30 silver-plated objects, metal wire. Private collection” width=”224″ height=”300″ class=”size-medium wp-image-1115″ /> Cornelia Parker (English, b. 1956). Thirty Pieces of Silver (exhaled), 2003.
30 silver-plated objects, metal wire. Private collection

This art installation called, Thirty Pieces of Silver, pleasantly surprised me because I was engaged in an intense debate about dinner tables and silverware. The checkered floor took me to the 1950′s era and the silver hanging from the ceiling was fine silver. I read about the art and it stated, “This sculpture is made from scavenged collections of silverware that were first crushed by a 250-ton industrial press and then hung from wire. The violent flattening of the objects and their gravity-defying suspension just above the floor transform the silverware and relate to Parker’s interest in the concepts of death and resurrection. These themes are also implied by the work’s title, a reference to the coins for which Judas betrayed Christ.” The flattened silver, the violence of material culture, yet the hope for resurrection made my thoughts go multiple directions.
I was left questioning, have we, creators of cultural memory, been like Judas? Have we betrayed Christ’s gospel by judging others according to their dishes and silverware? What does it say about us to falsely depict historical homes and as a result tarnish cultural memory? I am still searching for these answers. But…
I came to the understanding, that ultimately, there is hope of resurrecting past narratives and preserving cultural memory as long as we are willing to look beyond the dishes.

I’ve never been a godparent before and I spent a long time after that phone call thinking about how godparenting works. What am I “supposed to do?” How will it work when his family moves away in June? How can I “be there” for him and his parents without being there. Maybe it’s very capitalist of me to have decided on creating a tradition that centers on “stuff” but I decided one thing I could do was making sure he has books to read. I decided that when I travel I’ll bring to him books about where I traveled. Seems appropriate to me since our godparent / godson was formalize via computer connection from 2,000 odd miles apart.

For the first of what I hope will be many and interesting books I decided to find is called The Little Red Lighthouse and tells a story about the little red brick light house that stands beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. I chose it even though he won’t appreciate it for a long time because I recently learned that the author is a relative of mine though my grandmother. I checked in all the gift shops of all the museums we went to and finally found a copy at the New York Public Library in the last few days of our trip.

Before leaving the library I sat and read the story again thinking about my family and my godson, remembering the richness of my families’ past and the memories I hope to create with my godson in the future. For a few minutes time folded and memory touched future between the pages of an old book.

The Living Holocaust Memorial at the Jewish Heritage Museum is beautiful.

Each glacial boulder has a miniature elm tree growing out of its center. This memorial to mass death is living and growing and changing. While this process of life continues the trees will always be reaching up; usually understood as a hopeful gesture. Each year the deciduous trees will repeat the life cycle of growing leaves, turning in the fall, being bare in the winter, and welcoming new life in the spring. The memorial is very private and located off a back patio over looking the river. It’s a place you want to visit many times and pause to spend time in and reflect. Even in rainy January my experience of this memorial was hopeful and peaceful and promised a better future.

The 9/11 memorial was a completely different experience.

First the experience of getting to the memorial is a security nightmare that is nearly an exact parallel to the airport. You have to get timed passes in advance and provide the same information as when buying a plant ticket. Long pathways wind you around the block and into security screening where you and all your belonging pass through x-ray and metal detectors and government issued photo ID may be required at any time. Once you finally get to the memorial plaza it is large and open with lawns and ivy and trees but everything is surrounded by signs telling you not to step here, don’t leave flowers or gifts here, etc.

The memorials themselves are large black holes in the ground into which water constantly and loudly pours. Some of my classmates connected flowing water to life and found the memorial uplifting. I on the other hand was struck by how loud the water was and how far it fell, first over the side and then into a second smaller hole you can’t see the bottom of. Around the edge of the two pits are the names of all who died. I kept watching the water and reading the names and thinking “No one could survive that fall. Nothing could live in this water. Look at all those lives pouring and rushing away.” To me it spoke of an absence absolute of life, which parallels the 9/11 tragedy: no one in the towers when they fell survived, no one on the flights survived. I was relieved to leave the memorial. It was not a welcoming place and it didn’t offer me any hope or promise for the future. Instead I felt a weight of sadness and oppression.

