Three long, heavy bags of salt snake across the wall in one of the galleries in the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and their goal is empathy. To artist Ying Ye, who created them, they evoke fortune cookies. But their weight — 50 pounds each — is meaningful, too; as Ye writes, that “represents the average physical weight … restaurant workers need to lift up in the workplace.” The salt “implies their sweat and pains have transformed into delicious tasty food.”
Ye’s piece, entitled How May I Help You?, is part of “Brilliant Boba,” running now at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Feb. 20. “Brilliant Boba,” in turn, is one piece of Yale-China’s annual Lunarfest celebration. That event usually happens in person over the course of a weekend. Facing the Covid-19 pandemic for a second time, however, Lunarfest counters with a host of virtual events spread out through the month. Livestreamed events include a screening and discussion of the comedy The Farewell, tai chi and qigong demonstrations, a wishing tree at the New Haven Museum, and a discussion about Chinese opera. A community mural will be created on Feb. 15 on Audubon Street. While supplies last, the New Haven Free Public Library and the New Haven Museum is offering four-frame tiger animation kits as well as postcards to send to someone wishing them a “healthy and auspicious” new year.
“Brilliant Boba” — which was part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas last summer and, in addition to the physical exhibit up at the Ely Center, has a large online component on Yale-China’s website — is billed as a “resource for educators,” intended to “center Asian-American voices in their classrooms through art and narrative. It gives students and educators new ways to reflect on how we can build community and empathy through experiencing others’ perspectives.” The activities surrounding it are “meant to spark thinking, creativity, and learning in a short amount of time. Rather than immediate change, this resource kit acts as seeds for learning and empathy.”
Part of this rich project is an oral history component available that, in the tradition of Studs Terkel or StoryCorps, is engrossing in the way the people speaking contend with their own identities, in their own words. The testimonies remind us that it’s all too easy to talk about “the immigrant experience” in a way that washes out the specificity and makes it harder for people to connect with one other. The voice of each person quietly brings the humanity back.
In the Ely Center, Artist Kaitlin Tan Fung’s piece, From Shanghai to Chicago: A Martriarchal Map, looks at first like an abstract painting, but the shapes she’s employing are actually the geographical boundaries of the places the matriarch of a family — Clara Shen, a globetrotting, twice-married musical prodigy who became a teacher and patron of the arts — lived over the course of her long life. Clara Shen’s story is among the narratives collected for “Brilliant Boba,” and for Fung, tracing the path of Shen’s travels is also a reclamation of her own roots. The piece connecting Fung to a complex past and a richer conception of identity that’s only half-tied to place, and more connected to a sense of migration, and the way that people bring their culture with them across miles and generations.
Fung encourages people to make their own ancestral maps. “What are some places that are important to your family?” she asks — noting that they could be cities or towns, buildings or street corners. She also invites people to think of other elements that connect their particular family members. “Maybe you share a love of gardening or learned how to knit from your grandmother … maybe you went to the same school as your uncle or perhaps there are certain foods or recipes that link you to your ancestors … whatever those things are, consider: how can you incorporate imagery or symbolism to pay homage to those ties in your artwork?”
Similarly, there’s artist Zulynette Morales’s What Fills My Bowl, which starts with a handout of a simple image, of a pair of adult hands passing an empty bowl to a child. Students (and anyone) then “fill it in with what is or has been handed to you from people before you — they can be guardians, grandparents, ancestors, neighbors, teachers,” the instructions read. “What stories have you heard around your identity? Do you share certain traits or talents that run in your family? Are you learning things from those around you — a recipe, a dance, a song, how to play an instrument, a language, etc.? Fill the bowls with images, words, phrases, cut out images from other sources to fill it. Or you can use the sheet to brainstorm another way to present what’s being given to you to fill your bowl — is it a dance? Dance it instead of drawing it. Is it a song? Sing it. Is it a story? Share it aloud. Don’t be limited by the paper.”
The online version has everything a teacher needs to fill bowls in classrooms, or for parents to fill bowls with kids at home. In the Ely Center, a few bowls that had already been filled now decorate the walls. In one, the hands are labeled “my mom” and “my dad,” and what’s being given centers on food, one of the deepest ways culture is passed from one person to the next. Two others become more abstract, open to interpretation. In one, it’s the Puerto Rican flag that fills the bowl. In another, it’s a part of the American flag. They evoke stories of migration, of leaving one homeland to perhaps try to establish another. Or perhaps they convey a sense that a homeland is whatever is given to you, whatever you carry inside.
Which brings us back to Ying Ye’s How May I Help You? It concentrates on the singular experience of her family of running an Asian restaurant in the United States, and the salt bags are just one component of the project. They appear in a video Ye took of her family working in their restaurant, going about their day, preparing food, interacting with each other and with customers. That video highlights how many people start working in those family restaurants young, in some cases essentially growing up there. Ye’s own journey, she reveals, involved the tension inherently in the love and loyalty she and her family felt for one another. They relied on each other for daily help and support. Ye’s parents wanted her to pursue her dreams outside the restaurant. Ye, in turn, wanted to be able to keep helping them in the restaurant. The interdependence this created involved the clash of traditional Asian and Western values and the financial, linguistic, and cultural struggles they all faced as migrants. How May I Help You? brings out how the family members “contribute their time, care, and labor to support each other’s needs and dreams.”
Ye’s piece also examines and reinvigorates its title. “How may I help you?” has become so common a question in restaurants that we don’t stop to think what it really means. What if it was asked with real empathy? What if customers asked it of the restaurant workers who are waiting on them? How might we use it to cross the divides of language and culture, and treat each other more fully as human beings? In the exhibit at the Ely Center, viewers get a chance to contemplate it for themselves, ask it of others, and perhaps leave the gallery’s doors a little more open, ready to connect.
“Brilliant Boba” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Feb. 20. Visit its website for hours and more information. For a full listing of Yale-China’s Lunarfest activities throughout the month, visit its website.