Extra(ordinary)

Prompt: what is (extra)ordinary about your grandmother? write a 3-stanza prose poem of max. 18 lines per stanza. writing in columns is encouraged. each of the 3 stanzas should tell a story about your (extra)ordinary grandmother.

1.
After a lifetime of service you remain completely
selfless. Perhaps selflessness became a habit for you,
like breathing, folding the summer clothes that I let fall
carelessly strewn about on the floor, or heating congee and
eggs on the stove before anyone else wakes. That morning when
you left for the market and returned, carrying a ripe watermelon in
thin papery arms and a proud smile, mother scolded you
gently, firmly. 都这么大年纪了, people will think we don’t take
care of you. The dangers outweigh your love for us.
And I said nothing, because I was supposed to rise
before dawn and go with you, but I failed you. It would have been
too heavy for me to carry anyway.

2.
You raised me, that much I know, but did you ever mention
those who came before me? My uncle and aunt you dragged to
adulthood in 河南, through the Cultural Revolution. Then came my mother,
the youngest daughter to be lumped with the next generation of
first grandchildren. Who had time for stories then, when the women
warriors fought with butcher knifes and sewing machines to
feed and clothe the extra children who they never expected to come
but took in anyway. Grown, they scatter to better things in the wide
expanse of the great world—America, 美国, beautiful country.
Back then, who had time to sit and rest,
or think of anything but survival?

3.
You were at peace with the idea of dying, or so I believed.
My answer to your rhetorical questions of 姥姥还能活几年？
was always 万岁, ten thousand years, a phrase I must have picked up from
TV dramas featuring imperial China, with emperors who demanded
eternal life and glory from their subjects and God, these warrior men who
could not face their mortality. And I (foolish imaginative child I was) believed
that you, with your wondrous stories and wise freckled skin that never grew
more ancient than it already was, would defy time’s passing.
and the world would stop here with me,
the youngest and last granddaughter of this generation.

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Some comments on form--

I love free verse poetry. When given no guidelines, it's the form that I default to, hence the form I feel the most comfortable with. Because there are no rules for rhyming or number of syllables, I have the freedom to craft my own sentences. Not that I don't pay attention to how the words are arranged or how the syllables sound--I tend to turn the sentences over in my head until they make sense and sound natural to me. But maybe what sounds natural to me isn't necessarily clear to others, or purposefully unclear. I know that there are still many elements of free verse that I need to refine in my writing, like the intentionality of line placement and word choice. But for now, it remains my favorite poetry form because it liberates me from restrictions.

My writing professor said that when students ask him if they have what it takes to be a writer, he asks them if they like sentences. If you don't have a passion for sentences, then the joy of writing is lost. Interesting theory. (at least I can say that I do like sentences and don't find the question strange.)

Cavities

At this particular moment I believe that perhaps the fatal difference between real life and artistic representation is thus: In real life, struggle is agonizing and draining and ugly. But life spawns art. And in art, struggle is still painful, perhaps more so, yet emotionally cathartic and moving--therefore beautiful.

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Cavities

After putting the goggles on, I become like
an obedient young scientist awaiting dissection—
the eye of a cow or worse, cat carcasses, trembling with tools in hand and
avoiding her lab partner’s confident gaze

instead it is she who does the science
to me, it seemed more like destruction
drills whirling in the deep cave shaving off pieces (you never
know when you're strapped to the chair and gaping like a fish)
then construction, the molding of pearly gates in darkness
and the wads of cotton lay passively under all this
to soak it all up

she tells me to think of distractions when I’m
squirming because the cotton has slid from
under my tongue when I think too much of
silence and numbness and the tools spitting out water light and air

after it is all over I run my tongue across the geography
of everything to make sure what I can’t feel still exists
despite the numbness and the persistent feeling that the flesh that was
once so familiar was not, and has never been mine.

-from a half drugged and numb Heidi after a trip to the dentist for fillings

it was an old theme even for me:/language cannot do everything--

-Cartographies of Silence, Adrienne Rich

I just watched the Disney Pixar film "Up", and I was crying within the first ten minutes. I realized that very, very few movies make me cry. Seriously, out of all the movies I've seen over the years, I can count all the times that I actually got emotional on one hand. And then when I thought about the movies that actually made me really cry rather than just tear up, (that I remember), I only came up with these: "Persepolis", "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs", and "Up", all animated films.

