Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! On this day, mooncake consumption, family gatherings, and gazing at the sky are all in order; such festivities are not only embraced by Chinese-speaking communities but in other parts of Asia under different names: Tsukimi in Japan, Chuseok in South Korea, and Tết Trung Thu in Vietnam . . . However, not everyone can reunite with their loved ones on this special occasion. To commemorate both the joy and sadness of family ties across spatial divides, we invite you to revisit the following three pieces from our archives that shed light on the Asian diasporic experience. states a message from Asymptote Journal.
First up, an interview with Swedish-born artist Lap-See Lam from our Winter 2021 issue. Profiled just last week in The Guardian, Lam discusses her project Mother Tongue, her exploration of the Cantonese diaspora in Sweden by investigating Stockholm’s Chinese restaurants. Of her decision to channel a fictional narrative through the voice of a Chinese restaurant, she says:
“[The stories that the restaurant told] are not only about the history of Chinese restaurants in Sweden, but also stories about human relations, community, language, othering, and mortality. […] The idea of using the restaurant’s own voice came from a need to problematize ideas of representation.”
Our Summer 2021 edition featured Chinese artist Zi Yi Wang, whose practice, dubbed “trash history,” transforms discarded materials and objects through media such as video, photography, and installation. The result is a poignant jumble of memories, nostalgia, and utopia:
“I think the first part of my language is understanding the environment of an object or the relationship between materials and the intangible, as we are in this flux of identities, information, systems, cultures, and languages. […] My language is an assemblage of hybrid cultures, aesthetics, and values, with the hope of producing a fresh, possibly unstable, but slowly transformative process.”
Finally, in our Spring 2019 issue, we spoke with Vietnamese-American poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen on her debut poetry title Ghost Of, a collection of “complex and visually-driven elegies” written in the aftermath of her brother’s suicide. Experimenting with found materials, she delves into intergenerational storytelling within the Vietnamese diaspora:
“When I was writing the poem, for each of the spaces—whether it was the poem shard, or the text as frame around the shard—I’d have to cut off the word wherever the white space was, and then start across. […] It was useful for my own understanding of grief, history, familial trauma, and just having to revisit memory and my own personal history.”