This is what I understand of the life cycles of my own body-mind-and-heart: My own proclivity towards death has been as fierce a force as my mother’s will to live.
The map of my life unfolds over infinite pages. Ten thousand descansos ¬– white crosses – scoring the roadside. The scars that mark my heart.
I am learning to dwell within these resting places.
Like my mother’s self-portrait, every text I write tells a story of my heart. The tools of my practice: language, the mind, my hands, the body’s history. I listen to the stories told to me with the clairaudience of the acupuncturist who charts the patterns of my pulse.
At Alki Beach, a woman commemorates the anniversary of her divorce by throwing stones into the Pacific. Hurling rocks laden with loss, she rids herself of grief by acknowledging death.
Around me, totems manifest – a dying bat falls out of a tree at dusk, a turtle crosses my path at Greenlake. I make a lantern at the toro nagashi festival, and ask a stranger to launch it.
I think of Hibiscus Lake in Forest Hills on the night of the bon festival six years ago – hundreds of paper spirits illuminating the night. Tributaries flowing into an imaginary ocean to be rounded up in the light of day by the park’s clean-up crews.
I say goodbye to the love that I always longed for, so that I can finally walk out of the darkness.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
An essay in parts, take two...
When she grew bored with wearing the white cotton blouse, my mother soaked the shirt in black tea until the cloth took on a pale brown hue. The effect of the organic dye on the floral appliqué drew the trim away from the fabric with a delicate intensity.
Pre-Martha Stewart, my mother was the master of all things handmade.
The kitchen was a laboratory of her botanical experimentations. From the guava and mango fruit that my parents purchased at the nearest Asian market sixty miles away in Rancho Cucamonga to feed her cravings for the motherland, she’d take their stones to sprout in glass mason jars that did double duty as organizers for her paintbrushes. Eventually, the seedlings made their way to the backyard, to be planted between apple, plum and peach trees. Years later, we ate guavas off the stem and distributed the surplus harvest to my parents’ Taiwanese friends.
Once she spent a month carving the depilated shell of a coconut to resemble the scalloped plumage of an owl. When I saw the peach pit carvings housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, I wondered if she drew her ideas from what she saw as an art student on sketching trips to the galleries, in the way that my own interests grew out of spending my formative years in the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, marveling at Cornellian aviaries and walking moving through the spaces between the thirteen wooden pillars of Tadao Ando.
At the National Taiwan Academy for the Arts, my mother specialized in non-Western art with a bent towards abstract modernism. Trained under the western-style painters that immigrated from China and who catalyzed the New Art Movement – the modern Taiwanese artist worked in oil, watercolor, abstract expressionism, pop art and mixed media. Turning away from traditional brush painting, calligraphy, and landscape painting, the trendsetting avant-garde adopted a glorified European style and subject matter that would become the outdated signature of an entire generation of post-war artists. Picasso became my mother’s muse – a white European male who celebrated and shattered the feminine body with his gaze.
The wall tapestry that hangs in my parents’ bedroom is one of few non-abstract images in her body of work; it is her earliest figurative work and the only image in which my mother appears directly. A neo-baroque-style tapestry created from heavyweight, acrylic yarn and hung from a metallic-gold curtain rod, the hanging features a self-portrait of my mother. The image is unmistakably her. Dark brown eyes rimmed with soft eye shadow. Red glint of hair contrasted against her pale skin. High breasts and a narrow waist. An indecipherable half-smile. She is ageless in the embrace of the muscular blonde lover whose wings encircle her. A trio of plump baby cherubs buzz around the fantasy couple. My mother’s youthful beauty is positively Dorian Grey.
In the typical Taiwanese household, a formal wedding portrait of the happy couple hangs prominently above the marriage bed. Depicting the idealized beauty of a woman’s transformation to wifedom, these fantasy photographs present a ritual of carefully manufactured romance, offering evidence of passion. All imperfections are airbrushed out of the images and even the most unpowdered, yellow-faced individuals transform into glamorous sexy brides. Grooms pay thousand-dollar deposits on bridal packages that include posters, prints, and thank-you cards as part of their wedding dowry. To deny a bride-to-be this rite of passage is to do nothing short of denying her of the culturally significant documents of her lost youth.
My parents left convention behind to marry at a courthouse in Kirksville, MO. Neither of their families attended the proceedings. My father resigned from the travel agency in Taipei where he worked with my mother, when he was accepted into the graduate education program at Northeastern Missouri State University. Unlike his older brothers and sisters who succumbed to arranged marriages, he asked for my mother’s hand in a modern love match. He came to the U.S. in 1970, and she joined him a year later with all the money that she had saved from her work at the agency. No pictures document the event, but they recall paying ten dollars to the court to provide a witness.
At my own commitment ceremony three years ago, my father lamented never having been able to give my mother a proper wedding. Haunted by all the fineries that he has never been able to provide her with – a full set of china, a fancy dining room set, matching furniture, bookcases made of real oak – he imagines the objects and events that would have made their lives together better. A fantasy as impossible to maintain as the illusion encapsulated within a formal wedding portrait.