I'm not sure why animated characters affect me so much more than real life actors. For a long time, I thought of myself as coldhearted and closed off because I couldn't cry during classic tear-jerkers like "Titanic", and I was the one sitting dry-eyed during movie nights/sleepovers while my more sensitive friends and their mothers were in tears. But then I found myself shedding tears over Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on the plane to Louisiana and fighting to hide my embarrassingly public display of emotions from people sitting next to me, thinking, these characters are not real! I find that I'm most affected by profound relationships between pixar characters, maybe because their faces are so expressive. And when their expressions are joyful, I feel it so much more too. The scenes from Carl and Ellie's life together were so adorable that I wanted to cry whenever he mentioned her during the rest of the movie. The special effects in Up were also so imaginative and evocative. In recent years, it's been hard for me to take special effects in big-budget fantasy films seriously because they're so ridiculously extravagant. But maybe because the characters and settings aren't supposed to be real, but childlike and fanciful, Pixar is able to utilize new technology in a way that's fantastical but not overdone.



I couldn't help noticing that the Pixar films I've seen recently, Wall-E and Up, both incorporated underlying themes of environmentalism, which was really interesting to analyse (Yes, I can't seem to escape from analyzing all elements of pop culture that I come in contact with, blame it on my liberal arts education). Up revolved around this theme of nature, and what it meant to be in touch with nature as an explorer. Of course, these are all mainstream themes of environmentalism focusing on preserving nature, rather than the global effects of Capitalism and overconsumption, but that's another issue.

Up was also the one of the only mainstream films pf my memory that actually features an Asian American main character, Russel, a chubby, coddled kid of the technological age who gets caught up in an adventure.

All in all very satisfied with the film, and now I feel the need to stuff my mind with more cutesy Disney films meant for children. I finally made it to the library today and greedily grabbed a giant pile of books that I'm not going to be able to finish, even though I know I should have restrained myself more. I managed to get English and China Witness, and hopefully I'll get through part of those before break ends. But I'm now caught in reading Alice Munro's collection of short stories, "Too Much Happiness." I also have Lorrie Moore's new novel "A Gate at the Stairs," a collection of Adrienne Rich poems, and Issac Asimov's "Foundation." Going to the library to pick out books always makes me really happy, and the Germantown library has a fantastic collection, and I couldn't refrain from borrowing too many as usual. So even though I love books, I never thought about getting a Kindle because the experience of trips to the library and browsing for books is so integral to my love of reading, and as I really read only a small percentage of what I borrow.

在那遥远的地方 (In that far away place...)

Urumqi （乌鲁木齐） skyline, Summer 2008. Taken atop a mountain in Hongshan Park （红山公园）.



My grandmother and I at the People's Square in downtown Urumqi, 2008.

As a child, I lived in a largely Han community in Urumqi as a descendant of ethnically Han migrants. My grandparents moved to Xinjiang in the 1950s so my grandfather could work as a water resource engineer for the government. Even though I'm the third generation to be born in Urumqi, it's still common for people to ask, "where is your hometown?" (你们老家在哪里？） Which leads me to question, when does a place become home? Is it only based on length of residence, the permanency of residence, or something more than that? (In traditional Chinese culture, it was rare for people to leave their extended family, and home was the place you and your ancestors were born and buried.)

Last July, a series of violent riots between the Han Chinese and Uyghur ethnic minority erupted in my hometown Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province in Northwestern China. According to official reports, the riots resulted in at least 197 deaths with many more injured.

The details of the riots are hazy. On the first day of the riots, around 1000 young Uyghurs (some from the university? ) assembled to protest discrimination connected with a factory incident in Shaoguan that turned violent. But it is unclear how the protest escalated into chaos, violent attacks on mostly Han Chinese bystanders, buildings, and street vehicles. The violence had torn apart the city and irrevocably impacted communities in Urumqi. Some who are not tied to the land, who want to leave and have the resources to do so (like my aunt and uncle who left for the US) have already left. But others, like my grandmother, who have lived in the same community for more than 50 years with the same people, call Urumqi home and are reluctant to leave. And still others don't have the economic resources or connections to leave.

