The Grief Gallery

I look through my mom’s photo albums — the old-fashioned kind with sticky pages and a clear sheet of acetate on top that lifts up with a distinctive sound. These albums from her teens and early 20s have photos lovingly curated by my mother and carefully arranged on the page, sometimes in playful layouts.

I am struck by how “All American” some of these photos of my mom and her schoolfriends are: perched on a convertible, laughing outside her high school, standing on a sailboat. At the 1964 World’s Fair in New York — a highlight for her whole family and instrumental as an introduction to American culture.

The Soy Sauce

After my mom died, I found myself standing in her kitchen, transfixed by a bottle of soy sauce. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. 

Everytime I looked at it, the memories flooded in: Her love of food. Thanksgiving dinner at her house. The Chinese porridge she would make with the leftover turkey.

How was it possible that she would never cook again?

…

The soy sauce on display here, photographed during my design residency at Toronto’s DesignTO Festival, was not THE soy sauce from my mother’s kitchen. I did finally throw that away, more than a year after my mom died, with assistance from my cousin Eva (I really couldn’t do it myself).

In Toronto, I bought a bottle of soy sauce at H Mart for The Grief Gallery’s exhibition, to represent my mom’s soy sauce and all the meaning attached to it. It was fascinating to see how immediately visitors “got it” especially visitors of Asian descent. They instantly recalled the soy sauce in their grandmother’s kitchen, their auntie’s cupboard: the dark soy sauce, the light soy sauce, the oyster sauce. A specific brand, a particular label. Depending on the culture, maybe it was a fish sauce rather than soy sauce. Or perhaps curry powder that was the ubiquitous ingredient that evoked memories of food, cooking and love.