To my mother’s credit, her determination to make a life worth living drove her to surround herself with images of beauty that reflected her imaginative life and world, transforming the impoverished space of our household. If she couldn’t pay to have a wedding portrait that immortalized her beauty, then she’d weave her own.
In my childhood, the schoolmates that made it past the threshold of the front door would inevitably stumble upon my mother’s self-portrait. I assumed their discomfort was the shock of nudity. My husband, who grew up in the conservative South with a mother who produced figure drawings drawn from live models, tells a similar story: parents banning their children from playing at his house, due to the “pornographic” nature of the artwork decorating the walls of the living room. When I reflect upon it now, perhaps the strangeness that my peers reacted to was the clear disconnect between the image of biracial coupling and the reality of my mother’s marriage to my father. A country boy from Ching Shui with naïve tastes, my father has no interest in European cultures or aesthetic traditions. He favors traditional Eastern landscape painting – birds and flowers and cliché mountain landscapes that recall memories of his native village.
So my mother embroidered a half dozen wall tapestries that catered to these nostalgic tastes. Cranes winging over the ocean at sunset. A textile of a tiger juxtaposed with a night scene of a waterfall. A reproduction of album art from my father’s favorite recording of Swan Lake combines Tschaikovsky’s profile superimposed upon the body of a giant swan bedecked with crown.
With the surplus yarn left over from her various projects, she crocheted soft toys for my stuffed animal collection in between producing wall hangings. My collection included a seated rabbit with an oversized head that hung limply from its neck, a mother-and-child themed pair of knitted mice lacking appendages, a pierrot doll with a cone-shaped hat, and a handful of limbless lions and disembodied Santa-head ornaments with felt eyes that emerged once a year to overweight the plastic Christmas tree that took up residence next to the upright piano in the living room. I stored my handmade toys in the overturned, brown cardboard boxes that accompanied our move to Riverside and remained in my closet as permanent shelving for my books and clothing.
When I was six-years-old, my father arranged an exhibition at the San Bernardino County Museum of my mother’s tapestries. Based in Redlands, the Museum is a tiny regional collection composed of taxidermied wildcats and buffalo in dioramic settings alongside fossils and various archaeological objects. At the time, my mother had taken to producing tapestries with Native American motifs typical of the Southwest. My father sold the Museum staff on allowing her to show her works alongside their collections, marking her first solo exhibition in California.
My mother continued to conduct her art-making activities in the hours when my father sold used cars at the dealership. After picking me up from school, she’d disappear into her bedroom where I’d hear the mechanized sound of a needle punching through heavyweight canvas. She propped up the frames of her tapestries with chairs borrowed from the kitchen table. By mealtime, the chairs were back at their place settings, everything restored to its natural state, just as my father walked through the front door.
For my bedroom, she designed a pink and purple tapestry around the figure of a young girl with bangs cut straight across her forehead. She carries an umbrella to shield herself from the sun, while walking forward into a field of flowers. Her eyes resemble my mother’s eyes. When I entered adolescence, I removed the hanging above my bed and replaced it with commercial images of my musical icons: mope singers Robert Smith and Stephen Morrissey. Though both of my parents ridiculed and complained bitterly about the long-haired, masculine objects of my adoration, they only put their foot down about one image. A poster-sized photo of Siouxsie Sioux and Robert Smith wearing a t-shirt with a stylized drawing of a horned face. My mother claimed that the ghost image on Smith’s t-shirt would spook my diabetic grandfather. Superstition touches even Christians apparently.
When there was no more walls to fill, she stopped making art and became a nei zai mei. An “inside” person. Confined to the social life of the family, she became a suburban housewife in a community where Asians made up less than 1 % of the local population. The friendships she formed through my father’s work were with wives of business associates – strained friendships based on the commonalities of ethnicity, language and place. There was Mrs. Lee, who trained as a biologist in Taiwan but immigrated with her scientist husband to end up running a fried fish and chips restaurant in the business district. Three years my junior, Mrs. Lee’s daughter was an all-star tennis player with dark brown skin and straight black hair. We endured countless comparisons to one another throughout our teenage years and the failings of my filial piety seemed if not first measured against the qualities of my older brother, than against the virtues of Mrs. Lee’s daughter.
The Dr. Changs looked down on my family, but readily co-opted my mother’s talents to teach their children and their children’s white friends arts and crafts after school. Eventually, my mother withdrew from these unfulfilling circles and ceased to leave the house. Performing the duties of a wife and mother, she became an expert at disciplining her own heart. She slept until one in the afternoon each day, the household wrapped in a blanket of preternatural, unbroken silence – the likes of which I have only observed elsewhere amongst migraine sufferers.
At the time my brother had his nervous breakdown, my mother hadn’t actively made art in twelve years. Edwin was in his second to last year of the pre-medical school program at the University of California at Riverside; he had his doubts about pursuing medicine and fought with desperation to hold on to any tenuous claims to creativity. He fantasized becoming an artist, perhaps even in our mother’s footsteps – though he settled on a medium in which he could carve out his own signature. In the back of our house, he installed a potter’s kick wheel, a sludge bucket, and shelving to display his creations.
