Inviting you to my launch party! [with working links]
[updating the email I sent earlier due to faulty links--thank you for pointing that out to me!]
Dear friends,
I've been in my mother's hometown, where there is thousand year old well dating back to the Three Kingdoms bubbling hot springs. Around the gaping, steaming mouth of the well: nightly square dances, a bustling foot massage and ear picking industry, and 精神的,elderly folks asking me, "What are you doing here, you are not retired?"
This town, Warm Soup, is a six hour high-speed train ride away from Shanghai, though it was a twelve hour overnight journey when I was younger. The dialects would get softer as the train made its way West, until the rhythm of my mother's tongue because familiar yet still stubbornly outside of my understanding. I actually wrote about these trips to "Old Home, Mother's Home' for The Common in 2016, the first nonfiction essay I tried to write and published.
So it is surreal that this town has now been taken over by elderly folks similar to my father's side of the family, proudly urbane 小资 folks from Shanghai. Rumors of the healing properties of the hot spring (mineral rich, the skin feels soft after soaking, no one from here has cancer, everyone lives till 100) has caused retired Shanghai folks to flock here. Big hotel chains moved in, the well is now fenced off and protected, hot spring water is now dispensed from a coin operated machine, the old town renovated anew - painted over to give a veneer of "tradition."
back when we could still pull water from the well ourselves
The town is hardly recognizable these days. The only "hotel" that existed a mere ten years ago was a 工人疗养院,a Worker's Healing Co-op, where star workers doing intense, dangerous manual labor like metal processing all over the country would get sent here to heal, a tradition inherited from the soviets.
I came here around a month ago from Macau with my parents -- and have been gradually finding a slowness with daily bike rides around the surrounding mountains and hot spring soaks. It's weird to feel like I'm living a "retired" rhythm at a time when I feel like I should be working my hardest, when the world is in such turmoil -- and I'm not sure how to reconcile such feelings -- with the 13 hour time difference, the work I am doing literally begins near midnight, a reversed, alternate me, unhinged from this land.
CHAPBOOK LAUNCH 11/20 7PM EST
And indeed, in a strange continuation of this year-long fever dream, I'm thrilled to invite you to my book launch next Friday! I will be reading with my literary heroes, Anne Carson & Robert Currie -- who will be doing a surprise Zoom performance related to our exploration of Zoom as a form. This is extra surreal to me because I think there is no one writing like Anne today, and when I first read her books Glass, God, and Irony, and the tombstone of a book Nox, I felt shivers deep in my spine and thought, if I were to write, I want to write like her.
RSVP HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/radix-reads-there-is-still-singing-in-the-afterlife-by-jinjin-xu-tickets-128131511801
I am also so excited to read alongside Aria Aber, the judge for this chapbook contest, and author of the revolutionary book Hard Damage, and the singularly thoughtful critic and friend Yanyi, author of recent Yale Younger Poets winner, The Year of Blue Water.
Please help me spread the word of this event! Invite your loved ones and all who might be interested :)
You can also share it here on Facebook.
& You can still PREORDER the chapbook here, there are only 250 copies (!) :
https://radixmedia.org/product/there-is-still-singing-in-the-afterlife-by-jinjin-xu/
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POEM AS PRAYER
I have a new poem "Against This Earth, We Knock" up on Epiphany. The making of this poem was done in a way I'd never felt before —and I don't know how to return to it again, either—I wrote it after kowtowing 100 times for a performance I did with my friend Sara Elkamel in Anne Carson's class. After, my body was on fire, and yet my mind, clear.
I was inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist ritual of kowtowing 10,000 times before reaching the pilgrimage site -- on the train to Tibet with my dad after I got into college, I saw many, many pilgrims with knees, foreheads, hands, caked in mud walking, praying, bowing, along the train tracks, kowtowing every step of the way. Their simultaneous stillness and motion, how much weight was given into each step, moved me so profoundly. I tried to write about that feeling.
documentation of performance in class
Read it here https://epiphanyzine.com/features/2020/11/7/against-this-earth-we-knock-by-jinjin-xu
TWO EVENTS THIS SUNDAY:
The Immigrant Artist Biennial Performance 11/15 6PM EST
I will be performing and in conversation as a part of the duo Silkworm Pupas, formed with my friend Jiaoyang Li.
In America, You Are Asked, Why Are Leaves Green?
“Immigrant artists constantly betray their sources. With tongues silenced by our homeland, what can we say in America?On the internet? How can we tell our stories to an inherently foreign audience—must we be consumed by the American gaze? Must we eat off American palms to be seen?” - Silkworm Pupas. In America, You Are Asked Why Are Leaves Green? is a video-performance showcased in an online VR installation. Within a ghostly silk forest, a world within worlds, the labor of Chinese factory workers and silkworms are evoked through a satiric reimagining of the Chinese mythology of the Silk-Worm Horse. Surveilled by hovering avatar audience members, who can enter the installation frame, the artist-duo appear in their cyborg embodiments and mirror each other as they uncannily merge into one. The work questions censorship, self-censorship, orientalization, and self-orientalization within the context of global late capitalism.
Conversation with Kirun Kapur 11/15 8PM EST
The Asian Alum network is hosting a talk between me and Kirun Kapur, who taught poetry at Amherst though I never took a class with her. But I got to attend her debut book launch for Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist and it made me realize writing poetry books could be a real thing? She has another new book out: Women in the Waiting Room, and we will do a reading together this Sunday 11/15 8-9PM EST, along with a little conversation. This will be the first time I am officially reading from the chapbook!
RSVP HERE:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYucOivqjsjH92ttCWYY5of1TdNXAbfM36s?fbclid=IwAR3fjuBUxtYY4qkUFyScM4DXV70m2j7ln0JxK8KhuzjfERpMnHuoZwXPTWk
Take care, my friends! Grateful as always to be in your company.
warmly (with soup),
JinJin