Miyah

• What is your personal definition of home? - What experiences have influenced/continue to influence and shape your understanding of home, belonging, and safety? Are there any core memories?
  
  

Home for me can sometimes have a quite literal definition. It is the place that I eat, sleep, rest and create… It is the physical space that I curate. My home is full of color and soft surfaces and smoke from the jasmine incense floating in the air. 

Sometimes my home holds a mental purpose. There’s a sense of security and occasionally complete isolation. I can rest and exist without performance. Growing up and still today, I feel as if I am always attempting to perform. The pressure of people’s perspectives is exhausting… at work, in public, with family. We change who we are to fill the form that’s expected of us. We aim to appear solid and well-adjusted. When I am home, I feel good in my physical body. My spirit is fluid and boundless in my space. I am with myself or with community that requires nothing of me.

• What particular place(s) do you feel at home, deeply connected and safe at? 

I feel at home when I take long walks around Lake Merritt on Sunday mornings. It’s a common place for everyone in the neighborhood to show up as you are. I love the way I feel in my body when I walk in the morning. The air is more crisp and the way the sun falls on your face at that time of day… There are usually people out, and other than quiet smiles and simple good mornings, we go about the day on our own. 

Another place I feel particularly connected to is my local yoga studio, Hot Spot Yoga in Oakland. I have been a regular visitor for the past couple of years. It’s a space where I can feel free to explore movement and learn how to be more attentive to how I’m feeling - my hands, my heart, my core, and my lungs. The physical and the spiritual are intrinsically intertwined. When my body is aligned and strong, my spirit is as well. Here, a community is curated to allow for this self-examination - to feel and investigate ourselves - alongside each other and without judgment.

• What parts of your personal/family/collective histories help you feel grounded in (or disconnected to) your idea and understanding of home? - When/if you feel disconnected to your cultural community, where do you go and/or what do you do to feel safe and accepted?

In college, I interviewed my grandmother for a paper I was writing on shifting Iu-Mien food practices before and after the Secret War. She detailed the events that occurred during that time - forced to leave her home within a matter of hours, learning how to farm and find food with what limited resources she had, the fear of being shot down while traveling down the river, the anxiety of not knowing whether or not her son was alive. Through this conversation, I gained perspective of her life and I felt closer to her than I had before. My grandmother rarely, if ever, speaks about her life before coming to the US. I don’t think she likes to talk about what happened to her, maybe because it would bring up a lot of unresolved emotions, so she chooses not to. I feel that our communities’ connection to our homeland and life in Laos has become fragmented because of it. The generation that lived through it and have that knowledge of what we were before the violence, have become disconnected out of necessity. While we are still “in community” with each other, the fragmentation and dissociation still carries through generations, through social relationships and relationships to ourselves. 

For now, I feel a bit disconnected from my family and collective history. There is so much that we don’t know, and so much that has been passed down to us that we don’t fully understand. I don’t necessarily have a place to go when I particularly feel this way.

• What aspects of your identity do you feel most connected to? - What parts feel the most challenging to feel connected to and how does this impact your understanding of home and belonging?

One thing I am connected to, however, is food. My grandma shows her love by cooking and providing food. Every time I come to her house, she likes to unload her whole kitchen on me. I laugh when she starts going through every item in the cupboard, “You want this? You want this? Take avocados.” I like when the family comes together to eat, and more recently I’ve been going earlier in the day to help her out in the kitchen. I think she appreciates it.

The most challenging part of my identity is that I don’t know the Mien language. Things can be translated into English, but I feel that a lot of what is being communicated in Mien is being lost, especially for more complex topics and stories. When people around me are speaking in the language, I feel a little bit like an outsider. And, how do I learn my family and community history when I know it is much better communicated in the native language? I grew up in a Mien and Korean household where English was the primary language. Neither of my parents speak each other’s languages, so neither did I.

• Time isn’t linear–spiritually speaking, we carry our ancestors and descendants with us everyday. How do you hope to contribute to the healing, growth, and transformation of your people’s collective understanding of home, place, and belonging? Through your art, how do you hope to help your ancestors and descendants find home and feel + know safety?

I hope that my artwork and my story resonates with others. By speaking about my experience and my journey finding place and belonging, I hope we form relationships and community without expectations. To come as we are and to find home in each other. I hope that my ancestors know that my artwork is me reaching out to them for guidance and that I am ready to listen.

• What role does art/creativity play in your life? Is this connected to your journey of belonging? If yes, how?

I want to continue incorporating more creative projects in my life going forward. I started making candles and playing with scent and wax when I was in high school and even more in college. I am not a gifted orator and I often leave a lot unsaid, but I’m much better when it comes to expressing myself in more artistic ways - mostly writing. This is connected to my journey of belonging. I want to create more art in the hopes that I can convey myself more easily, and hopefully, other people understand.

• What is one dream you have for your community?

I hope that our community, living relatives and non-living ancestors, find restfulness and ease. I hope that we continue this work to find belonging, and create space for the newer generations to feel comfortable in their bodies.

• How has this project influenced your understanding of community, belonging, home and/or safety?

I think this project has shifted the way I view what home and belonging can be. The workshops have allowed me to listen to other people’s perspectives and know that I am not alone in my feelings. My experience of disconnection is not unique, in the best way possible, and that can create community and belonging in itself.

• After this project, what's next? Is there anything on your horizon or forthcoming for you as an artist/storyteller?

After the exhibit, I am considering producing a second part to the project, but this idea is still in the works. Otherwise, I have no other projects as of yet.

• How can people learn more about you and keep up with your work?
  
  You can follow my Instagram @miya.yang to keep up with any other work I might have planned for the future.