A father stands holding his baby. We can assume the baby is his from the pride beaming off his body: arms outstretched, lips pulled in a wide smile, chest swelled and baby held with a tender strength. The father has no eyes. There are people behind them, too, with grayed and melting faces, hazy with missing features. From their distorted, gaping mouths, our eyes are drawn to the golden baby in the middle of the painting—the beaming, delightfully round, wondrous baby. Held by its father—held synonymous with loved. A dragon watches solemnly in the background. Its head is tilted stoically into the vague distance, solid and devoted behind the baby. The painting—which is not really a painting, but a projection—flickers on the wall. Only the infant and its protector are depicted in full form.
Look at them again. Something about the baby’s face, like the ghosts behind it, is anguished. We see it in full force, now, face crumpled with some emotion too heavy, too intense for such a small, warm body. Awe? Confusion? Shock? The fierce dragon, silent and heavy; thick colors curling around its body like tendrils of smoke breathed with conviction; light from the screen dripping softly onto our faces, tinged with a choked emotion we can’t think too much about. The dragon displaces the father, rich in a distinct cultural memory now blank and unknown—a loss contained within a painting.
American Soil, Chinese Heritage by Katelyn Wang (ES ’27) waits for us, glowing in the room. Our hands are tingling from the abrupt warmth of being inside with too many people, gaggling and pressing into each other—into us. It had been too cold outside, cold enough to feel your breath cool in its leaving; to press your hand deeper into your pocket; to clutch your rubied ears like a string of pearls, theatrically gasp and scurry up the slippery steps into the house, briefly wondering if you should take off your shoes. There was some jazzy piano playing softly under the projector. I wish it was quiet.
The Asian American Cultural Center (AACC) bathes their strip of Crown Street in flickering, orange warmth as their doors sweep in (admittedly, mostly Asian) students for the art exhibition on Sunday, January 28. A total of eleven pieces, artwork from undergraduate and graduate students are scattered among the floors of the AACC—collages and photographs and felted rugs and paintings of varying mediums. I walk in through the doors, a companion cool and solid behind me, flushed with the anticipation of warmth and chai. Turning left is where I encounter the dragon, the father, and the baby—a kind of unmistakably Asian trinity, clothed in a memory just dense enough to catch the edges of it, but accordingly vague to belong only to the artist. This is a familiar pattern: memory, pride, and the gaping desire to show your Asianness to the world.
The multipurpose room hosts three pieces scattered around the room. In the corner: an easel props up Eagle-eyed Warrior by Khulan Erdenedalai (SM ’25), a painting of a bold woman on a misty blue-gray canvas, body poised and certain in the finishing stance of an archer. She is a warrior and a weapon, I am sure. There’s something piercing about her eyes, flashed away and shooting just past me, chasing where her arrow has soared to meet its target. She’s vivid with a specific kind of pride – it’s painted in the curves of the bow, her slightly flushed cheek, the armor firm on her chest. My eyes tear away from the warrior and flicker to a boy standing behind the easel, who is scrutinizing a poster on the wall. The boy’s eyes strain upward; the archer’s eyes strike sideways. I turn away from this corner, unable to meet either gaze.
The stairs creak and shift with a precarious steepness as my companion and I climb up to the second floor. The game room is dim except for the lamp in the corner, tinged with an orange warmth. The room sucks in the breath of everyone tucked into the crevices of the couch; leaning on the armrests, slanted against the walls. Even the light feels pleasantly heavy, draping over faces and slipping between interlocked fingers. A series of photographs (“Childhood”, “Passing down”, “Touch”, “Rinse”, “Balanced”) fade into each other on the screen. Han Yang (BBS ’28) hurriedly explains each one, pointing out her childhood snacks captured in the corner of one photograph as it fades away.
Each photograph is drenched in some manner: rainwater pooled in the mud beneath strikingly green crops, taller than the farmer himself; a river running steady and quiet, greenery fanning its sides; a window soaked in the sorrow of being empty and abandoned. I patiently wait through three cycles of these photographs just to see the river again, and again. A heaviness settles in my chest each time—the picture is still but I can imagine the current, skimming against the long reeds of grass as they bow over the water.
On the right side of the photo, a woman in an alarmingly pink shirt crouches over the mouth of a slight curve in the soil, stroking the water as if to commend its tame nature. I think of my grandmother, back bent like the grass and hands clutched behind her, walking at a sharply efficient pace. She laughs in my memory, the kind of cackle I would be slightly terrified of as a child. The problem with Asian-American art is that most things remind me of what I thought I’d left behind.The problem with Asian-American art is that most things remind me of what I thought I’d left behind. Nostalgia pools in the corner of my eyes, disappearing as quickly as it came. The aftermath of guilt curdles in my throat. I shake my head and look away. It’s pretty—of course it’s pretty. Would we like art if it wasn’t, in some way?
I sit on the couch on the other end of the room, a warm knee pressed into mine. From here, the screen is obscured by the darkened heads of people gathered around, murmuring to each other or humming in assent to Han Yang’s delayed descriptions. We’re an interesting people, here – eager to devour everything cultural and representative of our heritage, which we each thought was the most unique, eager to chew it and splay it open on our tongues: look at this. Look at who I am, who I’m capable of being.
The entire exhibition is coated in warmth – something tender dipping the crevices of each piece, yet colored with an underlying feeling that maybe we’re all talking about the same thing, here. All the same kind of resentment and nostalgia for being Asian—layering on a thick cultural memory to return to a place that we’re unable to call home—and the complicated act of loving despite it.
As I begin to leave, I encounter American Soil, Chinese Heritage again: slow my pace to catch the baby’s face one more time, feel the ache of a father’s love sink into the painting, the dragon’s pride resonating as the artist’s. The music has stopped. The door opens again, reminding my body with a chill that it must endure the cold again, soon. Too soon. I keep walking.
A hand, warm in mine. Held synonymous with cared for. It’s a wondrous thing on its own.
