Spectral Absences:
A Conversation Between Chantal Peñalosa Fong and Jaime González Solís
Jaime González Solís (JGS): The video dwells on a series of specters that become present through absence. It’s not just about the loss in your family history, but also that of disappearances, missing voices and the erased memory of historical narratives. What other specters have become present during your research for this project?
Chantal Peñalosa Fong (CPF): In China, there’s a type of literature known as zhiguai xiaoshuo, which we could translate as “records of anomalies,” or “tales of the strange” which I’ve been reflecting on for years. These are compilations of ghost stories and those who dedicated themselves to compiling them called themselves “historians of unofficial histories.” This type of historian disquiets me. Some academics have called this type of narrative “bad history”, as there’s no way to prove if these scenes happened or not; besides, they were originally oral tales someone heard and wrote down. But there’s another idea that considers these “records of anomalies” to be one of the origins of fiction in China.
While reading and reflecting on these compilations, I felt a connection between this literary genre and the way in which we discuss Chinese immigration to Mexico. In public archives, and even in my own family history, the journey to Mexico also appears as a tale of the strange, because that’s how Chinese people were treated when they came here. When I reviewed the documents drafted by nationalist committees during the period of the anti-Chinese campaigns, I realized that the adjectives used to refer to Asians belong more to tales about nonhuman beings: by crossing the Pacific, the Chinese became others, the abominable, the monstrous, disease incarnate, the apocalypse. The history of Chinese immigration to Mexico is a history that has been banished to the phantasmal. I have felt this all my life, even in my very body, in my family, in this immigrant community to which I belong and yet from which I fade. Ghost stories are never just ghost stories. The strange: are not literally records, but Sino-memories.
JGS: The experience of inhabiting the border has been a central theme in your practice. Despite the fact that this project arose from your research into Chinese immigration in the context of the western border between Mexico and the United States, perhaps it marks a turn in your production in which the experience of the border appears in an expanded dimension of ambiguity, not just in terms of territorial limits, but encompassing other interstices and liminalities as well. How would you situate the video Fong in relation to these prior explorations of the becoming of the border?
CPF: I work with images, ideas or situations that intrigue me, that have something enigmatic about them. I’m interested in multiple temporalities, it could be something that already happened and yet it has left behind a wake to our day. My work often involves autobiographical experiences, sometimes on the border or somewhere else; it’s a recurring procedure to approach events that I consider important for reading the present. Sometimes, my work doesn’t involve a resolution, but instead complicates any understanding of my autobiography. This happened with the video Fong.
Whenever I make a piece, I create a type of fiction in which the spaces and cities where I live or work are transformed into my art studio, somewhere I can experiment with fiction, history and my life. Each clue I find can therefore be integrated as new material. That’s why I’m interested in working with different media and formats.
This started early on, with the first pieces I made, in which I reimagined my workplace at the time—a restaurant along the border—as my first art studio. I used my work shift and the resources I had on hand to make my pieces. There’s something in these explorations that shaped my personal language and strategies for addressing certain things. In the case of Fong, I spent a week walking down the same streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown for hours and hours, taking notes, observing what was going on around me, people’s activities, tourists entering stores…a type of loop in which I thought through this other story that took me to this place.
JGS: The video makes the spectator participate in an internal dialog. Its images expand the questions raised by the narration. The way the piece combines different registers and genres of writing is also interesting, moving from the short story, the epistolary and historical speculation to the description of a personal scene with your grandmother. How did your search for family records consolidate this way of combining text and image? Did the image dictate some of the written approaches, or did the writing make you seek out a gaze or focus?
CPF: There have always been ghost stories being told in my family. Visiting my grandmother and my mother’s family meant that, at some point, while we drank coffee, someone would bring up some strange occurrence or retell a story that, no matter how many times we heard it, was always just as astonishing as it was the first time. There was always a halo of mystery about the past in my family: we both did and didn’t discuss these women and men, their arrival, our family’s life in China, the journey to Mexico, life since then. And this mystery and this deflection of memory became my only way of understanding a certain part of our autobiography. They didn’t tell me children’s stories, they told me extraordinary stories about the house next door, about the night, about pirates arriving in the midst of the Ensenada fog, women who appeared in La Rumorosa and voices calling out to the people living in the rancherias of the north. This phantasmal realism has been present in much of my work from past years, and in my way of telling stories. It’s a double phantasmal realism: that of my family and that of the border. It’s a way of listening and telling that I learned, understanding that what we see probably has a second or third reading. Seeing that beyond in things.
After my childhood, I understood that these stories substitute others that couldn’t be told. For a long time, there was a silence about our family’s Chinese origins, or it was only discussed in a low voice. The letter that appears in the video is, in the end, a story of trauma that marked many generations of women on my mother’s side. And it’s also a history that’s repeated in other families of Chinese immigrants that experienced similar things. In this sense, we’re talking about a series of racist and nationalist events that ended up changing our fates and configuring silences, personalities…life itself.
JGS: In terms of narrative and artistic research, what implications have you found for the power of fiction in your practice? How did it appear while exploring your family history?
CPF: Both historical archives and family histories have gaps. In this project, like others I’ve created in the past, a question arose: What do we do with archives, with these images that inhabit me or that I inhabit? In this case, the process involved intertwining both narrative elements in order to reveal absences, that which has been silenced. And doing this made me once again see China in my city, Tecate, and all along the border and the rest of the whole country—in all of America, really. It’s perhaps in those interstices where there’s a re-creation that takes elements from different places: yes, from the archives, but also from non-archived memories—to put it one way—and even our imaginations in order to unveil this history and transform it. I’m not interested in processes in the artistic field, in which showing the archive as the archive is the result. I feel that lacks language.
Fiction is part of everything, principally on the autobiographical plane. Sometimes I feel that I’d be unable to understand my own life without fiction, or my family and all those cities that have crossed my path. In this case, it’s very clear that this was a counterresponse, a delayed response, in which not only was this period of Mexican history concealed, but also its characters. In the case of my family history, the women who stayed behind decided to modify their Asian last name for a Western one in order to avoid harassment. That’s why I use the Fong in my name as a recuperation and revindication of something my maternal legacy should have kept hidden. Fiction allows for a reappropriation of history, but it’s a reappropriation that never ends: more images appear each day, even in my dreams. And I believe that my pieces arise from this interminable reappropriation.
