BABY BABY, COME ON HOME by Zoe Camille Huey
needs, and my wants. I am more rigid. I find less fascina- tion with the small things around me. I discover less. I am in awe, less. There are times when I manage to sort of step out of my grown-up suit - when holes emerge in the fabric like portals, reminding me of who I am. In these moments I don’t feel like a kid again but instead I feel the kid inside of me. These moments happen when I am playing with my dog and together we howl. Or when the toddler I care for and I attentively watch and roll-y poll-y bug crawl through the playground sand. Or when I am in the garden with dirt under my nails, pulling weeds, and I come across a salamander who has made a home in the earth under the bag of mulch. I return to myself when there is nowhere else I have to be. In thinking about how queerness, home, and creative practice all intersect, I return again and again to ideas of childhood. “Home” can feel like a stillness, but it is not stagnant. Instead, home changes and grows with me, as I search for my way home within my own body. Home is a grounding root and the branches who spiral upwards and out. The word home and the word return feel deeply related, with return referencing a movement both back- wards and forwards in time. As I grow older I grow closer to the child within me, so that I can hold my small self again, nurture her, and learn from her. My childhood was not black or white but rather gray- I was safe and loved, and also very anxious. Sometimes, on a whim, I wish I could go back in time, with what I know now, and encour- age little me to be more silly and care less about grades and fitting in. But the real desire lies in learning to offer myself now the breath and space and time to play . MY MOM WAS WHITE. She grew up in Southern California, with a mom whose lineage traces back to Britain. Her dad was Jewish, probably from Poland, but was never a practicing Jew. My dad is Chinese, born to immigrant par- ents from a farming region in Southern China in 1952 San Francisco. With two older sisters, he was the first born son of the family (a position of high responsibility). I am someone who experiences whiteness as both a twisted blessing and a curse. In classic racist fashion, I get the “what are you” question alongside the myriad of guesses about just who exactly I might be. I get the back- wards compliment that praises mixed-people being so beautifully unique. I have been called white. I have been told I am lucky to look so white. I have the privilege, safety, and access of being half-white. At the same time, whiteness has been a force of erasure in my life. There was a brief period of my childhood where my dad taught me the numbers in Cantonese. On our visits to Chinatown, he’d encourage me to speak and count in Chinese when it was time to pay for the don tots, cha siu bow, and gin doy. I’d practice my Cantonese numbers in
I WAS ONCE A DOCTOR, a receptionist, a dog-walker, a teenager with a boyfriend and cellphone, a model, a dancer on So You Think You Can Dance, a waitress, and a spy - following in the legacy of Harriet the Spy. I was once a famous artist who sold colored pencil drawings for five and ten cents to save the arctic penguins. I was once the founder and sole operator of a lemonade stand. I was a liaison with the fairies, a builder of fairy
houses, and a culinary mastermind who created nasturtium wraps in my very own backyard restaurant. I was once best friends with a hermit crab named Bob and heartbroken when I had to say goodbye to the little creature. I was once an archaeologist who dug ginormous holes in the backyard. I was a sculptor, who shaped the clay I found in the earth into animals that were part dog, part bird, part fish. I was once a kid who felt time slipping by, who, in fifth grade, was already worried about regrets that I felt bub- bling up. I was once a kid who began to lose myself and
also the way home to myself. I was once a kid who believed, less and less, that I was all these things, because reality and imagination became more and more separated from one another. I was once a kid who played dress up. I am a kid, dressed up in a grown-up suit. What makes my grown-up suit a grown-up suit, isn’t the color or fabric or cost or brand. It isn’t the size or washing instructions. My grown-up suit has been slowly growing with me for years now, like a second skin. In my grown-up suit I feel disconnected from my sense of bodily time, my
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SPRING 2022 in dance 47
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
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