ARTIST STATEMENT:

“Sowing Rice with Salt” explores how immigration affects the relationship dynamics between generations, particularly its impact on the younger generation. This exploration occurs between an archival image of an immigrant parent and an interpretive recreation of the archival image with the child. This image is accompanied with the child’s written reflections on their relationship to their parent and ancestral culture. “Sowing Rice with Salt” sheds light on the interconnected struggles of children of immigrants through exploring the most formative and intimate, yet often strained, relationship. By visually placing the child in the shoes of the past version of a parent, the adjacent images devise a visual bridge where the child can empathetically imagine their parent’s past, suturing the gaps which arise from diverse upbringings, traditions, and hardships across diasporic landing points.

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“Sowing Rice with Salt” - Transcriptions

Ben Chin's writing:

Pa

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How come the older I get the more I realize I don’t really know you? I try to fit the puzzle pieces together but they never really make sense. Grew up in kampong, house on stilts. Dig clam, catch fish for fun. Next thing, you set up basketball game for your team. Everyone chicken out, so instead you go yourself.

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College? You go by yourself to New Zealand. Make friend with Bush Rat, explore the island and found mom. You guys stayed for a year after right?

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That fire must have been strong. You and mom jump over to Europe, backpacking, hopping trains, and sneaking back into hostels. Someway, somehow, you landed with me and Nick back in Singapore. And when it was time to leave your job and evacuate Jakarta, you skipped over Singapore for London Business School.

 

How ah?

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We haven’t even reach the chapter of your life where you’re doing laundry, cooking three meals, and dropping us off everyday. Haven’t even reach the chapter where I stop speaking singlish except to you and mom. And already I cannot keep up.

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I look at this photo and think: how?

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How did keep looking out the window, looking for more?
And when you saw something you wanted, how did you go for it, knowing that there would be other windows you can never look through again?

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The more I ask, the more I realize I don’t know how you did it.
And the more I ask myself, the more I realize I don’t know how I’m going to do it.

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Michelle Huie's writing:

My relationship with my mother, Mei Lee, was cut short due to her losing battle to breast cancer when she was only 55 and I was 15. My memory of her is filled with her energetic spirit and her entrepreneurial pursuits. My mother grew up extremely poor in southern China and never received a formal education. When she and my father along with my three siblings moved to the U.S. in 1967, she was determined to make something of herself and was never satisfied. She worked as a seamstress in the garment district during the day, made ice cream cakes at our family's ice cream shop at night and worked at her hair salon during the weekends. 

 

My mom's hair salon was her first entrepreneurial pursuit and to her it was more than a hair salon. It represented her journey towards her own independence, community, and voice. She found a small space in the basement of a tenement building on Elizabeth Street and opened the doors of her salon in 1971. Her hair salon became the social center of newly emigrated women in the Chinatown community. As a child, I remember the room filled with cigarette smoke, perm solution, and the sound of laughter, gossip, and mahjong tiles. She had her hair salon until her first cancer diagnosis. 

 

Her unadulterated hustle and drive have lived on in every aspect of my own life. Several years ago, I made the decision to quit my corporate job, and go 100% into my own business. When I was wrestling with this decision, I thought of my mother and the bold moves she's made throughout her life and the conviction and confidence she had in herself, and I immediately knew that I was making the right decision. People always say that I have my mom's spirit and that I look just like her. And my response is always, "I hope so."

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Mischelle Moy's writing:

There is a photo of my mom and I at the corner of Bowery and Division St., next to the Confucius statue. I am 7 months old, in a white bonnet, a baby blue onesie, and red silk shoes. I am in my mom’s arms who is wearing a black and white houndstooth coat with a denim bucket hat with an orange flower on it. My mom was 25 and had just immigrated here a couple of years before. I think of this photo often when thinking about my roots and identity as the first American-born child in my family. 

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My mom grew up in a Taishan village where she biked or hiked to school, surrounded by chickens, cows, dogs, and mountains, and everyone knew each other. There was no internet and Chinese color TV was new. She often talks about memories of living in school as a young girl, being the top of her class (proudly ‘#1’ with a ribbon, she’ll say), and of the village life of multi-generational households. 

