Voices of Yellowwood

A proposal for an imaginary object in the Museum of Chinese in America:

Unknown

Voices of Yellowwood, 1882-present

Osage orange wood, leaves, white latex

8×4 ft.

This tree is an assemblage of voices. You are invited to lean over the counter to touch the tree’s bark. When you rub the bark, you will be able to hear a voice naming itself as Wong Hau-Hon reading an English translation of his memories. If you jostle a branch, the voice will begin again in Chinese. If you tap one of the leaves three times another voice resembling a mother will read a daily fortune, then proceed to share enduring superstitions such as the particular color one should wear for the day, or how to serve a meal properly, as the placement of chopsticks differs according to whether one is serving the living or the dead. If you pull one of the fruits off the tree and cut it open, a third voice will recite poems engraved into the walls of Angel Island. If you recite a poem with the tree, it will pause, then begin answering the questions once posed by immigration officers without the prompt of the questions themselves. To silence the tree, you may ask the tree its name.

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Title: Voices of Yellowwood (maclura pomifera)

Date: 1882 - present

Geography: Red river drainage basin

Medium: Osage orange wood, leaves, white latex

Dimensions: 8 × 4 ft.

Classification: Imaginary

Credit Line: N/A

Description:

“Voices of Yellowwood” is a miniature Osage orange tree planted behind the counter in MOCA’s display of a Chinatown general store. The tree is no taller than the average height of a man. The trunk is short and stout, producing a milky sap, and boasts thorny boughs at eye-level with the counter, its dense foliage sometimes resting on the glass case. Its exposed roots are a brilliant orange; the rest of the bark undulates in strips of sienna brown and a dampened orange with the texture of a cooled basalt magma twisting its variously thick ribbons upwards from the ground. The leaves are dark green, though they turn lime green, then yellow over the course of the day, returning to the original green by morning. Chartreuse-colored fruit the size of softballs hang off slender and hairy twigs.

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Both a performance piece and an interactive installation, “Voices of Yellowwood” is inspired by the bleeding tree of Polydorus from The Aeneid. In Book III, Aeneas tears shoots from a bush to fashion a covering for an altar he will use to make offerings to his mother. While blood oozes out from the splintered branches, the tree cries out to Aeneas that it is not a stranger, but Polydorus himself. The spears that maimed him sprouted into his current form as a tree. We know of Polydorus’ history through how Aeneas remembers the tree voicing its memories to him. Our knowledge of Chinese railroad workers on the transcontinental railroad depends likewise on a migratory imagining of their presence through their absence in the archive. Except for one account of Wong Hau-Hon from his time working on the Canadian Pacific Railway, there are almost no direct testimonies of their experiences.

The first voice remembers its experiences working on the railroad. The second voice imparts a tradition. The third voice recites an elegiac record of many voices upon arriving in a new land. The tree is an assemblage of voices similar to how the display of the store is itself an assemblage of many stores just like it that were once open all over the United States. According to the plaque in MOCA, the store functions as a pharmacy, post office, travel agency, and community learning center, a supplier of both Chinese traditional herbs and items for everyday use. Thus, the tree has both a mythological and a practical function, planted where the owner of the store would be standing to manage the business. The tree honors the diversity of migratory paths through its symbolic presence as the longing of an impossible whole, containing voices from various moments in Chinese American history. “Voices of Yellowwood” is an Osage orange tree because that was one of the main species of wood used in the construction of the transcontinental railroad. It is planted by a wall of herbal medicines to juxtapose states of the natural world in their original and cultivated forms. The juxtaposition is its own archeological record, expressing how our relation to nature is rooted in mythology, cultural beliefs, and knowledge as if to suggest that all three ways of knowing are at different moments in time synonymous to one another. Myth becomes knowledge; belief is grounded in myth; knowledge names the condition of belief ascending to the status of myth.

The tree is known for its heavy wood resistant to decay. Its sap is known to irritate skin. The prized qualities of the tree resemble the industrious stereotype of the Chinese in an American psyche. That its sap is also a skin irritant speaks to the physical effects of inscrutability. One of the tree’s common names is Yellowwood; other common names include Hedge Apple, Bois d’Arc, Bow-Wood, and Bodark. The various fates of this tree offer a ghostly and yet more inclusive perspective of distant moments in history: while laying individual railroad ties, the hands of Chinese migrant workers may have touched the very kind of wood Indigenous people carved into bows and other ceremonial objects, a wood that was also considered a valuable item of trade. Rather than bleeding like the tree of The Aeneid, “Voices of Yellowwood,” will “bleed” sounds. The voices are named and anonymous to reflect the constant tension that an active listener may experience when paying attention to disparate certainties of history and the sources of those certainties. The tree also listens to the visitor and will adjust its behavior to the visitor’s speech. It will answer a question without needing to be asked the questions because many of the answers that paper sons gave in detainment at Angel Island were predetermined and memorized. That an answer may be given without a question also places pressure on the nature of an answer, and how the power of a question exists beyond its immediate presence in language. Because this is very much an imagined tree, it is able to acknowledge the presence of whomever may be present. The time frame of the tree is from 1882-present in reference to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Timing the tree’s “origin” with the beginning of the exclusion era places the tree—and the narrative of each voice—in the paradox of its necessity, in remembrance of both the repulsion and desire that define the conditions of alienation each voice passed through to be heard.