Post performance

It is a blustery day in late May. I am sitting in a turtleneck and sweater, two pairs of pants, and hand knit socks before my window where the four o’clock sky is weakly glowing grey. The clouds in my head refuse to pass—inexplicable fatigue. It is beginning to rain. Droplets of rain land on glass, scarring the window with short, needle-thin streaks.




After reading ‘Tea that Burns’ (a family memoir of Chinatown, by Bruce Edward Hall) I find myself furtively glancing a little longer at dim and dusty Chinatown doorways into family associations and old apartment buildings with intricate iron grille entrances. I return to an obsession with access, permission to enter through locked gates into lives and stories billowing untold beneath my feet.

History is bitter, burns like tea freshly brewed and scaldingly hot, like bootleg alcohol tipped back in a swift savage gulp drunk from a teacup. Why, in a cheery folk melody played on the erhu, do I hear the sadness of a forgotten history, a fading generation. All the incongruous mysteries of my contemporary reality draw themselves to the surface in a clattering cacophany, while the impassioned screams and giggles of children at recess in the neighboring courtyard fade from my memory.



Mommy and I translated a thread of Chinatown’s invisible tapestry of female laborers mired by financial hardship, family, and fabric, which they hold in their hands, cutting threads, sewing pieces, making shirts, pants, belt loops, collars and pillow cases out of cottons, refined silks and flimsy cloth. In a segment of video footage that explores the poetry of everyday gesture, two women are talking to each other and to the camera while they go through the motions of their garment factory job, cutting loose threads from finished clothes. They are older, with grown children and grandchildren. They only speak Toisan; I can barely make out what they say. I understand the dialect in random exclamations that lead to little comprehension of content. Mommy and I decipher their story: with generous smiles and uninhibited laughter peppering their dialogue, they tell us they are happier here than in rural China. Compared to filling their hands with stones to construct a well, sitting with scissors to cut threads with a friend is a reprieve. They will be taken care of in their old age by their daughters and their grandchildren. Their aging hands are deft, moving smoothly against the backdrop of their bright eyes and animated exclamations.



Writing is exploring the imagination with history alongside of it, recalling, remembering, recording, conversations, scraps of newspaper clippings, dog-eared photographs untouched up and blurry. Writing is choosing your memories.



The scaffolding at 70 Mulberry Street seemed like a permanent fixture until it was removed last Saturday in the quick space of a day, revealing the renovated historic contours of the landmark P.S. 23 built in 1891. The newly washed, painted façade of the building looks offensively stark, too brilliantly terracotta in colour, and strangely angular, as if time had not smoothed away the sharp lines of newly hewn stone. This recently unveiled corner of Mulberry and Bayard is suddenly bright and the shoemaker now has to put up a large beach umbrella to shield the sun and rain where the scaffolding had once covered him.

The other day, I brought my battered red shoe to the shoemaker, interrupting a conversation he was having with another man, who took leave of him with the usual, I’ll stop bothering you and let you get back to work sort of expression. To better examine my broken shoe, he puts on a pair of large, plastic framed glasses that nearly consume his small-boned face and make his eyes look googly. His hands look tough, well-worn with leathery fingertips stained almost the same viscous tallow colour of the glue that he uses to reattach my wayward strap to the shoe. To me, he is beautiful, in all his wrinkled splendour, the albeit romanticised wrinkles that I have affixed to his nondescript clothing and his small body bent over in careful scrutiny of my old red shoe. I sit gingerly opposite him in a collapsible stool, my two bare feet resting on my one remaining shoe watching the agility of his hands speak the language of learned craft.