Mama’s Story
Mama’s Story is a book for my niece, Pip, a family history and family tree, a collection of stories and memories that drift in and out of the personal and the collective, the factual and the mythical, the historical and the magical, the real and the imaginary.
It is a work in progress project, currently in the form of small self-published book based on interviews with my mother about her family history and family photos. It also contains other elements for installation such as a set of photographs, illustrations and texts on mounted scrolls, ancestor tables, audio files of a lullaby sung by my mother, and other small objects and a video film screen on projection.
Mama’s story traces 6 generations of women, and includes a migration from the Chinese mainland to Malaya, under British occupation and the turmoil of the second world war and the post war British occupation.
The story describes how two women, the maternal and paternal grandmothers, of a family with Hakka origin, left China to build a life abroad. The story starts with Yap Zhu, our paternal grandmother.
The Hakka people are a subgroup of the Han people in China, and have many subsequent groups themselves as they are known as a Nomadic people who have made their world their home.
