cái zhū 财珠

cái zhū, performance, single channel audio recording, video, installation, 2023, Mid Residency Show, A402, California Institute of the Arts

Uneducated(文盲). Arranged marriage(童养媳). Deaf(耳聋).

Since I was a kid, these three words are my impression of Caizhu (财珠), my grandmother on my mother's side, which I learned from the people during my growth. Two years after she passed away, I finally brought up the conversation to talk about my grandmother with my mother, Meifang(梅芳). When I was young, my mother only spoke Mandarin Chinese to me, but during our conversation, I asked her to speak her dialect, Gan Chinese, to me. This is the mother language she learned from Caizhu, but she decided not to teach me during my youth. 

In the audio I recorded of my mother talking, she narrated that Caizhu is an abandoned daughter, an unloved wife, and a hardworking farmer. Her parents gave her to someone else's family. Her adoptive family raised her as their future daughter-in-law. Her husband married her because he couldn't deny the order of the elder. Without going to elementary school, she started farming at 7. Everything she did and everything happened to her was because almost everyone was doing the same in the little village. 

Caizhu had never had the chance for education. Attending the literacy classes for adults offered by the government was the only education she got to learn a few Chinese characters. Likewise, I had never learned how to write traditional Chinese calligraphy. When Caizhu could never tell her story in her words, using the Chinese calligraphy tool to freely write about my narration of her story while listening to Meifang’s voice is my retelling of the family story. By tearing the written paper into small pieces and using them to remake paper, I’m using the process as the metaphor to represent the process of story retelling from generation to generation.  The seeds, the soybeans, are the symbol of Caizhu's spirit in her own words; if you plant one bean, you will get plenty back.