Annotated Migration (Second Response)
2022
acrylic, inkjet prints on paper, international shipping receipts, assorted consumer packaging (passport photo file, perfume packaging, leaves, house paint sample card, passport photo, prescription slip, ink on card, printed photographs on gloss, fortune cookie paper slip, fabric
multiple pieces, 8.3in × 11.7in
I was 10 years old when my mother was published in AALR. At the time of this piece’s creation, I was 20, the same age she was when she moved to the USA and began the process of becoming an ‘Asian-American.’ Two years before that, I performed my own emigration to a third country, and when I introduce myself in my new country, I always mention both my mother’s and my father’s country: Sri Lanka, and America.
In this visual ‘annotation’ of her text, I considered how she questions the very term ‘Asian-American,’ and how I am not Asian-American but I am Asian, and I am American; I considered how, in her piece, she argues for that which defines us both in broader strokes—to take pride in our collective ‘Other’ identity—and that which defines us in minutae, defying that which others us in the first place.
Her ‘response’ to her citizenship over the years has been directly shaped by the fact of her three daughters, American citizens by birth, of which I am the second. I find myself tracing her steps like a map I was never given, and I think this is what they mean when things run in your blood. Is it Asian blood? Is it American blood? To me my identity is a collection of ephemera accrued over time. Migrants are usually collectors, which means that most Asian-Americans, at some point in their bloodline, are as well. The particularities of our ephemera are what tell each story anew. In this piece I utilised scraps from bureaucracy of my own emigration process as well as hers, from my birth, and from the journeys that parcels and I both take between the two lands that define me.