Our names are Veronica and Charlene and we are the designers and developers behind They Are Your Classmates. We are both Canadian-born Chinese who speak English as our primary language, so we never experienced any of the hardships that Chinese international students experience. However, we have observed throughout our lives that there is a stigma towards Chinese international students within our society and a tendency for Canadian students to have prejudices and misconceptions about them. Truthfully, in grade school we also had many of these prejudices and misconceptions, despite being Chinese ourselves. Our aim for this project was to understand why these misconceptions exist and connect to Chinese international students to understand their perspectives better and critically rethink our own opinions on these students.

They Are Your Classmates was our way of connecting with these students that we largely ignored in school. Through our experience creating this project, we have learned from and empathized with these students’ stories; now we want to share them with you, in hopes that you will learn something too.