656 w 35th St, Chicago, IL 60616
2
656 w 35th St, Chicago, IL 60616
It was sometime in 2020, before we got married. The global pandemic had silently redirected everyone’s norm. Diana and her brother Aye moved to my rented house near Chicago Chinatown after their student dorms were shut down. One evening, or perhaps an afternoon, both Diana and Aye sat in front of their computers with excitement. They were watching their national election result, and the Myanmar embassy in America contacted them to arrange relief flights for Burmese citizens in the U.S. to go back home. I remember they joked with me that if the Chinese government would do the same——and if I know what it feels like to vote.
The relief flight came as promised on 31st January 2021. Diana and Aye left in the snow. I remember that the Uber driver struggled to start the car on a slippery slope. On their plane to Incheon International Airport for transit, I took a long nap and woke up with the news of Burma just had a “coup” ––It was a word that I did not understand, and though not banned, the word had slowly disappeared from mainland Chinese glossary. The news of the military coup arrived like a period for my memories at Chicago house. While Diana and Aye were stranded at the Incheon airport for a week and later joined the protest in Yangon, I lived alone for another half year with only more news: people flooding the streets, people getting shot in the head, the military drugging prisoners and releasing them to burn villages…I did not understand that “the life you thought inevitable, unalterable, and fixed in some foundational reality is smoke, a mental construction, fabrication.”³
656 w 35th St, Chicago, IL 60616
2021
Three layers of photolithography,
etching, letterpress
20.3*81.2cm
2021
Three layers of photolithography,
etching, letterpress
20.3*81.2cm
3. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark. (Duke University Press, 2015), 138.