blood run: Letters to a Lost Aboriginal Ancestor

These letters are the result of a daily writing practice in which I write a letter to my imagined female indigenous ancestor each morning.

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) What ideas, images, or specific phrases resonate with you?
(2) Are there any parts that you find confusing and would like clarification on?  Anything you find problematic?
(3) How might you imagine these being used in performance, installation, or other public sharing of art?  How might they relate to or be integrated with the other blood run material?
(4) Other thoughts?

21 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Hi.  你好。 I don't know what language to greet you in, phonemes racing trolling lazily in my blood cells, the pulse and undertow of the Pacific.  I speak to you like dolphins, sonar, vibrations of oceanic language in our bones, your bones long disappeared, turned to dust, wreathed with kelp.  I imagine you, brown skin, lined face, joyful wrinkles around your eyes, unbound feet.  Strong capable hands that till the soil, a child on your hip, taro and sweet potato at your feet, ordering the men around. 

But maybe that is wrong.  Maybe you are young, a young woman with deep-set eyes and a long nose and sea-black waves of hair.  Maybe you saw the dark silhouettes of approaching ships, the masses of men who streamed onto your island like long-queued rats storming the fertile western plains, with horror.  With wonder.  With fear.  With love.

So many generations, an ocean and several languages later, your mixed blood daughter writes you in English.  The history books say we are extinct, your language and people are extinct.  The history books were not written by our people.  I doubt my motives but I want to know you, I take bitter rice wine into my mouth, temples clench squeeze from the harsh alcohol, spew and retch in a would-be blessing.  I kneel at the Pacific, half a world and four hundred years later, and touch the water, waiting hoping to hear you.

Love,
Cynthia

22 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Hi again.  It's me, your mixed lost daughter of the future.  Yesterday, I walked along the Pacific, saltwater swirling sand around ankles and calves, and thought about another coast, craggy rocky waves crashing the sailors praying to Mazu for protection as they crossed the black water from Fujian.  What did you think and feel as they crashed headlong into your shores and lives?  What does it mean to think about my origin point as a story of colonization?  What would you think of me?  Would you look at me, scornfully, and tell me I am not one of your own?  Would you look at me as the greatest mistake in the history of your people, to love and trust a foreigner?  Would you regard me with loving abhorrence, the offspring, perhaps, of a forced encounter by the field one night?  Would your heart be sad, betrayed, understanding of the layers of assimilation, of all the lost and imposed cultures and histories that run through my ancestral and dancing body?  What have I inherited, what have I chosen?  Is it possible, dear ancestor, that I inherited my love of border-crossing and cultural difference from you?  Or is that wishful thinking, colonial guilt?  In the end this is the unanswerable question: was your "marriage" to that Han man -- my ancestor, a 李 -- a choice, a survival tactic, an act of violence?

With love and wonder,
Cynthia 李怡欣

June 23, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Like a little girl or an almost illiterate ABC, I have been practicing handwriting.  Writing Pingpu family names over and over -- or rather the Chinese surnames you were forced to take on -- or which you chose to take on as a tactic to avoid discrimination.  It reminds me that my parents took on Anglo names when they first moved here, my dad's name a strange echo of a Confederate general, Robert Lee, the same name on an FBI no-fly list, the routine interrogations at LAX when he returns from Taiwan.  Wooden prow replaced by metal bird: how we have chosen to leave, now and then.  Someone said that immigration is giving up on one's homeland.  We came in the 70s, before martial law was lifted, when Nixon decided, oops, Taiwan isn't China, China is China, and we thought, the Communists are coming!  the Communists are coming! -- a threat which is true even now.  I don't know what prompted that earlier migration, that other moment of complicity with a settler-colonial project that ended up with me as your descendant.  Years of drought, maybe, like this bone-dry California Gabrielino-Tongva land that I love.  Financial incentives by the Dutch, who could not persuade you to till your land for their profit.  Or arriving with the Manchurian Qing, who managed the indigenous people and the Han settlers by pitting us against each other, as even now we are pitted against each other in my heart, ventricles gasping, blood cells fighting each other for oxygen, as even now we are pitted against each other in Taiwan, the DPP wanting to use aboriginal identity for its own political purposes, you call us pai lang in our language, you call us mother-fuckers in yours.

What's in a name?  What's hidden in a name?  Even as your people took on Chinese names, they were still different than ours. 哀, Ai, sorrow.  猴, Hou, monkey.  毒, Du, poison.  Were the names phonetic translations, like those weird Chinese transliterations of foreign names: Mary becomes 瑪麗 (Ma Li).  Or are there traces of meaning -- red, baby chick, poetry  -- that connect to your lost names, our lost names.  Did you agree, in the end, to take the name 李, wood radical Lee, to enter a Han patriarchal lineage, a woman lost in the branches of men, the native roots and brambles of your matrilineal ancestry disappeared from the naming, the graves, the altars, the books, the family genealogy.  I cannot offer incense to you.  I can only speak, haltingly, these names in colonial translation: Yue (月), Hong (紅), Li (力).  Moon.  Red.  Power.

