Kate Bradshaw

_{Skateboarder Kat Sy pauses at the top of a ramp at the Foster City Skate Park. The Foster City resident is featured in a new short film documenting her life through her love of skateboarding as she graduated college. Photo by Magali Gauthier.}

New film shares Foster City woman’s experience as a queer Asian American skateboarder 

By Kate Bradshaw

May 12, 2022

On a recent Monday at the Foster City Skate Park, Kat Sy stood out in her witch-like pointed bucket hat and joke T-shirt reading “I lost my virginity at Shen Yun.” Riding around concrete obstacles at lunchtime, she was the only female skateboarder there, something she’s gotten used to over the past 17 years of skateboarding.

“For me to stick with it this long, I’ve really adopted a full ‘I don’t care’ attitude,” she says. “I don’t feel like I need to prove myself to anyone or even respond to people who are talking to me or soliciting me.” 

Sy, a Foster City native and current resident who works as a software engineer at LinkedIn in Mountain View, is part of the skateboarding collective Unity, co-founded by Oakland-based artist Jeffrey Cheung and Gabriel Ramirez in 2017. The collective aims to make skateboarding more accessible for the LGBTQ community and has a skate team associated with it. Cheung and others on the team also curate and design the art associated with their skate brand, There, which has a whimsical, colorful and body-positive sketch-based aesthetic style. 

Sy’s experiences as a queer Asian American female skateboarder are being highlighted in a short film being shown at the Center for Asian American Media’s 40th CAAMFest now through May 22. “Crashing Wheels on Concrete,” by filmmaker So Young Shelly Yo, follows the ups and downs of Sy’s life through her love of skateboarding as she graduates from college and takes on the challenges of adulthood. 

Full story here.