The difference between the two memorials was stark and while comparing the holocaust to 9/11 would be a fools errand I did find those differences telling. The holocaust memorial supports a nationalist message of resilience, support and rosy promise for the future. “We will rise again” seems to be the message. The 9/11 memorial supports a narrative of victimization and grief. “Our grief will never end” is the message I came away with. I think it is easier to want revenge and justify violence if what you remember is your pain and I couldn’t help wondering if this memorial was in someway trying to support the idea that a violent response was appropriate or inevitable. It linked nicely for me with Schulman’s idea that the dominant try to “feel weak in order to avoid accountability.”

A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, Goldsworthy’s “Garden of Stones”

Gray sky    Gray glass                    Gray

saplings perched in granite          Parched

Parched                                             with no beauty

All that Jazz, with riffs

fleet and deep, sleek and sweet.  This

is Louis, Dolly.

The National Sept. 11 Memorial (under construction)

heroes and victims

United Nations Peoples

vengeance, no                 no peace

The African Burial Ground National Monument

.               lovingly buried

.                         indomitable spirit(s)

.               wailing and walking

And, now that I have mangled an Asian art form, let me do likewise to a Western form.

There once was a class from PSR

Who were immersed in New York with no car

For two weeks they flaneured

They hobbled and blogged and observed

Now back at home

Still counting and twitching

Devin quickly repaired to a bar

The idea that you would stop working on a problem before it was “solved” was totally new to me and perhaps I should admit to a larger savior complex than I thought but I think it’s an idea that is foreign to our churches too. Churches as institutions, are meant to last forever and with the same color carpet in the sanctuary to boot.  Or so we see to think. 

I asked Todd to say more about why he choose plan and works that way and he offered the observation that no matter how long Free Dimensional exists it will never be anything other than a bottleneck. The number of artists in need will always be greater than the number Free Dimensional is able to help at any given time and existing for a longer time won’t decrease the number of artists in need of aid.

Instead Todd hoped that the art spaces that Free Dimensional worked with to house and shelter artists would learn the need and how to address it on their own and that after awhile they would continue to do the work even without Free Dimensional’s prodding.  In essence: start the organization to get the ball rolling by focus the need and available resources, do what you can to model justice knowing you won’t meet every need, then disband the organization so that everyone you worked with becomes a microcosm of the organization to carry on the work. It’s an interesting idea and an incredible act of faith in people and the movement that the work will continue.

We’ve seen it work in the Occupy movement. After being evicted from parks across the country, occupiers took on a multitude of justice projects that never could have happened if their focus had stayed on maintaining the public encampments. My favorite example is the Rolling Jubilee that uses donated money to buy debts and forgive them. Another example that got a lot of press is Occupy Sandy that offered a more practical, immediate, and effective aid to those affected by Hurricane Sandy. The wrongs Occupy sought to address are to many and too great for any one action to solve, and the effort of maintaining a physical occupation drained resources from practical change but once that bottleneck was broken open and things happened.

I think a reason this breaking open works is that when the group or institution is disbanded the urgency of the work becomes personal. We can’t sit back knowing that X group is doing the work we want to see happing.  The group is gone, if we want it to happen we have to do it ourselves.

So how much of our church life is a bottleneck too? If the church stopped doing “it” every week, what practice would you continue on your own? We say that God has no hands in the world but ours, no feet but our feet. Surely God’s hands and feet have better things to do in this world than research sanctuary carpet swatches, arrange flowers for worship, and fold bulletins. Would we find a hall to open on winter nights for the homeless if our church didn’t host the rotating shelter once a week? Would we raise our pledges if the church counsel didn’t sell scrip? Would we march in the pride parade with signs about God’s Love if the church didn’t send a delegation?

