What happens when you finally say “I love you”—and the response is silence, or sliced fruit instead of words?

In this deeply resonant episode of Embracing All of Me, Chinese Canadian spoken word artist and storyteller Anto Chan invites us into that exact moment.

Recounting the first time he told his mother he loved her, Anto shares how her response—quietly slicing pears—revealed a generational gap in love language shaped by culture, survival, and unspoken grief. “I had to breathe through that moment,” host Ross Victory reflects, naming what so many feel but rarely say.

Anto’s work lives in that tension: between longing and restraint, visibility and erasure, pain and humor. Through comedy, poetry, and performance, he transforms intergenerational trauma into something shareable—and survivable. “Art isn’t just something we make,” Anto says. “It’s our mentor.” His creativity often runs “four or five years ahead” of his healing, leaving breadcrumbs for his future self.

The conversation moves fluidly through masculinity, queerness, addiction, and the weight of the “model minority” myth—especially for Asian diasporic communities taught not to ruffle feathers. Anto names how suppression fractures the nervous system, and how vulnerability onstage becomes a radical act of self-reunion: revisiting the child who learned to survive by shrinking, pleasing, or performing.

For bi+ people of color navigating inherited silence and chosen expansiveness, this episode is both mirror and invitation. Anto reminds us that courage isn’t loud—it’s aligned. And sometimes, healing begins when we let our art speak before we know how.

Listen to the full episode to hear how grief becomes comedy, and how love—spoken or sliced—can still transform us.