In the aftermath of the riots, the initial government response was to deploy national police forces to maintain order in Urumqi. Now, information flow to and from Xinjiang is strictly controlled. International calling is limited, and internet access remains largely restricted to a few websites. As a result, only government sanctioned news websites are able to report updates of government action and policies. According to Chinese news sources, further state action in Urumqi is now comprised of increased security forces (Patrol vehicles, surveillance cameras) monitoring communities, particularly migrant communities comprised of poor Uyghur migrant workers. The government blames unrest on Uyghur separatists, terrorists, and extremists, as well as foreign influences -- namely a Uyghur leader in exile Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uyghur Congress based in Washington D.C. However, this analysis of the problem only glosses over the root, social and economic causes of the conflict.

Recently, the international community has been both enthralled and intimidated by China's economic progress. Particularly after the spectacle of the 2008 Olympics, which captured China's desire to awe the West, and the Western world's ambivalence about China's success. The economic boom in China has not only transformed the face of a nation, but also widened the wealth gap and accelerated ethnic tensions between the Han majority and the diverse minority groups. As China transitions from a command economy to a market economy, independent corporations flourish, creating a wealthy business class. However, the conditions of life for the majority of Chinese citizens have remained the same or worsened. In large cities such as Urumqi, the landscape is being revolutionized. Skyscrapers are constantly being constructed. Downtown, high end department stores replace clothing stores with more reasonable prices and discount food shops. When I was in China in 2008, the prices in designer stores were pretty much equal to US department store prices converted, which is high for us as privileged American residents and ridiculous for the average Chinese person. But as Urumqi rapidly modernizes on the outside, we don't see the invisible people who are swept away with the old, unwanted structures and customs.

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Politics.
you'd say, is an unworthy name
for what we're after.
What we're after
is not that clear to me, if politics
is an unworthy name.

-Adrienne Rich, Rift

what in fact I keep choosing/are these words, these whispers, conversations...

...from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.
-Cartographies of Silence, Adrienne Rich

I've been thinking about why people make art. There are so many reasons why people would write, paint, make music, create. Perhaps some do it for fame, money, or the illusion of future fame and fortune. Some people do it to survive, as their only means to earn a living. Some do it for survival because they would die a metaphorical death without art. And for some it's both.

People create with a particular objective in mind, to expose injustice and to politicize (For some reason Ayn Rand comes to mind, perhaps because her description of the human condition is so lyrically beautiful that I'm compelled to forgive her politics). And perhaps people create because it's inexplicably beautiful. Art for art's sake.

I create because I see a piece of myself and my experiences in every piece of art that I appreciate. This sounds like narcissism, but I find comfort in seeing myself reflected in others, especially when I feel like my life is a mess and that I've lost that sense of self (So I gather the identifiable pieces from other people's work and attempt to piece together something recognizable?). As Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project resolves, "Think about myself so I can forget myself." Art allows me to reassemble the broken pieces of myself. Good writing rearticulates my thoughts perfectly when I'm too crippled by confusion and emotion to do so myself. So I write in the hope that I may replicate that feeling, that sense of connection with someone else in the audience, if the audience exists.

I create because I am secretive and being too direct and rough with my words and emotions seems too painful. So I circumvent the issue, hope that someone will mistake my sentimentality for originality. Wanting to be original, innovative, and yet understood by everyone, yet terrified of being understood. Wanting mutually exclusive things at once (that are burning up when they are bottled up and will explode when they aren't reconciled) and wanting to make sense of the complexities of a world that encompasses so many contradictions. Wanting to say things a certain way because it's impossible to say them any other way.

Of course, I create because I want to make something beautiful.

(And I have romanticized the idea of art as a life or death matter, a matter of survival, I suppose.)

But are any of these reasons either-or, mutually exclusive? Is there a commonality that encompasses all of these reasons, besides the human element?

Maybe the capacity for art is a part of humanity, and to maintain our humanity we must tell our stories with some desperate hope for understanding and connection. History books say that all the great civilizations must have acquired some sort of capacity for language. But these standards for qualifying civilizations is according to our modern, extremely linguistic and visual culture. Though, it would be extremely difficult for us to conceptualize a great civilization that didn't prioritize language, visual art, or representation (because it would be lost to our tools of interpretation?).

