COMMISSION - 2020, Peabody Essex Museum
laundry and cooking
2019
Chamber nonet for Hub New Music + Oracle Hysterical
Premiere March 7, 2020 at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
Commissioned by Hub New Music & the Peabody Essex Museum
As a second generation Chinese immigrant, I grew up knowing that my family, like many Asian families, had relied on restaurant work once in the US. laundry and cooking sets The Heathen Chinee by Bret Harte to the UK style, grime. Harte’s poem illustrates a card game between a migrant Chinese laborer and a pair of cowboys in California during the 1870s. The cowboys, with aces up their sleeves, cheat the immigrant to make a buck and the immigrant, speaking no english while subjected to indentured servitude as a railroad and gold mine worker, cheats to survive. Harte was in support of immigrant labor and yet his satirical poem, misinterpreted by the general public, fueled anti-Chinese sentiments. Along the west coast, it became a battle cry of the xenophobic movement, leading to a mass lynching of 1871 in which 17 Chinese men were killed by a mob in Los Angeles. This hate encouraged the 1882 the Chinese Exclusionary Act which passed and remained in effect until 1944 when the first Chinese man lawfully gained US citizenship, roughly 200 years after immigrants started being documented. Harte died, best known for his misinterpreted work, one of the most famous poems of the time. laundry and cooking explores these tensions, left unhealed and often forgotten, till today.
‘when China Discovered the World’
2019
Chamber nonet for Hub New Music + Oracle Hysterical
Premiere March 7, 2020 at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
Commissioned by Hub New Music & the Peabody Essex Museum
Drawing on inspiration from Dawn of Midi’s Dysnomia and research from 1421 The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies, this work reflects on the expeditions of Zheng He. His expeditions were made during the rise of the Ming Dynasty and the construction of the Forbidden City which lasted for a matter of months before burning down. Suddenly, the Yongle Emperor Zhu di died and was superseded by the Zuande Emperor Zhu Zhanji, the economy tanked, and thus the political landscape of the era flipped. The new government burned all documentation of China’s age of exploration and thus buried the historical documents that might have proved that China was the first country to make a map of the world by way of trade and diplomacy rather than colonization.
