The Fabric of Time

written by Jun-ting Zhou, edited by Arthur Shufran

Screenshot of The Sculpture, 2024

During the process of filming The Sculpture, there were several moments where what felt like uncanny cosmic connections revealed themselves to my consciousness. During these moments, I feel like I got a glimpse of the secret of this vast entity that we call life. These intimations were so overwhelming as to be almost unbearable in the moment. Now it has been more than two months since we filmed in Seattle, but it still feels impossible to move on to the next stage of production without writing down those feelings I had on the Seattle trip. Maybe I should call this the “magic”of filmmaking–that making movies itself reveals those almost unperceivable, yet omnipresent and profound, connections of real life. It is like a time machine, helping me see through the past, present, and future.

In 2014, before I ever came to the U.S, my parents took a road trip with my uncle and grandparents from the east coast to the west coast. They visited Seattle long before I did, so when I visited, they recommended some places to me, and Gas Work Park was one of them. That is how I came to know the park. Now, looking back, it is hard to say if this film would have happened without my parents, since they are the ones who first guided me there. The Sculpture is about mourning for late parents, a film driven by my fear of a future without them, a fear woken by the passing of my beloved grandmother in 2016 and which has been haunting me ever since.

The main character in The Sculpture is based on my lead actress, Nancy Ma, a Chinese American of Hoisan descent who grew up in New York’s Chinatown. Scouting for shooting locations in Seattle, I found a Hoisan restaurant in (Harbor City Restaurant) through another  Hoisan friend of mine. I visited the space beforehand and reached out to the owner, Han, a very low key, middle-aged Hoisan man. Film shoots rarely happened there, but it didn’t take him too long to be convinced and make a deal with me (the fact that my offer wasn’t bad also helped). Although I don’t speak Hoisanese, Han speaks Cantonese well. I wonder if our shared language helped the deal at all (at least it wasn’t English). A month later, I came back to the restaurant with my cast and crew the day before shooting. In light of their shared background (and perhaps a certain common nosiness), the owner asked Nancy about her family. We discovered that Nancy and Han shared the same family name, Ma, and, in fact, he was able to say out loud the names of the brothers of Nancy’s father: it turned out that they are from neighboring villages all the way back in Hoisan in China, and they knew each other when they were kids. In some way, Nancy’s father and Han are small different branches from the same, big family. Decades ago, they all left the small, poor villages in Guangdong, trying to find a better life in the States. Some ended up in New York. Some ended up in Seattle. And here they are today. Their stories cross paths again. Nancy was thrilled and called her mom immediately, and these two remote families ‘reunited’ over facetime. Being there and witnessing everything before the shooting felt like a film within a film. I often say life is cinema. This was one of those moments.

Photo of me, Nancy and Han at the restaurant..

Before shooting our scenes in the Gas Work Park, I came across an online article (link here) about how people dealt with the contaminated, toxic material at the site during the process around the 1970s when they transformed the old gas work plant into the park we know today. It was much more environmentally friendly because they preserved the infrastructure, instead of tearing it down and transporting it to a landfill. And because the infrastructure remains, the contaminated materials are safely contained from the public. This part of history felt familiar, and I realized it was similar to an urban advocacy project that I worked on, The Tanks, in Williamsburg in New York. That project consisted of a group of volunteers, bringing together activists, architects, urban planners, landscape designers, lawyers, and more, to try to preserve and transform some defunct industrial tanks at the park known today as Bushwick Inlet Park.

I made this short documentary with the advocate group about the tanks in Williamsburg.

Although I joined the project at a later stage, I still had the pleasure of visiting the now-demolished site and got to know the history and the stories of the conflicts between the city, the neighboring community, and the advocacy group for the Tanks. The group shared a vision with me of what the future can hold for these industrial relics. Although it was a fleeting dream for the tanks (I witnessed them being demolished in 2019 by the city), it is a dream realized decades ago in Gas Work Park in Seattle.

