Politicizing and Poeticizing Diasporic Experiences: A Chinese-Spanish Literary Voice

Summary

The video presented by USDHumanitiesCenter explores the nuanced experience of a Chinese-Spanish woman's reflections on literature and identity. Through her insightful talk, she challenges the Eurocentric perspective on "universal" literature, emphasizing the importance of recognizing diverse cultural voices. She shares her experiences growing up in Spain, dealing with stereotypes, and the pivotal role her family’s restaurant played in shaping her identity. The discussion also highlights the intersection of various cultures through the lens of literature, including the challenges of translating her work into multiple languages. It offers a poetic narrative on identity, belonging, and the power of words to transcend cultural barriers.

Highlights

• The discrepancy between 'universal' and Eurocentric literature is examined. 📘
• Diaz delves into her experiences of cultural stereotyping in Spain. 🎭
• The role of her family's restaurant in shaping her cultural identity is discussed. 🍽️
• Diaz's poetry serves as a bridge between different languages and cultures. 🔗
• The importance of food as a cultural signifier is highlighted in her work. 🥢

Key Takeaways

• Eurocentric literature is often labeled as 'universal,' but true universality must include diverse voices. 🌍
• Cultural identity is complex and cannot be fully understood through stereotypes. 🏮
• Food and family are integral in shaping one's cultural identity and experiences. 🍜
• The translation of poetry is a collaborative act that seeks to retain the essence of the original. 🌐
• Poetry can challenge societal norms and give voice to underrepresented narratives. 📚

Overview

In this enlightening talk, USDHumanitiesCenter presents a compelling narrative by a Chinese-Spanish woman who questions the so-called universality of European literature. She articulates how the literary canon often excludes non-European perspectives, thereby marginalizing diverse voices and experiences. Through her personal anecdotes, she challenges the Eurocentric standards and advocates for a broader, more inclusive definition of 'universal' literature.

Diaz candidly shares her life experiences growing up in Spain, where stereotypes and prejudices about Asian women influenced her self-perception and literary aspirations. Her family’s Chinese restaurant serves as both a literal and metaphorical space where cultural hybridity comes to life. This setting is a testament to how everyday environments can shape one's sense of belonging and identity.

Her poetry, often a reflection of her multicultural background, navigates themes of identity, race, and belonging. She discusses the challenges and nuances involved in translating her work into various languages, emphasizing the importance of maintaining the poem's essence. Her work stands as a testament to the power of poetry to challenge societal norms and highlight underrepresented narratives.

Politicizing and Poeticizing Diasporic Experiences: A Chinese-Spanish Literary Voice Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] the five compulsory books I studied in a course called un Universal literature in
• 00:30 - 01:00 high school in Spain in my case almost 10 years ago were called Classics but they were all European with the same logic we call European music classical music and we differentiate it from folklore traditional music and World music like The the colonial theorist Ramon grogel I am inclined to consider everything called Universal and that is
• 01:00 - 01:30 in reality simply European as deeply provincial in the sense of a small unlimited Ramon grogel asks how is it possible that the cannon of thought in all the disciplines of the social sciences and Humanities in the westernized university is based on the knowledge produced by a few men from five five countries in Western Europe Italy France England Germany and the US
• 01:30 - 02:00 how is it possible that men from these five countries achieved such an epistemic privilege to the point that their knowledge today is considered Superior over the knowledge of the rest of the world how did they come to monopolize the authority of knowledge in the world end of quote I ask myself who produces knowledge in what context for whom the existence of the subject
• 02:00 - 02:30 by disembodied knowledge is impossible knowledge is always anchored and marked by the subjects who produce it the place matters in terms of what is produced there is no pure Universal literature the literature we read in the classrooms has not reached the compulsory curriculum in a happy way free of conflict why for example in Spain we do not study the literary Legacy of the Roma people and if we do
• 02:30 - 03:00 why do we study non- Roman authors who use artistic or literary forms contributed by the Roma people but without recognizing their origin in 1998 journalist T Charlie Rose asked grer Tony Morrison can you imagine writing a novel that is not centered about race and see very elegantly answer
• 03:00 - 03:30 that tolto thola or James Joyce also write about race the person that asks this question does not understand that he is also rationalized Morrison means that the white person has naturalized its hegemonic identity but the black person knows that this is just a mask the white person takes its white gays as
• 03:30 - 04:00 default black sociologist du boys put it like this in 1897 it is a peculiar sensation this double Consciousness this sense of always looking at one's self Through The Eyes of others of mising one's Soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity the literature of those WR esecially privilege has its own style
• 04:00 - 04:30 and language it is literature that likes to dress as Cosmopolitan and Universal my Reflections from my identities as a Chinese women from uel Valencia wenzo Spain cannot be disguised as Cosmopolitan and Universal on the contrary they can be seen if we follow hegemonic criteria as examples of a particular and minority