My brother collapsed in a microbiology class, shortly after the girl that he loved rejected his ill-timed advances. Doctors diagnosed his fainting spells as a form of nervous anxiety disorder. He refused to leave his bedroom for an entire year and became dependent on valium to regulate his panic attacks.
When I read about Japanese hikikomori in The New York Times three years ago, I was stunned by the similarities of Japan’s social “drop-outs” to my brother’s own hermit-like existence. I read everything that I could find about rental sisters and community uncles, hired professionals and volunteers who rescue shut-ins from obscurity by engaging them in conversation, play, and simple activities.
It was my mother who coaxed my brother out of convalescence, by reconnecting him to his own imaginative spirit. Convincing him to teach, she persuaded him to share his love of ceramics with her – he passed on to her the knowledge of throwing on a potter’s wheel, hand-building objects, and the temperament and chemistry of glazing. When he had physically recuperated, he moved out of my parents’ house and entered medical school, determined to upstage the doctors who’d diagnosed his illness. My mother takes credit for my brother’s return to the world of the living; by tapping into his creative power, she brought him back to his senses.
Looking back, I see things differently now: the act of engaging my brother in making art functioned also as a way for my mother to heal her own spirit. Since my brother’s breakdown, she has produced prolific amounts of work and returned to her original medium of painting. My brother provides her with an endless supply of canvases, paints and brushes ¬ the tools of her discipline which she had little access to in my early life. The yarn tapestries and fruit carvings were an improvised detour, informed by cheap and readily available materials adapted for imaginative uses.
Her first exhibition after the tapestry show took place in 1999, through collaboration with a Taiwanese-American artists’ league based in the L.A. metroplex. She shows with this group annually, and four years ago, the league organized an exhibition and trip to Paris, France. In the catalog for the show, my mother describes her life. Born in Funabashi, Japan at the end of the World War. Her resume bears all the institutional markers of the professional artist: an exhibition history, a teaching record, and a presence in private collections. Her identity as a wife and mother are erased from the public record.
We don’t talk about my parents’ separation – the way that no one in my family acknowledges my brother’s breakdown ever really happening. When she came back from a trip to Taiwan in 2006 to grieve the anniversary of her parents’ death, my mother went up to Carmel to housesit my brother’s animals. She did not return from cat-sitting until April 2008. My father says that the beach house reminds her of her childhood in Fong Yen, the crashing of waves on the beach. I wonder sometimes if these same waves bring up images for my father of swimming to the shore of Matzu Island under heavy artillery fire.
I am now the age that my mother was when she gave birth to me. My father asks me at every opportunity when I will deliver a grandson. He believes I will understand what it is to complete a life cycle when I have assumed the role of mother.
This is what I understand of the life cycles of my own body-mind-and-heart:
Pre-Martha Stewart, my mother was the master of all things handmade.
The kitchen was a laboratory of her botanical experimentations. From the guava and mango fruit that my parents purchased at the nearest Asian market sixty miles away in Rancho Cucamonga to feed her cravings for the motherland, she’d take their stones to sprout in glass mason jars that did double duty as organizers for her paintbrushes. Eventually, the seedlings made their way to the backyard, to be planted between apple, plum and peach trees. Years later, we ate guavas off the stem and distributed the surplus harvest to my parents’ Taiwanese friends.
Once she spent a month carving the depilated shell of a coconut to resemble the scalloped plumage of an owl. When I saw the peach pit carvings housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, I wondered if she drew her ideas from what she saw as an art student on sketching trips to the galleries, in the way that my own interests grew out of spending my formative years in the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, marveling at Cornellian aviaries and walking moving through the spaces between the thirteen wooden pillars of Tadao Ando.
At the National Taiwan Academy for the Arts, my mother specialized in non-Western art with a bent towards abstract modernism. Trained under the western-style painters that immigrated from China and who catalyzed the New Art Movement – the modern Taiwanese artist worked in oil, watercolor, abstract expressionism, pop art and mixed media. Turning away from traditional brush painting, calligraphy, and landscape painting, the trendsetting avant-garde adopted a glorified European style and subject matter that would become the outdated signature of an entire generation of post-war artists. Picasso became my mother’s muse – a white European male who celebrated and shattered the feminine body with his gaze.
The wall tapestry that hangs in my parents’ bedroom is one of few non-abstract images in her body of work; it is her earliest figurative work and the only image in which my mother appears directly. A neo-baroque-style tapestry created from heavyweight, acrylic yarn and hung from a metallic-gold curtain rod, the hanging features a self-portrait of my mother. The image is unmistakably her. Dark brown eyes rimmed with soft eye shadow. Red glint of hair contrasted against her pale skin. High breasts and a narrow waist. An indecipherable half-smile. She is ageless in the embrace of the muscular blonde lover whose wings encircle her. A trio of plump baby cherubs buzz around the fantasy couple. My mother’s youthful beauty is positively Dorian Grey.