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I was raised in a matriarchal household where my mom was the breadwinner, my grandma did all the housework, and my aunts were always around. After I was born, there was my sister, then 5 girls by my aunts, so altogether a group of seven cousins. As the eldest of us all, I grew up being the ringleader and “the trial child”-- experiencing everything firsthand to warn the rest so mistakes are not repeated and to make their processes easier. My mom was working every day as a patternmaker/seamstress but without an American education of her own, she couldn’t help me. For as long as I can remember, attempting to translate documents and taking over English-speaking services has been a part of my role and responsibility even though I was raised speaking Taishanese and had to take ESL in elementary school. I still have the best communication skills between the generations because of this but I also had to spend a lot of time putting my everyone before me.

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I grew up with my mom rarely around but she would come to school for my birthday parties. As the eldest herself, she was trying to sustain a new life here not just for us, but her parents, and in-laws as well. Many years later, she’d help her younger brother and his family start their immigration journey too. With all this, she has also spent most of her life putting others before her.

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Contrary to my dad’s job in America, my mom worked in ateliers where English was spoken and this pushed her to understand her industry and the culture here more. And unlike my siblings, I commuted to schools and jobs all over the city, also in pursuit of a creative career. Despite growing up in such different environments, we both share similarities in being strong women with a hustle and being that bridge between generations. Maybe it’s the city grind or maybe it’s just we are female alphas with talent and ambition that help carry and push what we can do for ourselves and our family. Through her years of hard work and skill after immigrating, mom has established a reputation for herself in NYC as a patternmaker. And seeing her  through this process, I inherited her eye for detail, her drive, and creative mind, but also her need to constantly work, a scarcity mindset, and never feeling financially secure.

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Today as an adult who is about to get married and start a family of my own, I have embraced and found gratitude for all the traits I got from her and the experiences of my life as the first-born Chinese-American child. I have started to unlearn the workaholic traits and encouraged her to do so as well but I’m aware it is not as easy for her. Being the first to do anything comes at a cost but we still try to let our inner child come out. There is still a little girl in both of us despite the challenges and sacrifices: I love to play with colors and toys in my artwork and collect silly knick-knacks while my mom still gets super giddy over seeing a sunset, likes whistling to the radio, and immediately fawns over any and all flower arrangements. She still acts like her kids are babies because we are her babies, but it made me realize everyone is also someone’s baby in their eyes, and we will always just be grown up versions of the children they remember.

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I often work around Chinatown and drive around that Division Street corner to the Manhattan Bridge on the way home and recall that photo. Everytime I see a houndstooth coat or a denim flower bucket that folded at the face like my mom wore, I think of this moment frozen in time to remind myself of where I came from and where my mom came from and where we’re going. Most people in her village in Taishan have moved away, dispersed around the city and in other states, but most of our very big family is now rooted in Sheepshead Bay, New York—our new village.

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Peter Cheung's writing:

My parents arrived in California from Taiwan in their 40’s along with my older siblings (ages 6 and 7). My twin brother and I were the first to be naturalized in the states and were born in a small hospital down in Southern California in the 80’s, we wanted to be as American as possible, eschewing our mother tongue for English — a sense of pride that we didn’t have an “accent”, and altogether our sense of our Taiwanese culture began to vanish, along with our grasp of Chinese. My older siblings adapted as well, but my parents still struggled with their new language. We somehow developed a shorthand that one couldn’t even call “bi-lingual”: my parents spoke to us in Mandarin and we responded in English. Without missing a beat we understood each other completely.

At home still we had two conflicting cultures fighting for our attention: Asian and American. Food, however, seemed to unify and keep us close to our roots. My mom, at the forefront of teaching us how to navigate the kitchen, taught us dishes from her homelands of Taiwan and Southern China. The most iconic, yet most utilitarian recipe: home-made dumplings.

We would whip up a huge batch of raw ground pork filling, seasoned with green onions, ginger, sesame oil, soy sauce, garlic, salt, dried shrimp, reconstituted shiitake mushrooms, and white pepper, with finely shredded Napa cabbage. Packages of square dumpling skins (store bought obviously) sat stacked in the center of the table, a small bowl with water to seal the edges tight. Armed with spoons, my mom showed us the first round — not too much filling, seal the corners, fold in half, and the final flourish: a twist to make them look like little purses.