If we would do all those things if the church stopped facilitating them, why aren’t we already doing them on our own? The effort would be doubled! Just think about it, twice as many shelter beds, a stewardship campaign that is finally successful! If we wouldn’t, why are we letting the status quo dictate church’s work?

And still it is nearly a given that our efforts would still not meet the world’s need and a savior complex is the sure recipe for burn out. As Catherine Keller points out, the process of redemption will always excede our human capacity. Instead of focusing on achieving a concrete goal, Keller urges us to work from what is possible, reminding us  that radical justice rarely comes from within the realm of what we think is possible but from the edge of chaos. When the organization is gone and the rules and bets are off, and the institutional bottleneck opened and we think chaos seems certain, what would we try to do? Let’s try to do That right now.

My seminary friends are in complete agreement that class group projects are anathema.  A group presentation was required in this course and there was a collective groan.  To my great surprise, however, I found that two extreme introverts working together can be pleasant and productive.  Ben and I had independently chosen “Immigrant Memory” as our first choice but, instead, we were both assigned to “Urban Queer Space.”  We had both just completed Prof. Johnson’s transformational “Transforming Christian Theology” class so we had a fund of shared knowledge.  The work was joyful—fast decision making, short discussions (a.k.a. “meetings”), worked well separately, worked well together, and each bringing different strengths to the project.  I think that my new criterion for group work for the rest of my time at PSR is that the group all must be extreme introverts or they all must be Ben.

We wondered:  what is “Queer Urban Space”?  The site visits to the Alice Austen House and the Gay Liberation Monument were obvious spaces, that is, spaces that were occupied by those identified as queer.  But, like different-gender loving folks, same-gender loving folks (“queers”) were/are everywhere and in every time.  Therefore, we encountered queer space in many other sites.  Like so many sites rich in cultural memory, queer sites were sometimes tinged, but more often drenched, in sorrow.  Sarah Schulman is sorrowed by the forgetfulness of new generations who have no concept of, or interest in, the “Plague” (earlier period in the AIDS epidemic) and no sense of the terror of mass deaths.  Ben and I discussed this peculiar lack of awareness of such a profound time.  In addition to Schulman’s analysis, we thought a possible factor might be the isolation that queer people were subjected to; imposed by themselves, by their families, by a society so fearful of apparent differences.  Isolated deaths do not leave behind individual stories that are told and retold so that new generations can remember.   This lack of story telling and remembering underscores the worth, importance, and function of these urban spaces, these museums, monuments, and memorials as memory-keepers.

And Then There’s Queer . . .

Equally instructive to Ben and me were the assigned readings for our unit:  “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies” from In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives by Judith Halberstam and chapters from The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman.  Having taken Prof. Johnson’s class, Ben and I understood that, aside from sexual orientation, “queer theology” points to a space in, and a point-of-view from, the margins, the same space occupied by Jesus, and that this queer space has been with us for a long time—from the Christmas story to Easter to the Transfiguration to Pentecost.  Both authors write a theology that is relevant also to Christians.

I have, to a much smaller degree than Schulman, experienced that “activists win policy changes, and bureaucracies implement them.” (12)  I also experience anger and disbelief when I see “truth of complexity, empowerment, the agency of the oppressed, replaced by an acceptance of banality, a concept of self based falsely in passivity, an inability to realize one’s self as a powerful instigator and agent of profound social change.” (14)  Schulman names “this thing that homogenizes complexity, difference, dynamic diologic action for change and replaces it with sameness” as gentrification, which includes the literal/physical (razing diverse urban communities and replacing them with money making homogenized groups) and the spiritual (“a gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change,” i.e., “a diminished consciousness about how political and artistic change get made.”) (14)  My particular frustration is with those of us who occupy privileged places in a bureaucracy, with the ability to make changes, but refuse or are unable to see themselves as agents “of profound social change.”  So many of us who should know better have come to “the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.” (51)

I have come to see queer space as a factor that could counter gentrification.  If gentrification is about homogeneity, queer-ification is about differences, diversity, and dialogue.  If gentrification is about forgetting, queer-ification is about radical memory, memory not just of facts and events but also of searing pain and energizing rage, and this memory can be our collective memory by its retelling to every generation.  If gentrification results in “a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves” (27), then queer space like the public memory spaces found in New York City are crucial reminders and disruptors to all of us.  For me, practicing Christianity means all of the same things (insert “Christianity” in this paragraph in place of “queer. . .”).

