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By Various Storytellers for Unbound Visual Arts
August 12, 2020
This is the first in a two part storyteller series as part of the New Narratives: Reclaiming Asian Identity Through Story through Unbound Visual Arts. The series was curated by Leslie Anne Condon in partnership with the Asian American Resource Workshop. New Narratives and can be viewed in its entirety at unboundvisualarts.org. Enjoy!
Amy Pollard - A poem for lost daughters
My mother never
taught me to cook dumplings
to place each wrapper on parchment,
dropping spoonfuls of filling
asserting place belonging
texture and flavor
i never saw her negotiate the folds
of each wrapper, dampening the edges
with water,
sealing each child shut
was it love
on the tip of my tongue
or garlic--uprooted and raw
as i imagined a woman who needed
me until she didn’t
who clutched, then let go
a woman who never taught me
to steam fry boil
to leave everything you love
in the water
there are many names for hunger
and my body knows them all
a nation lives within me, split open
never satisfied
its daughters wrapped,
left in baskets
i never saw my mother
hunched over the stove, stirring,
even as the dumplings drifted away,
longing to hold them in her hands
and know their warmth
Maria Fong - "Sorting Through" zine preview
Mookie - Whose Lives Matter? A Spoken Word to Sister America
kathy wu - chinatown (a thousand migrations)
many migrations (work in progress), 2020
embroidery design on cotton apron shirt
in the early days of
new york's chinatown
women coalesced into
a garment district
a labor movement
fast yellow hands forming
shapes that became metaphor
>
darting needle, dancing thread
the easier sewn bundles
sih yauh gai,
could earn you more—
steam-press a dress
a young woman can wear
while falling in love
>
my parents came to america
later that century
master’s degrees tucked into crisp shirts alongside
white colleagues—
my mother wove capacitors and diodes into green schematics
so that electricity speaks to itself
in the palm of your hand
>
our chinglish stitches
hyphenate space
between powerpoints
and pork feet at the super 88
i learned to sew,
after four years of family-paid
private arts education
writing english poetry about
how fast bamboo grows—
a childhood memory so foreign to me
i am a tourist within it >
i only know how swiftly
luxury condos materialize—
entire groves, several feet a day
a force to be reckoned with
a magnet for trust-fund whites and
crazy rich chinese
as trade war makes headlines >
fabric taught me namelessness
the ways some people are artists
and others workers
needle taught me how two sides holding together with tension
can almost create the shape of a story >
no one is surprised to see
slanted eyes in corporate america
yellowness weaves
convenient allegiance across lines—
professionals with macbooks extract capital from silicon pockets,
are also the adopted daughter
of a manhattan shopkeeper
placing her hand on my shoulder—
a touch that feels familiar >
ni de lao jia zai naer? >
"my mom is from anhui—” >
extra bag is free, she insists
we are kin now, and in chinese
"home" and "family"
are the same sound >
over and under—
yi shang yi xia—
hide stitch, cut thread
remembering a thousand migrations
that aren't one's own
Michael A. Rosegrant - Faces Like My Friends Were All Over the Food I Ate
Christine Hiu-Tung Chen - What the Girl in the Red Quilted Jacket Remembers
A black and white photo of a little girl with chubby cheeks in a quilted winter jacket, a frown in the forehead, a lower pouting lip, in the arms of Grandpa wearing a Mao suit and a stern stare. Behind them, the brick columns of a balcony, a cloudy sky. Below them, the chanting of the people “Long Live Chairman Mao! Long Live Chairman Mao!”
A sea of gray uniforms, arms brandishing the Red Book, the marching pounding the ground. The smell of gasoline, the smoke that made her cough and stung her eyes, and her mother, shuffling between the bedroom and the furnace, carrying papers and books to throw into the flames. The flames licking the worn copy of Tales of the Monkey King, her mother’s teary face, Grandma in a corner of the room, trembling in the dark.
Hundreds of sparrows in the sky, a raven cawing in the distance. Her mother gripping her shoulders at the procession, the sudden cold and moist palm of her mother on her eyelids, the angry mob, the collective gasp as the first piece of garbage was hurled, the smell of rotten eggs at their feet, the Red Guards shouting “Death to the Bourgeois!”
The empty seat at the dinner table, Grandma and her mother voices stumbling in unison over the carefully crafted characters of the father’s letter from America, bowls of noodles untouched. She, in the red quilted jacket, holding her breath. A concerted sigh of relief as the mother repeated the lines of the visa approval over and over again, as if hope was impossible to bear in silence.
Grandpa on his bicycle, sliding down the cobblestone street on Nanjing road, right up to the front door where she was waiting for him, the chewy candy wrapped in a rice paper he would pull out from the right breast pocket of his gray jacket, the melting of the rice paper on her tongue, the laughter of Grandpa, the sweetness of the milk candy on her tongue, a moment lost in the chaos of time.
August 14th there will be a Storyteller Roundtable Discussion including short readings by a few storytellers and an in-depth discussion with Q&A facilitated by the Asian American Resource Workshop.
The storyteller panelists include Kathy Wu, Amy Pollard, Michael Rosegrant, Maria Fong, and Adi Nochur of Subcontinental Drift, Boston.