'My family inspires a lot of my ideas for TikToks. Just watching them helps me generate ideas'
Isabel Kanaan, an actor and content creator, came to Canada from the Philippines with her family in 2008, when she was 16 years old.
“We moved in the summer of 2008. I remember being on the plane pretending to sleep under a blanket while I cried. It was slowly sinking in that the life I’d lived, the friends I’d made and the dreams of the future that I had hoped for in the Philippines, would be gone forever. When I came to Canada, life didn’t feel real. I experienced such a culture shock. At first, my relatives told us not to tell people we were Filipino because they thought we’d face discrimination.
“After I graduated from high school, I went to York University to study math and become a teacher. When I had only one year to go, I realized that it just wasn’t for me. I started to meet people who graduated with a teaching degree who were finding it difficult to find employment. I thought,