• 04:30 - 05:00 experience in the west and this is how our literature is sometimes treated the white Gaye has never let me believe that my literature could be Cosmopolitan and Universal the current sensitivity in Spain towards in particular Chinese women is still full of stereotypes and prejudices hypersexualization ftiz exotication The Stereotype of the
• 05:00 - 05:30 delicate sweet obedient women the association with the mafia or crime Chinese and Asian women are not interchangeable or identical in our experiences and projects we are not the same we are crossed by multiple experiences by our Corporal and social diversity our psyche our class conditions and different ethnic and National Origins but Spanish Society tends to describe a Chinese women with the same
• 05:30 - 06:00 attributes that will serve to describe another Chinese women a generalizing device that undervalues us and construct Us in otherness in alienness so I grew up believing many these empowering narratives about myself and one of the best antidotes I found was to just look at my community
• 06:00 - 06:30 realize that my community is very broad very diverse and that all our experiences are valuable our bodies and our knowledge are socially marked by class gender sexuality race at least since modernity thus it is not possible to write from any place as there is no body without social markers there is no literature without belonging so what I'm trying to do is to produce literature aware of these
• 06:30 - 07:00 tensions but of course there are many uh writers and artists that also do it very well and that are with me in these Reflections for example s Mao is a Chinese American poet that published The Poetry collection Oculus in 2019 and I think it's a poetry collection that is very aware of the
• 07:00 - 07:30 paradoxes of seen and being seen the intimacy is made possible and ruined by the screen Oculus is a reflection about the hypervisibility of Asian women's bodies and the silence these figures suggest so the very title Oculus already Associates this work with the concepts of the eye and the Gaze and there are indeed two poems named Oculus in in the
• 07:30 - 08:00 collection the first poem named Oculus is about the suicide of a young women in Shanghai in the year 2014 she documented it on Instagram there is another remarkable poem in the volume called No resolution it is dedicated to asle Han whose father from Queens kukan was pushed into the train tracks of an oncoming train none
• 08:00 - 08:30 of the bystanders tried to save him but a New York Post photographer had enough time to take terrible images of the man trying to escape as the train approaches so we have this images right of these Asian and Asian American people dying in this way a spectacular hyper visible mediated by technology deaths that still could have been
• 08:30 - 09:00 prevented some Chinese people in Spain die because of Street violence they are victims of theft and vandalism in their own shops about this reality in Spain we lack images and words today when I am in a coffee shop for example writing which is my most intimate act in a space between the private and the public I remember myself as a child and teenager reading and doing homework work in the restaurant of
• 09:00 - 09:30 my family and although I miss it I know that it was not a safe space for me and my family businesses of Migrant people open to the public are especially vulnerable to racist and classist violence they are insulted robbed killed because wanting some beer or some chocolate on July 20 20 uh 2022 phone one the owner of a bar in my
• 09:30 - 10:00 city Valencia was stabbed to death by a local man Elena his 22y old daughter in a statement to the local newspaper denounced that her father's murder stems from the aversion and rejection that some people profess against the Chinese population she said my father is not a unique case violence and robberies of Chinese people are happening every day in Spain the performance collect Ive Kreo
• 10:00 - 10:30 Pro the first in Spain made up exclusively of Chinese women has a piece about violence in Chinese shops based on true personal stories I was able to see the piece twice it is ironically called B alino let's go to the Chino so Chino is the name that many US in Spain to refer indistinctively to any shop or restaurant run run by an East Asian
• 10:30 - 11:00 person and that carries racist connotations even if many Spaniard will deny these racist connotations in an interview I did to Shia Shiro founder of the collective she told me after the covid era two colleagues from Kreo Pro shared similar incidents with us their mothers who own grocery stores had almost simultaneously suffered robberies with violence this is
• 11:00 - 11:30 not an isolated case this type of business suffers from a lot of insecurity and some colleagues from Kreo Pro have experienced it since they were little we felt that we had to do something about it and that was our way the only way to deal with our personal and Collective need what is the alternative the police who do not meet our needs on either a practical or emotional
• 11:30 - 12:00 level so the restaurant of my family was called Chinatown and Chinatown the English term for um areas neighborhoods where Chinese and Asian people concentrate in non non Chinese countries um in Spain there is also a history of calling China Town something like that in Spanish like barino to NE neighborhoods and districts
• 12:00 - 12:30 with businesses related to Services of sex work areas that in other parts of the world are known as red light districts Barcelona's barino El Ral or Valas barino the be area have actually nothing to do with Chinese people and it has been one more way of stigmatizing chineseness in the Spanish language
• 12:30 - 13:00 although it is no longer in use today the term barino has been used in a pejorative way associating illegality drug addiction degradation dirt poverty lust and illness with chineseness the restaurant of my family the China Town closed in 2020 that year I found myself like thousands of other people in the world confined
