Field of Water is an 80-page full-length poetry collection I wrote for my senior honors thesis, centered on water and waterways as containers of cultural memory, myth, and environmental history. I explore water as a marker of invisible borders and space and envision the body as a waterway.
For my project, I conducted ethnographic research and interviews along 8 locations spanning 1,000 miles of the Yangtze River (長江) basin in China, where my ancestors lived for generations. The core of my project was a series of poems I wrote composed entirely of language from oral histories of 長江, organized by the banned Chinese environmentalist and journalist Dai Qing and published with translations by Probe International. These testimonies reflect the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in 1994, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, which submerged hundreds of villages and displaced millions of people living in riverside towns and villages.
ORAL HISTORY POEM SELECTION: