A few years ago, my mother, my sister, and I went to Hong Kong in search of our ancestral roots and routes. We were looking for the home of my mother’s deceased father. Born in Jamaica in the late 1920s to a Chinese father and Afro-Jamaican mother, he was taken to live with his stepmother in Hong Kong at the age of seven.[1] In search of traces of his life in Hong Kong’s New Territories, on our first visit to Asia all we had was the name of his village and old family photographs collected over the years. With the help of a new friend who was able to interpret and introduce us to the village chief, we were led to the house where my grandfather grew up. Tang-kwong, a man we later discovered was my mother’s half-cousin, greeted us at the door.[2] We were surprised that he was unsurprised to see his black relatives. Whether he knew it fully or not, he had a black Jamaican grandmother too. It was as if he had been expecting us. We had fancifully dreamed of but had not known if there were Afro-Chinese who remained in Hong Kong. Tang-kwong did not speak a word of English; we did not speak a word of Cantonese. And so we spoke in the only language we could, the back and forth of family photographs on iPad screens, of recognition, of kin.

Weathered and torn photographs sat framed on the mantelpiece of the traditional Chinese house, and there we saw a portrait of my grandfather, my mother’s father, who lived a life unknown to us in Cantonese and patois, between Jamaica, Hong Kong, and New York. Here were the muted narratives of my grandfather’s boyhood in a sequence of images. Here we addressed the loss of history and how lost subjects were being found anew. These photographs communicated something unspeakable, an articulation of recognition and affirmation for the abject. Inscribed in the flesh of these photos was an entangled history of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe. I attend to a global transoceanic conception of Afro-Asia that bridges Chinese Atlantic and black Pacific currents in the space of the Caribbean archipelago. The specificity of the family was at once entirely important and unimportant, close and distant, familiar and unfamiliar.

Caribbean genealogies stretch and span across continents. They are, to echo the way Hortense Spillers describes the transatlantic world order, a “human sequence written in blood.” A mutilated and muted history was written on the body not only in scars but also in psychic trauma. The crisis of kinship in the shadow of transatlantic slavery, she writes, is one of “diasporic plight marked by a theft of the body” for African and indigenous peoples.[3] What would it mean, I ask, to add to this sequence the theft of the Asian body? Some people of Asian descent arrived in the Caribbean as merchants and shopkeepers in the twentieth century, but many arrived as indentured laborers much earlier. Though enslavement and indenture are not the same, the transatlantic “coolie” “signed” contracts in blood during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, establishing a brutal racialized system of Indian and Chinese debt peonage that was not fully abolished until 1917.[4] Nearly three thousand depositions of this sequence written in blood are documented in the Cuba Commission Report, published in 1876—indentured Chinese describe the horrors of being flagellated, starved, and tortured for insubordination at sea and on the plantation.[5] The afterlife of the coolie, then, is one defined by the mutilation of flesh.[6] In the way Spillers describes the captive body severed from motive will, indentured laborers were dehumanized. Their bodies on lease, as temporary property signed for in contracts often of five years that in many cases were extended and extended, were suspended in an “ungendered” space. They were not imagined to be subjects with interior lives of desire or privacy. And yet rendered ambivalently in the colonial discourse, Asians were sometimes granted a capacity for bourgeois domesticity that the enslaved and emancipated Africans were not. There was an oscillation between the stereotype of the “heathen Chinee” and the “industrious Celestial.”[7] As such the figure of the Caribbean Chinese family is a conundrum. Lisa Lowe details the way the 1803 memorandum of the “Trinidad experiment” depended on the Chinese woman as a linchpin to propagate a racially pure family, “distinct” from the black family, the majority population in the West Indies.[8] In contrast to the “bachelor societies” that formed in the United States as a result of the Page Act of 1875 and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese women were encouraged to migrate to the Caribbean. However, Lowe finds, they rarely did.[9] According to historian Walton Look Lai, 160,000 indentured Chinese migrated to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, of whom the vast majority were male.[10] Many fled sugarcane plantations, breaching their contracts, and returned home if they could afford to; some chose to take their own lives.[11] But some laborers remained, settled, and started families.

Chinese futurity was rendered differently in the United States from the rest of the hemisphere. While the state attempted to limit that future in the white-majority context of the United States through antimiscegenation laws, in the Caribbean and Latin America, Afro-Asian intimacies formed more commonly between Chinese migrants and the local black population and indigenous populations, though this was not encouraged. The question of family is a question of futurity. In the Caribbean, with the layers of the indigenous, European, African, Asian (East Indian, Chinese, Syrian) presences, the question of who has the right to a future is a thorny one. After indenture, the channels of migration from South China to the Caribbean and Latin America remained open, with a second wave of twentieth-century merchant laborers. In spite of being defined by a series of race-based exclusions, Chinese families in the Americas often excluded within themselves. Those who did not fit the picture of a “pure” Chinese future, because of mixed racial heritage or for not conforming to traditional gender norms, were pushed to the margins of the family frame. Therefore the family portrait is a fraught site of representation of ambivalence, of desires and absences, for the Chinese diaspora in the Americas.

Though the birth of photographic technology in 1839 happens to coincide with the abolition of enslavement in the British West Indies, the fact that there is a scant photographic record that represents this historical moment presents a challenge. The absence of images, historian Krista Thompson remarks, should not be viewed as “a lack for which compensation is necessary, but as an intrinsic part of, and even representation of, the history of slavery and post-emancipation in the region.”[12] To this convergence of events, I add the British occupation of Hong Kong following the First Opium War in 1842. This lack, or lacuna, in the colonial visual archive regarding Asian indenture should be troubled rather than filled. The absence of photographic representations of Caribbean Chinese families is a space for inquiry.[13] So how do we read the layers of silent narratives inscribed in family photographs? The silence exists in who is missing but also in the juncture between what is being performed in the family pose and the family dynamic. Even inasmuch as family portraits can humanize and restore a sense of interiority of familial intimacy, they also police. This is why troubling the multiple exclusions of the family photo album is critical for a history that has already been obscured. My viewing of this history, as a subject of the Caribbean diaspora, requires the lens of visual art.