• 13:00 - 13:30 but in my case I was confined with my parents in our town uel a place sadly well known in these last weeks because of the terrible floods it has suffered and I grow the poem San Fernando TR a love haate letter to the restaurant its title is the street and number in which the restaurant is located maybe I am not from any continent country City or neighborhood
• 13:30 - 14:00 bario maybe I'm just from this tiny location s Fernando Tres zip code 46300 so San Fernando Tres starts with some verses of a of an Asian-American poet called Chris Anon Tran and it says if we are going to suffer we got to do it over good food and the poem says like
• 14:00 - 14:30 this my parents have a restaurant more than 20 years old but for some reason that I would say is ethn racial it has never been considered an authentic local business
• 14:30 - 15:00 where are you from from C San Fernando number 303 where can I find you on C San Fernando number 33 if you're a customer will tell you you are right even if you are not you'll find me drinking at some unearthly hour finishing up the course pretending I don't understand white European comments and putting on a
• 15:00 - 15:30 flattering accent you'll find me watching the news from a country that is not mine because no country is mine you'll find me messaging my father and devouring a serving of lemon chicken we made in excess because someone made a telephone prank that they wanted it for carry out the secret to this popular recipe is Fanta and tears of an oriental migrant
• 15:30 - 16:00 laer Papa Mama I don't want to go to China I want to stay in Chinatown I grew up in a Chino and I don't want to walk between nothing and grief I choose nothing Papa Mama I don't want to lose my home I can't bear this loneliness there are white people doing Joga in every Park following a to videos by shanan I won't say anything bad about
• 16:00 - 16:30 shanan because shanan is a basa comrade with fluid breath in and identity she's a French joogy and women both Asian and Western and I also watch her classes in my house I only have a house because my parents just sold the business the old China Town is now called House of dragons de la why say the menu is more authentic
• 16:30 - 17:00 only because there's no daily menu for 750 in the end to them it's all the same whether it's a walk an Asian Susy a gym meditation or sexual Tantra so long as if the backpacking trip paid for by dad and mom falls through they can show off on Instagram live and stories
• 17:00 - 17:30 but somehow it's true that CA San Fernando number 33 is still somehow my home because in those thousands of calls received over these decades there have been various translations many misunderstandings constant reproaches to mistar Melancholy with oyster sauce tasty dimsum made with sweet and sour
• 17:30 - 18:00 happiness so I'd like to thank especially to Lauren shimel and Julia Connor for their amazing translations into English of some of my poems and of course to Martin that I know has translated some of the poems also for some of his uh
• 18:00 - 18:30 students so this poem about my restaurant San Fernando is by Julia Connor and she's a Wonderful Chinese American teacher and translator from both Spanish and Chinese to English that just if anybody's interested has a whole finished manuscript of my poetry collection in English and is looking for an opportunity to publish in it reading Sally WMA and many others I realized how much inspiration I drew
• 18:30 - 19:00 from those very relevant Asian American poets in some poems in Oculus salau uses the Persona of Anna May Wong the first Chinese American Hollywood star to convey this apparent contradiction between the aesthetic hypervisibility and the hiding of the perspectives voices and narratives of Asians in the poetic imagination of San m Anna mayong is casted the same way as
• 19:00 - 19:30 racist stereotypes in movies like The Last Samurai or killville she even goes viral as a webcam girl again the element of the camera is there working as a witness of orientalist consumption and objection Sama also resurrects afon Moy the first Chinese woman to travel to the United States in 1834 before afono
• 19:30 - 20:00 toured the main American cities being exhibited and displayed by the car Brothers among various Chinese gadgets the Asian products could be sold to the American white middleclass Spectators that paid a ticket to see her afono was considered both a magic being and a monster this is the contradiction that Sal and ma explains in an interview with
• 20:00 - 20:30 Jenny sh the racialized feminine Asian body is both a spectacle and an absence convicted and reviled at the same time afo was being exploited and as far as we know was not recording or producing anything of her own every research material found until now comes from the perspective of a white man looking at her
• 20:30 - 21:00 so s wau explains for Anna May Wong's voice I look through old columns she wrote for the New York Herald Tribune and biographies and grow the poems from there afon moy's voice was imagined on my part so I took the facts for example she was pressured to show her bare bound feet against her wishes and constructed a voice from these records in the newspaper stories that described
• 21:00 - 21:30 her her otherness was so emphasized that no one consider what her perspective may have been how she processed whiteness for the poet there is a chance of reanimating both aomo and Ana Wong there are clear limits as documentation lacks critically there is not an actual voice to someone in an imaginative speculative
• 21:30 - 22:00 exercise like Oculus but there is a recreation as the author States it of a history more felt not for the exploiters but for the exploited so San M's poetry collection is an attempt to resurrect and reconstruct lost voices at the same time that it recognizes the silence and absence in historical archives
