Research Notes on Beyond the Shore
Why do you want to tell stories of women? It is not just because they are often marginalised. It is not simply because we are female makers. Female embodiment is the fact of living for us. There is the unsaid pressure of carrying ourselves around as female bodies, always ready to be looked at, hopefully not to be groped nor raped. The male gaze is omnipresent. The fear of assault is palpable. You just get used to it, eventually. Objectification of female bodies is inescapable, prevalent in Asia, in Europe, in the US... everywhere I have visited. Female bodies are lesser bodies—it is almost written in the social fabric, codes that condition our bodies and how we behave.
I work on this artistic research from my own situated perspective. At the age of 36, at the cusp of perimenopause I picked up the book, Hormone Repair Manual, written by Lara Briden, a naturopath. As I prepared for the menopausal hormonal ride, I was surprised by the way menopause was conceptualised. To the author, menopause allows women to reclaim their girlhoods, to remember what life was like before our bodies became sexualised, before our worth became tied to attractiveness, before we were evaluated as marriage material. A lightbulb went off in my head. I began to understand how I have been feeling about my body at age 36. Slowly but gradually, I felt freedom returning to my body, an ease of being that accompanied motherhood and aging—I am a mother now, male strangers are much less likely to pick me up. I am a mother now, men will not catcall me while I walk my toddler to the park. Indeed, at the cusp of perimenopause, my body was becoming, once again, mine. I want to take good care of it, for myself, and not for the gaze of others. I want to attend to its sensuality, its desires, and listen to its mischievous whispers. I want to have sex the way I want it, never out of pleasing someone else. I have battle scars on my belly from my pregnancy, and my nipples have nursed a baby for 19 months. I do not have to invent a story about a non-existent boyfriend while travelling alone. Paradoxically, at this age, I am on the path to becoming a girl again. To become a girl who is unafraid. To become a girl who can play, frolic in mud and puddles, and laugh about it afterwards. I did not know that my own daughter could become my role model, so that I could learn to enjoy the liberties of girlhood and my physical body again.
This is my autobiographical note to the research for Beyond the Shore, the lived experience from which I look at the body of female myths, stories, and histories collected.
Beyond the Shore is a project that researches Inter-Asian feminist histories, which have been marginalised in official records. Through the work, we compile our own alternative archive of female stories, which we then retell and restage through performative means. Some stories are so old they have reached mythological status, with scant archaeological evidence. Others have been reimagined through historical and speculative fiction. A few of our heroines were briefly mentioned in a line or two in historical documents. As part of the research, we travel to understand not only the networks of maritime trade and connection set up in the pre-colonial and colonial times, but we also travel to gain first-hand experience of various cultures and relevant stories of women in different societies.
Conducting research for this project requires something other than standard research skills. It requires a strong stomach, and bucket loads of empathy. Women's histories include plenty of painful stories. A good proportion of the story came down to sex work, the oldest profession in the world, as well as forced sexual labour and human trafficking. At a summer school in 2019, I broke down inconsolably during Elizabeth Son's seminar on her book Embodied Reckonings: "Comfort Women", Performance, and Transpacific Redress (2018). How does one work through a subject matter as heavy as comfort women histories in South Korea? It was inconceivable. I could barely sit through a screening of Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death (2009), which centred on comfort women in Nanking during the Japanese invasion in WWII. But I could tell from Son's discussion that the survivors, who live to tell the tales and fight for justice and redress, give her strength to give voice to their incredible work through academic activism and writing. She said, "I'm not going to put everything in the opening chapter. The reader has to work for it." Truly, the reader has to work for it and work through it. I take it upon myself to understand these histories and to bring reflection through artistic means.
It is a skill to work through difficult histories. One of the most triggering pieces of historical research in the project is Elizabeth Sinn's book Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (2013). The chapter focused on women was essentially an account of how Hong Kong was an entrepôt for women trafficking in 1870s-1930s. At school you learn about Hong Kong as an entrepôt for all sorts of goods as a British colony. They failed to mention that the 'goods' included women. Women were sold from places on the South China coast to Hong Kong, and subsequently trafficked to other port cities like Singapore, and especially San Francisco during the gold rush. Hong Kong was not a place that had respect for women's agency. Shek Tong Tsui alone housed a few hundred brothels. The statistics, while unreliable according to Sinn, were cruel—75% of women in the population were possibly traded bodies, and a staggering number participated in sexual labour.
It is a harsh realisation that these histories are so very recent. It is a shock to the system to discover that these histories are so close to home. 1870-1930s was about 2-5 generations before me. I begin to wonder—are we, Hong Kong women, descendants of women sold into subservience, whether as maids, concubines, mistresses, or whores? I know the politically correct and respectful term is sex worker, but they were rarely treated with the dignity that the title 'sex worker' deserves. In later years, a rare few gained stardom as sought-after sex workers, but the stigma of sex work and the shame associated with it never fully went away. There were whores in port brothels and Chinatown brothels, in brothels at sea and in brothels on shore. Upon arriving in San Francisco, these women would be stripped naked and sold directly at the pier in public auctions. While some lucky few become wives of local Chinese merchants, others were bought as concubines, maids, and whores. Many entered a life they never wanted, and experienced repeated sexual violence and trauma. The bulk of their first-hand accounts are perhaps lost to history at this point. And the ones I can find are terribly hard to get through—my tears would blur the words on the page.