In the typical Taiwanese household, a formal wedding portrait of the happy couple hangs prominently above the marriage bed. Depicting the idealized beauty of a woman’s transformation to wifedom, these fantasy photographs present a ritual of carefully manufactured romance, offering evidence of passion. All imperfections are airbrushed out of the images and even the most unpowdered, yellow-faced individuals transform into glamorous sexy brides. Grooms pay thousand-dollar deposits on bridal packages that include posters, prints, and thank-you cards as part of their wedding dowry. To deny a bride-to-be this rite of passage is to do nothing short of denying her of the culturally significant documents of her lost youth.
My parents left convention behind to marry at a courthouse in Kirksville, MO. Neither of their families attended the proceedings. My father resigned from the travel agency in Taipei where he worked with my mother, when he was accepted into the graduate education program at Northeastern Missouri State University. Unlike his older brothers and sisters who succumbed to arranged marriages, he asked for my mother’s hand in a modern love match. He came to the U.S. in 1970, and she joined him a year later with all the money that she had saved from her work at the agency. No pictures document the event, but they recall paying ten dollars to the court to provide a witness.
At my own commitment ceremony three years ago, my father lamented never having been able to give my mother a proper wedding. Haunted by all the fineries that he has never been able to provide her with – a full set of china, a fancy dining room set, matching furniture, bookcases made of real oak – he imagines the objects and events that would have made their lives together better. A fantasy as impossible to maintain as the illusion encapsulated within a formal wedding portrait.
To my mother’s credit, her determination to make a life worth living drove her to surround herself with images of beauty that reflected her imaginative life and world, transforming the impoverished space of our household. If she couldn’t pay to have a wedding portrait that immortalized her beauty, then she’d weave her own.
In my childhood, the schoolmates that made it past the threshold of the front door would inevitably stumble upon my mother’s self-portrait. I assumed their discomfort was the shock of nudity. My husband, who grew up in the conservative South with a mother who produced figure drawings drawn from live models, tells a similar story: parents banning their children from playing at his house, due to the “pornographic” nature of the artwork decorating the walls of the living room. When I reflect upon it now, perhaps the strangeness that my peers reacted to was the clear disconnect between the image of biracial coupling and the reality of my mother’s marriage to my father. A country boy from Ching Shui with naïve tastes, my father has no interest in European cultures or aesthetic traditions. He favors traditional Eastern landscape painting – birds and flowers and cliché mountain landscapes that recall memories of his native village.
So my mother embroidered a half dozen wall tapestries that catered to these nostalgic tastes. Cranes winging over the ocean at sunset. A textile of a tiger juxtaposed with a night scene of a waterfall. A reproduction of album art from my father’s favorite recording of Swan Lake combines Tschaikovsky’s profile superimposed upon the body of a giant swan bedecked with crown.
With the surplus yarn left over from her various projects, she crocheted soft toys for my stuffed animal collection in between producing wall hangings. My collection included a seated rabbit with an oversized head that hung limply from its neck, a mother-and-child themed pair of knitted mice lacking appendages, a pierrot doll with a cone-shaped hat, and a handful of limbless lions and disembodied Santa-head ornaments with felt eyes that emerged once a year to overweight the plastic Christmas tree that took up residence next to the upright piano in the living room. I stored my handmade toys in the overturned, brown cardboard boxes that accompanied our move to Riverside and remained in my closet as permanent shelving for my books and clothing.
When I was six-years-old, my father arranged an exhibition at the San Bernardino County Museum of my mother’s tapestries. Based in Redlands, the Museum is a tiny regional collection composed of taxidermied wildcats and buffalo in dioramic settings alongside fossils and various archaeological objects. At the time, my mother had taken to producing tapestries with Native American motifs typical of the Southwest. My father sold the Museum staff on allowing her to show her works alongside their collections, marking her first solo exhibition in California.
My mother continued to conduct her art-making activities in the hours when my father sold used cars at the dealership. After picking me up from school, she’d disappear into her bedroom where I’d hear the mechanized sound of a needle punching through heavyweight canvas. She propped up the frames of her tapestries with chairs borrowed from the kitchen table. By mealtime, the chairs were back at their place settings, everything restored to its natural state, just as my father walked through the front door.
For my bedroom, she designed a pink and purple tapestry around the figure of a young girl with bangs cut straight across her forehead. She carries an umbrella to shield herself from the sun, while walking forward into a field of flowers. Her eyes resemble my mother’s eyes. When I entered adolescence, I removed the hanging above my bed and replaced it with commercial images of my musical icons: mope singers Robert Smith and Stephen Morrissey. Though both of my parents ridiculed and complained bitterly about the long-haired, masculine objects of my adoration, they only put their foot down about one image. A poster-sized photo of Siouxsie Sioux and Robert Smith wearing a t-shirt with a stylized drawing of a horned face. My mother claimed that the ghost image on Smith’s t-shirt would spook my diabetic grandfather. Superstition touches even Christians apparently.
