Losing Yourself in Diasporic Nostalgia
Stephanie H. Shih's ceramic memories of the old Lower East Side
I don’t know why I don’t take comfort in images and items from the past as much as I do, especially if it’s a past I didn’t experience first-hand. The present is definitely not so great with, you know, everything, but the past was hardly perfect. I can only guess that when members of my family came over to America, they likely thought it was definitely better than what they experienced in Eastern Europe. Was it paradise? I don’t know. The places they lived in the States are always referred to as “slums” in various histories I read. The part members of my mother’s family started out, around Maxwell Street in Chicago seemed miserable. According to Ira Berkow in his 1977 book Maxwell Street:
In 1900 a social scientist determined that if all of Chicago were as densely populated as its average slums, the city would have 32 million people instead of 2 million, and if were as densely populated as its worse slum, such as Maxwell Street, then the whole of the Western Hemisphere could have been housed in Chicago.
Yet I still mythologize this past even as I sit around complaining about the coffee shop I’m reading in being too hot or the fact that I’m sometimes too late to grab a Citi Bike, and I have to remind myself if one of my great grandparents heard me they’d likely think I was a freak and would say I should learn to share a single bathroom with an entire building.
Something I’ve talked to with plenty of friends whose family made their way to America is how we recognize the past is not perfect, but there is something calming in the simplicity of the relics from times we ourselves didn’t know. A friend of mine, whose grandparents made their way up from the Jim Crown South and settled in Chicago, was once talking to me about the music of Skip James, and he was telling me that it’s difficult to disassociate the pain and hardship the musician went through, but that it was also so easy to get out of the now listening to his songs because of how sparse and melancholy they are. Similarly, I’ve had friends born in America, but whose families came from all over, Russia, Mexico, China, India, and pretty much any point on the globe you could point to. Some of them reconnect with the past they didn’t know through food, trying to learn to cook recipes their ancestors may have made. It’s an opportunity to rediscover something, but also learn about themselves.
The reason I bring all of this up is that we’re “taught” history. Experiencing it through music or books or food, that’s usually an endeavor we have to undertake on our own. The history we’re taught when we’re born and raised in America is the American version of history, and what we’re taught is always lacking and will likely get worse given the state of things. That’s why I was so moved by the work of the artist Stephanie H. Shih. Obviously, I’m going to get excited over ceramic cans of Cel-Ray and fortune cookies. Everything in Open Sunday, the show that’s on now through August 6th at Harkawik in NYC catches my eye, but there’s something so moving about the way these pieces, all depicting little reminders of the Chinese and Eastern European Jewish diasporas on the Lower East Side that is still there, but less so.
I was looking at all these ceramic sculptures of items I’ve seen countless times in their authentic form and I had to really ask myself if I was as truly moved as I believed I was or if maybe I was just impressed by how good they look. And the answer is “Both.” I’m very taken by how Shih could capture the essence of things like a bottle of U-Bet chocolate syrup or a can of Yang Jiang preserved beans, but I’m also moved by the idea of our shared experiences as people who maybe started out in different places with different languages, foods, and customs, but we ended up in the same place, side by side. I can’t speak to the specific past Shih is referencing since any members of my family that maybe lived on the Lower East Side got out as soon as they could, likely over a hundred years ago, but I can say that Chinese takeout food that you’d get in those pagoda boxes resonates very deeply with me and the sound of mahjong tiles clicking and clacking is my idea of ASMR, and I can only assume that those things are true because somewhere at some time in my family’s history there was some closeness to people who weren’t where we were from and didn’t speak the language we spoke or prayed the way we did. And yet, despite the differences, there was something we liked or learned from each other. That’s beautiful to me.
Today, whenever I hear people talk about the idea of “learning from each other,” it’s often in the context of that dreaded “both sides” discussion. The whole idea that there are “very fine people” mixed in with the violent and hateful. I’m not a fan of that sort of learning from others. If somebody is hateful, if they don’t like me or you because of who we are or where we come from, I’ve lost faith that there’s anything I could get out of talking with them, that’s just a truth I’ve had to face as I’ve grown older. If they want to change, that’s their thing. They can do it on their own. I have no time for them. But everybody else, your stories, your family stories, your food, your culture, the past you are connected to, I still like to learn about and from those things. And by making these sculptures of Jewish and Chinese memories of getting by in America, Shih has done us all a service of reminding us that we’re all connected in this world no matter what.
This is lovely, and thank you so much for introducing me to Stephanie Shih! What evocative work! (Also, I live in Jackson, just down the road from Bentonia, where Skip James was born).