Hidden: A Senior Listener Lyric Photographic Diptych by Xiaorui Luo (2017)

My lyrical essay, titled “Hidden“, tells about how it is like to be an asian immigrant living in US. Many people always expect you to be just like the others in your ethnicity group. It make the person pressured to fit into the stereotypes while they could be something completely different.

The passage I choose for the diptych project is “your uniqueness is always covered by all the labels that are been slapped on.” This shows the central idea of my lyrical essay the most, for it conveys the feeling that people might feel when they are been restrained within the frames named “this is what you should be” setted up by others around them. Since the main focus of the essay was on asian immigrants, I went to Chinatown for photographing. In the photo, the stairs are all painted with different color and different Chinese food names. It’s rather symbolic, for those names are what many people think of when mentioning Chinese food and the many other aspects that could be contained within this topic will often be ignored.