Losing Touch

This lithographic triptych represents my anxieties of moving out of my childhood home away from my family, and potentially with it my Chinese culture. I’ve tried for years and years to learn Chinese, and I still have the skills of a six year old. This makes it nearly impossible to maintain relationships with my extended family between visits. And although I can make a basic stir fry, authentic Chinese food from my parents’ hometowns are very complex and require unique ingredients. I’m worried that leaving the Chinese environment my parent’s created will make me lose that huge part of myself.

Towards the left of my portrait contains some scenes of my happiest memories when I visit extended family in China. When I visit my mom’s rural home town, we love walking through parks and I’ve always loved the pagodas’ beautiful and intricate designs and colors. However, the things I miss and remember most about my trips are cooking and eating with my family. I love enjoying the complex dishes that can take hours to make, street food, the specialty cuisines of the area, etc. There are different scenes including my aunt rolling out dough for dumpling wrappers, my grandma forming bao zi, my uncle eating hot pot, and the wide selection of dishes at dim sum restaurants. Each stage of the print gets darker and the details become less clear representing how I’m worried that this important part of my life and how I was raised can completely fade away and disappear in the future.