Am I Really Here?

Untitled, video loop, work in progress.

Mount Hope Cemetery - Lots A, C, E

Visiting Mount Hope Cemetery, where many early Boston Chinatown immigrants are buried, I sensed the complex feelings of a class of forgotten people. I sensed kinship mixed with homesickness, friendship mixed with deep loneliness, pride with regret.

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Mount Hope Cemetery - Lots A, C and E are the burial grounds of the first wave of immigrants to Boston Chinatown in the early 1900s. Regarded as a virtue in Chinese social thinking, 落葉歸根, all things return to their source in old age - and expatriates return home, too. The Chinese family association of the deceased with financial means and known relatives, would arrange disinterment and trans-pacific shipping of bones to one’s ancestral village for proper reburial. The ones who remained here were the unfortunate ones. Lots A, C, E are respectfully clean thanks to the grassroots effort of the Boston Chinatown community and educational programs. However, it does not prevent me from sensing the poverty and loneliness of the people buried there. I am painfully reminded of the risk they took by leaving home in search of food, work and safety.

Reflecting on this feeling, I inscribed marks on broken stones. Illegible markings on stone pieces found at random spots in an anonymous ravine. Weather and rushing water wash-away the markings on the stones. The ink tints the stream, expressing itself for a brief final moment.

Am I really here?
This place, unfamiliar to me
May I go home?
-Homesick by Devon McElveen

小時候
鄉愁是一枚小小的郵票
我在這頭
母親在那頭
長大後
鄉愁是一張窄窄的船票
我在這頭
新娘在那頭
-excerpt of 鄉愁 by 余光中

鄉愁, homesickness
nostalgia, saudade…
our universal struggle with belonging and not belonging.

How do you name yours?

At this troubling time of COVID-19, in New York City, where the death toll is close to 600 a day, unclaimed bodies with no known next of kin or families unable to pay for burial, are interred in a mass grave on Hart Island in the Bronx.

Did they go home?

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The 1,500 graves at the Mt. Hope Cemetery are physical evidences of Boston’s early Chinese immigrants. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Boston Chinatown native, Nancy Lo, and UMass Boston Asian American Studies Professor, Peter Nien-chu Kiang, from whom I learned about the Mount Hope Cemetery. You can read an article by Professor Peter Nien-chu Kiang here, and find additional information through the Chinese Historical Society of New England (CHSNE) here.

Mt. Hope Lot A, Wen-hao Tien, 2020