The Dialogue with the Dead Cannot Stop Until They Hand Over the Future that has been Buried with Them. — Heiner Müller

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China, Chinese Bone Repatriation, death, Derrida, George Steiner, Home, immigration, migration, philosophy, Summer Mei Ling Lee, Takeyoshi Nishiuchi, Toisan, travel

I am not ready to talk about their immigrant bones, or the difficult stories that each bone box tells. And besides, most are missing, disappeared on the wayward routes returning home, displaced even after death. Or they are in almost-forgotten fields marked by stones that don’t hold names anymore, nonetheless narratives. Sometimes just numbers, sometimes just the memory held by someone’s grandson who saw him bury them over there under there somewhere. And in there could have been my non-existence. As we peered into one unearthed bone urn, the top exposed to the sky cracked open by neglect, he said, there is the way into the underworld.

I need to listen.

I am aware that each word here is an act of listening, opening a new space for the next word. And of my failings of projections and memory and desire and convention, so that some words spill out overwhelmed by chatter and are already dead. Listening, like love, comprises a reverberation between self and other, where words and acts seem to fall out gracefully and illuminated and are received as a welcomed guest.

“It takes two freedoms to make one.”

Even if my grandmother has been gone for twenty years, she speaks to me in a certain way. When she was here she couldn’t explain anything about her childhood or her crossing to the United States, except that she had a favorite brother who died young, she didn’t know how.

By dint of so many unlikely arrangements to explain here, she brought me last week to a 700 year-old village in southern China. A group of villagers greeted me with their own generous hospitality to take what evidence I had and prove it was her home. Easily, she could’ve been from a village destroyed long ago, or one where no one could help. Instead, she knew somehow. What they wanted of her to want of me to know. So I could sit in front of her burned brick house with the gift of her brother in a bone box of a suitcase I brought from his grave in Chicago. So I could witness as nothing and everything took place. I had given nothing. In a long string of no’s, I just had to say yes.

(detail from Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, Prado)

They asked me if it felt like my homecoming, and it didn’t. I don’t belong there in any way, or really anywhere these days.  For now, I feel I belong to her retreating voice hurled through different time zones. Or when my sons resign their sleepy bodies near mine. It wasn’t my homecoming but it was his, and hers to give him. At the modest home’s ancestral altar, she had returned her sweet, young brother to where he had just left months before he died, at age 21. He knew of no other home. Even if that year was 1924, it was last week.

In that moment of offering inside my grandmother’s childhood home, and earlier on that slave mountain where we hiked for hours with that suitcase to their humble tombs, I asked about home. The calls of the flightless geese from the farms surrounding the village were deafening. Eventually, I understood that he belongs with my grandmother on her mountain overlooking this ocean. Some migrations are irreversible.

There is a lot of fear in listening, of unanswerability, of surrendering to silences too long to bear. In her words, it is the absence that the child can tolerate from the mother and no longer. It wants to choose a withdrawal into a security rather than the uncertainty of new countries, new losses, a new home. Maybe in those spaces created by fear is where unhousedness began, because security is a delusion we need to rest in.  The beginning lines of a tragedy. But a great awakening is at the bottom of a tragic flaw. Tragedy reminds us of our human dignity, opening us up to all possibilities, whereas fear has us only hear what we don’t want.

In southern China where my grandmother is from, more people have left than live there today. Thousands of years ago, her earliest Han ancestors brought their family bones when they migrated from the north to the south. Still now they practice a second burial tradition, where years after the first funeral, bones are cleaned and moved to an ancestral tomb. During the first waves of overseas immigration, arduous arrangements were made for those who died abroad to have their bones returned to their ancestral villages, tens of thousands of bone boxes crossing oceans and borders. But then history changed and almost all of the bones don’t come back anymore. Some I visited are stuck in transit and have been for a hundred years. The odds they will go back to their ancestral homes are near-impossible, but they are a living-dead memorial that continues to cry out for all of us, I want to go home.

(Bone boxes in Tung Wah Coffin Home, Hong Kong, awaiting repatriation.)

