We will partner you with one member of your cohort. We ask that the two of you spend some time together exploring how you can learn about each other’s home place/ground through forms of readily available distance-based media like zoom, bluejeans, email, google and cell phones. Please “meet” with each other a minimum of 3 times over the duration of this assignment.
Ask yourself: is your home ground where you are in the moment? Or is your home ground an ancestral location? What has meaning for you? What is part of your identity? How can you share some form of experience of your home ground that is more than facts and figures? How can share some visceral, emotional, sensorial experience through zoom, bluejeans, email and cell phones?
Partner: Sam Stretch
Duration: 1 week
Immersive Reflection
I was paired with Sam for Action 1, and an important part was about talking with my partner in this exercise, Sam, over virtual meetings, and receiving ideas from each other. The making in the end was actually only a small part.
There were many thoughts running through my head during and after every meeting: we would have very distinctive perceptions about the meaning of “home ground” but still agree with each other.
After the first meeting, because of the uncertainty, and to expand my limited point of view, I tried to look at the meaning of home ground through the lens of my family. To them, those places I have lived in the United States where they are absent cannot be called home. My parents always refer to the place I am living as “dormitory” even though I live in apartments outside of campus. To them what home ground means where family members live together because the close tie between everyone is what matters.
After our second meeting where I briefly talked about this perspective with Sam, I questioned if I actually agree with it. My parents’ viewpoint actually inspires me to think about where sentiments reside inside my memory when the word “home ground” is spoken, and what is the entity that really shaped how I think, write, and create? The interrogation gave me an idea. At the moment I realize that my home ground is actually the small factory town, Qingtongxia, that I was born in, and this answer feels much more affirmative than others. I could feel the weight of the place when I recall images of it from my memory. “What formed that weight?” I asked myself. I can almost be certain that a large part of it is nostalgia, a romanticized sentiment toward a place in time that influenced me greatly. The town still physically exists but the time and events were gone after I moved away.
In order to introduce Qingtong Xia to my friends from other backgrounds, I need to talk about something other than nostalgia. So I started to review its history, mostly through memorizing past verbal conversations with my family, especially my grandparents. Then I found out how extraordinary and bizarre my home ground really is, as mentioned in the presentation (texts below).
Presentation
The place is called Qingtong Xia, which literally translates to Bronze Gorge. I was born in an aluminum factory there and stayed there until the age of 12. We generally referred to it as “The factory”. The factory is so huge, that the residential areas for its 20,000 employees form an entire town.
The place was built from scratch on a barren land in the late 1950s by my grandparents’ generation, following the national industrialization movement. The architecture and infrastructure were heavily influenced, and say, assisted by the USSR. When take a wider look at where this factory is located, you would find that this is inside a Muslim autonomy province. So that this whole place is a conglomeration of socialism and Muslim religion, with its residents immigrated from all over the country. (No one at all had lived here before). Now of course everything is changing: local government is removing both the Soviet resemblances and muslim symbols; young people are leaving it for larger cities, and the factory has become a quiet and empty place.
Although I moved away from the factory a long time ago, I would return there whenever I had the chance. I would go to my old house’s location to see how tall the date tree has grown, to mourn my pet turtle buried under, to photograph sites that I have photographed many times before. This is a part of me that I never dare to wave goodbye.
I can’t even summarize what exactly are the influences that my home ground has had on me. For me personally, as one of many so-called “Children of the factory” I think about my intuitions and interests. But for the whole generation that has lived here, it is something about the socialist eras, when communal bath was still a thing, where factory workers like my grandparents had and still have, today, a strong sense of belonging to the factory, to the collective. Their sentiments and affection are really touching.
To describe the experience of being in the home ground, one cannot do so without some degree of romanticization.
Thank you for reading.