Legacy

The plot

"Legacy," in collaboration with poet Fiona Tinwei Lam and based on her poem, creates a memory space using symbolic objects, evocative tableaux, and a variety of digital effects to concretize the wisdom that comes with temporal and emotional distance, creating a fanciful, wry, and occasionally bittersweet postmortem of a relationship that founders on the rocks of cross-cultural differences.

Biography of Fiona Tinwei Lam

Fiona Tinwei Lam is a writer, editor, and educator from Vancouver, Canada. She has authored three poetry collections: Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize), Enter the Chrysanthemum, and Odes & Laments. as well as a children’s book. Her poetry and prose appear in over 40 anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry (2010 and 2020 editions). She has co-edited two anthologies of nonfiction and edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poetry about Facing Cancer. Her award-winning video poems have been screened at festivals locally and internationally. www.fionalam.net

Text of the poem:

Legacy

Each summer, your mother’s handstransformed heaped bowls of ripe fruitinto glistening fillings.Her deft persuasion of dough into pastrythrough the white silted airRhubarb, blueberry, peach, apple --desserts for a year’s worth of holidays.

I tried to make piethe way I tried to be a wife:four pyrex pie plates, a battleto bind flour, fat and waterinto elusive tenderness.

You gave me a yearningfor homemade piethat lingered longer than love,then left with the pie plates

and what you learnt --congee breakfasts,the intricate textures of dim sum,how to eat shark's finwith a spoonful of vinegar,never to forgo the good luckof red bean soup, and alwaysto rest your chopsticksparallel across the bowlat a meal's end.

From Fiona Tinwei Lam, Intimate Distances (Nightwood Editions, Canada, 2002) Copyright © Fiona Tinwei Lam 2002

• Age Rating General (12 and under)
• Running time 00:02:03 mins



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