My father’s biological father was a gambler. He gambled away any resources he had that would have been useful to raise 6 kids. So, his wife (my father’s mother) left to go back to China and took half the kids. She left the youngest child, my father, and the oldest…
This is a photo of my mother’s family, placed atop woven strips of fabrics to represent our Chinese and Indonesian heritage. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika is Indonesia’s official motto and is translated from Old Javanese as “Unity in Diversity.” I wanted to refer to the official motto especially when they were being discriminated…
My grandmother was largely the breadwinner of the family. My grandfather wrote booklets which he sold as a subscription. This did not earn very much money, so my grandmother developed skills to make embroidery for women’s shirts. She had 2-3 employees, according to my mother. My mother and her 4 siblings…
My mother resolved in her mind to emigrate out of Indonesia in 1965. It was after six generals were kidnapped and assassinated in a failed coup d’état that was quickly blamed on the Indonesian communist party. This resulted in riots, from which my mother escaped and at least 500,000 people getting…
Here is my small interpretation of how it feels to be Chinese Indonesian. The backdrop is a list of 16 laws that were enacted that directly or indirectly discriminated against Indonesian residents with Chinese ancestry. There were 45 laws made during Suharto’s regime (1966-1998). About 62 laws total were made…
There are two images here. One is in the background. They are of 5 sisters: my mother and her sisters. Their father wanted boys very badly. He got his wife pregnant five times, all of which resulted in girls. Still he did not give up. He gave them all boys…
This is my grandmother on my mother’s side. She was the bedrock to my mother’s family. She supported a family of 7 as a seamstress and with dividends from her father’s company when her husband who was a writer did not earn enough money. This is the only photo I…
This also focuses on my father’s side of the family. On the right hand is an image of him, his eldest sister, and his aunt (behind his sister). The other two figures were the neighbors. My father’s father went back to China to find a wife and brought her to Indonesia. She…
This is the first piece from my parents’ photo collection that I made. I found this group of forgotten images on my last visit to see my folks. It was all neatly wound in plastic that I don’t think anyone has opened since at least 1983 when we emigrated out of…
It has been so long since I posted here. I had been working on a new series of work, titled Excavation that is exhibited in a show, Liquid Stories, at Lindsay Dirkx Brown Art Gallery at San Ramon Community Center. The curator asked all of us to speak about 5…