AHA Scientific Sessions

On September 22nd my husband and I participated in the Brooklyn Heart Walk for AHA. The route took us past the site of our first date, our New York wedding picnic, and along the new waterfront! I am currently working on an essay about walking. 

On November 8th I will attend the AHA Scientific Sessions conference as a Heart Valve Ambassador. From the website, "Programming is designed to improve patient care by communicating the most timely and significant advances in basic, clinical, translational and population health research, spanning the full spectrum of cardiovascular disease from a variety of perspectives, from prevention, through diagnosis and through treatment." I look forward to gaining some insight into my own condition, and to finding better questions to ask! 

The Literary Review

Thank you to the editors at The Literary Review for reblogging my generative translation "From the Yellow Crane Tower" last week! This translation originally appeared in Issue 21 of Drunken Boat earlier this year! 

A Fine Example

During my writing fellowship at NYU Shanghai, I produced a manuscript of poems that I printed with laser-etched woodblock plates. I was influenced by the region's publishing practices during the Song Dynasty when publishers treated text like drawing. This enabled them to hire anyone, even an illiterate person, to copy text and images onto woodblock plates, and print and bind pages for book production. I was intrigued by this idea and cast myself, a Chinese-American Publisher in China, as both writer and bookmaker, which enabled me to move through a world in which I was both literate and illiterate. 

In 2013, I printed ~100 test copies of a poem. I presently have no more test copies, but to my unexpected delight one has recently been made available on Derringer Books! I'm flattered by the gesture of the unknown lender of the work to the bookshop, and by Derringer who calls the print "A Fine Example". Thank you!  

The American Heart Association

"bouquet of hearts" commission for The Kimberly-Klark Gallery, 2015

I'm thrilled and honored to announce that I will be an ambassador for The American Heart Association this year! I will facilitate discussions about heart disease in online forums and within my local community here in New York. Please reach out if you have a story about your heart to share. 

Summer in Ithaca

Gao Ling Gong Shan Dongba Paper Village, Yunnan, 2014

This summer I will attend the Image Text Workshop and Symposium at Ithaca College. I have been asked to bring in-progress or found material to develop in a collaborative environment, and mining my research archives I found several sheets of Dongba Paper that I purchased from a Naxi papermaker in Tengchong, in the Yunnan Province last June. 

Dongba paper was traditionally produced by the Naxi minority in western Yunnan. In recent years the patent recipe for the paper, which did not belong to any individual, was sold to a Han Chinese man. The paper is now sold as a local souvenir in "Ancient Towns" within cities like Tengchong and Lijiang, along with a fictionalized history of the Naxi minority group. In Tengchong, the Naxi people collaborated with TAO Architects to construct a paper museum. Made of paper, the structure resembles more of a pavilion than a permanent monument, but it houses the rich history of the Naxi group, and their papermaking practice.