Created as Artist in Residence with Allowing Many Forms, Fall 2022.

This book contains traces, reconstructed memories, multi-directional storytelling, searching, and unraveling sourced from archival maps, film photographs, drawings, engravings, and photos from my phone. These sites were first inscribed into land by US white settler colonial infrastructures, exploiting Chinese bodies to dispossess Indigenous peoples and lands and to suppress Black resistance and liberation: the California Trail (established 1811–1840), the First Transcontinental Railroad (constructed 1862–1869), and Interstate 80 (constructed 1956–1986). Their sequence was traced again in 1988 by recently arrived Chinese students, my parents in the Beautiful Country, and in 2022, by me, searching. In nearly every case of Chinese diaspora along these inscriptions, Chinatown is set on fire and burned to the ground. In nearly every case of Chinatown burned to the ground, I search for and unravel traces of us in the insurance maps they drew in case of fire.