The entanglement of the Chinese presence in the Caribbean is the subject matter of artwork by Afro/Asian diasporic artists Albert Chong, Richard Fung, and Tomie Arai. These artists use a sequence of vernacular photography—family snapshots, passport photos, studio portraiture—to examine the affective ties of diaspora. They interrogate the notion of family and the scripts of bourgeois intimacy in the context of Chinese migration to the Caribbean and Latin America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work examined here emerges from a moment of global transformation for the art market in the 1990s when artists of color asserted the autobiographical as a challenge to the way art is formed, how art is made, and what counts as art. Of late, attention has been brought to the Caribbean/Latin American Chinese diaspora with the joint 2017–18 exhibition Circles and Circuits II: Contemporary Chinese Caribbean Art by the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles and the California African American Museum. What distinguishes the context of the artists discussed here from Caribbean/Latin American Chinese art as a whole, is that their work is anchored in how the family album and photography interact with cultural memory. Through a poetics of manipulation of the context and surface of the family photograph, these diasporic artists remake the album as a space for the inclusion of difference. Engaging with rituals of mourning and marriage, they enhance the tears, blurs, and creases in family photos to illuminate the intimacies and tensions of transnational kinship. As a result, the surface of the film becomes rendered as flesh. Chong, Fung, and Arai use distortion to highlight the ways the historical frame distorts and obscures the Caribbean Chinese from the traditional historiography of the Americas. Beyond nostalgia and against a simple retrieval or recovery of culture, these artists are concerned with how stories are told. Employing techniques of photographic manipulation such as photo transfer silk-screening, video keying, and hand tinting, the artists suture and restitch the fragmented diasporic family, emphasizing and celebrating the complexities of difference. They etch into the surface of the family album a new hieroglyphics, to echo Spillers, that retells a mutilated history.[14]

The mixed-media artwork negotiates the competing affiliations of race, ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship. In doing so, it articulates the politics of what photo historians Thy Phu and Laura Wexler term “visual kinship” to examine how family photography not only illustrates the family but also shapes the very idea of family, as a racialized and gendered structure.[15] Experimenting with photographic albums and narratives of Afro-Chinese and Chinese families from Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica, the artists discussed here remix the family album. They challenge the racial and gender hierarchies of the colonial-era bourgeois family and how the family is represented and recorded. This type of art-making troubles notions of cultural inheritance and the visuality of the photograph as proof of relation. By putting photos in conversation with other objects through processes of fragmentation and collage, the artists grapple with what has been muted and with psychic traumas of the colonial archive.

In shifting the analytic focus from nationalism and toward diaspora, I engage with the kindred and enmeshed, rather than comparative, circuits of black and Asian diasporas. Positioned in the United States and Canada, the artists also mediate another layer of diasporic identity. The photographic poetics formed are from the position of artists who do not live in the Caribbean, which is significant because in many ways the future of the Caribbean Chinese and Chino Latinx family is located outside the region. In many Caribbean and Latin American countries, the numbers of people identifying as Chinese have dwindled such that it is no longer a census category. Sociopolitical movements of revolution and decolonization from the late 1950s to the 1970s across the Caribbean and Latin America led to the dispersal of many families of Chinese descent to the United States and Canada. Chineseness was often associated with merchant-class privilege and a perceived proximity to, though exclusion from, the white colonial elite.[16] In their artwork, Chong, Fung, and Arai negotiate the multiple exclusions of antiblackness, anti-Chineseness, and homophobia. In the diaspora, too, there are disciplining forces that push and blur the darker skinned and non-heteronormative subjects out of focus. Against these scripts, the visualities explored here interrogate what it means to be excluded from not only the frame of the family but also the frame of history. Frames contain and delineate, and in doing so they necessarily exclude.

Distant Cousins: Caribbean Chinese Visual Kinship and Form

The fictive kinship of paper sons, picture brides, half-sisters, and stepmothers in the African and Chinese diasporas produces double narratives of strategic evasion from state surveillance and a continuous reassembling of intimacy. The restitching of black and Asian kin in the wake of the violent legacies of enslavement and indenture puts the family photo album, the visual proof of family, in a fraught position of performing kinship in the Caribbean and Latin America. Collecting and compiling the family album is an inherently petitbourgeois practice. “Every portrait,” Allan Sekula writes, “implicitly took its place within a social and moral hierarchy. The private moment of sentimental individuation, the look at the frozen gaze-of-the-loved-one, was shadowed by two other more public looks: a look up, at one’s ‘betters,’ and a look down, at one’s ‘inferiors.’ ” The traditional album enforces what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “hierarchy of legitimacies.”[17] Yet in the context of picture-taking for themselves, for Afro or Asian diasporic subjects, this disciplining is further complicated by the attempt to reconstruct family units splintered by migration and colonial practice. To celebrate and use the camera to humanize and record family history is to counter the way colonial-era photography was deployed as an ethnographic tool of documenting and objectifying the other. W. E. B. Du Bois, among other black intellectuals, used the family and community album in the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition to perform this type of restorative work.[18] Speaking of Caribbean diasporic portraiture in particular, Tina Campt writes that the images were sites of articulation and aspiration.[19] She echoes Stuart Hall: “[Portraits] documented where people were at a certain stage of life, and how they imagined themselves, how they became ‘persons’ to themselves and to others through the ways in which they were represented. The photos were what you sent home as ‘evidence’ that you had arrived safely, landed on your feet, were getting somewhere, surviving, doing all right.”[20] Studio portraiture, in particular, performs a bourgeois intimacy of propriety that disciplines in its formal poses and clothing that encode a politics of respectability. The artists discussed here seek to unravel those codes.