When there was no more walls to fill, she stopped making art and became a nei zai mei. An “inside” person. Confined to the social life of the family, she became a suburban housewife in a community where Asians made up less than 1 % of the local population. The friendships she formed through my father’s work were with wives of business associates – strained friendships based on the commonalities of ethnicity, language and place. There was Mrs. Lee, who trained as a biologist in Taiwan but immigrated with her scientist husband to end up running a fried fish and chips restaurant in the business district. Three years my junior, Mrs. Lee’s daughter was an all-star tennis player with dark brown skin and straight black hair. We endured countless comparisons to one another throughout our teenage years and the failings of my filial piety seemed if not first measured against the qualities of my older brother, than against the virtues of Mrs. Lee’s daughter.
The Dr. Changs looked down on my family, but readily co-opted my mother’s talents to teach their children and their children’s white friends arts and crafts after school. Eventually, my mother withdrew from these unfulfilling circles and ceased to leave the house. Performing the duties of a wife and mother, she became an expert at disciplining her own heart. She slept until one in the afternoon each day, the household wrapped in a blanket of preternatural, unbroken silence – the likes of which I have only observed elsewhere amongst migraine sufferers.
At the time my brother had his nervous breakdown, my mother hadn’t actively made art in twelve years. Edwin was in his second to last year of the pre-medical school program at the University of California at Riverside; he had his doubts about pursuing medicine and fought with desperation to hold on to any tenuous claims to creativity. He fantasized becoming an artist, perhaps even in our mother’s footsteps – though he settled on a medium in which he could carve out his own signature. In the back of our house, he installed a potter’s kick wheel, a sludge bucket, and shelving to display his creations.
My brother collapsed in a microbiology class, shortly after the girl that he loved rejected his ill-timed advances. Doctors diagnosed his fainting spells as a form of nervous anxiety disorder. He refused to leave his bedroom for an entire year and became dependent on valium to regulate his panic attacks.
When I read about Japanese hikikomori in The New York Times three years ago, I was stunned by the similarities of Japan’s social “drop-outs” to my brother’s own hermit-like existence. I read everything that I could find about rental sisters and community uncles, hired professionals and volunteers who rescue shut-ins from obscurity by engaging them in conversation, play, and simple activities.
It was my mother who coaxed my brother out of convalescence, by reconnecting him to his own imaginative spirit. Convincing him to teach, she persuaded him to share his love of ceramics with her – he passed on to her the knowledge of throwing on a potter’s wheel, hand-building objects, and the temperament and chemistry of glazing. When he had physically recuperated, he moved out of my parents’ house and entered medical school, determined to upstage the doctors who’d diagnosed his illness. My mother takes credit for my brother’s return to the world of the living; by tapping into his creative power, she brought him back to his senses.
Looking back, I see things differently now: the act of engaging my brother in making art functioned also as a way for my mother to heal her own spirit. Since my brother’s breakdown, she has produced prolific amounts of work and returned to her original medium of painting. My brother provides her with an endless supply of canvases, paints and brushes ¬ the tools of her discipline which she had little access to in my early life. The yarn tapestries and fruit carvings were an improvised detour, informed by cheap and readily available materials adapted for imaginative uses.
Her first exhibition after the tapestry show took place in 1999, through collaboration with a Taiwanese-American artists’ league based in the L.A. metroplex. She shows with this group annually, and four years ago, the league organized an exhibition and trip to Paris, France. In the catalog for the show, my mother describes her life. Born in Funabashi, Japan at the end of the World War. Her resume bears all the institutional markers of the professional artist: an exhibition history, a teaching record, and a presence in private collections. Her identity as a wife and mother are erased from the public record.
We don’t talk about my parents’ separation – the way that no one in my family acknowledges my brother’s breakdown ever really happening. When she came back from a trip to Taiwan in 2006 to grieve the anniversary of her parents’ death, my mother went up to Carmel to housesit my brother’s animals. She did not return from cat-sitting until April 2008. My father says that the beach house reminds her of her childhood in Fong Yen, the crashing of waves on the beach. I wonder sometimes if these same waves bring up images for my father of swimming to the shore of Matzu Island under heavy artillery fire.
I am now the age that my mother was when she gave birth to me. My father asks me at every opportunity when I will deliver a grandson. He believes I will understand what it is to complete a life cycle when I have assumed the role of mother.
This is what I understand of the life cycles of my own body-mind-and-heart:
Monday, August 11, 2008
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Beginnings
I've been trying to write an essay about my mother and her creative production all summer. Here's how it starts:
When she grew bored of wearing the white cotton blouse, she soaked the shirt in black tea until the cloth took on a pale brown hue. The effect of the organic dye on the floral appliqué trim caused the detailing to stand out from the fabric with a delicate intensity.
Pre-Martha Stewart, my mother was the master of all things hand-made.