Maybe in order for art to be politicizing, its message doesn't have to be obvious. The very act of storytelling can be empowering because it allows someone to reclaim their humanity by redefining a representation of hirself. In a world infiltrated with violence and coercion, art can be a subversive force. For all of society's attempts to silence voices that have stories to tell, there are those who will rebel. For a woman like my grandmother who has told stories despite the wars waged to keep her silent, her art has power.

Why do you create art?

They are, they have always been outside history

I'm beginning to look for books, videos, and other resources that might help me gain background information for my research. I realized that I have no idea where to start, because I've never done any sort of independent study with Chinese history. I'm heading to the library tomorrow and will hopefully pick up a few books to start reading over break. (I tried going today but I woke up at 4 and by the time I got to the library everything is closed. But I'm nocturnal AND on California time...not a good combination.) So I'm going to list a few books that I'll try to get ahold of and read, before school starts and life gets hectic again.




The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang is pretty much the only book about 20th century Chinese history that I've heard of, because it's been popularized in Western culture. My friend Jenny also recommended it to me as one of her favourite books, so I intended to read it eventually but never got around to it. The book is a history of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing (then the capital of China) from 1937-1938 during WWII and the Sino-Japanese War. I don't know how helpful the book would be for my research, but I know that my grandmother was affected by the war and Nanjing was not far away from her hometown, so this may be a good place to begin.



English by Wang Gang is a novel translated into English about the protagonist's experience growing up in Xinjiang during the Cultural revolution. This is the only novel about Xinjiang written in English that I know of after Far West China blogged about it, but maybe I just haven't looked hard enough. I'm vaguely skeptical of this novel, but since material about Xinjiang is so rare, it might spark some ideas and be helpful.


China Witness by Xinran also seems to be an interesting read. The author travelled around China to interview men and women who have survived the Cultural Revolution, including political prisoners, an acrobat, and a teahouse news singer (According to the library catalogue - what does that even mean?). And there's a chapter called "New discoveries in Xinjiang, the World's Biggest Prison." Sounds fascinating (especially since people who write about China tend to forget about Xinjiang).

I have to include a disclaimer that though I'm excited about reading new materials about Chinese history, I'm skeptical of the books I listed, which may be part of a certain narrative about the east. Chinese history translated into popular Western nonfiction is often sensationalized and exoticized. (i.e. foreign culture with fascinating, strange traditions, oppressive communist, conformist government, backward, third-world, primitive cultures etc etc) Of course I'm not saying that Chinese history and society isn't inherently oppressive and shouldn't be criticized, but I believe we should be critical of a particular narrative concerning "the Third World" that the West perpetuates in popular culture and scholarship. This discourse often implies that "Third World" citizens have no agency and must be rescued from their oppression, by either escaping their conditions and immigrating to a better place, or by some sort of Western interventionist rescue. As a result, the people represented are seen as "objects" of oppression rather than "subjects."

My articulation of this critique of historical narrative and representation is still vague. But throughout this process, I hope to be thinking about these questions. In writing about those who have been left out from history, how do we represent an accurate portrayal of the east without sinking into the dominant, established narratives that disempower certain people? How do we examine and critique social oppression in the "Third World" without adopting Eurocentric superiority or falling into cultural relativism? In my storytelling, how do I craft an alternative narrative of liberation, rather than a narrative that is a part of the dominant culture?

A note on blogging: since I haven't blogged in so long, I'm amazed by how much things have changed since I used livejournal so many years ago. Back then we actually memorized the HTML tags for everything! Now it's just all incorporated into the posting options to make things simpler. o_O And I've forgotten all my HTML tags so I have to actually use the automatic options!

I should stop here for now and work on my IIPP application. The deadline is so soon! Hopefully I"ll have better luck with the library being open tomorrow.

On Writing, and Falling in Love with the Concrete

For a long time, I wanted to be a writer. I thought, talked, and dreamed about writing the Great American Novel or the memoir that would be raw and honest and lead to a kind of catharsis about myself. I wanted to be revolutionary rather than sentimental. A couple weeks ago, I went to a writing workshop with Warren Liu, Professor of Literature. He said that poetry was in itself subversive, because it's regarded as childish and worthless in society. And by valuing poetry, by making a living from literature, your existence is subverting societal standards. That stuck with me; I loved it. I loved the idea of rooting my self-worth in writing, creating beauty from a medium that is so illusive, where the line between uselessness and greatness is versatile.

