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Talk Story: An American Family My Father’s Teachings: Influences in my Art I have always acknowledged the influence of artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe, Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, and others in the making of my contemporary art. What I have come to recognize is that I am even more influenced by my father, Gee Seow Hong. He came to the United States from China in 1912 as a teenager of 17. By the time I was born in 1938, my father, whom we called “Pop,” was working his way to becoming a restaurant proprietor with the help of my mother, Gee Suey Ting, and our family of 7 children. A working class immigrant by American standards, he was educated and wrote beautiful Chinese calligraphy. He was always teaching something to my siblings and me. My father loved to eat and cook. He combined this love with his love for family by gathering us, six daughters and a son along with assorted sons-in-law and grandchildren, around his tasty home cooked meals on Wednesdays. Wednesdays were our days off from the Great China Restaurant which we operated in Oakland Chinatown from the 1940s to the early 1960s. I was fascinated with his cooking skills whether he was cleaning pigs’ intestines to use as wraps for deep fried spring rolls or whether he was soaking a whole chicken to make soy sauce chicken. He respected the elderly and taught me as a child (when I visited other families in Oakland Chinatown) to greet the oldest person in the household first by calling them poo, grandmother, sook, uncle, or bock, uncle. He believed in education, having sent my three older sisters to school in China when most fathers only sent their sons. He hired a tutor to teach my mother to read Chinese in our village of Goon Do Hong. Here, in the United States, he believed that girls should be educated and was truly proud when my sister, Li Keng, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He was philosophical, reminding us that we had to yu how, yu mee, have head, have tail, which I interpreted to mean that we had to finish up what we started. Whenever we visited other Chinatown families he would say mmm hoong sill, no empty hand, so we always took something to give our hosts on our social calls. He was active in the community and was a member of the Ying On Association in Oakland Chinatown, attending meetings, helping to make governance policy, and helping to organize cultural and traditional social activities. He attended social gatherings focused around Chinese New Year and other holidays with members of the association. Exemplifying his community life he would say to us - his offspring - u loy u wohng, have come, have go. What he was saying was that we needed to give and also take. In other words, that life was a two-way street. I have been a community-based artist since the age of forty. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to work in the community to retrieve the extraordinary stories of ordinary people and make art from those narratives. As I review the bodies of work I have created for twenty seven years I find my father’s teachings deeply incorporated in my art. In my early Oakland Chinatown Series the drawings depict our large family and extended family who were the restaurant workers - dishwasher, cook, and waiter – in scenes that are both personal and professional. Our family’s life from the 1940s to the 1960s was work and work at the restaurant defined our family. One of my latest installations, made in usa: Angel Island Shhh, which explores the identity secrets of Chinese immigrants detained and interrogated in the United States, show my respect for the elderly. I interviewed many elderly former Angel Island detainees who were paper people. I loved speaking my rusty Cantonese with those whose stories were just emerging. In most of my art I have a research component to retrieve stories that might be hidden or forgotten. In this exhibition, Talk Story: An American Family, I return to artistic images of my family. The embellished rice sacks represent my 5 surviving siblings; the monoprints narrate my mother’s lament when my father was shot by a relative in a business dispute sixty-five years ago. The 3 artist books are a further development of my early drawings. I owe this all to my father, Gee Seow Hong, whose teachings are central to this show.
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