INFO
| Name | From Me to You |
| Year | 2021 |
| Writer(s) | Sochetha Meng |
| Type of Text | Zine |
| Artform | Zines |
| City | Pōneke Wellington |
ABOUT
From Me to You is a 3-part zine series by Cambodian New Zealand designer, Sochetha Meng, released in 2021. Titled The Past, The Present and The Future, each zine tackles a different temporal space and the subsequent effects of migration — from Meng’s parent’s migrating to Aotearoa after the unsettled landscape post-Khmer Rouge Regime (The Past), to the present point of Meng as a second-generation immigrant (The Present), to Meng’s imagined future for Asian-New Zealand diasporic communities (The Future). Meng describes the series as a “care package”, hoping for the zines to provide comfort for young Asian migrants living in Aotearoa.
The idea was born out of Meng’s feelings of isolation during COVID-19 lockdowns — unable to visit her parents or family in Cambodia, Meng wanted to find a way to both vent these feelings and normalise the experiences of migrant diasporic communities:
From Me to You uses both Khmer script and English, recording the stories of Meng and her family through a range of creative mediums; poetry, anecdotes, personal histories, collage and paintings are threaded throughout the zine. Collage is particularly used to manifest feelings of cultural liminality — in The Present images of Meng as a child are overlaid on a background of both Cambodian and New Zealand fabrics, landscapes and cultural animals. The cover of each zine features traditional Cambodian textual patterns.
From Me to You is sold in both Aotearoa and Cambodia, with all proceeds going to the Raksa Koma Foundation.