The gospel or good news is that God disrupts, Jesus models this disruption, and the Holy Spirit moves us to unexpected queer spaces.  I have experienced that loving, holy disruption and I have come to understand that, as a 61 year old straight Chinese woman, I can (and must) occupy and help to create holy queer space.  The Schulman writing gives theological under-girding to the importance of cultural memory.  Urban spaces in New York City overflow with cultural memory and serve as lessons of the dangers of gentrification and the vital promise (the necessity, really) of queer-ification.

In 2010 I traveled in Israel and Palestine for two weeks meeting with grassroots peace organizers on both sides of the conflict. I was traveling with an interfaith group of Christians and Jews and our conversations were nothing if not candid, challenging, and transformative. We began out travels all over the ideological map and returned still not agreeing but none of us in the same places as we started either.  The people we met with and the books we read troubled the waters for my understanding of Israel, the government’s actions, the United State’s support, and our cultural narrative that unquestioningly supports Israel and its right to exist. Not only was Palestine far from a peopleless land, it was a thriving and diverse nation that was systematically conquered, evicted, and replaced by European Jews who told each other that this land was their birth right.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage and Living Holocaust Memorial was an entirely different experience this time. I was reminded of the adage that the winners write history and I would include memory as a part of that history. Perhaps memory is the first piece of creating history. Our memory determines what we will carry forward and what we collectively distill to the mainstream idea of objective “history.”

The version of history that most of the world supports for Israel and Palestine revolves around the image of the Jews, as underdogs, triumphing over all odds to establish a sacred, god-given homeland. There is more than an overtone of deserving in this narrative that is not unlike the American narrative “we built this!” (We don’t often note the contradiction between the ideas that Palestine was a “peopleless land” and that the Jews fought and triumphed to establish their homeland. If the land really was peopleless, whom were they fighting? The bushes?)

In Gentrification of the Mind Sarah Schulman writes about the supremacy ideology: “the self-deceived pretense that one’s power is acquired by being deserved and has no machinery of enforcement. And then, the privileged, who the entire society is constructed to propel, unlearn that those earlier communities ever existed. They replace the history and experience of their neighborhoods’ former residents with a distorted sense of themselves as timeless.” I don’t at all want to down play the horror and oppression of the holocaust, but Schulman’s observations about supremacy and gentrification are being played out on an international scale in Israel and have been since the 1940’s.

Though they have international support that gives them a vast military advantage, many Israelis and the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) cling to the notion that they are still the victims and that the Palestinians don’t deserve their homes because they just left; they weren’t forced out with violence. On the political stage Israeli officials pretend that new West Banks settlements are innocent and neutral acts, not the calculated and malicious takeover of even more Palestinian land. The Israeli government constantly puts forward fear and victimization as their justification for the actions they take against the Palestinians all the while those actions further reveal the nation of Israel to be victimizers, oppressors, or as Schulman might call them: gentrifies. Yet the international community stays silent as if the Palestinian people never existed, and the Israeli occupation was just a natural, inevitable occurrence that colonial powers had no part in engineering. Best yet, Jews living in Israel is in the Bible! It’s a timeless phenomenon. It’s divinely ordained.  It is the gentrification of a land, a people, and a nation.

Our visit to the Living Holocaust Memorial left me wondering what are we remembering and at whose expense? What can we do when the “history” is being constructed is based on flawed memory? Does the elevation of one memory or narrative always come at the expense of others? What would a memorial to the Palestinian people or the occupied land look like? Can such complex and inextricably intertwined narratives as the ones held by the Jewish and Palestinian people’s ever be honored and memorialized at the same time or in the same place? What would it take to try? Can the United States ever participate in the process honestly when we haven’t acknowledges or made reparation for our occupation and oppression of this land and it’s native people?