The kitchen was a laboratory of her botanical experimentations. From the guava and mango fruit that my parents purchased at the nearest Asian market sixty miles away to feed her cravings for the motherland, she’d take their stones to sprout in glass mason jars that did double duty as vessels that organized her paint and paintbrushes. Eventually, the seedlings made their way to the backyard, to be planted between apple, plum and peach trees. Years later, we ate guavas off the stem.
Once she spent a month carving the depilated shell of a coconut to resemble the plumage of an owl. When I saw the peach pit carvings housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, I wondered if she drew her ideas from what she saw as an art student on sketching trips to the galleries, in the way that many of my own interests grew out of spending every day of my early 20s in the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago.
When she grew bored of wearing the white cotton blouse, she soaked the shirt in black tea until the cloth took on a pale brown hue. The effect of the organic dye on the floral appliqué trim caused the detailing to stand out from the fabric with a delicate intensity.
Pre-Martha Stewart, my mother was the master of all things hand-made.
The kitchen was a laboratory of her botanical experimentations. From the guava and mango fruit that my parents purchased at the nearest Asian market sixty miles away to feed her cravings for the motherland, she’d take their stones to sprout in glass mason jars that did double duty as vessels that organized her paint and paintbrushes. Eventually, the seedlings made their way to the backyard, to be planted between apple, plum and peach trees. Years later, we ate guavas off the stem.
Once she spent a month carving the depilated shell of a coconut to resemble the plumage of an owl. When I saw the peach pit carvings housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, I wondered if she drew her ideas from what she saw as an art student on sketching trips to the galleries, in the way that many of my own interests grew out of spending every day of my early 20s in the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Thursday, August 07, 2008
I have been to Seattle's Wing Luke Museum of Asian Art twice in the last three months. This is what greets you when you enter on King Street.
You go upstairs, the original stairs of the Kong Yick building which immigrants before you climbed, and are greeted with this installation:
These are letters collected from immigrants who wrote letters to loved ones in their native countries. Installed with the papers is an audio track/looped reading of people reading these texts aloud.
The museum has a number of historic/preserved "light wells" which were as far as I can understand, formerly open spaces between buildings (i.e. alleys) which were preserved and re-created but with a skylight to protect the interior.
My favorite object in the collection is the canvas scrim which is inside the theatre. It is painted with asbestos and must therefore be shown under plexi/protection, but boy, is it a beauty and terrific piece of history.
Vintage advertisements for an old I-district movie theatre dating back to the early 1900s that include:
(I don't know what this is advertising.)
A shoe shop:
A dress shop:
It's my dream to be the first writer-in-residence at the Wing Luke Museum. Here's to dreaming.
You go upstairs, the original stairs of the Kong Yick building which immigrants before you climbed, and are greeted with this installation:
These are letters collected from immigrants who wrote letters to loved ones in their native countries. Installed with the papers is an audio track/looped reading of people reading these texts aloud.
The museum has a number of historic/preserved "light wells" which were as far as I can understand, formerly open spaces between buildings (i.e. alleys) which were preserved and re-created but with a skylight to protect the interior.
My favorite object in the collection is the canvas scrim which is inside the theatre. It is painted with asbestos and must therefore be shown under plexi/protection, but boy, is it a beauty and terrific piece of history.
Vintage advertisements for an old I-district movie theatre dating back to the early 1900s that include:
(I don't know what this is advertising.)
A shoe shop:
A dress shop:
It's my dream to be the first writer-in-residence at the Wing Luke Museum. Here's to dreaming.
other totemic sightings
K and I walked Greenlake on Monday. No bat or turtle sightings, but we did see a crane. What do cranes symbolize?
To the ancient Chinese, the Crane was a symbol of justice and longevity. A Crane totem entering your life could signal recovery of what was lost to you.
Crane people have a sense of secrecy and protectiveness.
Crane reflects the importance of not dividing your attention between more than one project rather focusing on just the more important one.
Crane can teach you how to celebrate your creative resources and keep them alive, by having the proper focus in your life.
To the ancient Chinese, the Crane was a symbol of justice and longevity. A Crane totem entering your life could signal recovery of what was lost to you.
Crane people have a sense of secrecy and protectiveness.
Crane reflects the importance of not dividing your attention between more than one project rather focusing on just the more important one.
Crane can teach you how to celebrate your creative resources and keep them alive, by having the proper focus in your life.
August 6, 2008
This is bunny and me on our third anniversary. We have actually been together since 1998. We both need haircuts here.
We went to sushi for dinner at Kisaku in E. Greenlake, which was excellent. Than I dragged bunny over to the Toro Nagashi event. I was under some serious misperceptions about the event. And our reference point was the Forest Hills bon festival in Boston.
August 6 is, in addition to our wedding anniversary, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. I don't think I knew this when we planned our wedding. The event at Greenlake was dedicated to remembering victims of violent conflict all over the world, a distinctly political agenda. The programming included a gospel choir, a folk singer, and lots of talking heads. Oh yes, and someone who stumped for money. The event was highly regulated - no one was allowed to put their lantern in the water until led by a Jodo Shinshu priest down the dock lit by farolitos - any other gesture would have been pre-emptive. I understand this, but...
