Artist Statement

As early as I could think, as sure as I could breathe, I have been writing.

Writing is affirmation. I write for I am living. My writing is a gust of urgency, honest, sensory, and embodied. My pen to paper is pestle to mortar, a crush of garlic stinging the nostrils. My language is peppered with music and movement. My words are stained with fog, tickled with rain, and smoothed by the sun, wandering through single tracks trails up and down the mountains and the valleys.

I write to rattle bones yet to clamor to stillness. I write to burn it all down and then rise from the ashes. I write to saw through the bone of the human condition, to alchemize inevitable grief into something short of comedy and joy. I write through my maternal lineage, of becoming and arrival.  I write for the ancestral tongues I may never speak. I write for my ancestors, future and past, and the tree roots that sinew between us.

The line break, to me, is a gift to the unspoken silences, to breath.

My creative process is rooted in this breath and of being alive in the body. With a background in theater, professional cooking, and running ultramarathons, I am no stranger to the body as instrument. To live and breathe in this body, even in this day and age, as a Chinese American woman, is a political act.