Table Sessions: Mel Hsu

Great performances. Great food. Great conversation. And you.

Letters to the Moon, a soundbath in honor of those who made me

Mel Hsu invites you to be still, close your eyes, take slower breaths and let sound wash over you. Mel’s Table Session, Letters to the Moon, is an evening of sound collages featuring ethereal cello, haunting vocals, projected images, fragments of familial interviews and stories told across splintered languages. The evening is performed by Mel Hsu, in collaboration with visual artist Bz Zhang, and directed by Cat Ramirez.

A note from Mel Hsu

The island of Taiwan has been passed between the hands of different global powers for centuries. While several generations of my family all grew up on the same land, the multiple shifts between Chinese, Dutch and Japanese governments caused the land and the lives upon it to be completely re-coded with new languages, cultural expectations and history class curriculums every few decades.

Multiple generations of Taiwanese and Indigenous people were forced to speak a new language with the entrance of a new government. Depending on who was in power, native tongues were relegated to being spoken only at home and forbidden to be spoken in public.

A decade ago, I embarked on a journey of exploring the impact of linguistic colonization within four generations of my family. My great-grandparents’ first words were in Taiwanese. My grandmother writes her poetry in Japanese, my parents dream in Mandarin. My sister and I are schooled in English grammar.

For one year, I conducted interviews with my grandmothers, my parents, and my sister. My original hypothesis was a condemnation of the ways in which colonization causes intergenerational rupture. I was grieving and angry. I wanted to be able to read my grandmother’s poetry - I felt that war, foreign occupation and white supremacy had stripped me of that sacred privilege.

Through the interview process, what was illuminated for me was the underground ecosystem of linguistic myselia that my family created for ourselves when we were stripped of words. What I found was resistance - we reached for one another despite having different vocabularies. We created our own languages, stronger languages, languages of family that no government could take away from us. The sharing of food, of music, of touch, of play, of grief, of migration, of dreams.

What I found was that my grandmother grew into Mandarin alongside my mother, my mother grows into English alongside me. We create our own familial vocabularies alongside each other. Our mothers grow to find us in our mother tongues.

Keeping Voices was the collection of a summer’s work, a year’s interviews, two years of focused thought, several more years’ grief of not knowing my family’s history, a lifetime of Chinese sounds hidden in my mouth.

Ten years later, when Intercultural Journeys reached out to me, I felt moved to revisit this piece. To listen back to the interviews for the first time. To conduct new ones. To breathe life back into the soundwaves that transformed me. To cradle myself in the voice of my paternal grandmother, who has since passed away. To remember the woman who was the only person in my life who called me by my Chinese name. To honor the people who dreamt across oceans and dared to build new homes.

Letters to the Moon is a tender revisiting. A re-writing of memory in companionship with visual artist Bz Zhang, my childhood best friend and co-conspirator in imagination. To intertwine my past and present communities by inviting in the brilliant direction of Cat Ramirez.

Thank you for being here with me. For bearing witness. For honoring those who built me.

To learn more about Mel and the artists, visit: https://www.interculturaljourneys.org/table-sessions-mel-hsu

Lead support for The Table Sessions is provided by the William Penn Foundation.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Asian Arts Initiative, 1219 Vine Street, Philadelphia, United States