Table Sessions: Mel Hsu

Great performances. Great food. Great conversation. And you.

Letters to the Moon, a soundbath in honor of those who made me

Mel Hsu invites you to be still, close your eyes, take slower breaths and let sound wash over you. Mel’s Table Session, Letters to the Moon, is an evening of sound collages featuring ethereal cello, haunting vocals, projected images, fragments of familial interviews and stories told across splintered languages. The evening is performed by Mel Hsu, in collaboration with visual artist Bz Zhang, and directed by Cat Ramirez. The event is co-presented with Asian Arts Initiative.

While there will be chairs available for everyone, attendees are welcome to bring comfortable mats, pillows, or blankets if the attendee would prefer to experience the performance lying down or reclining.

A note from Mel Hsu

The island of Taiwan has been passed between the hands of different global powers for centuries. While several generations of my family all grew up on the same land, the multiple shifts between Chinese, Dutch and Japanese governments caused the land and the lives upon it to be completely re-coded with new languages, cultural expectations and history class curriculums every few decades.

Multiple generations of Taiwanese and Indigenous people were forced to speak a new language with the entrance of a new government. Depending on who was in power, native tongues were relegated to being spoken only at home and forbidden to be spoken in public.

A decade ago, I embarked on a journey of exploring the impact of linguistic colonization within four generations of my family. My great-grandparents’ first words were in Taiwanese. My grandmother writes her poetry in Japanese, my parents dream in Mandarin. My sister and I are schooled in English grammar.

For one year, I conducted interviews with my grandmothers, my parents, and my sister. My original hypothesis was a condemnation of the ways in which colonization causes intergenerational rupture. I was grieving and angry. I wanted to be able to read my grandmother’s poetry - I felt that war, foreign occupation and white supremacy had stripped me of that sacred privilege.

Through the interview process, what was illuminated for me was the underground ecosystem of linguistic myselia that my family created for ourselves when we were stripped of words. What I found was resistance - we reached for one another despite having different vocabularies. We created our own languages, stronger languages, languages of family that no government could take away from us. The sharing of food, of music, of touch, of play, of grief, of migration, of dreams.

What I found was that my grandmother grew into Mandarin alongside my mother, my mother grows into English alongside me. We create our own familial vocabularies alongside each other. Our mothers grow to find us in our mother tongues.

Keeping Voices was the collection of a summer’s work, a year’s interviews, two years of focused thought, several more years’ grief of not knowing my family’s history, a lifetime of Chinese sounds hidden in my mouth.

Ten years later, when Intercultural Journeys reached out to me, I felt moved to revisit this piece. To listen back to the interviews for the first time. To conduct new ones. To breathe life back into the soundwaves that transformed me. To cradle myself in the voice of my paternal grandmother, who has since passed away. To remember the woman who was the only person in my life who called me by my Chinese name. To honor the people who dreamt across oceans and dared to build new homes.

Letters to the Moon is a tender revisiting. A re-writing of memory in companionship with visual artist Bz Zhang, my childhood best friend and co-conspirator in imagination. To intertwine my past and present communities by inviting in the brilliant direction of Cat Ramirez.

Thank you for being here with me. For bearing witness. For honoring those who built me.

To learn more about Mel and the artists, visit: https://www.interculturaljourneys.org/table-sessions-mel-hsu

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What is a Table Session?

It's a gathering. A place of exchange. A time to be still and listen or get up and dance. To eat delicious food. To connect with other people about art, food, and life. Intercultural Journeys is bringing artists and audiences around the table, sharing a special moment with friends and strangers across the city and working to rekindle our connections to one another.

Three curators, Solomon Temple (October 2022), Mel Hsu (January 2023), and Ximena Violante (April 2023) lead the sessions. Each with their own story, each with their own musical language to share, and each with a different cuisine to explore and enjoy. Join us around the table all throughout the season.

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Know Before The Show

Accessibility

The performance event will take place indoors in Asian Arts Initiative’s Black Box Theater. AAI’s entrance is ADA accessible by ramp or 2 short steps to the front door of the building. The gallery and theater entrance is through a door on the left, just inside of the main entrance. There is level flooring through the first floor of the building. Restrooms are accessible and all-gender.

Covid Policy

For this indoor IJ event, we require audiences to wear a mask throughout the duration of the performance and talkback segments of the evening. 

Audience members may choose to have dinner after the performance in the theater or take dinner to go, according to personal preferences. 

If dining in, we encourage mask wearing when not actively eating or drinking.

IJ is committed to holding our community in care, and asks you to hold the community in care as well; we encourage testing before attendance in the event of known exposure. We also ask audiences to stay home if they test positive for COVID or are experiencing any illness, and we have a full-refund policy in the case of illness. 

We continue to follow City of Philadelphia and CDC guidelines, and thus this policy may change. If you have any questions about the policy, please reach out to [email protected] or call us at 267-753-0757.

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Lead support for The Table Sessions is provided by the William Penn Foundation. The Table Sessions: Mel Hsu is co-presented by Asian Arts Initiative. Asian Arts Initiative is a community-based arts center in Philadelphia that engages artists and everyday people to create art that explores the diverse experiences of Asian Americans, addresses our social context, and imagines and effects positive community change. Learn more about AAI’s past and current programming and exhibitions at www.asianartsinitiative.com.

Host or Publisher Intercultural Journeys