The Mount of Olives (now the largest Jewish cemetery in Jerusalem), view through a muslim-built arch on the Temple Mount, previously the center of Jewish ritual practice, which currently holds the Dome of the Rock, the 2nd most holy site for Muslims after Mecca.

Before I say much more, let’s be clear(er) about two terms: heteronormative and queer. “Heteronormativity” describes the set of assumption and cultural norms that associate biological sex with gender presentation, gender role, and heterosexual sexual orientation. The epitome of an American heteronormative family is the nuclear of a married husband and wife with 2(-ish) kids, in which dad is the breadwinner and mom is the homemaker. Remember the beginning of the movie Pleasantville when it’s still black and white? That is Heteronormativity to a T. The catch is, lesbian and gay (or “same-gender-loving”) relationships can also be heteronormative. The lesbian household down the street with two moms, two kids, one breadwinner, one homemaker, and marriage equality signs in the yard is still participating in the same assumptions and power systems of the dominant heterosexist culture.

“Queer,” the verb, has come to mean the process of questioning and reevaluating dominant cultural assumptions and norms particularly around gender, role, sex, and relationship. A heterosexual household with a stay at home dad and CEO mom: that’s queer. A household of three adults co-parenting a child: that’s queer. A gentleman proposing marriage to Alice Austin and Gertrude Tate indenting marry both and live as a “triad”: that’s queer.

But back to the historic house: the Alice Austin House Museum showcases some of Alice’s photographs, but none of her more queer photographs. The dining room has a table and chairs that are undoubtedly period, though not original. The living room is painstakingly arranged to exactly match one of Alice’s photographs. Other than the sitting room which displays a contemporary art show and the caretaker occupying the second floor, the house looks like every other house museum: frozen in time, the famous inhabitant just left but will be back soon. It’s Living History!

Except it isn’t. In explaining his desire for house museums to be relevant and vibrant community and cultural centers, the director of the New York Historic House Trust, Frank Vagnone says “It is so fundamentally NOT about the dishes.” His take is that rather than focusing on having the perfectly period, matched set of china on display, historic house museums should look to the lives of their historic inhabitants and the cultural, contextual issues of their lives. Instead of stressing over the accuracy of Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet room, what if Monticello housed a think-tank for racial justice? Rather than using objects to idealizing a version of the past that perhaps never existed, can we instead use the lives of our ancestors to creatively orient our future?

As it stands now, the Alice Austin house is primarily about the dishes, also her photography, but mostly the “dishes.”

Before meeting with Frank and visiting the house we read an article (Austin_house_HHT)  that explains the controversy and resulting conflict between the non-profit that works with the historical house trust to run the house and the local LGB community over Alice Austin’s demonstrably queer life. One side says: you wouldn’t care that she was a lesbian if we hadn’t first preserved her photographs and house. The other says: you can’t erase our history; you have to acknowledge her lesbian life. The article points out that no matter what we call her, Alice likely never called herself a lesbian.

As it stands now, the museum is mostly about the dishes. Personally, calling Alice Austin a lesbian, adding in her queer themed photographs, and a blurb about Gertrude would be more interesting but would still feel to me like focusing on the metaphorical “dishes.”

Very little of what we know of Alice’s life fits into our contemporary image of a “lesbian.” Instead, she lived the “larky life” of disregard for heteronormative expectations. She didn’t just pioneer in photography; she and her friends wore the “wrong” clothes, slept with the “wrong” person (or people), played a lot of tennis, and held a lot of parties. They pioneered new ways of being and being in relationship.