Albert Chong and Richard Fung are both, to use a Jamaican phrase, wash belly babies, or the last born. Chong is the youngest of nine, and Fung the youngest of eight. Their birth order influenced a sense of familial hierarchy. As the youngest, their relationships with their parents were mediated by almost a decade from when their oldest siblings were born. Therefore they grew up overwhelmed with inherited memories, manifest in the family album. Chong and Fung both grew up with lives dominated by narratives of their immediate family that preceded their birth or consciousness. For as long as they can remember, they were imagining a past before they were born, searching for a window into an ancestral past. In conversation with Chong and Fung, Tomie Arai collaborated with them to address the ritual of marriage and interethnic union as part of her exhibition Double Happiness, discussed later in this essay. Fung addresses the longing in his personal family archive when he meditates on the invisible branches of family trees. He speaks about what is unspoken surrounding wedlock, inside and outside children. Fung considers what it meant to be able to afford home video recording technology in late colonial Trinidad. In kind, Chong examines the affirmation of subjecthood for his mother instilled in child studio portraiture. “I recall feeling transported back in time when looking at old family pictures,” he says, “as if our most precious commodity was the experiences we had shared as a group of related people and the proof of the connectedness and continuity was this collection of memories we called photographs.”[21] Each artist grapples with the materiality of how photographs index and influence memory and how both are pliable.

It is not enough to simply excavate or reproduce these family images. Chong, Fung, and Arai position the pictures in a way other than that intended by the original photographer. They place the photographs in a carefully narrated context of global circulation as works of art. Aware that this is an obscured history, each artist is careful to narrate the specifics of individual Caribbean Chinese and Chino Latinx families so as to counter public fantasies about who the subjects might be.[22] Put another way, without the context of a caption, most would probably not guess that the photograph’s subjects are part of the Caribbean Chinese experience because most people who are not Caribbean have never heard of the intersection of these two cultures. Using the images of individual families gives texture to the micro level and the global entanglement of Africa and China in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Afro-Jamaican Chinese Ancestral Dialogues

Jamaican Chinese American photographer Albert Chong (b. 1958) began his career identifying more with his African Jamaican heritage. A professor of photography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Chong is a celebrated international visual artist who has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, among other honors. Just like the Cuban modernist painter Wifredo Lam, Chong has navigated the complex territory of the burden of representation in the art world as an Afro-Chinese Caribbean artist with a Chinese surname.[23] His heritage as an Afro-Chinese person is representative of the undoing of the colonial imagination of a “barrier” race in the proposed Trinidad Experiment. Afro-Asian familial intimacies formed after emancipation, but not without their requisite tensions and sets of exclusions based on color and class, which Chong tackles in his artistic commentary. Like Lam, Chong turns to the symbolism of Afro-diasporic spirituality, namely, Rastafarian beliefs and Santería, in his aesthetic. It was not until the death of his father in 1989 that he began to engage directly with his Chinese heritage in his art as a type of eulogy. Chong’s mother and father were both born to Afro-Jamaican mothers and Hakka Chinese fathers who migrated from Southern China to Jamaica. Chong’s parents worked as merchant shopkeepers, an occupation held by many people of Chinese and especially Hakka descent in Jamaica. Chong’s grandfathers were part of the second wave of voluntary migration from Guangdong Province that followed Chinese indenture in the British Caribbean.

His artwork—which includes photography, sculpture, installations, video, and mixed media—draws on spiritual iconography, ritual practices, and mysticism. “Family photographs are like windows to my past and a fraction-of-a-second glimpse into the lives of the people who lived in that past,” he explains. “I have continued to honor their memory through the act of veneration that is the construction of a still-life photograph focused around a picture or portrait of an ancestor. In the veneration of the past and of those who have come before us, I am African and I am Chinese.”[24] Though Chong was raised Catholic, obeah rituals were also an important part of his upbringing and are an important part of his art today. Chong’s father, before moving his family into their new home in Kingston, employed both a practitioner of African-inspired obeah and a Catholic priest to bless the house.

His father is a frequent presence in Chong’s artwork from the late 1980s through the 1990s. Addressing the Chinese-Jamaican Business Community (1992) is a photo collage comprised of layered objects (fig. 1). A photograph of Chong’s father standing at the head of a table of Jamaican Chinese businessmen, perhaps delivering a speech, forms the background. African cowry shells are scattered near a small headshot of Chong’s father. To the left, an old speeding ticket of his father’s lies folded in half. The government-issued fine gestures to the everyday encounters with law enforcement through which colonial subjects are made legible to the state. A miniature copy of his father’s passport, which also represents his relation to the crown as a British subject, is placed askew. The irony here is that Chong’s father was known by the nickname “the Justice” because of his prominence in society, which led to him becoming a local judge.[25]

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Despite his father’s stature in the Jamaican Chinese community as a successful businessman, Chong’s father was ridiculed for the dark hue of his skin, read as a marker of his African ancestry. It was common for Chinese people to use derogatory Cantonese and Hakka terms such as Ban Lao Shee, meaning “half brain,” denoting how people of mixed ancestry were “incomplete.” In the Jamaican context too, Chong remembers being called “Chiney Royal,” which is arguably more ambiguous and indeterminate in origin but is likely rooted in colonial eugenicist vocabularies of racial types and breeding.[26] The derision came not only from outsiders; Chong describes the negative way his father would treat him at times because of the darkness of his skin. This was combined with the encoding of Jamaica as a pigmentocracy, where social hierarchy and skin tone are still closely aligned: “In my youth I recall being conflicted about the mixtures of my ethnicities. . .  I identified with and wanted to be with my Chinese heritage. I was an early victim of Jamaican color prejudice, which stated, in no uncertain terms, that light was right. I wanted to be on the winning side, I wanted straighter hair, more Chinese features, not the kinky hair and light brown skin that defines me.” Chong also recounts that growing up in Jamaica, black workers employed in the Chong family business would comment on the texture of his hair. A woman named Ella would always run her fingers through his hair and ask the same question, “Bwoy why yu hair so bad eh?”[27]

There is an undeniable visuality of the perceived fixity of race, which is what makes the photographic medium apt for teasing out the visual cues of reading race in physical traits, phenotypes, and physiognomy. Is it possible to read a photograph without reading race? Anthropologist Lok Siu asks this question in her reading of Chong’s rephotographed collage named Aunt Winnie. “I found myself looking intently at the picture,” she admits, “studying the features of her face—eyes, cheekbones, lips—framed by shoulder-length black curly, wavy hair. Over and over again, I searched for traces of her Chinese and African features; I found myself looking for race and fascinated by her racial mixed-ness.”[28] This complicity of looking for markers of race is something Campt grapples with as well, in searching for photographs of black British domestic life.[29] It is at once the problem of the colonial ethnographic gaze that seeks to separate and sort, and it is also the gaze I must use to find those racialized subjects who have been obscured. Chong contends with the question of race by proudly wearing what was described as his “bad” hair in dreadlocks in a series of self-portraits he named I-traits, embracing his Afro heritage.