• 22:00 - 22:30 her poetry is defending thought discourse writing voice words opposed to the hypervisibility and spectacularization of Asian women's bodies Dan Chason reflected it this way her book is in part A sustained defense of writing Mouse poems intervene in a culture gled with visual images on behalf of what she calls the self you want to
• 22:30 - 23:00 hide San Mouse book was an ax for the Frozen sea Within Me In the words of Kafka and I would like to read my own poem about my own ambivalent relationship with words that in Spanish is called peraa
• 23:00 - 23:30 I've always had more respect for Words than for my parents I've always had more respect for those that do periods at odd hours than for my parents I've always had more respect for Fernando pesoa than for my parents because Fernando pesoa found words and he had a good translator and a good editor and my parents
• 23:30 - 24:00 found European scam desolation my parents found broken words that heart a small Source oooing tongue and since I didn't want broken words that hard the small Source wooing tongue I tried hard to speak I tried hard to pronounce the ER sound I Tred hard to speak correctly White was my accent and dominate the words that dominate my
• 24:00 - 24:30 parents that are dominated by the words that they Dominate and today my voice no longer has color my voice no longer has history nobody knows where I'm from cuz in nightclubs where you from on Tinder where you from On the Border where you from in Spanish in Chinese in English where are you from and when my parents talk where are you from and when the streets
• 24:30 - 25:00 the streets talk where are you from and where are you going where do you live where are you from I'm from fake Japanese passports and Family Savings I'm from loans and letters that do not arrive I'm from blood Duty and beauty and from faces like mine that whisper slowly facing is the hope that I understand and although
• 25:00 - 25:30 I don't understand and even though they don't understand although nobody understands I only understand that my parents made me understand that I have to speak speak speak it doesn't matter that we don't understand speak speak speak and so I speak with fractured language with broken words that hard a small Source
• 25:30 - 26:00 Who in Tong so I speak with broken language and yes my parents are proud of me and Fernando pesoa too even if they don't understand everyday interactions are full of poetry likewise everyday interactions are also
• 26:00 - 26:30 r with linguistic harm racism is contained within quotidian language as I mentioned in the first poem I have read today toal laa in which I reference to the real Academia Espanola definition of negro and the ubiquity of the phrase tro deos poetry is a means to transform everyday language and just as our everyday language permits my poetry
• 26:30 - 27:00 poetry permites my everyday language if with poetry we can invent new ways to name our silenced realities then they will be silenced no more the fact that our quotient language is full of racist Expressions means that our society is full of racist Expressions so poetry can help us to rethink and reinvent it all my work and life areas are deeply
• 27:00 - 27:30 connected my poetry relates to my journalism teaching research activism because all areas Inspire feed and sustain each other last year in the summer of 2023 software developer Raul sanalo and I released Sans pixel scenes that is both a digital poetry collection and a wallpaper app for mobiles and tablets with animated pixel art scenes users
• 27:30 - 28:00 readers can read and listen to my work on my own voice these poetry collections includes uh translations into Catalan English and Mandarin which are all credited to myself Spanish Catalan English and Mandarin are the four languages in which I consciously live so even if I normally just write in Spanish I wanted to experience the process of self transation and to know more about the
• 28:00 - 28:30 poems of those Catalan English and Chinese myself that all as myself as all myself are somewhat foreign and local at the same time fortunately I had the help of the translators Laya benth James and Ian fores for English of my high school teacher Nestor Torres for Catalan and of my friend actress and writer juang yen and researcher son yion for
• 28:30 - 29:00 mandering so they have been my other myself for my other dear languages in which I am not proficient or fluent enough the process was painful joyful and truly truly enriching Lila benit James andan fores had many smart questions for my English translations about what I meant in specific verses or with specific words
• 29:00 - 29:30 and I was surprised myself that even if I did not know the answer at first I always came up with some explanation and after all all translations are interpretations and even if there are a lot of things Lost in Translation um you can also gain a lot right with the with the translations and in the opportunities I had to recite in other languages just just like today I
• 29:30 - 30:00 did that it was kind of challenging and very scary but I always enjoy the feeling in the case of Catalan with the help of Nestor Torres I did a translation that kept close to the Catalan variant that we speak in the valencian community that is different from the one spoken in in Catalonia as I used to study classic Valenti poetry as a teenager reading my poems in Catalan was again a wonderful experience experience and lastly in the case of mandering the process was so
• 30:00 - 30:30 beautiful because I have been also helping my friend the actress and poet juang Yen with her poetry in Spanish and having her in this project taught me so many many things so my friend's mother tongue is Mandarin and the dialect of her region her region is tangu but she writes mainly in Spanish as well as a little bit in Chinese and English and she started writing in in this new language in Spanish when she migrated to Spain with 30 years
