical student named Anissa Pierce (played by Nafessa Williams). Grace’s special powers have yet to manifest on the show, but her back story is laid out in the DC Comics source material; she’s half-Amazonian, giving her a common ancestry with Wonder Woman. Thus, in the comics, she possesses superhuman strength, endurance, and self-healing. Hopefully, we’ll see her powers at work on the TV version of Black Lightning this season!

Grace and Anissa Bookstore
Grace (right, played by Chantal) and Anissa (left, played by Nafessa Williams) meet for the first time. Grace holds an issue of The Outsiders comic book, an allusion to the DC Comics superhero group that includes both Grace and Anissa.  (Image: The CW)

But Chantal doesn’t just portray an extraordinary character. She’s an extraordinary person, which I’ve found as we’ve interacted over the last year. In this Feminist Asian Dad interview, Chantal discusses bisexual and Asian American identities, her family’s refugee experience, what she does for fun, and much more. It’s a truly heartfelt conversation which I know you’ll enjoy! (And it’s been gently edited for length and clarity.)

Continue reading “Black Lightning Actress Chantal Thuy: The F.A.D. Interview” →

My Family’s Refugee Story

On By Feminist Asian Dad
Girl 1
This is the first in a series of four photos by award-winning Getty Images photographer John Moore. Here, a Honduran mother seeking asylum nurses her toddler just inside the Texas border. They’ve been traveling for about a month, she tells Moore.

Yesterday, we marked World Refugee Day, and we did so under surreal circumstances. The uproar over the current administration’s policy of forcibly taking migrant children from the arms of their parents and sending them en masse to shelters far away continued to burn, despite the president’s signing an executive order supposedly stopping the practice. The same day, the administration’s Secretary of State praised the “strength, courage, and resilience” of refugees.

Continue reading “My Family’s Refugee Story” →