Originally, I wanted to film Gas Work Park solely because I see the transcendence of the industrial relics as an inspiration for our own perspective of the passing of our loved ones. As I developed the idea of the film, the process of mourning also evolved into a reflection on the difficult relationship between my main character, Fei, a second-generation Chinese-American daughter, and Yu-lian, her traditional Chinese mother who has just passed away in the film: how to reconcile with a toxic relationship from the past so that we can grow from our traumas, instead of trying to forget or toss them away (because trauma never just disappears). After reading the article about Gas Work Park and reflecting on the project of The Tanks, it suddenly came to me that these urban projects, the vision of growing beauty for the future from toxic industrial relics of the past, resonated with the core of The Sculpture all along. They are intertwined. Now I wonder, would I have found inspiration in Gas Work Park at all, if I was never a part of The Tanks? Perhaps when my mom told me to visit the site, when I first stood under the Gas Work relics, the epiphany that moved me had been inside me all along. It is not a coincidence.

The Gas Work and The Tanks, the two similar industrial reclis that connect in my life and filmmaking journey.

When I was first conceiving this story, I needed to decide the cause of the death of Fei’s mom, and not knowing why, my first instinct was breast cancer. As I continued to develop the characters and their relationships, I found it difficult to imagine how an adult might feel toward their formerly toxic parents. As I was searching my memories for a reference, a family that I grew up with came into my head. They are my relatives. For as long as I have known him, the father has always been ill tempered, toxic, and abusive. When his son was growing up, he would publicly humiliate and hit him during family gatherings. A few years ago, when the mother was dying from breast cancer and the father was consequently venting all his stress on his son, the son decided to steal thousands of dollars from the family and then ran away from home and disappeared. Several months later, the family hired a private detective and found out that he ran to Shanghai and had spent all that time in an internet cafe playing video games. Finally he returned home, and his mother passed away not too long after. 

Is this where my idea of breast cancer comes from, a family trauma that I never reflected on, or that, at the age of 20, I didn’t have the capacity to fully comprehend its impact on each family member? What does the son feel about his dad now that he is a grownup? Or did he never grow beyond his abusive childhood? Does he miss his mom? I never asked these questions of myself or my family until today. It seems the making of The Sculpture offers me an opportunity to look back at some aspects of my own past that I have never reflected on. Or is it perhaps the other way around–that I want to make The Sculpture because subconsciously I have always wanted to figure out those unresolved personal histories?I can’t tell if I am making this film because of my past, or I am reflecting on my past because of making this film. It seems to me that a direct causality is not enough to define or outline the relationship between my personal life and the making of The Sculpture.

Mother Tongue, a performance by Nancy Ma, directed and recorded by me.

The reason why I chose to shoot in a Hoisan restaurant in Seattle was because I cast Nancy, a Hoisan-American, as my main character. That led to the reunion that happened in the restaurant. But the reason that I cast Nancy in the first place is that together we have worked on an experimental film about her immigrant identity and her relationship with the Hoisan language (Mother Tongue). We already have a shared language and experience on this topic. In Mother Tongue, we tried to explore how speaking languages can affect the same content (medium is the message, in a clichéd way of speaking)–in this case, the text/monologue–and how differently this can reveal the character, for when speaking different languages the same person can be possessed with different memories, identities, and personae.

But even Mother Tongue is not the beginning of this journey of exploring languages and immigrant identities. If I go back even further, around 2017, I think, before I knew Nancy, I wrote a short essay about my own experience and thoughts on my relationship with the languages I speak:

It is almost Chinese New Year and I caught a cold. I am eating these fried dumplings right now. In my memories, they taste meaty, juicy, a mixture of fresh chives and pork. But they taste nothing. Do you know that it is actually our nose that gives us all the joy of flavor in food instead of our tongue and mouth? Our tongue can taste nothing more than sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami.

It is funny that every time when we say this dish tastes so good in our mouth, actually we should say it smells so good. I feel sad that our noses never take any credit only because we take it for granted so badly. We don’t even know when we use them.

I have been thinking about language very recently. We listen in language, speak in language, see in language and even think in language. We use language so often that we forget we are not born with it…I always wonder, which comes first? Language, or thoughts?

But language is not a right, since globalization, since the industrial revolution, since the cold war, Language has become more like a privilege.

My former Brazilian roommates, Moises and Rodrigo, always talk to each other in Portuguese at home when I was present. Some people would think it is rude. But I understand the pain of expressing yourself in a foreign language. It is our home. No one should feel unsafe to speak their own language at home.

