"Legacy," in collaboration with poet Fiona Tinwei Lam and based on her poem, creates a memory space using symbolic objects, evocative tableaux, and a variety of digital effects to concretize the wisdom that comes with temporal and emotional distance, creating a fanciful, wry, and occasionally bittersweet postmortem of a relationship that founders on the rocks of cross cultural differences.

Biography of Fiona Tinwei Lam

Fiona Tinwei Lam is a writer, editor, and educator from Vancouver, Canada. She has authored three poetry collections: Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize), Enter the Chrysanthemum, and Odes & Laments. as well as a children’s book. Her poetry and prose appear in over 40 anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry (2010 and 2020 editions). She has co-edited two anthologies of nonfiction and edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poetry about Facing Cancer. Her award-winning video poems have been screened at festivals locally and internationally. www.fionalam.net


Text of the poem:

Legacy

Each summer, your mother’s hands
transformed heaped bowls of ripe fruit
into glistening fillings.
Her deft persuasion of dough into pastry
through the white silted air
Rhubarb, blueberry, peach, apple --
desserts for a year’s worth of holidays.


I tried to make pie
the way I tried to be a wife:
four pyrex pie plates, a battle
to bind flour, fat and water
into elusive tenderness.

You gave me a yearning
for homemade pie
that lingered longer than love,
then left with the pie plates

and what you learnt --
congee breakfasts,
the intricate textures of dim sum,
how to eat shark's fin
with a spoonful of vinegar,
never to forgo the good luck
of red bean soup, and always
to rest your chopsticks
parallel across the bowl
at a meal's end.

From Fiona Tinwei Lam, Intimate Distances (Nightwood Editions, Canada, 2002) Copyright © Fiona Tinwei Lam 2002