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Coming Home: a rediscovery of sapphic yearning in Ancient China
Lush, incandescent islands of possibility in a sea of quiet despair. Art by Ellie Zheng
May 25, 2021
Growing up as a first-generation Chinese-Australian, one of the ways that I connected with my elderly Chinese-speaking grandparents was through stories. My grandfather, who was gruff and said very little, would often sit me on his knee and put
Journey to the West on the dusty, old box-TV, which followed the adventures of the mischievous monkey king Sun Wukong and his companions. At bedtime, my grandmother, a warm woman with golden laughter and eyes that crinkled with mirth, would regale me with Chinese children’s stories filled with talking rabbits, monkeys and turtles. Every Mid-Autumn Festival, she would hold me and tell me to look at the moon. ‘Look,’ she would say. ‘Do you see the rabbit in the moon?’ It was through these stories, that I began to dream about the world.