WEBVTT

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I can read you
some more options,

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or I can just start selecting
for you if there's any--

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Yes, what would
you like to hear?

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[INAUDIBLE] biracial experience.

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OK, the biracial
experience, I would

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like to play that for you.

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There's two videos.

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Actually, there's a ton of stuff
around hybridity and biracial

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identity, but I will play you
one that leads up to it first.

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All right.

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I won't-- Well
there's only one line.

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You'll figure it out.

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So I don't need the--

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This is the sound of a train.

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This is the sound of a train.

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This is a sound of a train.

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This is a sound of a train.

00:00:50.590 --> 00:00:52.232 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

00:00:52.232 --> 00:00:53.440 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

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This is a sound of a train.

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This is the a sound of a train.

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This is a sound of a train.

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This is the sound of a train.

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This is the sound train.

00:00:58.240 --> 00:00:58.630 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

00:00:58.630 --> 00:00:59.838 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

00:00:59.838 --> 00:01:01.152 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

00:01:01.152 --> 00:01:02.360 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

00:01:02.360 --> 00:01:02.920 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

00:01:02.920 --> 00:01:03.580 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

00:01:03.580 --> 00:01:03.730 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

00:01:03.730 --> 00:01:04.840 align:middle line:90%
This is the sound of a train.

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This is the sound of a train.

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This is the sound of a train.

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[INTERPOSING VOICES]

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This is the sound of a train.

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"This."

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At the 2018 conference of
the Chinese Railroad Workers

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Descendants Association, I take
audio recordings of conferees

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saying one of three sentences:
"This is the sound of a train";

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"We do not ride on the
railroad, it rides upon us";

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and "We cannot
count all the dead."

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These lines are for a video
project I am completing.

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Those who speak
Cantonese, I record

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saying the lines in
their mother tongue.

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I cannot, however, get anyone
to approximate the quote from

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Thoreau.

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There is no way to
say this in Chinese,

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one man says, shaking his head.

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Po Po and Gung Gung, fluent
in Cantonese, are not alive.

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I cannot ask my mother
for a translation.

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My mother does not fully
comprehend Cantonese,

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and I understand, is embarrassed
about this among other things.

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One afternoon over
lunch she leans

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across the table with its pot
of tea steaming between us

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and says she's
sorry she moved me

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as a child from the
Asian-dominated Beacon Hill

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to the whiter
enclave of Ravenna.

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We did it for the
schools, she says.

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But now you are more comfortable
among white people than us.

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The us in this
sentence is the slap.

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There is a little
too much emphasis

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my mother puts on "us,"
the final forceful way she

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places her teacup by the bowl.

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Of course, I am not finally
responsible for that decision

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or its attendant comforts.

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I recall an afternoon in high
school sitting on Po Po's couch

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with my mother, Po Po's friend
smiling and staring at me.

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She's so white, someone
murmurs to Po Po,

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and my mother grinds
her hand into my knee.

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And-- No, that's not it.

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This is the one.

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What you're going
to see here are

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images from my
grandfather's photo book.

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"Heart."

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I remember the boy
who called me dirty

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and the French women who
hissed "pauvre petite"

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as I passed on the street.

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And I remember the
girl like me at school

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who pasted her face
with white paint

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and blacked her brows to
pass, she said, as Mexican.

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I remember everything for which
I was made to feel ashamed.

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Even the fact my father
said I would never

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make half the
woman my mother was

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because of my heart,
which the doctor now

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calls unusually large.

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Memory is the weakness
I bear on my own.

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I come from a race
on my mother's side

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said to be the most
stolid and insensible,

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yet feels so keenly
alive to suffering.

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It hurts to hear
the words strangers

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use for Chinese shopkeepers, or
watch the Chinamen here laugh

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when I say, I am of their race.

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I, who but for a
few phrases remain

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unacquainted with
my mother tongue.

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I have the name my
English father gave me,

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and I look like my father.

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I could be loved if I lived
as if I were like him too.

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But I prefer the name I
have invented for myself.

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I want the world to
see my mother in me,

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regardless if the
Chinese have no souls.

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I do not need a soul.

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It is not my soul
in question here

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in these hot glances,
these furious whispers.

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Why care for love when I do not
know if I should love others

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in return.

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Love is a white loneliness
that swells the heart

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and shuts me out from pleasure.

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What is there for one
like me to do but wander,

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a pioneer traveling between
west and east myself the link

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they threaten to
destroy between them.

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I do not need a name
on legal papers.

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Here is a match.

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Here is the mirror in which my
pale face burns its flickering

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allegiances.

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My soul is everywhere
on my person.

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I lose nothing of myself that
has not already disappeared.

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"Heart."

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Sui Sin Far, born
Edith Maude Eaton,

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was a journalist
and fiction writer,

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the daughter of an
English merchant Edward

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Eaton and a Chinese
mother, Achuen Grace Amoy,

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whom Eaton met on a
business trip to Shanghai.

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Far worked for a variety
of Canadian and American

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publications, largely writing
about the Chinese community

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she encountered on her travels.

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I do not know what
in her real life

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her relationship was like with
her mother, a former slave who

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as a child worked as an
acrobat and tightrope dancer

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for a Chinese company before
being rescued by missionaries.

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Far's Cantonese pen
name and her stories

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focusing on Chinese
life in the west,

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however, suggest she saw
something of her deepest

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self reflected in her mother,
that, though she could have,

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she preferred never
to pass as white.

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I first read Far's
personal essay,

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"Leaves From the Mental
Portfolio of a Eurasian,"

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just after graduate school.

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The memories she'd had of
racially disguising herself

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then of refusing to be disguised
felt distressingly familiar.

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One anecdote she relates
of being trapped in a room

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with a British Naval
officer who insists

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she succumb to his advances
made me feel briefly

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like I suffered from vertigo.

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The essay was written in
Seattle and published in 1909.

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One can say echoes.

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One can say similarities.

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And one can argue
that the insistence

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on these similarities obscures.

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The English poem
reflects the Chinese

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but it is not the Chinese poem.

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The past is not simply a
translation of the present.

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I can say that at
times I feel like Far

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or that I look like
my mother, but my life

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is different from theirs.

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We are citizens of
different countries.

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The slap in my
relationship with my mother

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is agreeing that some part of
me will never be her daughter.

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In me, she loses what
she's already lost,

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father, mother,
language, culture.

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Of course, she
and I ignore this,

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pretending that
the divisions I've

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learned to contain within
myself don't become unbridgeable

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when I'm with her.

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What draws us together
holds us apart.

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I don't think there
is a language adequate

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to express this
break at our center,

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even as my awareness
of it helps me see

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my mother with more sympathy.

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Perhaps this is about
race, perhaps not.

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But race has certainly made
our private experiences

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more private.

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Sui Sin Far's name in Cantonese
means narcissus flower.

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My Chinese name, I
refuse to translate.

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