Mosaic Project Google Hangout
Updated: Apr 6, 2020
The Mosaic Project is a (now online) space for Asian Americans and/or those descended from Asian ancestry in and around Richmond to share stories.
On Wednesday, March 18, Theresa piloted our first Google Hangouts drop-in writing workshop for the Mosaic Project. Participants were able to reflect, write, and share, in response to one of these prompts:
Write a poem using this fill-in-the-blank formula: "I used to, ______, now I _______."
Write a love letter to yourself, a family member, or friend.
Themed prompts from "The Sun" magazine: my country, holidays, and highs and lows
Here are two of our participant's responses. Enjoy!
Kim Flournoy DiJoseph's response to theme prompt: “My Country”
"Motherland"
My country is the east end of a southern city and far east of a continent. It is the southeast of North Carolina and the southeast of China. My country is country-fried and stir-fried. It is tea and rice cooked in different ways. It is tea and rice cooked with different rituals.
It is sweet tea and oolong-chrysanthemum tea. It is iced in styrofoam take-out cups and hot in handle-less clay. It is sucked with a straw and sipped with bare lips. It is steeped by the sun and steeped with heads bowed.
It is rice that somehow doesn’t stick and rice that is sometimes supposed to. It is rice yellowed with butter and rice browned with soy. It is rice from an 8 oz. box and rice from a 20 lb. bag. It is eaten with a spoon and eaten with bare hands.
The motion of eating rice with bare hands is the softest movement the human body can make. The slight cupping of 4 fingers and sliding of the thumb, more canal than trough. The motion of being fed rice with bare hands, skin to lip, as maternal as nursing -- the closest my mother came to mothering. And with each offering, the closer I came to landing on which is my home country.
Portia Chan's response to prompt “write a love letter to a family member”
"Orange Milk"
I saw you there,
a young boy who reminded me of my son.
Out of my imagination, in my dream state,
a cup of orange milk appeared,
like sleight of hand,
in my left hand.
It was magick, a gift from the Goddess, Herself.
You looked at it.
I sensed your hunger,
and I offered it to you, cup and all.
Cups are symbols of the heart, emotions, feelings.
You drank it, satisfied, nurtured,
Then I saw her.
Dressed in a formal hanbok,
she nodded,
gratitude, mother to mother.
You are my dad.
She is your mother, my grandmother.
Upon recognition. I awoke from my dream state.
I knew it was real,
Magick.