• 30:30 - 31:00 old and when she told me well you need a better poet than me to help you with this because for now you you know your your Chinese poems just sound so foreign I mean this they sound translated and I was like yeah like it's okay if for the Chinese audience feels translated I mean there is no way I can hide my foress so I will finish my talk and and then we can open some space for
• 31:00 - 31:30 questions and answers but I'd like to read maybe one last poem this time in Spanish which is the last poem of invasoras and I would like to thank you again for your attention elal
• 31:30 - 32:00 ni
• 32:00 - 32:30 m for
• 32:30 - 33:00 Lord
• 33:00 - 33:30 Elon
• 33:30 - 34:00 much graas
• 34:00 - 34:30 [Applause]
• 34:30 - 35:00 all right um what questions do we have for Paloma excuse me I came in late actually I have students from Ela I used to teach in Spain and I was called them about the flood so forgive me for my uh late
• 35:00 - 35:30 arrival and you might have said it uh but I was just curious because uh in the poem you refer to Fernando pooa who is Portuguese if I'm not mistaken uh so in other words when you're were talking about poetry you know finding your voice in these words what was it about pooa that uh had such an influence on you I think that uh yeah like during the period uh I
• 35:30 - 36:00 was uh I I wrote this poem so I was reading a lot of P's works so I guess yeah like of course he's like maybe the national poet of Portugal right but for me it was more about someone that I don't know that is like this white Portuguese man that also has like some poems like a little bit like yeah regarding the colonial past of Portugal
• 36:00 - 36:30 and a little bit like problematic that I still deeply admire with his vulnerability and with his of course like uh yeah his magic words so in this poem is like yeah trying to say that I always yeah like literally I always respected more my literature and uh that sometimes it it felt so um like my parents couldn't really understand like
• 36:30 - 37:00 different different worlds right so in this poem I'm trying like to to do this yeah comparison more questions all right I have a question for you palom um so you mentioned that you work in several languages um you
• 37:00 - 37:30 mentioned Catalan English Spanish and Mandarin um but that in languages other than Spanish you collaborate with translators in order to fully get your meaning across so I was wondering if you could um I know you spoke about this in your speech but I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what is that process of collaboration like right what's your process when you want to produce a poem in a language that isn't Spanish and how exactly does that
• 37:30 - 38:00 collaboration with a translator um how does it uh play out yeah so all those poems was about this project uh sanso pixel scenes that even the title is like in English and so actually this collaboration started like we wanted so it's a digital project right so um and this connects with some like of like some kind of other philosophy of the work of trying to uh get out like the Poetry outside the yeah
• 38:00 - 38:30 the boring books and sometimes not very accessible books and trying to do this like uh yeah digital collaboration and this project started with um some artists and a software developer that wanted to do this uh app uh with some illustrations that these illustrations could um yeah get into conversation conversation with some texts and I got really interested by um by that so I
• 38:30 - 39:00 started to to to write some poems and I I I just write in Spanish right so I was writing this these poems in in Spanish but then it felt like that we we have to have this app in other languages right like like English okay and then for me it was very important to do it okay if we are doing it like in English too why don't we also do it in in these other two languages even if it's going to um
• 39:00 - 39:30 yeah be like extra work and and and like that so I just so my poem in Spanish I just try with my best skills to translate into these other languages but of course it's it's so hard it's so hard right and I'm not a translator I I I guess this is super super clear that I'm not a translator myself and also that it's super difficult to translate your own things even if you're a translator right so for me it was Alo like this collabor collaborative project of
• 39:30 - 40:00 talking with people that most of them are like people that are already important in my life right uh this thing that I sometimes say about writing for your friends and also just collaborate with your friends um but yeah it's difficult and I think I was saying like at the last sentence of my talk like my friend was like yeah but your poems translated they are just like translating and I was like yeah because they are translated right um and I don't
• 40:00 - 40:30 know I'm just very fond of translations in general like when I was a a kid and a teenager I kind of always read writers that don't write in Spanish but of course like translated into Spanish I mean and this is a little bit like yeah like for some people anti-intuitive because sometimes they're like well but if you can like read it in English then why you you still want to keep it like in in in Spanish or sometimes with the with the movies right like now in Spain like everyone just
• 40:30 - 41:00 want to see every movie uh in original like in English and with the original subtitles and for me it's like well yeah of course but I grew up with this DFT voices you know like Robert DeNiro sounds a specific way right and I miss that voice sometimes um so yeah and and and the process was was very difficult I also I mention it like translators always ask very smart questions right
• 41:00 - 41:30 like very smart questions like what what do you exactly mean here and yeah like some sometimes like h i don't mean anything uh but then you kind of analyze your own poem and you're oh this reference to these and yeah I think that that's the best of collaborating with translators right thank you so much more questions for Paloma so kind of following up on Martin's question do you feel like your voice
