…so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl…

Maxine Hong Kingston

I repeatedly wrote this line from Kingston’s seminal text and semi-autobiography, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975) with chalk on a painted blackboard. Trying to reconcile the role of silence in my own upbringing and as part of my cultural makeup and personality, the performance was a kind of self-imposed punishment while simultaneously also a reclamation and subversion of silence. It was an attempt to erase the statement and its connotations by way of the layering of chalk and trying to force the blackboard to bleed back into the white wall.

This piece was created as a studio installation and performance enacted at on April 9, 2009 at the University of British Columbia over the course of six hours.