This embrace of Afro-diasporic spirituality is pictured in the repetition, with a critical difference, of images of Chong’s father in a number of his mixed-media photographic collages. For instance, in Portrait of My Father Addressing the Spirits (1990) his father is posthumously in commune with the duppy realm (fig. 2). The backdrop of the studio portrait is altered to look like a negative exposure, giving it an electrified effect. His father’s black hair becomes the inverse color, a white halo. Playing with color and shade is an important part of Chong’s aesthetic. How do we read color in black and white photography? As if in an X-ray, the desk and part of the curtain are transformed to a translucent white glow. The top of the photograph is damaged, with a horizontal crease. A frame within a frame, the copper mat, Chong’s signature technique of mounting his collages with a border around the image, is inscribed with Jamaican vernacular and frames the rephotographed image. Chong’s father is literally framed in fragments of patois—writings from a journal Chong found of his father’s as well as his own musings from 1989 when he was hoping to find his father’s will. There are also etchings of an African mask, a deer, and people running that signify the blending of Afro-Caribbean cosmologies, much like we see in the work of Lam.

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Chong joins an Afro-diasporic materiality of mourning with Hakka Chinese ancestor worship, or Gah San. Though most Jamaican Chinese converted to Cathlicism from Buddhism, Confucianism, or Taoism, the Chinese ritual of honoring ancestors endures to this day at the Chinese Cemetery in Kingston. Offerings of food, such as roast pigs, are presented as a gesture to the hungry ghosts of ancestors. Photo historian Marianne Hirsch describes Chong’s artistic Gah San as making pictures into “shrine-like ritual spaces.”[30] “Many indigenous people claim that picture-taking steals one’s soul and see the photograph itself as suspect,” Chong says. “In many of the still lifes I attempt to do the reverse by creating on the surface of the photo a shrine that is an act of reverence to restore the souls of these ancestors of mine.”[31] While altering the surface of a photo would typically be seen as sacrilegious, the manipulation actually works to venerate the sacred old portrait of his father. If we see the photographic collage as troubling the transatlantic theft of the body, then what does it mean when Chong applies color to the flesh that is the photograph? Chong’s reworking of old family photographs is a practice of Qingming, or tomb sweeping, a national holiday in China of tending to the dead, that brings the shadow world of obeah to the foreground.

Not only does his work communicate on many levels, but Chong also writes extensively about his strategic practice. In the essay “The Sisters and Aunt Winnie,” he explains about The Sisters (1986): “Several years ago, my mother sent me the only remaining picture of herself as a child—an old torn and yellowing photograph of three girls. She is the smallest child in the picture; the other two girls are her cousins. She asked me to repair the picture. I could not heal it, but I could rephotograph it incorporating the torn area of the image.”[32] The yellowing of time on the surface of the photograph is layered with the blue tint. It is important that he says he could not “heal” the photograph, which references the image as an extension of the body. He becomes a type of doctor tasked with performing an aesthetic of repair that is impossible not only because of the physical deterioration of the picture but also because of his mother’s psychic wounds. Elsewhere Chong says, “Without the evidence of pictures many of us would have very little proof that we ever existed.”[33] At the time the original photograph was taken, Chong’s mother had just become an orphan. The photograph provided Chong’s mother with a sense of affirmation. By inscribing his mother’s oral history into the copper mat as frame surrounding the photograph of his mother and her cousins, Chong introduces the African-Chinese subject to a global public (fig. 3). “While rephotographing the picture,” he recalls, “I became overwhelmed by the simple beauty of the image in its recording of three sisters of African-Chinese ancestry as they poised themselves for history. Jamaica was a mere sixty years out of slavery, and she was an orphan at the time.”[34] Outside history and outside the family, by repositioning the girls in the tradition of found-object art, Chong transforms them into found subjects. As with the portrait of his father addressing the Jamaican Chinese community, Chong places cowry beads ceremoniously. He dignifies what is everyday. This time side by side with decaying flowers, an old knife, feathers, and a fork, he mixes the decorative with the quotidian. He importantly makes a place setting with the utensils for the Afro-Chinese subject. The bottom part of the mat features an etching of three grown women, the sisters. Next to it reads the Jamaican proverb “Table napkin want to turn table cloth,” signifying someone wanting an unwarranted promotion in stature. Chong also employs the practice of hand tinting on the surface of the photograph. He colors his mother’s dress a pale blue, adding an accent color not for the sake of realism but to imbue a vibrant sense of the intimate beauty of the fictive kinship of cousins becoming sisters in the wake of death. Out of bereavement, the tonality of the monochrome, the past, is accented with color.

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Chong views his work as conservation: “I thought of the many old historical photographs I had seen, and of the fact that few contained people of color. I realized in that instant how inconsequential this photograph, and the lives that it illuminates, were to white civilization. I knew that I could not merely copy this picture, that it meant too much and should remain in the world meaning something to others.”[35] The sisters materialize from a fictive kinship as modern transnational subjects, gesturing to the many other Afro-Chinese children, like my grandfather and his siblings, who lived between Hong Kong and Jamaica, part of the flow between the tropical island port cities of the British Empire. The found subject that emerges, framed by found objects, is the product of what Lisa Lowe would refer to as global intimacies and the circuits opened up by a failed experiment of the British Empire.[36]

Without this essay and the framing mat, the photograph could easily become like an orphan image divorced from the Jamaican Chinese context. The artist recognizes that while photographs may appear to be unmediated representations of truth, they are, in fact, always mediated. Chong could do it justice only by representing the damage symbolic of the texturality of a torn family fabric. The deteriorating image represents the ephemerality of the photographic portrait, even though it seems to freeze a moment in time forever. His subjects are transformed from two-dimensional flat images to multimedia, multidimensional works of art, and then they become two-dimensional again when he rephotographs them. Chong frames the photographs that would likely have been forgotten and left disintegrating in a pile of papers in a basement.

