Perfect American English
I am reconciling a personal loss of history and culture, as witnessed and described by my mother and grandmother. This is a reconstruction of an idealized existence between me and the maternal figures I am surrounded with. I aim to reconstruct an environment that is unfamiliar as I yearn to understand more deeply the lives that were lived, and how it affects my own. Navigating the world, I feel disconnected and alienated from myself, dictated by the perception of my character and culture others project onto me. I feel lost in a sea of cultural immaterialities.
“Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, “This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.” And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.”
- Amy Tan, Joy Luck Club