All right.
So what did people want to listen to next?
Hobos, Hollywood, prostitution?
Chinese death rituals.
Everybody likes a Chinese death ritual.
OK.
That sounds so dark.
Why did I say that?
The wine.
OK.
Let me just read one of these.
And then I'll play--
There's two videos attached to it.
So first, "Body."
As part of their death rituals, Chinese workers
would pay a huiguan, a district association,
to bury their bodies, then have a bone collector exhume them
months later to scrape away the flesh
and break the bones up to fit into earthen jars or wood
boxes.
These boxes would then be shipped to Hong Kong
to the Tung Wah Hospital, which would distribute the remains
to the workers' families.
The man may die on foreign shores
but he always returns home.
Bones were shipped from San Francisco
to Hong Kong as early as 1855.
No one knows how many Chinese workers died
building the railroad, as the Central Pacific kept
no casualty records, so no one knows
how many coffin boxes linked to the railroad
were shipped to China.
And not all men's bones were collected once returned.
I
am sent a video by a mixed race artist named Summer Mei Ling
Lee who has documented the hundreds of boxes abandoned
in Tung Wah's mortuary.
In her video, Lee paints an art gallery with scenes
from Guangzhou and ash ink made from burnt incense.
I'm startled by the detail of her scenes.
Lee depicts houses, roads, villages.
Many images include seabirds which reminds me
of something my grandmother Po Po once
said about the cormorant, the bird whose
neck fishermen fitted with a tight ring
so the bird could catch fish, but never swallow them,
as it could never swallow the souls of the dead it hunted
on the seas.
Why would birds hunt souls, I asked Po Po as a child.
Because, she said some people never find themselves anywhere,
in life or death.
In her video, Lee stands before her installation
in the tiny San Francisco Chinatown gallery.
She looks white, the gallerist says
to the audience in Chinese, but she is one of us.
The artist flinches as if slapped.
The camera catches the flinch.
I am at home watching the flinch on my screen.
Whoops, no.
No.
Too eager.
Body.
Oh, sorry.
I'm ruining--
A carload passed last night.
Their bones returned in barrels marked "pickles."
Thick as bees, ants, locusts, celestials lay siege to nature
in her strongest citadel.
Their genius is imitation.
Show them once to do a thing and their education is complete.
Wherever you put them, you'll find them good.
They can withstand freezing, hunger, thirst, and heat.
Their simple narrow but not dull minds running in old grooves.
Congealed quantities.
Crystals of social substance.
Eunuchated as boys or sodomites, they breed defunct
in the heat of germs.
They can be shipped to shore in great quantities.
Even their clothes come identical, studded with rivets.
This comes with another video, "Return."
I got a drone for this to get the--
I just always like to say, I got a drone for this.
The falling leaves return to roots,
what grows when leaves cannot be gathered.
What returns, if not the body?
What remains, if not the soul?
Who is to say these graves, empty of their bones,
mean only loss, not that these men escaped
death's hold entirely?
They are not home, but they are not here either,
or have become so full of here we need another word than gone.
So throw out the cormorant, its leg tied with silken ropes,
let it drag the air from memory over and over, as many times
as you want.
You can't snare what isn't missing.
This country claimed their bodies.
It never trapped their souls.
"Return."
The Chinese believe the living possessed two souls, hun,
the light, male, active spirit that gives us
our spark of life, and po, the dark, female, passive spirit
which animates our flesh.
In death, the male spirit ascends to heaven,
the female part remains on earth.
Falling leaves return to roots, a Cantonese saying
about the return of the dead to their homeland, but not
everyone cares which leaves fall.
Women, children, those who died a violent death were
buried without ceremony, remaining where they died.
I think of the Angel Island suicide.
I think of my grandfather Gung Gung
and our family's July firecrackers, the sparklers
he nudged into my fists.
It was a point of pride for him that all three of his sons
joined the US military, though one, Kingsley, nearly died.
Once I asked Po Po what she considered the best
day of her life, and she told me,
the day your uncle King returned home from Vietnam.
If my uncle had died in that war,
his body would have been closer to his parents'
ancestral homeland, but not his own.
It is possible he might never have been recovered.
We treat the elegy as a pathological mode,
the mourner incapable of resolving loss,
but what if the point of grief is not
its resolution but the extension of memory, the insistence
that the listener, too, carry our history into the future?
Po Po bowed her head as she wept in front of me, her body
not making a single sound.
What about the women?
I asked Summer Mei Ling Lee on the phone
when I interview her about her installation.
I drew a face, she says, in one window.
You can just see her if you look.
The video pans by the houses.
On the white screen, a blur of ash.