(re)cycle/如鲠在喉

huiyin zhou (they/she)

This photo series, (re)cycle/如鲠在喉, shows the process of diasporic Chinese feminists/international students sending much needed medicine back to our families in China.

This series plays with multiple meanings of “recycling”: literally, the emptied packages of medicine piled up in the recycling bin in my college dorm room; some of the medicine was “recycled” from the two times I contracted covid in the US. This (re)cycling is also a material embodiment of the multiple cycles of violence we have witnessed in the past three years. The blurred or loss of focus is a visual representation of the sticky feeling of being stuck between the intimacy of care and the impossibility of being “there”: the struggle to articulate the absurdity of shattered hopes, like a fish bone stuck in your throat –

During winter break, after the Chinese government took a drastic, sudden turn away from “zero-Covid” – from one extreme to another but both were rooted in irresponsibility and disregard for our lives – some of my friends were able to go back to China to stay with their families. None of our families were able to escape from infection; many of them did not have access to basic medicine, such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen. My friends offered to bring back some medicine; so, I used ziploc bags to redistribute medicine to different parts of my family until three a.m. one night, writing down dosage and precautions in Chinese.

While this photo series emerged from a place of helplessness after several of my friends, (including myself) suffered from family deaths, it still gestures towards hope. The same feminist care networks we are cocreating in the US have carried that care across oceans and borders.

徽音 2023/2/4