A Collection of Stories

My project a collection of stories looks into the Chinese diaspora tied to my family history with its roots in Java and Madura. It speaks of ideology, oral history and identity.

A Collection of Stories serves as a continuous exploration into the Chinese diaspora, tied to my family history with its roots in the islands of Java and Madura.  I began this work over a decade ago as I met with relatives, and friends of my family and encountered stranger, and visited sights and places deeply intertwined with my family's experience as fourth-generation Chinese Indonesians.  The work touches on themes of identity, oral history, and ideology passed down from one generation to the next.

In 1965 there was a CIA backed coup d' etats in Indonesia that ended in the mass killing of one million people who were labeled as Communists with many of Chinese Descent. My grandfather was politically persecuted and imprisoned for fifteen years he only survived because my grandmother connections to a general whose wife had taken sewing lessons with her. My grandmother had lost her parents when she was child and became self reliant, she had been supportive of her husband's activism as she worked in a hair salon, as a seamstress and was a great cook. She was able to save enough for tickets and visas to leave Indonesia to study in Belgium, Germany and France. I was born in Cologne, Germany, growing up I remember often meeting relatives and friends of my family who were socially or politically active consisting of writers, journalists and artists.

I began this body of work thinking about my family history and the many ties that binds us as people throughout the world. How memory and family history is shared and shifted as we continue to discover our own. I'm interested in the connections. we have with one another throughout the world.