THE CAKE
ABOUT THE ANIMATION
THE BACKSTORY
“A month and a day after we arrive in America, she turns 45. She asks my father for one thing – a deodorant.”
As I approach my mother’s age when she first arrived in America, with me in tow, I can’t help but think how different our reality was from what we expected. We needed no English to quickly learn that poverty was difficult to escape for those who arrive with nothing.
Even as a kid, it didn’t take long for me to discover that what seemed like a good idea could quickly turn sour. In the end, this is a story about my mother coming to America and trying hard to find small bits of joy for me, her 13-year-old daughter.
–Mimi Chakarova
MEET THE ARTIST
Theint Soe (Cynthia,) a 2020 Visual Arts grantee for the “Still I Rise” series, worked on this animated story for nine months. She began to draw the characters while living in Los Angeles and eventually completed the animation for “The Cake” after she returned to her native Burma.
Similar to Chakarova’s story, featured in The Cake, Theint Soe’s own family came to America when she was ten. “We took several planes… spent two days traveling to New York. We arrived on a cold and gloomy night. On the way to our apartment, I rolled down the car window to smell the fresh air but instead inhaled the odor of trash and dead fish. When we turned on the lights to enter our new place in Queens, cockroaches scattered.
I felt deceived by all the great stories I heard about America. Now, I understand I’m not alone – the cockroaches, the isolation, the desperation of finding joy in the Happy Meals I shared with my father – is the life of many immigrants.”
