LA Writers Center presented a performance of Them's Ponies! by Rebekah Chang as a part of Home: Asian Voices Reading Series on Saturday 7 August 2021 at 11 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 1 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 2 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4).
Them's Ponies! by Rebekah Chang
By the time Becky Chang is thirteen, she has lived in five houses across three states and two countries, and she has been the new kid at school six times. So in 1976, when her family picks up and moves to a farm in a rural town in West Virginia, there’s more to the word “home” than she imagines. She negotiates between her parents’ Taiwanese influence and family values with the center-of-the-Appalachian-mountains-bible-belt-culture. As she navigates the emotional twists and turns, she discovers what home really means, with the assistance from an unexpected source.
Since the start of the pandemic last year, Asian Americans have faced constant and deadly racist violence. Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database, received 3,795 reports of anti-Asian-American discrimination between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021; women reported hate incidents at 2.3 times the rate of men. The LA Writers Center asked "what can we do?" We think by telling more Asian American stories, we can affirm that this community is a vital part of the American narrative. With this in mind, we are launching the Home: Asian Voices Reading Series.
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