My Feelings and Sensations Have a Temporary Effect. My Bond with You a Permanent One. (Pillow Letter). Performance, 2022. IEA Nantes, Nantes, France, 2022.
1. I want to love more than death can harm.
—Ocean Vuong
My Grandmother wrote down her love story. It was a narrative about the history of how she and my Grandfather fell in love since they were young and how the ran away to Taiwan (during the era of the Japanese occupation of the island) in order to live their love without family resistance. She wrote her tale during one of the multiple times my Grandfather had been imprisoned. He had always been a politically active university professor who was invested in promoting identity and freedom amongst his students. First he had been subjected to imprisonment by Japanese soldiers due to his efforts to teach mandarin to Taiwanese people, and then it was the Kuomintang military soldiers who finally assassinated and disappeared him in 1947 for being an intellectual author of the 228 peaceful student protest.
Upon his arrival to his home after one of the imprisonments the story of his wife’s love was placed in his hands. I’m not sure if he found it by chance or if she gave it to him, but afterwards she asked him to make the necessary corrections since he was a literature and philosophy professor and she had barely finished primary school. My Grandfather didn’t correct one single ideogram, not one single syntax, the only thing he did was transcribe the story of his love just like she had written it and gave her back a copy of their story so they would each have one in their possession.
I remember those sheets of paper: they were many of them, like 10 sheets of Chinese paper with a beautiful calligraphy. I remember them folded in half and how she would sleep on them under her pillow. This object with which she slept was born as a record, a representation of their love. It was later transformed into an object created by his handwriting, made by his own hands, proof of his humanity, his life: it proves the fact that he existed. The manuscript is an object to which we can hang on to, a promise of seeing him again, I like to think that my Grandmother slept with the document to be closer to his hands.
When we are confronted with the complexity of memory, the privacy of their love in this piece is my version of the love story of my Grandparents: constructed with the two elements that created this bond: my Grandmother and my Grandfather.