Against “Inherited Lenses”: Queering and Preserving the Trinidadian Chinese Home Movie

Richard Fung (b. 1954) also disrupts the lacuna of Asian indenture by centering the Caribbean Chinese narrative. The Canadian visual artist and activist, who is of Trinidadian Chinese background, is best known for representing the queer Asian perspective in his first documentary, Orientations (1986), and his widely anthologized essay, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn.”[37] While Albert Chong’s mode of experimentation is the still life and still image, Fung’s is remixing and manipulating the surface of moving images, the home movie. For Fung, to be a Caribbean visual artist is to face the challenge of being stuck with inherited lenses. He explains that these are the “third-world lenses” of tourism, paradise, and natural disaster, which make it difficult to picture Trinidad anew.[38] As such, much of Fung’s work meditates on the cultural inheritance of being a West Indian diasporic intellectual.

Fung’s heritage speaks to the heterogeneity of the Caribbean Chinese experience. His mother, Rita, was a third-generation Trinidadian descended from Cantonese Chinese indentured workers on sugar plantations, originally from Fujian. Like Chong’s grandfathers, Fung’s father was Hakka (a minority group in China), part of the second wave of migration to the Caribbean of shopkeepers and merchants from South China. While to those from outside the Chinese community the gradations of difference between Hakka and Punti, or Cantonese majority, would not be clear, they are the reason for centuries of warring in South China.

In an oral history collected by Arai for her installation Double Happiness, Fung explains his family dynamic:

From my earliest recollection, I remember my parents saying that Chinese should marry other Chinese. This was a little ironic since many of my relatives are mixed race, and as it turned out, only one of my siblings did marry another Chinese person. He was from Southeast Asia and from a different dialect, however, so they weren’t overjoyed about that either. (My father is Hakka, and my Cantonese grandfather wasn’t pleased with my parents’ relationship; displeasure with one’s children’s choice of life partner runs in my family.) Since I’m gay and have been in a relationship with a man for twenty-three years, my parents would probably have settled for anyone of the female gender.[39]

Here, Fung sits with the irony of his parents having an intercultural marriage yet enforcing scripts about Chinese ethnoracial purity for their children. Fung’s partner being male and white throws this all into chaos. In a colonial hierarchy ordered by European patriarchy, or whiteness and maleness, Fung’s choice of life partner fulfills an ideal in an impossible way because of queer desire. Fung addresses this complex power dynamic between white men and Asian men in his famous essay on gay video pornography. His mother had to come to terms with the fact that while her son would probably not continue the biological Fung family line, he is, in fact, the guardian of the family archive.

From Fung’s large body of work, I highlight three documentary video collage–style films, The Way to My Father’s Village (1988), My Mother’s Place (1990), and Sea in the Blood (2002), in which he explores the social and historic significance of the Chinese in Trinidad and Tobago through the lens of his family. Described by critics as Fung’s Father/Mother/Sister trilogy, the films examine the crisis of genealogy, inheritance, purity, and bloodlines.[40] Not only did scripts of heteronormativity govern, so did scripts of colonial rule, antiblackness, and Chinese purity. Though Fung is not of African Caribbean heritage, he sheds light on the dual exclusion and inclusion of his relatives who were of mixed heritage: “My parents divided the world into the pure Chinese, the half Chinese, the quarter Chinese, and the mix-up Chinese,” he says. “Anyone entering our house would be interrogated, and my parents really would know who they were. My parents always told us we must have Chinese friends, and it really was oppressive, but they seemed satisfied with even the smallest fraction of a gene.”[41] There are many parallels between this segregated racial ordering and Chong’s Jamaican Chinese context.

Like Chong’s, Fung’s journey into his family history was spurred by the death of his father and undertaken as a form of eulogy. In The Way to My Father’s Village, which he began filming in 1986, the artist documents his first visit to China on a quest for his cultural inheritance, much like the journey I took with my mother and sister. Fung says his father left no heirlooms, save for a photograph of a grand family house in South China built from remittances sent from Trinidad to the ancestral village. Fung had never seen his own story, the history of the Caribbean Chinese, in history books or on maps. So he traced his father’s migration, with his brother, in the early 1900s to work for an uncle who owned a shop in Trinidad and Tobago. Fung’s father remained in Trinidad while the brother settled in Jamaica. Fung frames his experimental documentary from the Western outsider’s perspective of China, including quotations from Roland Barthes’s essay on the Orient, “Well and China?” In a meditative voice-over, Fung is critical of his own orientalizing of China, as an overseas Chinese. Though he is of Chinese heritage, Fung will always be an outsider in China because not only is he Western, he is West Indian. The journey concludes with Fung not finding the essence or answers he was searching for in China. He learns much more in Jamaica, interviewing his newly discovered distant Jamaican Chinese cousins, who speak openly about their migration between Jamaica and China during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s. Just as Chong and Arai collect family oral histories, Fung interviews his extended family to reconstruct what he never knew about his father’s life before Trinidad.

Several years later Fung continued his filmic quest to unravel the normative intimacies of his family in My Mother’s Place (fig. 4). Even more experimental than The Way to My Father’s Village, the nonlinear narrative blends memory, personal history, and interviews. It is a story of the indentured agricultural experience rather than that of the shopkeeper. Fung explores the tension of what he phrases the consciousness of race, class, and gender under colonialism. Fung’s mother, Rita, speaks candidly about life as a British subject in Trinidad and how segregation was the unquestioned norm. Fung notes that his mother does not have any photographs from her childhood because her family was too poor. This family archival absence, he believes, is the reason for the numerous photographs and home movie reels from his own childhood. His parents filmed on Super-8, an expensive new technology of the time that had to be mailed to America to be developed. “These pictures show more about my family’s desire than how we actually lived,” Fung reveals.[42] His mother’s favorite magazine, Good Housekeeping, and its representation of American domestic bliss set the model for the ideal household. “Nevertheless,” Fung says, “my family’s desire to inscribe themselves into the conventions of the technology, and all that this was associated with, means that the films are not always what they seem; their familiarity can be deceptive.”[43] It is necessary to read these images against the grain because it is far too easy to look at old family photographs through the lens of nostalgia.