Reading these stories today, I question: what parts of these women have had to be killed off, compartmentalised, and reasoned away, so as to survive? How does one find dignity in the aftermath of violence and trauma? I am reminded of a quote by African-American author, Toni Morrison, "Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It's about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances." I think about the violence of exile, of being sold to a distant shore, of subjugation, of being subjected to continuous physical transgressions, and the violence of shame.
In the stories we collected, there are tragic endings and happy endings. While some suffered in silence, others demonstrated their resilient spirits and lived to tell their rag-to-riches journeys. They showed us how they transcended their dire circumstances and reclaimed their agency and independence.
These are the (her)stories carried by the Pacific Ocean waves.
In our artistic practice, we approach these stories from an embodied perspective, and we research female embodiment through the discipline of dance. Embodiment is both the poison and the cure—you cannot escape your body, and yet the body is what affords movement and expression and opens the door to escape. Psychologist and trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk reminds us that the body keeps the score, and recent research on trauma redirects attention from cognitive therapies to the somatic body for healing. One's body can be trapped in cycles of pain, shame, and trauma. But it is only through moving through these cycles that one grieves and finds repair and recuperation. We therefore centre the somatic body as a crucial site through which we experience and work through these female histories of subordination and empowerment.
In Beyond the Shore series, we wish to stage these stories not as a re-enactment of pain and suffering, but as stories of hope. Beyond the Shore focuses on women's stories connected to the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean, and we read these stories diffractively through one another. The term diffractive reading is proposed by quantum physicist and feminist philosopher of science Karen Barad. Diffraction is a physical phenomenon when waves encounter obstacle upon their paths or overlap with one another, creating particular observable patterns in water—“We can understand diffraction patterns – as patterns of difference that make a difference – to be the fundamental constituents that make up the world” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad 2007, p.72). As explained by Geerts and van der Tuin, "Rather than employing a hierarchical methodology that would put different texts, theories, and strands of thought against one another, diffractively engaging with texts and intellectual traditions means that they are dialogically read ‘through one another’ to engender creative, and unexpected outcomes" (New Materialism Almanac 2016-18). This act of placing these women's stories in dialogue with one another enables a creative historiography of Inter-Asian subjecthood of women. Their stories are considered together, with care, such that the sexual dominance over Hong Kong mermaids Lo Ting find resonance in the history of women trafficking in Hong Kong. Their plight is taken in tandem with the precarity of haenyeo women, whose pearl-diving is low-paying and dangerous, but afford them dignified livelihoods. The struggles aren't comparable—it's not the intention to compare—but there are shared elements in these stories that we could tease out, such as a joint desire for emancipation. Likewise, the Chinese mythological figure of Nuwa who patched the sky and stopped the floods is brought side-by-side with the Japanese shamaness-queen of Himiko, who allegedly ruled by spells over her kingdom. They are equally mysterious, and they both bring a touch of magic to the imagination. Instead of focusing on the details of these stories, we turn to the archetypal forces that underscore them to make these relations visible.
To borrow the ideas of Carl Jung, archetypes are a common foundation for the experiences of all humans. They are innate patterns of thought and behaviour that are realised in an individual's environment, on which they build their unique personality. All individuals are influenced by these archetypal forces, in addition to their own cultural upbringing and unique life events. Jung sees archetypes as a potential world that exists outside of time. For this reason, we include a range of female stories sampled from prehistorical, mythological times to contemporary times. Perhaps this is an impossible scope, something I would most certainly critique as a trained academic scholar, but this vast scope beyond geographical and temporal boundaries taken from a creative perspective opens up ways of reimagining female subjectivities.
And like the ebb and flow of oceanic currents, the research knows few borders. While our work focuses on Asia, I am constantly reading the stories of the Pacific diffractively with the stories of the Atlantic on slave trade and indentured labour. Like Lisa Lowe's Intimacy of Four Continents (2015), I wish to understand the intimacies of cross-currents and shared histories across nations. I am studying Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic (1993) with Sean Metzger's The Chinese Atlantic (2020), and folding in the archipelagic philosophy of Caribbean author Edouard Glissant. I am inspired by Christina Sharpe's work In the Wake (2016) -- on living, in the wake of the slave ship in the aftermath of slavery, and on grieving dark histories, in the wake of mourning. I embrace the tradition of Black speculative fiction that envisions slaves thrown overboard as aquatic beings, thriving in an undersea utopia... and follows the creative spirit of Saidiya Hartman doing justice to the lost records of African-American female slaves and imagines their lives through critical fabulation, where she combines historical research with fictional narrative to address gaps in the historical record. And while these sources do not fully find themselves in the performances we produce, they form a backdrop of rich, diverse cultural imaginations and discourses on the sea that allows us to navigate Asia-Pacific waters and reimagine other ways of being.
So here's to writing other stories. Here's to stories of resistance, of resilience, and of divinity. Let us write about maidens, mothers, and crones, girlhood, motherhood, and elderhood. Let us write women as goddesses, untouchable goddesses, with a magic spark. Let us write into being women who rise, in the wake of dreams and hopes of generations past.
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