In recent years, parents state by state have begun breathing sighs of relief that their gay and lesbian teens will be able to live “normal” lives with legally recognized spouses and families. At the same time, many young LGBT people are rejecting heteronormative monogamous relationship and gender identity in favor of polyamory, genderqueer identity, and co-op, co-parenting communities. The bottom line is that I want there to be room for them too and I want their parents to breath a sigh of relief that their kids are happy regardless of how recognizable their relationship structure.

I’m all for looking back in time and claiming our history. But looking back and claiming Alice Austin as a part of lesbian history doesn’t do anything for the LGBT community we don’t already have in other figures and it washes out the queer depth of Alice’s relationships and larky life. Instead let’s remember her as a queer pioneer who’s life makes room for multiple kinds of loving relationship.

“Leaving flowers, writing collective messages and lighting candles were declarative acts that aimed to  individualize the dead” writes Maurita Sturkin in her article, Tourists of History. “Whereas the images of spectacle produced an image of collective loss, of a ‘mass body’, these rituals sought to speak of the dead as individuals. These objects and messages attempted to speak of the dead as individuals”.

This journalist’s words ring so true as I reflect on our group discussions in New York after our tour of the 9/11 Memorial. Most of us were keenly aware of the commodification of tragedy, one of the most tragic events in American history. For whom was the Memorial produced? We felt little if any connection to the granite icon of American capitalism. Where did we find the emotional connection to the memories of those lost? For me, I found my connection to the ones lost in the individual names engraved on the Memorial. It gave meaning to those whose lives were sacrificed on that tragic day. Memorials classically are erected to mourn and remember. Much of this was lost for me even though THERE WAS CERTAIN SADNESS PROCLAIMED BY THE LOSS.

Yesterday, I watched a film, Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud for a second time. It was based on the story of a young boy whose Dad was killed in the WTC. The film unfolds as he tries to remember who his Dad was and to recall precious moments he had spent with him. Towards the end, we realize he psychologically becomes unglued each night he has a nightmare of his Dad falling from the Tower, with scenes of explosions and fire, with scenes of his Dad trying to find a way out of the building. He was extremely traumatized because he continues to remember his feelings when he and his Dad were together and he lacked courage to follow through with something his Dad thought he should be able to do. He was afraid he had disappointed his Dad by his lack of courage. So many things immobilized him with terror as he was an extremely cerebral boy who was too conscience of the all of the possibilities of life situations in which he could be harmed. He was afraid of taking the subway, airplanes, elevators and crossing bridges was impossible. His Dad had wanted him to try swinging in a swing at the park, but he refused because he was afraid of a concussion if he happened to fall off. He continues to have regret about not being able to be more courageous for his Dad.

On the “worst day ever” as he coined it, he had received a call from his Dad, but he was too scared to answer the phone, even though his Dad had pleaded with him to pick up the phone. He knew his Dad was aware that he was listening to him, standing completely immobilized, not able to pick up the phone and have a last conversation with him. He was completely consumed by his inability to have a last conversation with his Dad. He did not understand his hesitancy, particularly in this urgent and last encounter he could have had with his father.

The poignancy of this film after visiting the Memorial of Ground Zero created content and meaning for why I felt empty coming away from the 9/11 Memorial experience. There remained for me this question, for whom was the memorial constructed and what did the memorial committee want to portray? The void experienced there, the selling of wares to support the construction, the kitsch created to express national and international incredulity in the wake of this profoundly symbolic and lethal attack was numbing. Then, there is also the experience of being searched, undressed and scanned, reminiscent of preparing to board a plane which increases your discomfort about the entire experience of visiting the 9/11 memorial. It is not an experience I care to repeat and it does not leave me with good thoughts about what I had experienced. I salute the film maker with his moving story which more closely portrays for me what the memorial committee could have possibly have been looking to reflect. Unfortunately, they really missed the mark.

Nowhere was there a reflection of the individual lives lost. Immediately after the air strike and tragedy, families and friends showed up at Ground Zero with posters and pictures of their loved ones.” “These photographs seemed to aid in mediating and negotiating sense of loss. The photographs also became portals to speak to the dead. Many of the posters were assembled into an exhibition, Missing: Last seen at the World trade Center; September 11, 2001. These quotes come from an article  titled: Tourism and “Sacred Ground” by Marita Sturken.