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Cultural critic José Esteban Muñoz describes the kind of rupture that Fung performs as an authoethnographic disidentification. According to Muñoz, Fung inserts “a subjective, often combative native ‘I’ into ethnographic film’s detached discourse and gay male pornography’s colonizing use of the Asian male body.” Muñoz identifies the use of “reiteration and citation, with the use of strategies such as voiceover monologues, found familial objects like home movie footage, and the technique of video-keying, in a mode of performativity that repeats and cites, with a difference” in My Mother’s Place.[44] Video-keying, a postproduction technique that involves the layering of two images or video streams based on hue, produces a ghosting effect: part of the image becomes transparent according to color. In this ghosting, Fung addresses the theft of the body by altering the surface of the image inscribed with his new hieroglyphics. This visual practice that Fung employs, and Chong’s hand tinting, are necessary to subvert the norms that police intimacy and how families should look. Fung says of his approach, “I believe my family-based videotapes perform similar acrobatics of affiliation and demarcation: my family is and is not Chinese, Trinidadian, Canadian. In this task, the home movies are crucial. Their specificity ruffles neat categories. Yet as a videomaker reworking these films into my own counterhegemonic projects, I have had to manipulate their context and their surface to reveal these meanings. Otherwise they would be easily consumed as nostalgic, quaint, or exotic.”[45] Nostalgia clouds and romanticizes, flattening the past. Fung manipulates the home footage to call attention to how every representation is mediated and should not be viewed as objective truth. Fung, like Chong, repeats and revises to create a new album that is inclusive of those members of the Caribbean Chinese family who have been cast out and pushed to the edge of the frame. My Mother’s Place likely in part inspired Arai’s installation Double Happiness, and was screened in 1998 as part of the programming for Arai’s Bronx Museum of the Arts exhibition, the subject of the following section.

The third of the family trilogy, Sea in the Blood (fig. 5), entwines the narratives of Nan, his sister, and her struggle with the congenital blood disorder thalassemia, and of his partner, Tim, and his battle against HIV. Fung creates an imaginary of alternative kinship affiliations, in and out of blood. He negotiates sexuality, inheritance, heredity, and the ways illnesses were historically racialized. Fung splices footage and formats together—Super-8, VHS, and digital—to tell this intimate story. Another eulogy, this time for his sister, the photographic becomes more than just material evidence of kinship. The visual vocabulary of his film challenges the scripts of scientific racism that designated HIV as a Haitian affliction, the “4-H disease,” by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and thus the Caribbean as the possible origin of contagion.[46] He also challenges the racialized scripts that do not imagine people of Asian descent, like his sister, could be diagnosed with thalassemia, a disease believed to afflict only Europeans. The artist creates an album of alternative kinship in which he narrates family history. It is the perverse reality that many of the custodians and gatekeepers of family archives and albums across the globe are the nonnormative members of the family: the confirmed bachelors and spinsters. In spite of knowing he is not the bearer of biological futurity, through his lens of playful distortion Fung preserves the family history, photographs, and footage that would seek to exclude subjects like him.

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A Seat at the Overseas Chinese Banquet Table: Double Happiness across the Americas

Tomie Arai (b. 1949) is a third-generation Japanese American New York artist, who, like Fung, is well known for her art and activism. Trained in silk screen printing, her large oeuvre features themes such as immigration, Chinese laundry work, migrant journals, and family albums that perform an artistic storytelling of the heterogeneity of the Asian American experience. She has also created work commemorating the discovery of the African Burial Ground in New York. Though Arai’s practice is not autoethnographic like Chong’s and Fung’s, she mediates oral histories from families across the Caribbean/Latin American Chinese diaspora, performing important hemispheric work. Her 1998 mixed-media installation piece, Double Happiness, is a simulacrum of a traditional Chinese wedding banquet (fig. 6). The red-painted room features golden decals of the Chinese character for marriage, shuāngxi, or literally “double happy.” Other decals feature the Chinese symbol of harmony: entwined in a circle, the masculine dragon and the female phoenix, or fenghuang, represent balance. She sets the tables with chairs featuring large photographic headshots of her interviewees on the back of them. Considering the scripts of “good housekeeping” and womanhood that Fung’s mother idealized, it is significant that Arai as a woman sets the table. Yet often, at least in Hakka culture, men were responsible for the cooking. The centers of the tables feature silk screened wedding photos and family snapshots collected from Caribbean/Latin American participants of Chinese and Afro-Chinese origin.

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As well as the aforementioned oral history narratives with Chong and Fung, the catalogue for Double Happiness features photos and excerpts of interviews with some twenty people of Caribbean Chinese and Latin American background living in the New York metropolitan and Miami areas. Arai is not of Caribbean Chinese or Chino Latinx background, and her approach is less concerned with the sort of troubling that Chong and Fung employ in their autoethnographic practice. Rather, her work is about bringing the members of the diaspora together across national and regional borders. Families that have become splintered are joined around the banquet table. This works, like Chong and Fung, to trouble the theft of the body from the colonial archive. Arai’s aesthetic as an Asian American artist works to reframe and include the southern part of the hemisphere that is usually left out of US continental conceptions of Asian America. Her aim is similarly one of reconfiguration, to juxtapose and reposition photographic portraits, to form an album of inclusion in the traditional Chinese wedding banquet hall. Arai’s critical distance is important in that her work grapples with the ethics of identification to craft a creative aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it.

Perhaps Arai’s standpoint as someone born on an archipelago (she was born in Hawai’i) connects her with the aesthetic of rupture and reassembling present in Chong’s and Fung’s art. In Arai’s arrangement there is a quality of what Margo Machida calls “islandness,” in kind with what Michelle Stephens and Brian Roberts call for in Archipelagic American Studies—joining the geography of the island chain to the continent.[47] Each table is an island, part of a chain with a place setting for six. Though the geographies that Arai includes are not all islands, they are part of a chain archipelagic sensibility that connects the hemisphere from New York, itself an archipelago made up of forty-odd small islands, to the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru, where indentured laborers mined guano in the nineteenth century. The aesthetic is articulated in the bridging of interisland hemispheric connections that Arai forms between people from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Peru, and Jamaica. Arai also silk screened maps on the backs of the chairs, illustrating how these disparate geographies are connected by diaspora and family.