We waited several hours getting attacked by mosquitos and suffering the gospel singers, news crews, and yes, even a grad student from the UW anthropology program who towered above the crowd violently shooting everything in site. I left my camera in the car for much of the time. Eventually bun suggested that we either go renegade or abandon the project. Sadly, we had no matches or lighter. So I left our lanterns by the waterside with a nice woman who agreed to launch them for us. Then Kort and I walked the lake and found about half a dozen terrific launching spots that would not have been remotely pre-emptive. Next year I will have to bring a lighter. What we found frustrating about the event was the nature of how regulated and regimented it was. In Boston, you could launch your lantern at Hibiscus lake at any time from any corner. It was also much more personal - the lanterns made at that event were for any spirits of the dead in need of commemoration. The year we went, my childhood friend John Emmett had just died of leukemia and I could not get him out of my mind. I still can't.
By the time we made it around the lake, night had fallen and the lanterns had been launched. Many were clumping together, and the majority formed a long queue extending into the water in a single line. We wondered if Greenlake only agreed to the event if the lanterns were confined to a single area of the lake (the lake is 3.8 miles round) to make impact and clean up sustainable. I snapped some pics and we called it a night, thinking of Lake Hibiscus in Boston.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Happy anniversary, Kort.
Reasons I love you:
1. your oceanic heart
2. you tolerate my shenanigans
3. you push me to confront my fears and hold my hand while I am doing so
4. you embrace and accept change
5. you don't make me drive
6. you support my work in poetry
7. you are kind to my parents
8. you make me laugh
9. you are occasionally ridiculous and irrational
10. you make a mean bowl of tea
11. you let me read to you
12. you appreciate my cooking
13. you've been to therapy with me
14. you've been to yoga with me
15. you've cleansed with me
16. because we met at the Naropa tea house
17. because you are my dharma friend
18. because you listen to me, and others
19. because you talk to animals
20. because of who you were when you were a boy
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Totems
In the last two weeks, I've walked Greenlake twice and encountered strange animals on the path. Tonight it was a dying bat that fell from the sky and a week ago, it was a turtle. On both of these walks, I was walking with someone who has entered my psychic space and heart, causing some amount of dis-ease. His totem is the fox. If our animals choose us, I embrace the bat.
Totemic meanings:
The Native American animal symbolism of the bat comes from a keen observation of this magnificent animal. These people recognized that the bat was highly sensitive to their surroundings and so therefore was considered a symbol of intuition, dreaming and vision. This made the bat a powerful symbol for Native American shamans and medicine people. Often the spirit of the bat would be invoked when special energy was needed, like "night-sight" which is the ability to see through illusion or ambiguity and dive straight to the truth of matters.
The bat is a symbol of rebirth and depth because it is a creature that lives in the belly of the Mother (Earth). From the womb-like caves it emerges every evening at dusk. And so - from the womb it is reborn every evening.
It is a symbol of communication because the Native Americans observed the bat to be a highly social creature. Indeed, the bat has strong family ties. They are very nurturing, exhibiting verbal communication, touching, and sensitivity to members of their group.
If you have the bat as your totem you are extremely aware of your surroundings. Sometimes you can be overly sensitive to the feelings of others. Additionally, you are quite perceptive on a psychic level, and are prone to have prophetic dreams.
If you work with the bat as your totem, you will be put to the test, because it is demands only 100% commitment to spiritual growth. The bat will never accept half-hearted or lukewarm attempts at self-improvement. Indeed, if the bat senses that you are slacking in your psychic/spiritual training it will likely move on to someone else who is more willing to learn the lessons the bat has to offer.
As with most of our hardest challenges, working with the demanding bat will reap some of the most profound rewards you could ever dream of. But be warned, the bat asks a lot of us, like:
* Dying to our ego
* Loving our enemies as ourselves
* Going within to touch our inner demons
* Exploring the underworlds of reality (which can be scary)
* Renewing our thoughts and beliefs on a moment-to-moment basis
When life is chaos and we are rushing from one project to another, this is the time we need to be grounded to Mother Earth the most. Turtle walks with purpose and intention because she walks on our Mother Earth. She hears Earth's heart beat and carries the wisdom to feel this beat. Turtle teaches us to SLOW DOWN. Just like the children's fable of the rabbit and the tortoise, we learn we will make the finish line just the same as the rabbit, but with less stress. Turtle also reflect the secrets of the moon with 13 scale plates on her back that represent the 13 moon cycles of the year. Turtle, with her beautiful shell reminds us we need to take our protection with us, wherever we may need to travel to. Home and safety is always around us, this way we can be free to travel into any adventure.
In Nigeria, the turtle was a symbol of the female sex organs and sexuality. To the Native Americans, it was associated with the lunar cycle, menstruation, and the power of the female energies. The markings and sections on some turtles total thirteen. In the lunar calendar, there are either thirteen full moons or thirteen new moons alternating each year. Many believe this is where the association with the female energies originated. Turtle is the symbol of the primal mother.
