reflections on lima from ur fav (or second or third or fourth-fav) chinese canadian on this trip

oh yea here's my spotify please stream

I have spent the past two days advertising my spotify to everyone since I recently released a track I’ve been working on for a while. I am planning on releasing another track sometime during this trip so I will update you guys on presaves etc.

Though in my 19 years of individual memory, political uncertainty does not form an avenue of my concern, the same cannot be said about the shape of its impact in my collective conciousness. The guide in the The Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion (LUM) tells four decades of history and context, and it is recent, whatever that means. Memory is fragile and subjective, time is when you remember, and history if what you remember, it is always subjective. I’ve learned over the years not to search for neutrality anymore, for the analysis of overlapping shades of colour is far more vibrant and telling than the attempt to erase it and study the lineart beneath it. In my memory, my sense of time, my awareness of history, my grandmother distills me to distrust all who surround me, my teachers, my friends, my partners, stangers, for she walks through the period of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where those the closest to you could report you to the government and subject you to public abuse, torture, and humilation. My father discourages me from protests and rejects my critiques of capitalism, hearing the sound of tanks murder an unknown number of student during the Tianmen Square protests, students older than him by only a few years, and witnessing the precarious economic situation of his home country. This how fifty years of political uncertainty in my motherland shapes me, and this is how I can process what it means for Peru’s armed conflict, insurrency, or terroism, to be just as recent.

Most of our class knows little about Peruvian history and contexts when we embark on our first official day of class and are abruptly exposed to graphic descriptions and images of the political situation. Our guide’s words now form the basis of my understanding, she paints colours onto the canvas of my knowledge, and I can no longer make sense of them through the aforementioned analogy of the framework fo lineart, of a textbook decription of events, but rather interpret her persepctive through my own subjective experiences. When she mentions that the Shining Path, whether you call it a guerilla group, a terrorist organization, a counterrevolutionary movement, takes on Marxist-Lenninist-Maoist influences, I suppose my train of thought wanders to the fears and attempts of my motherland to secure itself and to provide for its people. I think about how likely it is that like the Cultural Revolution itself, the Shining Path must have been some part of a reaction to the desolation and loss rendered by colonialism and the loss of idenity that it brought on. And I think about how our guide’s charged words are so reminiscent of my father’s, tired and reactionary to the fear that has been all-so-present.

Last semester, I took a power and oppression course in which I for the first time, I started reading into how the colonization of China has effected me, and I started relection on how the binary of colonizer-colonized is hardly discriptive of my positionality as someone who both contributes to the continued disposession of Indigenous peoples but is also a child of refugees who struggles to maintain her native tongue. Up until that point, I had been mostly studying Yukon Indigenous peoples for that was the land I grew up on and I wanted to ground my studies in something, but it felt removed in a white saviour sort of way, so when I sought to study avenues of solidarity and collaboration of immigrant-settlers-refugees, everything started to connect together, for finally my studies were grounded both to the land of my home and the land of my orgin. So when here in Peru, when I also search for something to ground me, I’m surprised at how quickly I find it through the shared influences of revolutionary thought and extremist political ideologies.

Here are a short list of other thoughts that I’ve shared with others but do not feel like writing extensive sad existential essays about.

• the characterisation of the woman through the existence of vulva in the Larco marks the woman as its own gender, unlike the marking of the woman as a secondary gender in relation to the man through its lack of penis

• also in the Larco the loss of knowledge about the secretive counting system seems like a pretty epic fuck-you to the Spanish and the colonial ego as all-knowing, even if it is a tragic loss of culture. I wonder if there is just as much power as destroying knowledge as there is keeping it.

• I’ve watched a lot of tiktoks about French people rudely swtiching to English when someone speaks even with the slightest accent. It’s really nice to see that even servers who speak English are very patient with my terrible Spanish.

Again, please listen to my music!

Next week then <3

Annie