CLEMENT CHU

President, Canadian Chinese Youth Athletic Association

SPENT TIME WITH MY WIFE, YOLANDA AND MY DAUGHTER, MADDIE

“Praying is not about asking; it’s about listening. It is just opening your eyes to see what was there all along”

— Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

In 1995, the Canadian Chinese Youth Athletic Association (CCYAA) sought to provide opportunities for youth in our community to stay active and have pride in their heritage. Since then, 2019 was a peak year highlighted by the Raptors' NBA Championship which inspired the thousands of youths in our basketball programs. We worked with Marvel actor Simu Liu to launch a platform aimed at advocacy for Asian culture by hosting 20 celebrities to raise funds and awareness for the Jeremy Lin Foundation.

Then this year, we were impacted by the virus that was reportedly circulating in China, which at first felt very foreign to our day-today. It wasn’t until we began executing Chinese New Year events with the Raptors that we started to hear, “is a bunch of Chinese people together in a public venue a good idea?” Fast forward to May 25 with the murder of George Floyd when we, as Asian Canadians, had to ask ourselves what our role should be as part of the Black Lives Matter movement.

These unprecedented times have taught me that no issue is too foreign, and that health, both mental and physical, need reprioritization. The threats have always existed, and this period has inspired us to treat others with more thoughtfulness, invest in our local communities and build vigilance against problems that we might have been complacent about in the past.