Hi, everyone.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
How are you?
Hey.
Good to see you.
[LAUGHTER]
My name is Ching-in Chen, and I'm very grateful to be here.
Thank you Prageeta for gathering us all in solidarity
with each other.
And something that in a conversation
brought up today at the Troubling Lineages
and Genrequeer panel was about the question
of desire and the desire to have connection with each other
and to have this, I guess, this--
I don't want to call it family, but some kind
of familial, familiar connection that some of us
don't often have with each other or find, especially if we're
in unfriendly institutions.
And I came to the last Thinking Its Presence.
And it was a game changer to have
folks who are further down the path
be willing to be really vulnerable.
And I'm looking at some of you who I remember sitting here.
And that's the stuff people don't really often are
willing to share with you, except maybe
if you get pulled aside, it's a whispered conversation.
But it's not something that people
are willing to be public about.
And that's really important to changing the communities
that we're all part of and having
things be more equitable.
So thank you all.
Thank you Prageeta.
And I'm going to share two or maybe three pieces that--
I'm also really obsessed with the archive.
I grew up in Massachusetts, which has a troubled lineage.
And I have a troubled history with history.
So a lot of this work is about that.
And "Dear Story of a Risk, 1878."
I found them in box, rights directory
of Milwaukee, their printed names dusty on page.
Shane Ring, 276 Third.
Wing Wau, 86 Mason.
Clean as sheet, near in their rows, shelved.
A thin woman's back attempting to see, covered.
Paths cut off.
As if wore on skin, how many left behind this book?
In paper, this sergeant, this gunmaker.
She says, I do not want a window in the fucking sky."
So that poem is about going through archives in Milwaukee
looking for Chinese-American names.
There was a riot in Milwaukee in the late 1800s around the time
of the Chinese Exclusion Act.