Land holds so much of our history and memory—both personal and collective. Even when we leave land behind, our connection to it continues to evolve, shaping our futures. In this special folio, seven writers investigate and explore Asian relationships with land. The legacy of land can be unbelievably fraught, subject to both internal and external politics and violence. Family, identity, community, and legacy are the layers on which these complicated, frustrating, and hopeful relationships with land are built. The stories we tell about land have power. They can work to reclaim what we lost on it and create new pathways. They can mourn, inspire, and surprise. These pieces offer a window into the possibility and power of land.
I am no longer striving to understand something foreign, or to earn some measure of acceptance or belonging that I don’t deserve. I am here, simply, to see the land that my family came from, to know that we have been here before.
Since the new government promised land reform, the have-nots in your father’s village buckled over with joy, while the landed were bewildered
She was a prisoner in this home, where death and decay had collected like a fog.
Paragraph by paragraph I am piecing together the story of my Indonesian family—their trauma and struggle against colonial rule—alongside my dad.
we inherited sickly / roots our ancestors couldn’t plant / deep enough to / grow
Far from our barrios, mountains, and islands, we cook, so that we may practice swallowing our undesirable truths, acidic and blood-heavy.
There was a time, Abu says, before your great-grandmother, when water was blue because it was a bruise, when it could feel our hands like the skin of a fruit.
Land holds so much of our history and memory—both personal and collective. In this special folio, seven writers investigate and explore Asian relationships with land.
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
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New York, NY 10001