• 41:30 - 42:00 changes when you're when you you know read those translations because the collaboration is well of course everything is an interpretation right but everyone is interpreting your original which is in Spanish but yeah does that voice change at all or well what do you think I have no idea I mean no idea what do you think my voice say this I'm not sure yeah I'm not voice I'm talking about the potic voice yeah yeah yeah
• 42:00 - 42:30 yeah yeah I'm not yeah I don't know I really don't know what do you think Martin tell me some clue I mean and also you have translated some of my poems I did and I'm not a professional translator so I just want to make that clear um yeah I translated I wanted I know that a lot of the translations you shared with us are not published right so I wanted to make um some of your Works accessible to our students without you know so I did what
• 42:30 - 43:00 I could um and it was very challenging I mean it's it was really fun but it was really challenging um there's so much um in terms of the way like the way that you have rhythm right in Spanish that's difficult to capture in English and obviously the way that you perform your poems right gives them a whole other life beyond what I think can come through on a page right so there's there's just so many layers of meaning
• 43:00 - 43:30 to capture there um so in some ways I think your voice cannot it it can only change right um that would be kind of my thought but either way it's always beautiful so thank you yeah I I I feel a lot of the times that I'm just like doing jokes that I only understand myself actually what other questions do we have for Paloma yes
• 43:30 - 44:00 when you're talking about like translating and then digitalizing poems so it can be more accessible like who is the audience that you're most trying to reach through the poems or is it just like everyone yeah so um yeah that's the thing with this like digital poetry collection I was thinking that well when I was a kid I was like saving all my money to buy very expensive books because it felt really really really expensive and in Spain for many just
• 44:00 - 44:30 like migrant families they don't really have that budget for books I mean when you start like working in the yeah in the publishing industry and all of that you realize that books are very cheap because everyone just gets very little money but then you feel as a consumer or buyer or reader or whatever that books are are really really expensive so I do think [Music] yeah I don't know if if this sounds
• 44:30 - 45:00 correct but like I'm quite a fan of just downloading books like pirate like the pirate philosophy I mean that's also maybe just a generational thing like when I was a kid we used to Pirate just like pirate is that a word in okay pirate uh P right like through the internet like many films and video games and and and everything and I do think that for academic life that like the ability to to know how to get all but of course please I'm not going to defend
• 45:00 - 45:30 that practice so go to your library first right um but yeah the thing about accessibility is like everyone is just we are all the time reading on the smartphone on the on right so um so that also really attracted me of doing the that project that you can just you know be in the subway and reading poems right what audience I don't really know anybody that reads poems in the subway
• 45:30 - 46:00 right like nobody is reading poetry these days but and this this PO this project I feel that is quite Niche because on one hand you want to attract people that is into poetry but very specific kind of spoken word and like anti-racist poetry right that of course I would like that more migrants and uh rationalized people like me also read it but then these illustrations are pixel
• 46:00 - 46:30 art illustrations they have this because I have this collaboration with these artists that are pixel artists that recreate how video games looked uh decades ago and decades ago it was because of technical limitations but now they are like building this style and for me it that also have to do a lot with my poetry in the sense of like some topics like this Nostalgia this
• 46:30 - 47:00 reimagining things uh this trying to get this balance between modernity and like tradition um so yes in some sense I was trying to attract broader audience but then again when I'm writing and most of the time I I don't think at all about who is going to read or or listen to my poems but the first readers or the readers
• 47:00 - 47:30 that for me maybe are more important are my friends like a close circle of friends that are just really really into me really really into literature right and like after all a small circle of people that really care about your texts more questions
• 47:30 - 48:00 yes um in Professor Reen's class we watched you perform the first poem the s for everyone at the um Royal Spanish Academy and obviously in that poem you talk about the Royal Spanish Academy and one of the ways we interpreted it was like kind of referencing it in this um way of them being outdated or when you
• 48:00 - 48:30 mentioned the um gender neutral pronouns so I was wondering what that experience was like of sharing that poem in that space and um the impact it had on you or the impact you felt it had on the audience yeah when I have to do things that is scare me a lot like that I just tend to not think like at all about that right so I remember that I uh won yeah I
• 48:30 - 49:00 won this prize and this prize yeah this award okay and yeah then when I was in this contest which is uh spoken word contest I didn't know that what you have to do or like the the award is going to the Royal Academy to to do to read your poems I didn't know then then they told me and I was like wow
• 49:00 - 49:30 okay and then I thought that I wrote a poem so this this poem is specifically written to this performance and yes I was I just wanted to uh to reference to be an institution that is very yeah very outdated and like very yeah very old school with many not only like definitions but also with uh their practices on kind of I don't know linguistic police sometimes
