15 years ago, on March 31, 2009, my father passed away.
He was gone by the morning. My mother called in the afternoon. By nighttime I was on the road from school in St. Louis to Kansas for the funeral the next day.
My mother often says she thinks my dad was on borrowed time. There were so many occasions he could have died, during the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, etc.
He once told my mother he owed his life to a tree on Zhenbao Island, where he had been sent during a conflict with the Russians. He lived off the tree’s root water while waiting for survivors to be found among the casualties.
My mother sometimes tells me that I’m like a tree born in winter, when the soil was poor. She thinks I’m the tree that saved my father’s life, and she also thinks that I needed to move far away to grow deeper roots.
To me, this is an apt metaphor for diaspora. Trees and entire forests migrate in response to the changing climate. It is enough to make one wonder, what events are drastic enough to move an entire community, an entire forest?
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Note: I wrote this reflection late at night on March 31, 2024, in the middle of figuring out the next steps for my public art commission with Madison Metro Transit System after the City of Madison unexpectedly delayed the project until 2026. The City scheduled a last-minute meeting, without consulting me, on April 1, 2024, the anniversary of my father’s funeral. I had no choice but to prepare over the weekend for this meeting, and to show up or else miss out on having a say on the future of my own project.
While it wasn’t any individual’s fault that this happened, it is worth reflecting on the lack of humanity built into institutional systems. That there is nobody accountable is also a problem, because if no one is accountable then no one will help you fix an error that has harmed you.
When we talk about decolonizing institutions, what does it look like to decolonize the way institutions control our time? What does it look like to replace bureaucracy with compassion and mercy to guide decision-making?
