It is a moving ordeal for me to see the installation "waste not" in MOMA by Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong. A skeletal section of his mother's old house stands amidst all the items kept within it for 30 years, down to a single button, a pair of shoe string. Holland Cotter in NY times thinks the exhibition "is at once a record of a life, a history of a half-century of Chinese vernacular culture and a symbolic archive of impermanence". It is well said, yet I also found that the installation poignantly shows a marvelous and curious case of a preservation in an extreme unstable country. The truth is that to me only a few lucky ones like the artist's deceased mother had the luxury to hold onto her possession ritually to the end. For the past 30 years, life in China has been nothing but stable. The foundation of the society has been shaken time and time again. Massive population has been moved across a politically and then later economically turmoil landscape. Willingly or unwillingly, few people were able to live in one place for so long and created a personal emporium, despite clutter-filled and obsession-driven, ironically, it is also proven to be extremely comforting.
It is a record of a person's life, and luckily, a record that is still extractable from a country that nothing lasts long at all.
My mom moved four times in the past decade. It was originally because of a large civic project. The whole neighborhood I grew up had to be demolished in whole sale style for a river-side park and a bridge that links to the free way. Along with it, gone with the memories of my childhood, or more precisely, the physical evidence of my earlier existence. When I went back, I couldn't recognize the place at all. My mom was forcibly relocated, first to a school dorm, then to an apartment bordering a farm land, and finally to a seventh floor apartment without an elevator. The last move was to a first floor apartment because she could no longer climbed the stairs. Along each move, she couldn't possibly hold onto her belongings, so gradually she learned to lighten her load by shedding the weight of a life she has lived. Each move, she had to let something go in order to adjust to the new situation. By the time she was in her current apartment, she had remarkably little from the past, which likely or not, have all been scattered and lost.
And that, is the opposite from "waste not". It is another side of the reality in China.
Fortunately, last time I went home, I found a book that belonged to me when I was in middle school: the complete Tang poems. "Take it with you," my mother said, "for I don't know how long I can hold onto it." So I did just that, savaging a piece of my own memory from a place that things tend to get lost, and appropriately, that piece of memory happens to be a book of poems written long time ago, which not many Chinese would be interested in reading.
