A couple of days ago, while rereading “ Dream of the Red Mansion”, I was reminded by the opening line of “Daiyu Enters the Mansion”: “The fledgling swallow has parted from the past, and the lonely girl seeks refuge with her grandmother.” If we say that migration leads Daiyu into the tragedy of the Jia family, does that not also suggest that the fate of the larger environment often connects and drives the personal fate through “migration”?

In my previous exhibition, I attempted to analyse and understand my relationship with Hong Kong from a more macro historical perspective. Although it contained elements of personal history, those seemed to serve only as an implicit thread. In this exhibition, I am trying to start from a more intimate personal and family history, narrating the changes in the relationship between people and places during the process of family migration. Here, “place” might be better understood as a more abstract object, or perhaps as a kind of spiritual landscape. Looking at our family’s migration history, it has always revolved around women—from my grandmother to my mother, and aside from me.
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In Chapter 59 of “ Dream of the Red Mansion”, the metaphor of “pearls and fish eyes” is used to describe young girls and their mothers. Pearls seem to be frequently associated with women, whether in Eastern tales of the clam spirit or in Western classics filled with treasures and promised lands of pearls. Pearls often appear in people’s impressions as pure and sacred, like Venus.

My grandmother reminisced about her early days in Hong Kong, saying it was like Liu Lao entering the Grand View Garden, where everything seemed fresh and new. She described herself as a large clam, dragging along several small clams. Perhaps in her eyes, we were all pearls in her embrace. She carried us from Shanghai to Shenzhen, and then from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. My mother, who arrived in Hong Kong as a young girl, returned as a mother. Over the decades, her relationship with Hong Kong seems to echo a scene from a Cantonese opera she loves to sing: “A Lin sister dropped from the sky.” abrupt yet irreversible.

The connection between individuals and places, in religious narratives, develops vertically, aspiring to connect with the divine through practice. However, in secular life, it indeed expands horizontally: the family unit serves as a foundation, generating a solid relationship between people and places. Like me, like my mother, like my grandmother, we are layers of clams, all pearls to each other.

The combination of horizontal and vertical elements forms a coordinate system, seemingly providing a basis for human existence. Human migration is emotional; trying to explain human movement with cold, serious history feels cruel to me. I appreciate those intertwined and obscure relationships because sometimes they reflect larger historical narratives. In the turbulent flow of time, the fates of individuals and families are so insignificant. Thus, imagining everyone as a clam may be a form of compassion—at least we still have a shell.

I believe that everyone’s life is a journey of learning to become a mother, to become an old clam holding pearls.