> By [Shark](https://cohost.org/sharksonaplane?page=0)! Venba is worth buying for many reasons. The recipes are great and the soundtrack is awesome. The cooking mechanics are very fun (it doesn't hurt that I know enough about South Asian cooking to be able to figure it out without too much guesswork). For those who aren't familiar with diaspora stories, or with only their own diaspora stories, it's an important game to help learn about a common thing that happens in many diasporas. For those whose story is reflected in it, it's representation. If you are represented in any of the demographics I just mentioned above, please stop reading here, for your good and mine. --- I separated those groups out because most don't have the nuance for this so I'm just gonna block them when they try to talk about it, and for those whom this is their story I'm just going to hurt their feelings. I know the dev based a lot of it on their own story and that's important and I'm not disputing their truth. I'm also not addressing adopted diaspora kids' issues here because that's a whole other, extremely complex and nuanced situation that I know nothing about and do not want to make claims about over the voices of people with lived experience. (Mild Venba spoilers at the end of this post) but, and I'm so sorry, for the rest of us the story is truly mid. DAMMIT I am so SICK of content that makes it seem like we are all ashamed of who we are and we will never understand our culture until it's too late and we can never connect authentically to our parents who sacrificed so much for us until Tragedy Strikes and we are powerless to prevent our assimilation as kids and BLAH BLAH BLAH. When there is ever another same-generation kid who doesn't assimilate in these stories, it's someone who's newly immigrated and they're usually cast as the antagonist because they Just Don't Understand (Until They Get Discriminated). It happens, yes, all of it, way too often. It fucking sucks when it does. These things are very real. But these stories always frame it as an inevitable thing to which there are no alternatives (other than maybe being called names which of COURSE is an unimaginable thing to have to go through _eyeroll_). And THAT is just not true. You CAN keep the name your parents give you and still thrive in school. You CAN re-form relationships with your parents once you know yourself better. You CAN keep your language and the foods you love while still trying new things. And if you do lose your language, you CAN learn it back, yes, WHENEVER YOU WANT. Now more than ever! Even if you were born in the diaspora! You can even do them if you don't have a big diaspora community around you! I have done all these things!* (*don't let the handle fool you, I have never gone by an English name offline) But here's the kicker: Are any of these things easy? No. I've dealt with plenty of racist micro- and macroaggressions over the years. But that doesn't mean those things aren't worth doing. Despite my experiences, I've never regretted keeping my name in my offline life. I've never regretted taking my language back (even after a skeezy guy taught me that sometimes it really is your own people). With my name, my skin, my face, I will never be white enough for them. AND: that's great because I don't need or want to be! What I have gained from relearning and reconnecting to my language, my family, my food, my culture is worth far more to me, my family, and my community than the vapid toxin that is assimilated whiteness. When you are surrounded by people who will always see you as alien, emptying yourself for them will only ever leave you hollow. The biggest lie is that you "have to grow up" before you realize this. I started on this path when I was 12! Whatever age you want to do this at, you can! (And if you did grow up before you realized this, that is great and you are great, it is the belief that it can _only_ be learned as an adult that is not great.) I think for many of my fellow diaspora children, especially those who were able to reap the benefits of assimilating in school (those "benefits" being conditional adjacency to whiteness), it is easier to create a Great Tragic Story around our cultural insecurities than it is to do something real about them. For example, I often meet/make friends with people online who want to learn/relearn Vietnamese. As someone who has been a language teacher and has relearned my own Vietnamese, I always offer to help them (for free!). Nobody ever takes me up on it, not even perfunctorily. And I still have plenty to learn myself so I'm not even coming from an inaccessibly high level with it. I acknowledge that my family had many privileges that allowed me to choose the path I did, a big one of which is the freedom and safety for them to be who they are. I know not everyone has access to that and that there are systemic barriers blocking people from their birthrights, people who would love for their biggest barrier to be "what if kids made fun of me at school". But nobody wants to tell stories like that, or stories like mine. Because they're not easy. And those who took the "easier" path would then have to contend with the fact that they emptied themselves out for nothing, or less than nothing. And yet for some reason, they get to have their Great Tragic Stories and we, the ones who did not give up who we are and who actually went through all the shit they were afraid of, aren't allowed to be bitter about not being represented. Venba spoilers I guess but: by having Kavin as the only character of his culture from his generation, there is a sort of implication that he "had" to go through whiteness in order to finally understand his parents; that there was no way he could have done what his mother wanted and still succeeded in life; that his desire for whiteness was somehow "necessary" for him to achieve what his parents wanted for him in staying there in the first place. I hope I'm wrong about this but from what I've seen it feels like people who don't know diaspora culture saw his assimilation as "tragic but inevitable" or whatever. Idk I wanted to slap him three times across the face (once he was an adult of course). Again, as a game, it's good, and I wasn't lying when I said it's worth buying. And for all I've said about the story,, in the end it belongs to the dev and it's fine. It was well-written and I did cry (just not for that punk Kavin). I just wish there were more stories out there, different ones. Maybe if there were more stories like mine, future Kavins would be able to see another way.