William Yang’s multimedia performance is a nuanced and thoughtful meditation on the complicated notion of homeland. In fact he frames his multiple visits to the native country of his parents as a search for roots and belonging. His performance begins with the juxtaposition of his live presence with pictures of himself in 1989 on his first visit to China. In a way this engaging visual announces the theme of multiple identities that will be deployed throughout the piece. What is it, Yang’s piece asks us, that composes our notions of identity: Cultural practice, visible markers of ethnicity, clothing, food, music, notions of the sacred, language, or a combination of all of these combined?
The power of Yang’s performance is derived from the ability of photographs to both freeze time and serve as a capturing device for the odd and offbeat moments of intimacy that happen in everyday life. His long career as a photographer is evident in his eye for detail. From Bok choy stacked to the roof in an open market to a bright red blanket standing out in relief against weathered concrete, Yang highlights the way that photographs can function in the symbolic and magic realist modes. Intricate and memorable moments might pass by with little note in all of our lives, but under the gaze of Yang’s lens they become the fodder for a meditation of
the sacred within the mundane.
While there is much in this piece that could be said to function in the realm of simple homage to a lost homeland (the loving images of rich, teeming cityscapes, the misted vistas over various sacred mountains) Yang complicates matters by pointing out the disturbing echoes of the tragic slaughter of youth protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. He goes on to discuss the subsequent censorship in journalism and the chilly atmosphere that configured foreigners in China as “persona non grata.” His awe inspiring pictures of the Imperial palace are tempered with his matter of fact historical notes which remind us that common people were not even permitted to gaze upon such sites for fear they would pollute them with their mere gaze. He is keenly aware that it is his outward appearance that often allowed him to “pass” and thus gave him special access to people and places in China. Yang was also doubly configured as a tourist and hence a source of income to nearly everyone he encountered. Despite the warm welcome he receives from a worker in one of the factories he visits who tells him that “the blood of China” runs in his veins, he is nonetheless aware that many people in his newfound/long long homeland view him as a mark. His main function in China, he begins to discover, is to provide a good excuse for a party. And herein lies the paradox in any romanticized return to a homeland: the cultural is always bound up with and can never extricate itself from the economic. Yang expressed disappointment that his guides and acquaintances could not view him without also seeing dollar signs. He expressed disillusionment with the way that many of the holy places he visited had been converted to tourist traps. In the end, however, it is precisely inside of these “tainted” places or at parties that he has been billed for that he seemed to gain the most profound connections with people in China.
He noted that the act of climbing the sacred mountains for the Chinese people did not require a sombre sense of worship or even perhaps the singular sense of interiority that he associated with the sacred. Climbing the sacred mountains was simply something that the Chinese people do. It was quite matter of fact and accomplished with less pomp and circumstance than he had assumed. One of the most haunting moments of the piece is reserved for the end, when Yang is given instruction on how to pray by a young boy. To his surprise, the young man approached the act of prayer with an unstudied and natural grace that someone who consciously embarks on an ocean-crossing and photographically documented search for roots can never hope to attain. Yang is uniquely positioned to give the audience a tour of a land that he both longs for and is critical of. In the process he also enlarges his message, prompting us to interrogate our own position within the complicated and interlocking webs of nationality, ethnicity, economics and culture.
Dr. Natalie Meisner, Department of English
Mount Royal University, Calgary AB
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