Because of its great age and slow metabolism, the turtle is also associated with longevity. Long life and groundedness within life is part of what is associated with the turtle. It does not move fast. It is as if, on some level, turtle knows it has all the time in the world. Turtle medicine can teach new perceptions about time and our relationship with it.
Turtles have amazing survival skills and strategies. They hear well. Actually they sense vibrations in the water through their skin and shell. Turtles are also to distinguish some colors, and they do not have a sense of smell. Turtle totems hold the mystery of awakening of the senses~ on both physical and spiritual levels. Turtle stimulates hearing and clairaudience. It can help with vision and clairvoyance. It heightens the sense of smell and higher discrimination.
If turtle has shown up, you need to ask yourself some questions. Are you not seeing what you should? Are you not hearing what you should? Are you or those around you not using discrimination?
Totemic meanings:
The Native American animal symbolism of the bat comes from a keen observation of this magnificent animal. These people recognized that the bat was highly sensitive to their surroundings and so therefore was considered a symbol of intuition, dreaming and vision. This made the bat a powerful symbol for Native American shamans and medicine people. Often the spirit of the bat would be invoked when special energy was needed, like "night-sight" which is the ability to see through illusion or ambiguity and dive straight to the truth of matters.
The bat is a symbol of rebirth and depth because it is a creature that lives in the belly of the Mother (Earth). From the womb-like caves it emerges every evening at dusk. And so - from the womb it is reborn every evening.
It is a symbol of communication because the Native Americans observed the bat to be a highly social creature. Indeed, the bat has strong family ties. They are very nurturing, exhibiting verbal communication, touching, and sensitivity to members of their group.
If you have the bat as your totem you are extremely aware of your surroundings. Sometimes you can be overly sensitive to the feelings of others. Additionally, you are quite perceptive on a psychic level, and are prone to have prophetic dreams.
If you work with the bat as your totem, you will be put to the test, because it is demands only 100% commitment to spiritual growth. The bat will never accept half-hearted or lukewarm attempts at self-improvement. Indeed, if the bat senses that you are slacking in your psychic/spiritual training it will likely move on to someone else who is more willing to learn the lessons the bat has to offer.
As with most of our hardest challenges, working with the demanding bat will reap some of the most profound rewards you could ever dream of. But be warned, the bat asks a lot of us, like:
* Dying to our ego
* Loving our enemies as ourselves
* Going within to touch our inner demons
* Exploring the underworlds of reality (which can be scary)
* Renewing our thoughts and beliefs on a moment-to-moment basis
When life is chaos and we are rushing from one project to another, this is the time we need to be grounded to Mother Earth the most. Turtle walks with purpose and intention because she walks on our Mother Earth. She hears Earth's heart beat and carries the wisdom to feel this beat. Turtle teaches us to SLOW DOWN. Just like the children's fable of the rabbit and the tortoise, we learn we will make the finish line just the same as the rabbit, but with less stress. Turtle also reflect the secrets of the moon with 13 scale plates on her back that represent the 13 moon cycles of the year. Turtle, with her beautiful shell reminds us we need to take our protection with us, wherever we may need to travel to. Home and safety is always around us, this way we can be free to travel into any adventure.
In Nigeria, the turtle was a symbol of the female sex organs and sexuality. To the Native Americans, it was associated with the lunar cycle, menstruation, and the power of the female energies. The markings and sections on some turtles total thirteen. In the lunar calendar, there are either thirteen full moons or thirteen new moons alternating each year. Many believe this is where the association with the female energies originated. Turtle is the symbol of the primal mother.
Because of its great age and slow metabolism, the turtle is also associated with longevity. Long life and groundedness within life is part of what is associated with the turtle. It does not move fast. It is as if, on some level, turtle knows it has all the time in the world. Turtle medicine can teach new perceptions about time and our relationship with it.
Turtles have amazing survival skills and strategies. They hear well. Actually they sense vibrations in the water through their skin and shell. Turtles are also to distinguish some colors, and they do not have a sense of smell. Turtle totems hold the mystery of awakening of the senses~ on both physical and spiritual levels. Turtle stimulates hearing and clairaudience. It can help with vision and clairvoyance. It heightens the sense of smell and higher discrimination.
If turtle has shown up, you need to ask yourself some questions. Are you not seeing what you should? Are you not hearing what you should? Are you or those around you not using discrimination?
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Along with formerly believing in the necessity of suffering on the path to actualizing one's dream, I also resolutely accepted the crippling existential loneliness that is emptiness. Today, I experienced an inversion of that emptiness, which looked like the overbrimming fullness of the heart broken open by love. Now, it seems to me that emptiness seems to come from attachment and grasping to the fullness, as it slips out of the fingertips. There is nothing to do but let go - love will renew itself endlessly in all of its shapelessness, and there is nothing to mourn but rather the celebration of a deep gratitude.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
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