Snapshot

Christina Liu:
My mother’s “talk-stories” were mythology and bitter tea for me. We share the same, strong line of fate on our right hands. Shaped by historical destiny, she stopped her dancing, lost her family for years to work-camps in Maoist China, burned books in the attic with my aunt; their cinders alight our conversations even now. I try ineloquently to shape them into a Western narrative, but how is one to tell a story of escape to Hong Kong by swimming, through two imprisonments and the loss of friends, through a daughter who is barely literate in written Chinese?

“Snapshot” owes itself to my parents, who settled initially in the Bronx, NYC, and then in Chinatown. Many of the images are distinctly Western, and of a distinctive milieu: Reagan, Michael Jackson, big hair shellacked in Aqua Net, Jordache Jeans. The hot asphalt and architecture of fire-escapes are indelible for me, as are the senses I did not capture: crabs in buckets, spit and sizzle of hot woks, Capezio ballet flats. When I was in graduate school, a classmate asked why I retold Greek myths, Grimm’s fairytales: “You are Chinese. You should be writing about Chinese stories.” I had no answer, only that I did not wish to write in Chinoiserie, in clichés. “Snapshot,” with its Western images, feels Chinese to me. It is who I am, after all. Its alleys run my veins.