• 49:30 - 50:00 um so I yeah I was scared as so um I was just reading that with my best pocker face yes it's my best pocker face and I really didn't know if somebody would like it but then to that a small circle of friends that were with me when I everything finished and they just
• 50:00 - 50:30 told me that they were like so proud of me and that they really really liked it and then I was like okay okay this worked this worked because this couldn't and and yeah I think for for many people told me that it was that it was quite a thing I mean they liked it of course a lot of people also ask me why you go is very uh Hy yeah like what like very contradictory right that you are doing
• 50:30 - 51:00 this um but since then I have not been invited again right so I don't think I'm yeah maybe I need I'm inan a you a list or something sorry one last uh comment first of all pa uh I thank you for teaching an Arab about Palestinian
• 51:00 - 51:30 poetry I I didn't know about that poem until now until you just said it I could find it on Google so I want to thank you which is withas uh but I can't find your poetry with the digital images that you were talking about I tried searching for that if you can mention that and just as a final way to conclude I I I find it ironic because as far as I know this University is a simulacrum of alcalade andares and I'm thinking of nria and you know his colle ction of you know his contribution to the Spanish language Castellano and the grammar and I think
• 51:30 - 52:00 it's kind of quite poetic that you could challenge that Legacy even though this is a simulacra of that location but yeah please if you could tell me how to find your collection I'll be so grateful yeah yeah yeah totally like that I think that is also like important like to point out like right in in which space right where where you are so also thanks for for sharing that so I'm here thanks to a specific people right that are I think making this institution like super like
• 52:00 - 52:30 more open and like more interesting so super super uh great that that yeah so the Poetry Digital Collection is like an app so you can find it or on Google Play or on the app store if you have an iPhone yeah I know that it's called s pixel scenes so it's like s h a n n s h u i like
• 52:30 - 53:00 s pixel scenes yeah I can also send you the link later I've got it yeah yeah thank you all right I think we've got time for one or two more questions Rebecca thank you Paloma for your poetry and your performance with us today um I assigned the selection that Martin that Dr rein has translated to my food cultures class which is a first year seminar and I've always been really struck in your work by the presence of
• 53:00 - 53:30 food and so we know that food is a language we know that food is a system of communication um I was wondering if you had any thoughts about how you use food and the restaurant that you grew up in um in your poetic work yeah first like I'm kind of aware that some um again like Asian-American poets like
• 53:30 - 54:00 also do a lot of work with food because for Asian community in Spain too food is something that talks a lot like about our identity and our our history and also that thing about like in the specific case of uh Chinese migrant people like the generation of my parents like 80s 90s they came to touristy cities in Spain like Valencia Malaga alante to open primarily restaurants after that they open other things right like like bis and and right but
• 54:00 - 54:30 um for me the restaurant has just been so important right in the sense of I think I I I talk a little bit in the in the talk like I I remember me a lot of the time like reading a lot watching TV a lot but always in the like in the restaurant just like a house that is open to the public so I was not in Pama you know but it it it felt it felt like that and also so we didn't leave there
• 54:30 - 55:00 we had like another flat where we right like it was very near but the presence of the restaurant because of because my parents worked a lot and everything was kind of all the time I have this memory kind of unblocked really recently thanks to another friend that also experienced the same and he wrow it but I I because I kind of forgot it but there were many nights we were at home and in the weekends uh um and in the weekends my my brother and me were like yeah we're
• 55:00 - 55:30 saying wow so good we are now like like having arrest and everything but then the telephone ring so the telephone ring so my mother asked us to go right and then oh long faces and very sad to go again to the restaurant so there was this connection right that when I was a kid I never really thought about that like never but after that I did encounter some other works that realized me that a lot of the experiences in the restaurant were important for me were
• 55:30 - 56:00 kind of uh yeah like like things that I would like to to write about and I think some of you may know uh Chen right like GP aul like this graphic novel right where she is uh yeah drawing and writing about her life in the restaurant and I remember I don't know if it was 2015 or before when she had this tumbler and it was the first time I was yeah I was uh
• 56:00 - 56:30 seeing like these experiences in an in an artistic form right so then there is this connection of course like restaurant food and of course food sometimes related to sometimes like my conversations with my with my brother my brother for me is like one of the main connections maybe to China cuz he was born in China and he came to Spain with 12 with 12 years old and he was no nostalgic and melancholic and he was he was also trying to say oh
• 56:30 - 57:00 but the food we have in the restaurant you know Paloma is not real Chinese food I was like what what are you saying right so we had kind of very childish but at the same time very profound conversations about the truthfulness or what is makeup or what is adaptation or what is racism or right like all the all these days deits and so there is one thing and then maybe not so in some way
