a critical love letter to my ancestors: perhaps a therapeutics of recognition?

Preface: Part memoir, part Chinese history, part theoretical reckoning with settler positionality of my lineage as an immigrant on Turtle Island from Hong Kong, this article is a critical self-study and creative nonfiction experiment that dialogues with colonial recognition and with the abjection method to the self and ancestry, to wrestle with generational failures and what it means to honor my ancestors. I walk through the lens of Kristeva, Fanon, Muñoz, and Coulthard, using their frameworks to understand my distance and relationship with my ancestors and to speculate on their contexts, mindset, and behavior with the colonizers and as the colonizing others, engaging from a place of critical love. This article aligns with the mode of “depth education” as discussed by Andreotti (2021), as an inquiry to expand the researcher’s capacities and dispositions to observe our own affective responses and to hold space for complexities and paradoxes within and around us, without feeling immobilized or demanding to be rescued from discomfort. The writing uses a performative writing approach to interrupt conventional scholarly texts and discourse and seeks to generate curiosity and responses in knowledge-creation spaces.