Here lies the important “Cultural Memory” for the nation. “They conveyed both local and global meanings, raising the specter of the exceptionalism of the event”. I read that Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the memorial called the memorial design, Reflecting Absence, and for me this is exactly that, but what they call absence for me becomes a void of experience, not linking itself to the pain and grief felt by all of us on “the worst day ever”

One phrase that came up continually during our cultural meaning explorations was “it is so important to tell each other our stories. It engages us in discussion that erases the possibility of being dismissive of one another’s culture”. Alan Radley says of Collective Memory, “there emerged the wider view that remembering is something that people do together”. Ron Eyerman also states: “memory is located not inside the heads of individual actors, but rather” and here he quotes Radley again, “within the discourse of people talking together about the past”. I was struck by the reality of this statement at the Museum of the Holocaust and the Museum of the Chinese in America. The stories were not new to me, but the pictures of the real individuals who had been affected by Cultural Trauma was emotionally wrenching. It is true that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. The reality of the people whose lives were impacted by these levels of trauma was vividly portrayed.

A haunting image I continue to hold in my head, “memory” was of the young Chinese boys arriving at Ellis Island who were stripped naked and wrapped in sheets for physical examinations before they were allowed to come in. The stark humiliation and degradation was powerfully seen in their faces.

The video story told by a young Chinese woman on the day she discovered her father had another family in China whom he had deserted for a chance to come to the New Land. These men were called “the paper immigrants”and for a certain sum of money and a new identity, they were able to transport themselves via ship to the United States. Her father had come to the US with the pretense of having a profession, a large house in China and a different name, the name of a wealthy merchant. It was a certain piece of paper that allowed this to be the reality for many Chinese men; yet, it meant settling into a new life in America without the “first” family and rarely admitting to the new Chinese American family that there were children in China and another wife, waiting for their father and husband. In this story, the daughter in America had finally met the first wife and her half sister. Her mother had a very hard time with it, especially when the first wife moved to the states. In the end, they were all able to be a family. I venture to imagine that it did not always end with such a neat, comfortable wrap up of the two families. The sadness of this “cultural memory” is the knowledge that everyone involved was caught in a “no-win”situation.

Another video story was about a young who was told to be a good Chinese girl, as she was going up in a family of brothers. She was supposed to stay in her societal role by being quiet. From a very young age, she refused. She became one of the first female pilots in the Navy during World War I and she loved flying P-53’s. It was an amazing accomplishment to be the only Chinese woman pilot.

She and her Euro-American counterparts accepted the fact that as women they were only allowed to fly just to the outskirts of the “no-fly”zone where they delivered the plane they were flying to male pilots. They were not allowed into combat situations. On her last mission, there were so many p-53’S trying to land on the same air strip at the same time, she became worried and anxious about the landing, with good reason. She never made it in; she crashed and died.

For me, the significance of these stories is the injustice of having heroes in your culture who are an important factor in the history of this country. In contrast to the classic by Ernest Hemingway, “For
Whom the Bell Tolls”, in many of these stories of “cultural memory” never recorded, it is a travesty where here the title should be “For Whom the Bell Never Tolled”; such a miscarriage of justice. Is it so important to continually whitewash American History that we accept the distortions that never include those who are marginalized and oppressed?

Zofia Rosinska writes about the experience of the refugee, linking it to a continual melancholy that can remain for generations. She states, “The concept that connects emigration, melancholy and memory is the notion of loss. The experience of loss is a common element in all three phenomena”. In a later passage, she declares this melancholy to be not from a material source but the continual feeling of the loss as the feeling of want or lack of something intangible and ideal. It seems to me that it is a trauma of loss of great magnitude to arrive in an inhospitable country which had earlier been described to you as the promise of “the land of milk and honey”. Yet, this intangible loss of your collective identity and history would be a melancholy lasting through generations.