fifi rae
©2024
Quietly, I migrate. Quietly, I glitch. Quietly, I SWEAR I WAS HERE. I still am. Quietly, my ghost resists! statement
My curiosity about the history of adoption from China to the U.S. and the context of my adoption led me to the term “the quiet migration,” the mass movement of international and transnational adoption. The migration is called “quiet” because the adoptee moves from one place to another without a say in the decision, whereas the adopters do not migrate or relocate. Quietly, I migrate.
Thinking about tangible access to an intangible history, I was drawn to archives, physical and digital. I wanted to learn more about my shared history by physically sorting through collections of newspapers, writings, and images. I went through the Asian American Archives at the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley, haunted by an overwhelming narrative of loss. Struck by the photos and language depicting the Asian adoptees, the words that stood out to me were lost, saved, displaced, missing, absent, and ghosts.
This transformation during migration reminded me of ghost ships, where everyone on board mysteriously disappears overseas, but the ship’s body still exists, becoming a ghost in itself. Ghost stories and myths encourage speculation, imagination, and invention as resistance. Ghosts are embodiments of the in-between, never fully belonging anywhere, and representations of the past. They resist life and death, quietly existing as glitches. Glitches during processes of translation and transformation are acts of resistance. Quietly, I glitch.
“Media translation” refers to the process of digital to analog or analog to digital, where loss is inevitable, but gain through intervention is possible. I experimented with digitally reinventing the physical archives I collected. Patterns of digital and physical glitches as resistance and reinvention are throughout my work.
Combining digital and analogue, I repeated an image of my visa ID photo needed to immigrate to the U.S to create this pixelated pattern on the walls that spell out my given Chinese name. The format of my name in Chinese and English is directly based on my Chinese passport. Viewers are confronted with over a thousand pixels of my ghost from floor to ceiling as they witness a found and personal archival history. Quietly, I SWEAR I WAS HERE. I still am.
The crease of the walls in the corner of the room acts as a physical glitch in the middle projection, further distorting the archival photos and referencing the creases in the folds of the paper archives. This crease separates my Chinese and American identities and nationalities, translating my given name from Chinese characters to English letters.
My digital glitches explore patterns of removal and addition, loss and gain. The photos projected over my name in Chinese characters were taken by my parents when they came to China to adopt me. I removed parts of the background in these photos. The projector over my name in English letters uses childhood photos after I migrated. My sister, who was also adopted from China, and I are either erased or covered with red pixels. The middle projection shows the adoption archives I gathered and the ghost ship photos I found. The adoptees are erased, covered, or glitched, but the parents, who are mainly white, remain untouched and exposed.
As I aim to push away from the narrative of solely loss in archival histories of adoption, displacement, and migration, digital intervention and glitches are opportunities for imagination, invention, and gain. I am empowered to create answers and stories, like the myths of ghost ships I choose to believe. Quietly, my ghost resists!
Special thanks to Sine Hwang Jensen for helping me research Chinese adoption to the U.S. and giving me access to the Asian American Studies archives at the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley.