Brief for Open Call on Home: There are physical and metaphorical places that give meaning to the word ‘home’. What does home mean to you? How does it inspire or manifest itself in your artistic practice? How has your idea of home and your identity been challenged, misconstrued, and/or transformed over time?
Camels
A baby cried out and crawled out of the pool of the dragon’s fallen blood, its body oily with dirt and blood in the hot sun, it’s curled hair clinging to its scalp. The lion that had slashed the dragon’s belly with its sharp claws ran away in terror at the sight. From a distance a camel appeared, dragging its heavy, tired feet slowly towards the baby, which, for lack of water and hunger, licked the blood from its body before carrying it in its arms deep into the desert.
In a contemporary dance class on improvisation and choreography, the teacher asked us to interpret our dance journey using the imagery of three transformations in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I felt uneasy with the initiative and my head was empty.
I struggled to recall the birth of the self, culture, and family while slowly closing my eyes. With the early morning chanting of the mosque, Allāhhhh…… I rolled over and continued to lounge in bed, thinking about the story I read yesterday about the Sahara, while my eyes saw the picture of the handsome young Dalai Lama posed in the distance. My mother is a Tibetan Buddhist, but it seems that she believes in a little bit of everything, as long as the story brings her family good luck. Sometimes I even wonder if maybe that’s a social culture for her so that she and her friends can talk about it. A few minutes later, reluctantly, I got up from bed, put on my school uniform and rushed to school.
By this time, the classroom was alive with spiritual Western music and everyone was scattered around, dancing and revelling in it. The skylight split the sunlight into beige parallelograms and projected onto the floor. I had not long started learning to dance and did not have many skills to fill the void in the physical space under mental disorientation, and my body was a little tight. I slowly moved my arms and switched the weight of my feet from side to side, trying to relax. I pondered the idea of finding inspiration from familiar and jaded memories, searching for a camel-like spirit of hard work and perseverance. But I had been away from my homeland for so long that I couldn’t recall anything, and the only familiar way of moving my body seemed to be the standard national radio exercises for primary and secondary school students, which I did every morning in school.
One day, as I was coming down the stairs after school, I heard someone pointing at me from afar and discussing homosexuality, and I knew that the boy I liked must have said something to the others. The blood rushed through my neck and into my brain, and I fell down the stairs in a black flash. Like a long-whipped camel, I plopped down in the middle of the crowd and emerged as who I was.
To the long, melodious music of the classroom, I involuntarily did my radio exercises, as I had done in primary school, as I had done in junior high, as I had done in high school.
In fact, there were no camels in my city, It is located at the crossroads of Tibetan, Xinjiang and Mongolian cultures, where many religions and cultures are present, but nothing really represents it. Poverty and aridity that people in other places tried to cement me in an orientalist fantasy of a desert sunset， When I went to school in a southwestern coastal city, people used to make jokes about whether I was going to ride a camel to school and how I was going to get a camel licence. I would always add to the jokes, then everyone would ask with wide eyes, “Really? And we’d all end up laughing and giggling. Sometimes I wish I could live in a place like that, where I could ride a camel to school and dance around a campfire at night. But the fact is that the plains where I was born and raised, which have only been used for transportation since ancient times, are mostly desolate except for the endless Gobi desert and a few weeds.
The graceful radio exercises came to an end with that fall. I’ve forgotten how I got up off the ground and walked home. Except that for years afterwards, I lived in a state of anxiety, like a fugitive on a charge.
The music started a second time and I hurriedly mingled with the crowd of the bobbing lions at a hurried pace, and my brain fragmented with memories. It was like a hasty decision to scatter and flee when I realised that the lie I was pretending to be was being unravelled.
I spent my years at university a lot of time dancing in bars, flirting with all the sexy men under the warm, sticky neon lights, and volunteering with the local AIDS society. I tried to roar like a lion, ambitiously demonstrating my determination to live my own life. But in reality, my life was a mess, I couldn’t always remember the sequence of events, time was always spent in a certain restlessness and the queer “role and life” was becoming a burden. the summer of 2019 was hot and humid, and meanwhile, the university was drawing to a close.
One day I went dancing in a bar with my friends, the theme was a prostitute party so we were dressed in women’s clothes and wearing heavy make-up. However, the surprise arrival of my mother caught me off guard and I had to cancel my original plans and then clean my room thoroughly. In an almost frenzied and trembling state of mind, I slowly walked onto the stage with the black curtains hanging, the spotlights making me almost blind. No one was in the audience, and I cleared my throat and told my mother about myself.
I looked at my mother,
She looked at me coldly as well,
Then she slammed the door and left,
A few hours later,
She returned to my place,
Doing her chores with all her might,
Making a tinkling sound,
Every now and then a brief thought or two,
I sank down on the side of the bed away from her,
With my back to her,
Not saying a word,
The bed was soaked with sweat and tears.
All the performative moments ignite a fierce wave before sinking to the bottom of the lake and falling into a deep sleep. As the lesson draws to a close, I stand frozen in the sunset glow of the classroom, everything returning to a pristine calm. I look back at the mirror in the distance and I find myself a camel, its face full of sun-baked calm and weariness, slowly blinking its eyes with long lashes, its mouth seemingly regurgitating the grass it has eaten.
The music is not over yet, everyone is still expressing themselves with enthusiasm, like butterflies, waves and babies.
What are some racial misconceptions / ignorant remarks people have made at you, about your culture or your identity?
Gansu is located in northwest China and is a fusion of Muslim, Tibetan and Mongolian communities. Most people outside of China have no idea about Gansu and most of the discrimination and prejudice is internal to China. Do you ride camels? Do you have sheep at home? Do you often fail to eat rice?
There is a prejudice against northerners: there is a general perception that northerners are macho, rude…
Broken Englizh 