The art of ancestral listening through batik

I should have studied their faces as they said goodbye, the way they smelled, the lines on their hands.

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.

A former student recalls the ups-and-downs of Ho’s cult of personality.