sock city
I was 18 years old when I moved to New York City. A small delegation of my extended Chinese family met me at the baggage claim at La Guardia airport. Although I had briefly met some of them before during childhood vacations, the experience was not dissimilar from that of meeting very warm strangers in a foreign country. Not only was NYC a far cry from the suburbs of Houston, but my relatives spoke exclusively Cantonese and broken English. Upon arriving at their multi-generational apartment in Queens, I met a “cousin” my age who spoke better English.
I write “cousin” because I still don’t quite understand exactly how we are related. Technically, anyway. My maternal grandfather was the youngest of eleven sons (daughters were not counted), and several of his older brothers had also immigrated from China with their families. They settled all over the USA in the time between the two world wars: in rural Mississippi, San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Houston. It was Uncle Ten’s family who hosted me my first night in the city, and despite the vast communication gap (I never learned Chinese as a child), it did not mean we didn’t try to make contact. After taking a walk around Queens with cousin Henry and talking earnestly about our futures — art school for me, engineering studies for him — I was approached by an aunt around my mother’s age. She wanted to give me a gift.
The gift was a garment without tags. A medium weight bright red cotton blouse, with three quarter sleeves and a black ruffle at the neck. A neck which was neither that of a t-shirt nor a boatneck, but somewhere in between. Simultaneously out-of-time and unambiguously unfashionable. Red is a lucky color in Chinese culture, and from what I could understand from the interaction, it came from the factory where she worked. I thanked her graciously, and then immediately buried the blouse in my luggage when no one was looking. Later on, unable to wear nor throw it out, it got forever hidden in the bottom of my closet.
Receiving this gift filled me with a confusing feeling I did not understand at the time, but that was very obviously shame. Shame in myself for not proudly wearing the gift from a family that had briefly treated me as one of their own, shame for not being able to shake the thought of sweatshops, shame for not knowing they also existed in NYC, shame for all the times I had been picked on in my youth for having two stripes (not three) on my non-name brand shoes. Shame for internalising racial stereotypes.
Later on the shame grew to encompass not truly understanding my own grandmother’s limited English until I was writing her letters on her deathbed — and having my mother gently tell me on the phone that my language was too complicated for her to read. The Chelsea gallery where I worked fresh out of art school would not let me take off time to visit my grandmother after she was diagnosed with cancer, thus the letters. When I flew back for her funeral a few months later, the first thing I did was send in a resignation email.
The garment you hold in your hands was imported by me from a warehouse in China, most likely in Datang Town in Zhuji City a.k.a. Sock City. One third of all the socks produced in the world come from there. I liked the design and thought it would fit the situation you are reading this text in, but I do not know the artist. I did, of course, ask the supplier. The automatically translated response was quick and direct: 这个銌还真鎏嫄繸‘呢 (I really don’t know this)