So I can forgive those who won’t go, won’t listen, whether they immigrate or not. They don’t go, because maybe the risk is just too much unknown, too much disappointment, the fear that some pain is bigger than us. The greater the connection, the greater the vulnerability when it becomes absent. When I think of moments when I didn’t think I would survive, I remember the scary way my son was brought into the world, when I wanted to be nowhere near what I was experiencing. After losing a lot of blood, I asked my mom to not let me cross over. I discovered then that the over there is so close. Even though I bore it, it was too much to bear.

An angel appeared soon after and spent time with me.

I expected she would say, oh stop, you weren’t even close to going over.

Instead she said, you were close to there, and you could have gone over. But, she added, I know you would have returned. It wasn’t your time. And it shifted something and the nightmares ended, but I understood. We all have our mundane annunciations.

“The wisdom of love is that it isn’t always safe but it is always truthful.”

All of them, alive or in bone boxes, are telling me stories of un-home and home, and underwriting my own restless search for one. Home is certainly not in these small houses of cautionary being, toppled by each new intrusion of life. If so, my sons would not be here. I wouldn’t be here either, along with all the moments when immense gratitude and beauty overwhelmed me. Home seems to transmute from the relentless feeling of loneliness and displacement. Nathan said maybe we hover home, and reminded me that home, if it exists, enters only in the here and now and leaves. And it does seem to be a here of reception and not fear, even if the guest turns despotic or worse. “But without the gamble on welcome, no door can be opened when freedom knocks.”

Who knows what I will hear next.

In leaving China back to my temporary un-home, I followed her original route over an uncertain ocean. And I could imagine their bone boxes passing, going the other way. They pass by me, holding things I realized I had also lost, maybe continually losing as I keep living, and they are returning to the spaces I just left.

The same man who taught me most directly about tragedy, and therefore the beautiful fragility of presence, gave me a life-long address for this route: In welcoming a guest, you have found your home.

“Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.” — Derrida

Dai Wan Village cemetery, Toisan.

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“Already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.” Rilke

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art, China, death, immigration, nature, Rilke, Summer Mei Ling Lee

In the thicket of wild and obscure feelings, I want to have faith in the art of incantation.  Because I can’t but darken and over-organize the more luminous and playful energies in the inward privacy of a mind, I had stopped for so long.

But now there is so much uncertainty to invite me here.

The first impulse is to eulogize the land. To grieve the coastal mountains where I have lived all my life, now overlooking a sea-change, with only hazy constellations to navigate by.

Then the birds of my neighborhood, who will feed them now? Who will notice when Fox Sparrow arrives in the fall and leaves in the spring? Who will extoll how perilous and brave he is?

And then there are all my life-long loved ones…. And the ones who love my sons. The ones like me who don’t migrate and never have.

A few weeks ago, I was deep in the grand-mother land, under the green mountains jutting up like crowded tombstones in the fog of familiarly foreign languages. On one clear day I asked her about the lightening and thunder, and she said no, they are bombing the mountains to make way for roads.

I watched the locals prepare for Ching Ming, as I headed home. How it is that the snap of fireworks can cleanse the space of the afterlife. And yet the ways we keep the never-aging dead here with us. Along a new freeway — more of a battlefield than a road — I passed one ancient mountain where erosion had stripped the earth except for one gravestone. The simple tomb seemingly held up the core of stone and dirt and history. And the other unworldly mountains looked on and agreed. We had floated through those sentinels of ancient ink paintings on bamboo rafts. Our handsome raft-man says his family goes back 1500 years to that village, where now he can no longer survive on our one fare. So we helped him carry the raft upstream, and he let me miserably try to pole us as he so elegantly could. But I kept driving us into the riverbank where a lone woman kneeled among the rows of radishes over several lifetimes.