Love,

Cynthia
李怡欣

24 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

I wish I knew your name.  Your face.  I wish I had a picture.  A marking on a gravestone in the tall grass, worn by monsoon and time.  A mention of your laughter in a long-ago diary.  A song.  Something to hold onto and let me know that you are real.  Today the scholars tell me you are not real: the geneticists and anthropologists argue, waving their righteous flags, funded by government institutions. 

I remember going to get my hair cut with my mother in Taipei, and the hairdresser saying, Is she part American?  Her eyes look different.  My mother was angry and said I was a hundred percent Taiwanese, raised in the U.S..  At the time I thought, bemused and a little hurt, that my foreign clothes and way of being in my body must have shifted her perception, made her see me as part white, since of course that's what American means in Taiwan.  Now I wonder whether she was really seeing your eyes in my face: deep-set and round with the epicanthal fold.  Mistaking one set of barbarians for another.

I've been rethinking Confucianism.  Seeing its tightness.  What was once framed as the oh-so-predictable rebellion of the white-washed second generation American now presents itself as a decolonial act, as working to undo hundreds of years of assimilation to Han culture.  Queering Confucianism.  Family is a fist, squeezing tight as water runs and dribbles out, instead of gently cupping the water, holding it.  Family is a set of lungs shared between conjoined twins: we cannot breathe without each other.  Family is tightly woven silk, the strength of warp and weft: if you cut one thread, the whole thing unravels.  But what was family to you?  I read Jolan Hsieh's ethnography of Pingpu people, and it looks a lot like love marriage: noseflutes playing, young men and women dancing at harvest, an easy approach and retreat, following the ebb and flow of one's desire.  Did my Han ancestor slip into one of these dances?  Did you feel him beside you and take his hand in yours, smiling?  The collision course of history in one simple gesture?  Did he move to your family home, working hard as all immigrants do, to make sure his clothes wouldn't be hung outside the front door, to win your family's approval?  Did you know that he could come or go, that you need only stay together as long as you wished, that divorce and remarriage would be easy and without stigma, that you could come together and drift apart like duckweed floating on the pond's surface, that you could take for granted, as I never have, the right to choose who to love?

Love,
Cynthia

June 25, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

I imagine you wild-eyed dancing

I imagine you with millet and daikon and dirt under your nails

I imagine you with your mother and an earthbellied pot

I imagine you pouring sweet rice wine laughing fullbodied

I imagine your hands reaching into a steaming communal pot

            sweet potato and wild boar cooked together underground

I imagine you diving, a flying fish

            silverslipping in and out of waves

...my imagination stumbles, comes up empty. 

How can I imagine you when I know nothing about you?

A handful of dirt, salt, water.

Speak to me, please.

Cynthia

July 23, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Many days, as scholars argue in my head, stroking their long beards and waving their green flags, I wonder if you really exist, if you ever existed.  I feel you frowning, shaking your head at your daughter's doubt, at yet another erasure.  This is how genocide works.  So I continue writing and creating around the possibility of your existence -- hints -- detective work -- signs from a dream world -- delving headlong, shaking, into a bloody history that is far bigger than my own blood lineage.

I've been thinking about rainbows.  Somewhere over the.  Longing.  Pot of gold.  Queer leprechauns.  Oxumare dreams sky, snakes his androgynous spine as raindrops spill and shimmer, the jangle of cowry.  Genderqueer child of Oxum and Oxossi.  Birds fly why oh why can't I cross the rainbow bridge to meet you, to meet my lost ancestors.  It's true, my imagination refracts through a blockbuster film, Warriors of the Rainbow.  And yet what hands calloused torn from weaving.  What blood on my hands gripping machete.  What sacrifice do you require for us to be together?  Must I kill the Han in me?  The Seediq say that across the rainbow bridge in the heavenly hunting grounds, your enemy and you are at peace, the conflict forgiven. Would I have to split my head from my body in one clean stroke, to sacrifice myself to you to mend my warring selves, to heal?  But this is not a Pingpu tradition.  It is a headhunter spirituality from a patriarchal society that allowed the Seediq and the Atayal to violently, valiantly resist their Japanese colonizers.  Seediq Bale.  To kill is to become fully human.  And I doubt this was our way, our matrilocal plains people who married the enemy, loved them, maybe.

Rainbows remind me of Hawai'i, where they appear, spontaneously, in mist and light, my father, bigbellied full of mana, so happy at home there.  The possibility of you around every corner.  Maybe I should've suspected we were Pacific Islanders then.  Rainbows lit up my Facebook feed last month, suddenly everyone was queer, Queer Nation, the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage while my radical queer friends protested.  I know marriage is not liberation, but I am tired of critical queers, of negativity and gatekeeping and exclusion and hopelessness.  I want a world lit up by rainbows, rainbows without blood, pirates without pillaging, where the only blood sacrifice is to cut out the internalized colonizer within.

Love,

Cynthia