Moises once told me he felt speaking English changed his character. He is a different person when he is speaking English, a second language, instead of Portuguese. The moment when we step into this country, we agree to become a more submissive character than our true selves.  

I suddenly remembered my grandma who passed away 3 years ago. She had some nose problems and always asked me to smell things for her, you know, things like gas and leftovers. We used to go to eat dim sum together every weekend. Now I wonder, did she taste the same joy as I did from those shrimp dumplings?

However, at the same time, it is arrogant to think that you can just enter another country without knowing how to speak their language. Only people from the most powerful country in the world might think that. 

I really want to move to Mexico City, but I am too lazy to learn Spanish. It is painful to learn, you know. I used to assume maybe I could just find a job in Mexico City and learn Spanish there. I mean, I can speak English. Until a Mexican friend told me that I must speak Spanish first. And I realized, speaking English in America has made me arrogant. My English is not even that good, you know.

American-Chinese writer Li Yi Yun moved to America from China when she was 23 in 1996. And then she renounced Chinese, her mother tongue. She completely forgot how to speak or write Chinese. In 2017, She wrote in an article titled To Speak Is to Blunder in New Yorker. In the article, she said she still dreamed about her childhood in Beijing but everyone in the dream speaks English. She said, the memory before the renouncement is like someone else’ memory.

I am thinking perhaps no matter how fluent English I can speak, no matter how well people think my English is, I can never become a native speaker. Because I don’t have the memory of being a native speaker. My memory of English is almost as well as a memory of abasement, the fear of being mistaken or misunderstood. How can a language of fear become your true self?

But my English is getting better day by day. I can feel it. Sometimes I even use English to think without realizing it. It only makes me more of a stranger to my own culture. But does it have to be a bad thing though? 

When I walk on the street in New York, looking at this strange landscape, sometimes I ask myself, is this a dream that I live here talking in such a strange language? Are my friends real? Of course I ask myself in English. It won’t be a question if I ask in Cantonese or Mandarin.

I have always wanted to turn the feelings and thoughts in the essay into a film, yet have never succeeded. It is such an abstract and verbal topic for visual representation. In 2022, I tried to make an animated short film based on this essay with a very talented Cantonese animation artist. In fact, I even had Nancy and another filmmaker friend, Tin Lee, read a revised version of this essay during a Filmshop session. And again sadly, this animated short film failed to come to life. Mother Tongue was the result of my desire to turn that essay into a film as well as Nancy’s idea of experimenting with performing a well-known monologue from ‘night, Mother in Hoisan. I was thinking of making Mother Tongue into a feature film, which also never happened. I thought the 12-minute clip we had was too perfect to match anything I could have written at that time. But the idea of expanding that clip was planted in my heart ever since.

Nancy and Tin reading a script based on the essay in FIlmshop 2022.

After retracing my footsteps while making The Sculpture (still to be finished), the coincidental reunion in the Hoisan restaurant might not be such a cosmic coincidence at all; after all, all my life experiences, all the stories and memories of my family and friends, led us to the Hoisan-owned restaurant. And Hoisan is a small place where people can know each other and even be related, not to mention that families and friends frequently immigrated together back then, so that they could have a better chance to thrive in the new country. The moment I decided to cast Nancy and make this film based on a Hoisan immigrant, the ‘reunion’ of Nancy’s and Han’s family was destined to happen. It feels like a wonder out of nowhere but, in fact, we made it happen, out of our consciousness.

In its own way, the making of The Sculpture has refreshed my understanding of the connection among the past and present, as well as the future. I don’t know when it started, but I have always had this perhaps childish belief. I always try to convince myself that I can exist in different times at once, not metaphorically but literally, by recording the present, via camera capture or my sensual memory in my everyday life, believing that they are the portals I leave behind for my future self to travel through. Yet, the past and the present cross each other’s path effortlessly in the making of cinema, such as the Hoisan reunion, the resonance between Gas Work Park and The Tanks, my reconnection and reflection to my forgotten family trauma … I suddenly remember, in his recollection about the making of Happy Hours, Ryusuke Hamaguchi talks about how the camera only points toward the future. Perhaps cinema is the fabric of time made of the knots of the past, the present, and the future, and we filmmakers are the weavers. At the end, we dress in what we weave for warmth and protection from the cold and harsh chaos.