Peeling an Onion

by Hope Zhou

It was like peeling an onion. When one collapsed into memory, she was lost, but perhaps ‘collapse’ was not the right word. What I mean is the experience of consciousness being immersed in past scenes: what happened before you threw back to the scene again and again. Can memory be measured? What would be its units?

When Charles Richet and A. M. Bloch contemplated the meaning of measuring reaction time, they confronted the legitimacy of graphic traces: “If everyone can produce these traces, not everyone is capable of interpreting them.”^[1] Parallelly, if flashbacks are reproducible traces at all times, how are they made comprehensible? It seems that, to measure memory means to master the language that gives memory its shape. And this is not simply about re-enacting a concrete scene in one’s head; rather, it is as if to smell, the sensation of which should be understood as a process, not pertaining to objects. If the object-based talks about sensory perceptions reduce the qualities of our perceptions to external objects, the process view takes the role of the measurement of the sniffing behaviour into consideration and captures the discovered inseparability between the processes that generate an expression of a sensory modality and those that generate a change in these modalities.^[2] That is to say, in case memory can provide access to reality, it may not necessitate a reference to external objects or non-fictional events from which our sense of reality is derived; instead, it may result from the organism’s capacity to respond to stimuli in the environment.

What is an event then? What is a character? And what role does a narrative play? It was like peeling an onion, if one ever dived into that investigation of memory. Perhaps a pseudo haiku tells all:

detour

devour

our.

 

 

transcription:

1. detour

In this part, I videotaped Lola throwing an onion in parabola at various locations from Rice campus to my neighbourhood, to create montages of an onion entering the screen from the left, leaving the screen to the right, flying across time and space until it lands right in front of the doorway of my studio. I edited the montages to pace them with a theatrical mood to go along with the music, which is an excerpt from Xitai, which could be literally translated as the stage; it is composed by Chinese composer Zhao Jiping. Curiously, the onion landed in the sun becomes a crashed tomato at night. What’s the magic of nightfall?

2. devour

For this part, I asked my friends, parents and grandparents to videotape themselves cutting an onion for me respectively. I start with 30s of close up of my dear friend Erin cutting an onion at her apartment in New York City and then juxtapose it with my grandma cutting an onion at her home in Jiaxing, China. You can hear my grandma speaking in wuyue dialect saying she’s gonna cook something with this onion for dinner. And then the half split screen splits into four and later sixteen, showing various hands cutting onions on various cutting boards at various locations. I’m sure that one weird background music comes from my father’s video, since he likes to listen to that kind of music during pre-cooking time. So why is this part named “devour”? The onions being dissected will be eaten for sure. What else might be devoured, or who else, by what, by whom?

3. our

In this part, Lola and I, in our mother tongue, talked about how we, each as the only child of a Chinese family, make sense of our family bringing up and more specifically how the characters of our parents shape our own characters. We came up with the metaphor of a squash ball hitting the wall, the reaction to which turns out to be how the wall asserts its impact on the ball, to capture the parents – children dynamism. And Lola believes that her character somehow consists of her reactions to her parents, while for me, the whole bumping back and forth is not so much a chill game as some visceral struggle, it was almost as if I had to beat my head against the wall.

During the conversation, when I asked Lola to give an example to illustrate her description of her mother’s character, she could not think of one immediately; instead she resorted to the line of reasoning that it is not just one thing but lots of things that reveal her mother’s character. Is her impression and perception of who her mom is accurate then? Perhaps. I cannot be the judge. As for me, in the past, I’ve seen more things about both me and my parents as I recalled more layers of things. The narrative is not exactly stable, in a way, just like the ever-changing academic discipline of history. And we all know the open secret, the historical narrative serves the present, especially, one’s present sense of self.

For the visual, I videotaped Lola and I sitting down on the floor facing each other in front of a white wall and reaching out one arm towards each other. She used her right hand to pick up prepared eggshells in small broken pieces and press them intimately against the skin of her left forearm; and I used my left hand to pick up onion slices and use them to cover the skin of my right forearm. I framed the scene to reveal only our forearms and hands, mine slightly above hers, for balance and simplicity in terms of aesthetics. After we covered our single forearms, we started to exchange our covering, until the two forearms are similarly covered with both broken eggshells and onion slices.

 

NOTES

^[1] Canales, Jimena. “The Measure of All Thoughts” in A Tenth of a Second: a History. University of Chicago Press, 2011, p 71.

^[2] Barwich, Ann-Sophie. “A Sense So Rare: Measuring Olfactory Experiences and Making a Case for a Process Perspective on Sensory Perception.” Biological Theory, vol. 9, no. 3, 2014, pp. 264–266.