Then I realized that I was in love with the idea of being a writer rather than the reality, the essence of writing. I romanticized a lifestyle to find out that I didn't have what it took to be a writer because I hadn't fallen in love with the subject, and the subject of writing is inevitably the human condition. I don't write because writing enables my survival. I don't even write to be honest because I choose to hide behind an image that I've crafted for myself. I couldn't bear to honest and carve permanent words that speak truth because those words would transform my reality and I didn't want to face reality, so I preferred to hide behind academic language. Safe, only understood by an elite group of people with very particular beliefs, distant, impersonal.

In life, I spend a lot of time being infatuated with ideals. I fall in love with love. I love humanity. Sometimes I have so much love bottled up that I could burst with all that passion, pain, and sacrifice. But somewhere along the way I've stopped falling in love with the subject, what is present, concrete, What exists outside my narrow conception of who a person is, what a place is like. Really I've just holed myself in a narrow cell fantasizing about what living the experience is really like, hiding behind the language of abstractions, and loving the void between walls of substance.

The other day we were given a piece of chocolate and asked to hold, smell, feel, taste, and see the chocolate in order to write about it. And I never really realized how I don't particularly like the smell of chocolate (it's odd and not sweet exactly). So the idea is, you have this concept of what chocolate is, but how would you know really, unless you've experienced every aspect of it?

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All my life I waited eagerly for rain
because of the way passing streetlights reflected
in water-on-glass shined like glitter
from a fairy godmother’s wand,
or unknown galaxies, or a broken mirror.

Grandmothers and Granddaughters Project - First Post!

This blog will focus primarily on the progress of my research project, which is centered on documenting the oral history of my grandmother's life. The blog will detail my process, from the preliminary research into gender and the Chinese Republic, the history of the Sino-Japanese war, and China pre and post Cultural Revolution, to the experience of living in China with my grandmother to document her story through recording, video, and photography. I intend to culminate the project in an artistic representation inspired by the materials that I will gather. So hopefully through this process, I will grow as a writer, record my grandmother's story, and learn about my family history in a socio-historical context.

The blog will also include my musings on the art of writing, oral history, and storytelling.

I will also post selections of poetry/prose from the Asian American Studies Grandmothers and Granddaughters writing workshop occasionally. This workshop was the inspiration for this project.

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Now that I face making my project a reality, I have a million questions. There's the logistics of the project: Am I really going to transcribe a lifetime of stories into Chinese and then English? (No use doubting my competency now, it will be done anyway.) How will her words retain their original meaning after being twisted and distilled to fit in the mold of a foreign language (that she's only seen on TVs and heard on telephones and from her granddaughter's awkward mishaps?) Will I even have enough material to transcribe? What if she doesn't really want to talk to me? What if she doesn't want to remember? What if it changes my memory of her forever? What if it doesn't?

I'm apprehensive, glad, grateful that I'll have this opportunity to get to know my grandmother because though I believed I knew her so well, I was never close enough to learn what she loved, what she was like as a young girl, what made her cry, if she was happy with her marriage, what gave her joy. Though I suppose I'm luckier than many who don't know their grandmas because I know things like what her favorite fruit is (peach), and that she would recycle the water from the shower three times before throwing it away and wouldn't turn on the heat in the winter to save money. I knew that she's seen and brought up three generations of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. But I don't know if she got presents from her parents, if she loved her mother, if she was scared to leave home as a teenager, if she was resentful that she was born a girl (though I'm pretty sure she was), or if she was angry that the war, and then the revolution came to her door. Or did she rejoice secretly?

I don't know if the project would mean as much to her. I don't even know if she's especially happy to talk about her life with me (though I know that she's willing and excited about my visit, which makes me happy). I don't know if she'll hide secrets from me, if she would want to seem strong, if she would give me her version of the truth rather than carefully crafted stories--or if that truth even matters? After all, the process of oral history is giving the subject/interviewee/whatever you call the person the chance to dictate her own life. And for my grandmother, whose life seems to revolve around serving others when it could have been so much more, isn't it finally time for her to dictate her own life and determine her own truths?

But hasn't she been dictating her life for the past few decades? Hasn't all the choices that have been made been completely her own? (Was she ever afraid?)

(What were your dreams? What advice would you give an insecure, selfish, unoriginal young woman? Did you ever find out who you truly are amidst the violence---and silence? Were you lonely once? Now?)