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“Bai-Bai”
A Conversation with Our Ancestors
2023, digital rendering and animation
A reimagined ancestor-praying ritual, where the living share a meal with the dead.
On festivals like Lunar New Year’s Eve and Qingming, families invite ancestors home for lunch. We pray as ancestors eat. Once they return to the other world, their food becomes ours.
Not far away from each apparatus, I encountered markers. Markers of our timeline, of the spaces we come and go from. Where we exist.
I was at school. Class, recess, class, recess, class, recess. [make mark]
At the train station. Leaving and arriving at the precise second, the start of standardized measured time. [make mark]
In the park. Swinging, sliding, screaming in the little wanders we fabricated for temporary release. [make mark]
At the hospital. Mechanical beeps overlapping nervous breaths, overlapping heartbeats. [make mark]
At the bank. Lines spiking, digits collapsing. Ticking, slipping away. [make mark]
At the factory. Mass-produced, same size, same speed, rolling out from the assembly line. [make mark]
At the cemetery. Circles, pits, points, attempted alignment but always uneven. Covered up in layers, wavering at different speeds. [make mark]
Long walk, I thought. The field of sand seemed endless to me. Time is endless. Timeless. Many times I’ve heard of the word timeless. What does it mean?
Walking in the sand was not easy, I realized. Days seemed to go on forever. I seemed to be walking forever. How long would it take for me to get used to it, to be immune to sensations? I could not decide if the question was a hope or a fear.
I lifted my foot and shook off as much sand as I could. A vain attempt. Not to blame the sand. Might just be myself sweating a bit too much. Sweating, over what?
Perhaps an exhaustion. I wanted to take a break somewhere. Where would it be possible?
My walk was then aimless, careless.
And that was when I encountered the Grey Blocks.
And that is when you encounter the Grey Blocks.
Grey, narrow, irregularly-shaped. As if squeezed and stretched by unpredictable forces.
One by one you enter them.
Grey Block #1, discovered near the atomic clock.
To swim fast is an intuitive pressure - from what? Bump, bump. You stroke against the water. How many seconds have passed, how many milliseconds, is what the water keeps no record of. The water has no finish line. No finish, no line. Only endless blue and white waves, and you.
The lane dividers, plastic, yellow. Dissolved before you reach. Into a duck, rubber, yellow. What is your rubber duck doing here? This is not a bathtub. Is it? Can’t tell anymore. Confirmation is unnecessary. The water is a swirl of facts. Facts that it contains but does not appraise: your pulse, your favorite shampoo, your resilience ever since a kid. Yet the water is reassuring in its own way. Stand up. Sand in your toe gaps, on the floor of the pool. Lie flat, float, drift, bathe, in a multiplicity of facts. Absorbed. You flow in water, with it, within it, without worrying about entrance or exit.
Rubber duck or lane divider. And lane divider. Both facts. All facts.
Grey Block #2, discovered near the clock tower.
It is your highschool. (bell) Valentine’s Day, obviously. The cookie she bakes. Heart-shaped. She saves the last one for you. Only one? You joke. Am I not your best friend?
Clack, clack. Sand in your teeth. Be glad you only get one because OMG, it tastes so bad.
Leave it when no one is watching. Not in the trash, but in the unclaimed locker. You open that locker and get hit by hundreds of objects collapsing. You bend down. Hundreds of … cookies, each with one bite taken.
Who left them there, and why, are some of the many questions that arise in your head all at once, that rise and fall, and linger. Answers you feel you know. A little scary.
You touch all the cookies. All so real. Hits you hard, an answer that even yourself can’t believe. All hard, all coated in sand. How to take a bite without friction, without breaking? Courtesy, dos and don’ts. Precarious interactions. No need to tiptoe here, she always tells you. Save it for elsewhere. The countless elsewheres. Clack clack. Not cruel, not careful. Here your footsteps are already learned, so are your teeth bite, your sweaty palms after class presentations, your fabricated smile to hostile questions. Learned as facts. Secured.
Some facts, hundreds of parallel facts, are, in fact, just one. An unfragile constant, in a myriad of undulating variables. You pick up one of the hundreds of bitten cookies. You put it in your bag, and move on.
Grey Block #3, discovered near the time zones.
The plane. The flight.
Flight. To catch a flight. To miss a flight. To board a fight. To be denied onto a flight. Flight or fight.
Like many, you have chosen the former. In the air now, belonging nowhere, insusceptible to interrogation. Where to and where from are irrelevant questions. You plug in your earphones, eyes closed.
Until your earphones break. Silence is intrusive. Broadcasts. At the border, people’s movement fractures: doubted, detained, dismissed. Could be you. Is you. Is you and is not you.
To fly. To fly high. To fly over. To fly under the radar. When pigs fly. Pigs might fly. Bacon might fly.
Bacon pasta, the flight attendant hands you a lunch box. Open the box. Pasta and cashew for lunch, or for earphones. Two in one. Earphones in a form you’ve never had but somehow remember.
In one of the countless parallel timelines, to fly is more than to opt out. Not in the timelines where your earphones sustain you on the flight, made of either plastic or pasta and cashew. In most timelines, flight is always temporary; in most timelines, then, are you temporarily excused from broadcasts? Cashews already plugged in your ears. Listen only to your bowel movement, your music on repeat, and – itchy – inevitably, sand in your ears now.
Grey Block #3, discovered near the time zones.
The plane. The flight.
Flight. To catch a flight. To miss a flight. To board a fight. To be denied onto a flight. Flight or fight.
Like many, you have chosen the former. In the air now, belonging nowhere, insusceptible to interrogation. Where to and where from are irrelevant questions. You plug in your earphones, eyes closed.
Until your earphones break. Silence is intrusive. Broadcasts. At the border, people’s movement fractures: doubted, detained, dismissed. Could be you. Is you. Is you and is not you.
To fly. To fly high. To fly over. To fly under the radar. When pigs fly. Pigs might fly. Bacon might fly.
Bacon pasta, the flight attendant hands you a lunch box. Open the box. Pasta and cashew for lunch, or for earphones. Two in one. Earphones in a form you’ve never had but somehow remember.
In one of the countless parallel timelines, to fly is more than to opt out. Not in the timelines where your earphones sustain you on the flight, made of either plastic or pasta and cashew. In most timelines, flight is always temporary; in most timelines, then, are you temporarily excused from broadcasts? Cashews already plugged in your ears. Listen only to your bowel movement, your music on repeat, and – itchy – inevitably, sand in your ears now.
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