Rene Yung, Wellspring. Image courtesy of Richard Nicol.
In choosing artwork, I wanted to engage a public art piece that spoke to vibrant community spaces. In coming across Rene Yung’s Wellspring at the Seattle Public Library’s Chinatown-International District Branch, so many memories started to simmer, hum, and float forward.
Back when my family ran a Cantonese take-out restaurant in New Jersey, my mother would drop me off at the public library across the street. This is where I’d read for hours, slipping alternate endings into the pages of my favorite books. Among the stacks in the CID branch, you’ll find Yung’s resin cubes with a floating teacup inside. The cubes are internally lit and I like to imagine them having their own moon. Finding these cubes remind me of the scribbled notes, bookmarks, and little origami cranes I used to come across when I roamed the stacks as a kid. It’s such a bewildering surprise to encounter these glowing orbs of art tucked among the endless ribs of books. What portals they all are.
I have such a deep love for the CID, ever since I moved to Seattle in 2011. Decades before me, my family on my mother’s side made Seattle their home. The CID is where my family still gathers to eat, grocery shop, and gossip. Over a decade ago, on a bad date in the CID, I heard my Gung Gung (who is now in the ancestral realm) yelling at me from Hing Hay Park, the scent of beef broth from Mike’s Noodle House still lingering along his mouth. He made fun of my outfit and saved me from that bad date. I miss him intensely. To be closer to him, I like to order jook with thousand-year-old eggs from Mike’s and stroll around Maynard with my arms behind my back, grandpa style, slowly becoming an elder myself. I love the aunties low-key selling vegetables on the street, laying them on the ground like leafy, emerald necklaces. I love the sound of ping pong balls volleying and hearing shit talk about someone’s mediocre top spin. Love feeding the cute chickens at Danny Woo and the sonic loop of their clucks.
The word “wellspring” makes me think of nourishment, an endless spring, the source of generosity. Of tiny goldfish, slivers of water, sips of sharp green. In Yung’s piece, there are 120 teacups, which were donated by community members. Each cup has a story. When reading about some of these stories, they all speak to belonging and memory in some way. Ka Lun Yuen shares how she made her blue teacup in a class at Green River Community College: “Everything was strange to me, and difficult to me, because I did not know English. It looks like the two fish are swimming to a strange world, which is unclear and seems to lose protection. They are scared to swim forward slowly to adapt to a new world.” And Jeremy O. Simer offers a teacup and tiny spoon from Turkey, where his father is from. I make ceramics now, hand building little vessels out of this elemental thing that is clay. Clay crusting all over my hands and arms like good bread. I know how much labor goes into making these cups, these porcelain murmurations. Growing up, my family would go to yum cha every Sunday, which is all about the tea. My family’s order: chrysanthemum tea, guk fa cha. The more you pour tea, the more stories unravel. Over tea, I’d hear things I wasn’t supposed to hear. Like, your father owes me money again. Like, your cousin in China has a secret sister. Like, is Jane ever going to find love – what’s wrong with her? Declarations of failure, longing, grief. Punctuated with laughter so hard it makes the table rattle and spin. Gathered in a circle along a red wall, you can almost hear the conversations clinking against each cup, the layered cacophony of voices doing the thing we all do well, one way or another: live, tell, live, tell, live. ◼︎
Jane Wong is an American poet and professor at Western Washington University. She is the author of the full-length poetry collections Overpour and How Not to Be Afraid of Everything and has been published in Best American Poetry 2015 and Best New Poets 2012. Wong grew up in Tinton Falls, NJ, where her parents owned a Chinese restaurant, and where Jane remembers much of her childhood. In 2023, she released her memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City.
Rene Yung is a San Francisco-based artist, designer, and writer whose poetic and incisive works fluidly cross disciplines to address social and cultural issues in the globalized environment. Her work has been exhibited at international venues including TransCulture, part of the 46th Venice Biennale; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has created extensive public projects for institutions including the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle, the City of Oakland Cultural Arts and Marketing Division, and the Goldman Institute on Aging, San Francisco.
Ekphrastic poetry is a literary device through which the writer responds to a visual work of art through use of vivid description, extending the experience of an artwork into the realm of language.