Double Happiness was first exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 1998, then later in New York in 2005 as part of a mid-career retrospective, Tomie Arai: Untelling, at CEPA Gallery. The installation, importantly exhibited in the Bronx, amplifies the ways New York is a Caribbean city; it is estimated that one quarter of the population is of Caribbean origin.[48] To bring these various Caribbean and Latin American cultures around the traditional Chinese banquet table speaks volumes about the negotiation of multiple identities. Part of that negotiation is the politics of food, who is cooking and who is serving, another cultural archive of inheritance. The food has not arrived yet. What will be served? It could be Guyanese lo mein from Richmond Hill, or Upper West Side Cuban arroz frito, or perhaps Trinidadian shrimp wontons by way of Flatbush.

With no designated head of the table, a round table is potentially democratic and inclusive. Everyone can have an equal place. The focal point of each table, a centerpiece, features a tropical palm frond pattern and scattered lai see, red packets typically containing monetary gifts given at weddings and family holiday events. Inset with light boxes, the glass centerpieces form a concentric circle and feature silk screen–printed family portraits, a space for displaying the remixed family album in Arai’s installation. Arai’s husband is Chinese American, and their interethnic union, like Fung’s, is beyond the racialized scripts of “purity.” The artist disrupts norms that might exclude people of mixed heritage or non-Chinese people like herself. Double Happiness does not simply use the photographs to speak; Arai places in dialogue the polyvocality of recorded oral narratives she spent a year collecting as part of a residency at Miami-Dade Community College and the InterAmerican Center. She positions the chatter of the audio recordings of dinner guests to narrate and negotiate the ways they are included and excluded at the family table and in the album. Similar to Chong’s technique of inscribed copper frames, Arai surrounds the portraits with a typed oral history narrative on the backs of the chairs. Hers is a disembodied banquet with a ghosting effect similar to Fung’s video manipulation technique; the subjects voice their own narratives against the grain of what is a muted and mutilated history.

The irony here is that if the Chinese wedding banquet is a ritual of celebrating Chinese futurity and auspicious childbearing, in Arai’s banquet hall the future is one with competing affiliations. She embraces the instability of the diaspora in which mixed marriages are more often the norm than not. Double Happiness inflects a Pan-Asian and Pan-Caribbean/Latin American identity asserting the futurity and amplified happiness of an Afro/Asian family across the Americas that the European colonial imaginary predicted was impossible in the Trinidad experiment.

Photographic Detours and the Impossibility of Diasporic Retour

Against conventional ideas of cultural inheritance, each artist meditates on a future that is being pulled in many different directions. The featured works of art attest to how diasporic conceptions of family and mixed-heritage subjectivities narrate alternative genealogies of Asia and Africa in the Caribbean, Latin America, and their diasporas. An extension of the stolen body, the family photograph becomes an intimate site of both producing and challenging racialized and gendered hierarchies of the idea of the family. The visual poetics of the remixed family albums—in the forms of collages, films, and installations—is as much about the bringing together of family as it is about the undoing of family defined strictly by blood and “purity.” It signals the radical nature of insisting on family as something larger and more inclusive than biology. The Caribbean Chinese family becomes defined instead by a shared experience and the common aesthetic of images, videos, and oral histories across the hemisphere that challenges their elision from history. Ordinary family photographs carry this potential to speak the narratives elided by the colonial order. As much as this preservation and restoration is critical to challenging the lacuna in the archive—the silence—the artists discussed here importantly acknowledge the way these images offer a critical detour through a past presence. Fung’s journey to China, in The Way to My Father’s Village, like my own thirty years later, crystalizes the impossibility of true return to the point of origin or essential truth.

This is why, in response to the transatlantic theft of the body, the theft of the family, Albert Chong, Richard Fung, and Tomie Arai perform important work in crafting albums of inclusion. They trouble and challenge the archival absences, highlighting what is mediated through their lenses of poetic manipulation. The artists exchange the inherited lenses of colonial ordering for their own. These family archives are necessarily places where it is important to decouple resemblance or the notion of “looking like someone else,” as well as the fixity of race, as evidence of blood relation. As we know, within all families people do and do not look alike, and that does not much matter. What does matter is the materiality of what can be fashioned out of what has been torn apart. Another future of new, albeit fraught, familial intimacies beyond the visuality of race in the diaspora is celebrated in this collective aesthetic of framing difference.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Meena Alexander, Renee Blake, Alexandra Chang, Ana Paulina Lee, Heather Lee, Amita Manghnani, Tami Navarro, and Sukhdev Sandhu, who attended a colloquium at the A/P/A Institute at New York University and provided critical feedback. I would also like to thank Kaysha Corinealdi for providing an eye to an early draft of this essay. I am very grateful to my dear sister Gaia Goffe for laying the framework, in her personal narrative of our journey to China published in the South China Morning Post. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for their generous remarks. Finally, I would like to thank Albert Chong, Richard Fung, and Tomie Arai for providing not only permissions but also context on how they produced their work.

Footnotes

[1] See Thomas Bird, “Back to His Roots: Chinese-Jamaican Leo Lee,” Post Magazine, 24 May 2014; and Bernice Chan, “From Harlem to China: How an African-American Tracked Down Her Chinese Grandfather,” South China Morning Post, 16 May 2017. Paula Williams Madison, the subject of Chan’s article, documented her exploration of Afro-Chineseness in the Caribbean diaspora in Finding Samuel Lowe: China, Jamaica, Harlem (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), and a film of the same name (dir. Jeanette Kong, Virgil Films, 2016).

[2] My sister published an article in the South China Morning Post on the journey. See Gaia Goffe, “How a Chinese-Jamaican’s Family History Quest Led Her to Hong Kong,” South China Morning Post, 28 July 2016, www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/1996068/how-chinese-jamaicans-family-history-quest-led.

[3] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67 (italics in original).

[4] While some people may have been voluntary workers, records show that crimps in South China were known to hoodwink, drug, and kidnap people, locking captives in barracoons at the docks of Hong Kong before setting sail for the West Indies. See Edlie Wong, Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

[5] Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Denise Helly, Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

[6] See Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”

[7] For more on the depiction of Chinese stereotypes in Jamaican newspapers, see Andrew W. Lind, “Adjustment Patterns among the Jamaican Chinese,” Social and Economic Studies 7, no. 2 (1958): 144–64.

