ABOUT

Why This Website Exists

[ About this Project ]

Crossculturalkid.neocities.org was created in order to spread awareness about Cross-Cultural Kids (CCKs) and to support them by providing a place where they can read CCK stories and feel a sense of community with others who have had similar experiences. Additionally, I want to help normalize CCK stories so that people become more culturally sensitive and accepting when interacting with diverse people.

This website is a project for a senior capstone class regarding digital narratives. The research as well as website design and development were done by an individual in one semester. The information presented has been collected from multiple sources including those listed in the Resources page as well as one-on-one interviews with the project creator. Each entry on the Stories page were experiences that voluntary interviewees contributed and consented for their information to be shared publicly for this project.

[ About the Author ]

A debutante ball (or "cotillion") is a Filipino tradition
that celebrates a girl's coming of age (her 18th birthday).
This picture is from my debut party in 2019.

Hi! My name is Giselle, and I am a fourth-year student at the University of Pittsburgh majoring in Digital Narrative & Interactive Design (DNID), which includes but is not limited to studying storytelling in digital and interactive narratives along with learning technical programming and user design skills.

My parents and sister immigrated to the United States from the Philippines before I was born, so I am Filipino-American, and I identify as a Cross-Cultural Kid. Although I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood, the Filipino community in the greater area gathered multiple times a year to celebrate our heritage and traditions. With my parents teaching me about our culture, I was able to have a childhood in touch with my cultural background while growing up in the States. However, I did not learn Tagalog (one of the Filipino languages) and also do not have experiences growing up in the Philippines. Having this divide between my cultures as a kid made me feel proud to be different but isolated in feeling “not Filipino enough” or “not American enough” for each community in which I partook.

Although I began to accept that my own experience makes me who I am, it was not until I learned about Cross-Cultural Kids that I finally had a name for it—this opened me to learning about other people’s stories, which made me feel less alone in my thoughts and feelings regarding cultural identity. This project is an opportunity to bring that small sense of belonging to other Cross-Cultural Kids and hopefully strengthen the CCK community around the world.