• 57:00 - 57:30 it's has a relation but in other way I always had just with my Chinese identity I always had a kind of conflicting relationship with food right in some way because of beauty standards I think many women we have a travel relationship with food right if you eat so much food you you are constantly hearing that but at the same time our cultures revolve around food right so there is a lot of
• 57:30 - 58:00 ambivalences there yeah thank you all right I think we've got time maybe for one last question any questions yes yeah so thank you for the fascinating talk and the questions um I didn't mean to be the last question but uh actually I read your some of your poetry um that I was thinking about home you know because some versus you referring to that particular
• 58:00 - 58:30 address of the restaurant right so and then that's one way to understand home right and you kind of talk about this question both you know this very sometime very confrontational question about where are you from right many times that carry a racist connotation and then uh I relate to my own experience I you know how I uh was asked that question but over the years when I stayed in America now I'm a faculty
• 58:30 - 59:00 advisor sometimes I will ask my student you know that question where are you from and then some of them act surprised by my question right and some others feel I don't know if they're offended so uh I'm also thinking of you this question about where are you form defitely relate to home right who uh so my question is your thoughts about who get to ask that question of where are you from and then uh a particular scene I have in mind is
• 59:00 - 59:30 uh miazaki spirited way that moment of s I don't know if uh maybe some of audience actually I'm going to teach that next week uh the following week uh so spirited way in this moment you have this little girl confronting no face so uh this monster guy who's out of control who ate a lot of stuff caused a havoc in this bath house and then she kind of conquered that monster by asking you
• 59:30 - 60:00 know she's this very tiny 10 years old little girl and then she asked it uh this monster the question of where are you from where are you who are your parents right and then those very simple questions seems to kind of defeat it the monsters the monster really you see that his gigantic size get deflated so so I'm thinking of all those moments like that so the related question is okay your
• 60:00 - 60:30 thoughts about home and then maybe there are two questions and another one is you know uh in this our Global our age of global migration and then you can think of we are all living in this kind of a homeless mind of modern age if you think of that way right so when we ask this question of where are you from what does that mean
• 60:30 - 61:00 wow yeah I do think that because of how now is everything like right like this world like this question got so complicated right like before it was just easier because we well maybe I'm now I'm saying a myth because I was gonna say like yeah because before we never migrated okay that's not true but now it's like more right more it seems
• 61:00 - 61:30 like more movement more freedom or not Freedom or forceful migration so this question gets complicated and for me there are so many possible answers because for example um in Spain or in in like everywhere there are many people like like me I mean like like like their parents migrated and they don't have at
• 61:30 - 62:00 all a conflictive or they say that they don't have a conflictive relationship with identity because maybe they just say oh yeah I'm from China and that's like or or not or I'm just Spanish right so they don't mix they don't think it makes sense to give like a lot of explanation for me this question also kind of troubled me first because of how many times I was asked and and in what
• 62:00 - 62:30 circumstances because I do think that of course I also get curious like all the time about the intimate details of everyone really like a lot um but I don't keep asking them the first time I meet you right or if I encounter you on the street right or if I right so for me it was also a matter again of friendship again of trust right
• 62:30 - 63:00 we need to build some relationship to know in which conditions and maybe this sounds like too hard but like to know in which conditions we are talking about I mean if you ask me where I'm from and I and because I feel that my story is a little bit troubl and I give you a little more details like because my parents came and blah blah blah then tell me you also the same kind of information right I mean where part in Spain are you from but your parents also
• 63:00 - 63:30 migrated but right because people just tend to yeah like ask a lot of questions without also opening themselves right and for me it keeps like the relationship a little bit uh yeah disbalanced at the same time I do think of course that the question of where you are from is is important so well I love the movie is Spirited way I really like it I I think I don't I think I remember
• 63:30 - 64:00 the scene but now I I forgot like about the specific conversation between them but yeah in some sense it's important and in some other sense it has kept haunting me right so I'm starting to think more about where are you now right so um for me it will always be this looking at some distant space that is
• 64:00 - 64:30 important for my identity is important for my family but then it's even more important to look at the soil right that I am yeah standing right now all right everybody um I think we're just about out of time Paloma I speak for everyone in this room when I say it has just been a tremendous honor and privilege to be able to appreciate your work and to witness um your moving
• 64:30 - 65:00 performance um so please everybody join me in thanking Paloma [Applause] [Music]