Susan
Kai
Lin
林星语

Notes on Walking & Waiting from the show's accompanying zine: 

There is no such thing as an insurmountable distance. Nobody told me this when I was a child but it is the resounding lesson of my life, of my mother’s life, and the lives of all the women of my family. To arrive, we must begin. To begin, we must put one foot forward. And the next. And the next. We do it despite all odds: across the ocean, to our father’s funeral, and then back down to the kitchen to make breakfast for our sleeping children. And to return we do the same. One step and another. And another. And another. 

Like this, my mother taught me how to move from one time to the next. She started the time machine when she crossed the ocean to America. She believed in a time she could not imagine, where I have outrun her. 

When I could I tried to walk back towards China. But there is no such path. It has been covered with the years, with broken language, with the realities of a rapidly changing world. My walking is not a powerful enough time machine. Only dreams are so powerful and sometimes films. 

I wonder if I am living in my her dream or my own. If she is making the film or if I am. 

My mother would be the hero of my films I realized. She can cross the distances and reach where she is trying to go. This is why I have not been able to write my mother into my films although every film I write is about my mother. In the films I write there are no heroes. My characters always reach their destination and turn back around to where they came from. They are cowards and tourists. Pseudo-time travelers afraid to call anywhere home. They are waiting for a time that will not come. 

Waiting is the antithesis to walking. Waiting is the other great lesson of my life. 

I’ve learned, I do not have to be patient. Patience will be forced on me. The women of my life show their strength in the ways they must be still. My mother waited on us all. Myself, my sister, my father. Did her feet itch to walk? As a child I felt like my mother was pacing about like an animal in a cage. Or am I talking about myself? 

I walk too. And I wait. 

I walk from home to work every morning. I wear boots with tiny heels. Click-clack-click. I meditate on the sound of it echoing in the early morning streets. And then in the afternoon I walk back home from work. Click-clack-click. 

I wonder if there will be something more….. I think to myself as I walk. I wonder if I can run and if I do if my boots with their tiny heels will break. If I will hurt myself. If I will cry with pain or joy. I wonder if I will break free of this time and explode into the next. 

I wonder who will be waiting for me there and if they will be happy to see me arrive.