[8] Lisa Lowe, “Autobiography Out of Empire,” Small Axe, no. 28 (March 2009): 99.

[9] Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 200.

[10] See Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrations to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). This helps explain why the pervasive stereotype of the Chinese in the Caribbean is male, “Mr. Chin.” For an extensive study of how that sexualized caricature of Asian masculinity recurs through West Indian colonial literature, see Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

[11] See Isabelle Lausent-Herrera, “Tusans (tusheng) and the Changing Chinese Community in Peru,” in Walton Look Lai and Tan Chee-Beng, eds., The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean (Leiden, UK: Brill, 2010).

[12] Krista Thompson, “The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies,” Representations 113, no. 1 (2010): 63. Thompson writes of the coincidence of abolition and the daguerreotype.

[13] Interestingly there are some photographs from this period of Indo-Caribbean families. Nalini Mohabir poignantly engages with the visual afterlife of the Indian indenture experience in the Caribbean; see Nalini Mohabir, “Picturing an Afterlife of Indenture,” Small Axe , no. 53 (July 2017): 81–93.

[14] Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67; Meena Alexander, discussion with the author, 28 March 2018. I thank Alexander for sharing this observation and connection to Spillers.

[15] Thy Phu and Laura Wexler convened the conference “The State of the Album,” on 14 April 2017 at Yale University, based on a course they cotaught on visual kinship.

[16] For instance in Cuba, many families of Chinese descent left the island for New York following the Cuban Revolution because of their positioning as the merchant and shopkeeping capitalist class.

[17] Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 10. Pierre Bourdieu notes as well the way family photography captures the “high points” of a middlebrow vision of domestic life. He identifies the snobbery and “hierarchy of legitimacies.” Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (1965; repr., Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 19, 97.

[18] See Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

[19] Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 7. 

[20] Stuart Hall, “Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement,” in Jo Spence and Patricia Holland, eds., Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography (London: Virago, 1991), 156.

[21] Albert Chong, “The Photograph as a Receptacle of Memory,” Small Axe, no. 29 (July 2009): 128.

[22] See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 56.

[23] Lisa Yun, “Signifying ‘Asian’ and Afro-Cultural Poetics: A Conversation with William Luis, Albert Chong, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Alejandro Campos García,” Afro-Hispanic Review 27, no. 1 (2008): 183–211. It is interesting to note the way Afro-Chinese Cuban artist Magdalena Campos-Pons, who does not have a Chinese surname, is read. She was recently featured in the exhibition Circles and Circuits on Chinese Caribbean Art, a departure from the way she is typically affiliated with Afro-Cuban aesthetic practices.

[24] Albert Chong, quoted in Yun, “Signifying ‘Asian,’ ” 131.

[25] “Albert V. Chong,” in Kara Kelley Hallmark, ed., Encyclopedia of Asian American Artists: Artists of the American Mosaic (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007), 36.

[26] See Yoshiko Shibata, “Searching for a Niche: Creolizing Religious Tradition; Negotiation and Reconstruction of Ethnicity among Chinese in Jamaica,” in Kumar P. Pratap, ed., Religious Pluralism in the Diaspora (Leiden: Brill Academic, 2008), 359–74.

[27] Albert Chong, quoted in Yun, “Signifying ‘Asian,’ ” 198.

[28] Lok Siu, “Diasporic Affect: Circulating Art, Producing Relationality,” in Alexandra Chang, ed., Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 215.

[29] Campt, Image Matters, 127.

[30] Marianne Hirsch, introduction to Marianne Hirsch, ed., Familial Gaze (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), x.

[31] Chong, “Photograph as a Receptacle,” 128–30.

[32] Albert Chong, “The Sisters and Aunt Winnie,” in Hirsch, Familial Gaze, 103.

[33] Chong, “Photograph as a Receptacle,” 128.

[34] Chong, “Sisters and Aunt Winnie,” 103.

[35] Ibid.

[36] In her 2015 book The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), Lisa Lowe maps this connection between the opulence of bourgeois intimacy and materiality of the European family and how it depended on the underside of racialized plantation labor in the West Indies.

[37] Richard Fung, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,” in Bad Object-Choices, ed., How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video (Seattle: Bay, 1991), 145–68.

[38] Richard Fung, quoted in Andil Gosine, “Kitchen Table: Richard Fung and Ian Harnarine in Conversation,” Small Axe, no. 53 (July 2017): 126.

[39] Richard Fung, quoted in Tomie Arai, Double Happiness (New York: Bronx Museum of Arts, 1998), 54.

[40] Monika Kin Gagnon, “Agency, Activism, and Affect in the Lifework of Richard Fung,” in Helen Lee and Kerri Sakamoto, eds., Like Mangoes in July (Toronto: Insomniac, 2002).

[41] Richard Fung, in My Mother’s Place, dir. Richard Fung, 1990, videotape, 49:50.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Richard Fung, “Remaking Home Movies,” in Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman, eds., Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 39.

[44] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 80.

[45] Fung, “Remaking Home Movies,” 39.

[46] On 4 March 1983, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed Haitians as one of the four “high-risk” groups for AIDS. Earlier, in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 9 July 1982, the center had warned that “physicians who care for Haitian patients should be aware that opportunistic infections may occur in this population” (361).

[47] See Margo L. Machida, “Pacific Itineraries: Islands and Oceanic Imaginaries in Contemporary Asian American Art,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 3, nos. 1–2 (2017): 9. See also Michelle Ann Stephens and Brian Russell Roberts, “Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture,” in Michelle Ann Stephens and Brian Russell Roberts, eds., Archipelagic American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–54, in which the authors define “the archipelagic Americas” as “the temporally shifting and spatially splayed set of islands, island chains, and island-ocean-continent relations which have exceeded US-Americanism and have been affiliated with and indeed constitutive of competing notions of the Americas since at least 1492” (1).

[48] City of New York, Department of City Planning, “The Newest New Yorkers: Characteristics of the City’s Foreign-Born Population,” December 2013, 13, www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/nny2013/nny_2013.pdf.

Editorial Note: Thank you to Albert Chong, Richard Fung, and Tomie Arai for granting Arcade permissions to reproduce the artworks included in this article.