And they would apologize for being simple peasants, their words. And I begged them to know we dream their life. Except I know ours somehow has a deeper horizon — however unchartered, un-ventured and never satisfied. And our pastime of theorizing choices and opportunities when their doors open to another dark courtyard where the chickens scratch. But I sat by her fire and heard the pond language of traveling spring water and ate the fish they just took from there. All while the crickets and stranger frogs hummed oddities. I could place her here in my mind, like how one copes with an untouchable lover on a far-off continent. There I felt a new loneliness that lurked behind me in the bamboo forest, like a luxurious hotel room with no one to share the ache. And it has followed me home.

Because in the same day, I was driving down the street of my childhood home, firmly in an Americana that is iconic and unoriginal and unmoving. The same home that bore an insulated, however splintered child that never moved 30 miles from her birthplace. I arrived on that self-same street not by miracle of imagination but by dint of modernity and privilege and luck and post-human transportation and time changes. There are no words to describe that kind of return.

I cannot also romanticize that grand-mother-land — she is my fleeting sight of the glowing pheasant bird heralded in those ink paintings, digging through garbage behind the hastily-restored Great Wall.

Here is my love of grassy and vegetal air rising off the coastal scrub above the rough surf. The cliffs off which people much braver than I, with only fabric and string faith, jump into those circling updrafts. Here also are the voices of people droning on about sniveling inannities. Trying to escape from their own aching hotel rooms of life, like me.

Her migration was epic like Fox Sparrow’s. Not like ours to a new state. Maybe it is her cells flowing through me, carrying the trauma of torn roots that makes me feel otherwise. She came from so far to be buried here, now part of my mountain over this ocean, not one of those over his river. And I don’t want to go. God please don’t make me go. And I will go. I know and forget that all these minor heartbreaks are good practice for the final one, whichever mountain it will be.

(That fish.)

“Song leads us home to where we have not yet been.” — George Steiner

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ancestry, art, birds, China, George Steiner birds, music

As the intensity of morning light increases, it signals to different species of birds when to start their morning song. Each bird is prompted to sing by its own special light.

When I visited China, I had in hand my grandmothers INS interrogation which detailed the few belongings they had in hand when they left China, as well as the several dead, young and old, they were leaving behind. In it, she also recounted a gold ring her father had brought to her from America that she lost. I would inherit this reminder of impossible frugality like a mistaken familiar voice in a crowd. As my own trip wore on, I was accumulating breastmilk that I pumped every few hours for relief, but also so that I could return home to nurse my child.

After dumping a heartbreaking amount of milk in China, I persevered the survival of a small frozen stash of milk through five cities (via ferries, taxis, subways, three domestic planes, and a train, all between four separate hotels) and finally across the Pacific ocean home.

(Photo of pouring my breastmilk off the Great Wall of China, 2014. Summer Lee)

This trip symbolized the means of how an artwork based on my grandmother would come to be exhibited in the region where she was born. And soon, it will enter the permanent collection of that museum, as if I were the unwitting intermediary to repatriate her bones.

Several years ago, I was contacted for a potential exhibit at a university a few hours from my home, a show which took years to come to fruition. Finally this last week, during the same time my grandmother’s piece is in China, the show opened, and one of the paintings chosen for this exhibit is a watercolor of my grandmother’s husband, my grandfather, who was born in the same unlikely town of Stockton, where the university exhibit is located.

I don’t know if birds have homes, but I imagine they are more at home in the state of homelessness than I am, singing on account of the light, as much location.  In this winter of coincidental homecomings for my grandparents, I have become unhoused at the bird feeder of my yard. After so many years, a grasshopper sparrow, a spritely, smaller-sized, streaked sparrow, who was committed to my feeder winter after winter, has not returned. I will never know why, and I have no bones of his to return, nor an understanding of where his song might be.

This dawn chorus is ever a changing one.

(Photo taken by my friend, of where the restored Great Wall meets the ancient wall, 2014)

“Trust is the initial condition for gifting, even being open to betrayal. We are governed by normalities but that needs to fail, or let be failed. Art encourages us to go outside that safety of normality.” — Takeyoshi Nishiuchi

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art, China, Museum, Shenzhen, Summer Lee, The Realm of the Heart, travel, Zhu Yiyong

 

I am accustomed to a certain sinking kind of defeat after my art goes up in an exhibition. A colleague of mine who has exhibited far and wide told me that after every show he cries a little, then gets back to the studio to make more.

