and reassembles them into an improvised patchwork that she hopes will envelop her mother’s story, cloaking it in fabric in order to absorb and release her suffering. Wong’s intention is not a simple exorcism: the white hues of the textiles nod to Buddhist mourning rituals surrounding rebirth. Augmenting the scenes of cutting and stitching are close-ups of a woman’s hair being braided. To braid is to take disparate parts and bring them together, transforming them through touch. I think here of my own mother, who braided my hair many mornings before school. Or I think of my father now, who asked me at the age of seventy if I could teach him how to braid—so that he could care for my mother’s hair following her massive stroke.
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Shakespeare, 9.
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There was a moment in my own genesis as a thinker and writer when I felt compelled to frame every analysis I conducted— of a novel, a performance, or an artwork—with a few choice quotes drawn from critical theory. I no longer feel this way, and instead prefer to approach each artwork I encounter on its own terms. In tending to the threads of Wong’s work, I conjure the words of Fisher and Sedgwick for more personal reasons. They are the ghosts of my life, the writers whose ideas I have lived with and thought alongside for over fifteen years. We lost both of them too soon: Fisher to his own demons, and Sedgwick to a breast cancer that she battled for over a decade. And yet, ghosts have an uncanny knack for lingering—they are revenants as much as apparitions. Perturbed by the persistent intrusions of the king’s ghost, Horatio asks, in Hamlet ’s very first scene, “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” 6 He is none too pleased by the king’s phantasmic endurance. But to the reader of this book, I kindly request: greet the ghost with hospitality. Welcome its presence. Allow the specters that haunt Mending Body/Mending Mind to inform your engagement with the earlier moments in Wong’s oeuvre as
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Elizabeth Wiet
Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology
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