I can read you some more options,
or I can just start selecting for you if there's any--
Yes, what would you like to hear?
[INAUDIBLE] biracial experience.
OK, the biracial experience, I would
like to play that for you.
There's two videos.
Actually, there's a ton of stuff around hybridity and biracial
identity, but I will play you one that leads up to it first.
All right.
I won't-- Well there's only one line.
You'll figure it out.
So I don't need the--
This is the sound of a train.
This is a sound of a train.
This is the sound of a train.
This is a sound of a train.
This is the a sound of a train.
This is a sound of a train.
This is the sound of a train.
This is the sound train.
This is the sound of a train.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
This is the sound of a train.
"This."
At the 2018 conference of the Chinese Railroad Workers
Descendants Association, I take audio recordings of conferees
saying one of three sentences: "This is the sound of a train";
"We do not ride on the railroad, it rides upon us";
and "We cannot count all the dead."
These lines are for a video project I am completing.
Those who speak Cantonese, I record
saying the lines in their mother tongue.
I cannot, however, get anyone to approximate the quote from
Thoreau.
There is no way to say this in Chinese,
one man says, shaking his head.
Po Po and Gung Gung, fluent in Cantonese, are not alive.
I cannot ask my mother for a translation.
My mother does not fully comprehend Cantonese,
and I understand, is embarrassed about this among other things.
One afternoon over lunch she leans
across the table with its pot of tea steaming between us
and says she's sorry she moved me
as a child from the Asian-dominated Beacon Hill
to the whiter enclave of Ravenna.
We did it for the schools, she says.
But now you are more comfortable among white people than us.
The us in this sentence is the slap.
There is a little too much emphasis
my mother puts on "us," the final forceful way she
places her teacup by the bowl.
Of course, I am not finally responsible for that decision
or its attendant comforts.
I recall an afternoon in high school sitting on Po Po's couch
with my mother, Po Po's friend smiling and staring at me.
She's so white, someone murmurs to Po Po,
and my mother grinds her hand into my knee.
And-- No, that's not it.
This is the one.
What you're going to see here are
images from my grandfather's photo book.
"Heart."
I remember the boy who called me dirty
and the French women who hissed "pauvre petite"
as I passed on the street.
And I remember the girl like me at school
who pasted her face with white paint
and blacked her brows to pass, she said, as Mexican.
I remember everything for which I was made to feel ashamed.
Even the fact my father said I would never
make half the woman my mother was
because of my heart, which the doctor now
calls unusually large.
Memory is the weakness I bear on my own.
I come from a race on my mother's side
said to be the most stolid and insensible,
yet feels so keenly alive to suffering.
It hurts to hear the words strangers
use for Chinese shopkeepers, or watch the Chinamen here laugh
when I say, I am of their race.
I, who but for a few phrases remain
unacquainted with my mother tongue.
I have the name my English father gave me,
and I look like my father.
I could be loved if I lived as if I were like him too.
But I prefer the name I have invented for myself.
I want the world to see my mother in me,
regardless if the Chinese have no souls.
I do not need a soul.
It is not my soul in question here
in these hot glances, these furious whispers.
Why care for love when I do not know if I should love others
in return.
Love is a white loneliness that swells the heart
and shuts me out from pleasure.
What is there for one like me to do but wander,
a pioneer traveling between west and east myself the link
they threaten to destroy between them.
I do not need a name on legal papers.
Here is a match.
Here is the mirror in which my pale face burns its flickering
allegiances.
My soul is everywhere on my person.
I lose nothing of myself that has not already disappeared.
"Heart."
Sui Sin Far, born Edith Maude Eaton,
was a journalist and fiction writer,
the daughter of an English merchant Edward
Eaton and a Chinese mother, Achuen Grace Amoy,
whom Eaton met on a business trip to Shanghai.
Far worked for a variety of Canadian and American
publications, largely writing about the Chinese community
she encountered on her travels.
I do not know what in her real life
her relationship was like with her mother, a former slave who
as a child worked as an acrobat and tightrope dancer
for a Chinese company before being rescued by missionaries.
Far's Cantonese pen name and her stories
focusing on Chinese life in the west,
however, suggest she saw something of her deepest
self reflected in her mother, that, though she could have,
she preferred never to pass as white.
I first read Far's personal essay,
"Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian,"
just after graduate school.
The memories she'd had of racially disguising herself
then of refusing to be disguised felt distressingly familiar.
One anecdote she relates of being trapped in a room
with a British Naval officer who insists
she succumb to his advances made me feel briefly
like I suffered from vertigo.
The essay was written in Seattle and published in 1909.
One can say echoes.
One can say similarities.
And one can argue that the insistence
on these similarities obscures.
The English poem reflects the Chinese
but it is not the Chinese poem.
The past is not simply a translation of the present.
I can say that at times I feel like Far
or that I look like my mother, but my life
is different from theirs.
We are citizens of different countries.
The slap in my relationship with my mother
is agreeing that some part of me will never be her daughter.
In me, she loses what she's already lost,
father, mother, language, culture.
Of course, she and I ignore this,
pretending that the divisions I've
learned to contain within myself don't become unbridgeable
when I'm with her.
What draws us together holds us apart.
I don't think there is a language adequate
to express this break at our center,
even as my awareness of it helps me see
my mother with more sympathy.
Perhaps this is about race, perhaps not.
But race has certainly made our private experiences
more private.
Sui Sin Far's name in Cantonese means narcissus flower.
My Chinese name, I refuse to translate.