There is, of course, always the sense of falling short of art’s potential, always. But there are the inevitable dysfunctions of gallery spaces and the people surrounding them. Work returned damaged. Being forced to use a gallery’s caterer who egregiously upcharged for cheese and wine.

In this case, several instances coalesced into an impending collapse. I had travelled so far and so expensively, leaving my new baby boy at home for several days. The young and frenetic museum installers botched the frame around my piece. My installation room was in an unintuitively-accessed corner of the building. During the media presentation, I almost tripped over the cardboard box from my piece, abandoned on the floor of the hallway like a turd.

It could have been the jetlag, the nagging pumping of breastmilk, or the moment when my hometown curator hung her head and expressed regret that I didn’t push for more of my work to be included. It also could have been that the first greeting I received at the media opening was from a “famous” artist who didn’t pause to convey her surprise at how I didn’t look Chinese because my nose was so big. I was sent back to a six-year old self in the face of “What are you?”‘s from adult strangers trying to piece together my fair mother and my dark appearance.

 

(The Realm of the Heart no. 1, by Zhu Yiyong. Oil on Canvas. 2013)

The weight of failure contributed to me being a few minutes late to what was a spectacularly surreal, over-funded opening ceremony. Apparently, in this area of the world, it is commonplace at museum openings to hold an event where a gorgeously coiffed talk-show host emcee’s a number of speeches and trophy awards (trophies and cash awards for best art in show!) with video acceptance speeches, complete with music to fill in the pauses like I’ve only seen on the Academy Awards. Lots of speeches are made (in my ignorance of Mandarin, I understood nothing), dignitaries are noted, ribbons are cut, pictures are taken, and then more pictures are taken — then everyone watches a very serious, too-long performance-art piece of young people in tights wrapping themselves in string — all before entering the otherwise beautiful museum space.

Like the one to be picked last for a dodge ball team at recess, I stayed behind.

As my friends and I posed for our own photos on the deserted stage, my curator found me and said a journalist wanted to interview me. She advised me to grant the interview since it was for the area’s biggest paper, and the curator would help interpret into English. After the journalist’s initial questions of whys and whats and my half-hearted responses, I finally admitted that artists should not talk about their work. That my job is to set the initial conditions for the art to enter, but the more I talk about it, the more I destroy those conditions. She seemed to agree. But her assistant still asked, did I mean for the lantern to reference the historical Chinese lantern? This time, I turned the question back to her, and she said, yes, very much it does. I said, good. Sensing her initial exuberance fading into dissatisfaction, I then asked the journalist to tell me what she made of the art piece, why she wanted to ask me about it in the first place. She paused. Then spoke as if thinking aloud. My curator slowed down her interpretation, it felt in order to represent her sentiment with an impossible exactitude. She uttered, “When I held up the light to the piece and discovered that I was participating in the picture’s disappearance, I felt something miraculous occur.”

(The Realm of the Heart no. 12, by Zhu Yiyong. Oil on Canvas. 2013)

Her words fell out so elegantly like a poem and I began to weep. I still weep when I think about her earnestness, her gift. I apologized for my helpless tears, and told her it had been a very long day. She said her day had been very long too, traveling to the museum from Guangzhou, but that my piece had made it worthwhile. I then saw that the curator’s eyes were full of tears, too. Fumbling and raw, I explained to her that after a hard day, she had very simply reminded me that this is about art. That she had in some way restored my faith in art.

I turned away, now embarrassed that I would have to let the rawness drain out in order for it to dry up. And I let my curator friend continue a discussion with her in their language. Eventually, she asked for some photos of the work, so we walked towards the museum where we were denied entrance because of the yet to be finished performance piece. We took a detour through the mezzanine of the museum yard, when suddenly an egret floated by, crossing over us so strangely. And to my friend, I quietly said, hi Grandma.

“It’s better to be neglected.” — Xu Tan (One of China’s most famous artists), to me, as we left the museum opening.