The author's embroidery depicting her mother. Textile work resembles meditation, though it can also take place in knitting circles and quilting groups, where silence is shared. Yet for all the time I have spent outside in the Trump era, there is a corresponding need for time indoors, where I can be still and let the mind wander. Resistance is necessarily public, manifested in rallies and pickets, door-knocking and debate. None of this is to argue for retreat, let alone to the sewing room.
To embroider is to embellish: to create a fantasia and thus be momentarily free. Because it has tended to flourish in female and feminine spaces - namely, the home - it is a kind of secret. The history of embroidery affords a glimpse of “the private inner world” of women, as a chronicler of the Korean tradition puts it. It is a haven from news whorls and internet noise, a return to a female tradition when our bodies and minds feel so keenly under assault. On these ornate panels, subjugation and survival coincide: Soldiers burn down villages, families cross the Mekong River, women cook dinner in a refugee camp.Įven when the design at hand has no straightforward message, the act of embroidery can feel transgressive in its silence and domesticity. Consider the even more radical figures common in “story cloths” created by Hmong women. There’s an undeniable satisfaction in pulling thread through the last letter-limb of an embroidered expletive or sewing up the image of a raised fist. Given the oppressions of that era - she and her classmates were forced to use Japanese names she walked past soldiers on her way home from school - embroidery must have lent her a quiet, fleeting freedom. My grandmother created the panel around 1941, when she was a high-school student in Seoul living under Japanese colonial rule. The flowers are in full bloom, shaded dark pink to white.Įach tiny stitch of plumage and branch is the work of a young woman’s fingers, cramped by the needle’s demands, her bowed head curving her torso into a C. A light-green parrot sits at rest in a magnolia tree, the bird’s curved, red-orange beak contrasting sharply with its layered feathers. From a distance, the framed image appears to be a painting, but it is in fact hair-fine embroidery. An artwork of hers hangs on my parents’ wall, in Tacoma, Wash. With each clumsy stitch, I thought of my maternal grandmother, whom I never got a chance to meet.
Thread lends itself almost too easily to metaphor. I worked without a pattern, using cheap floss, a needle with a too-small eye and a plastic embroidery hoop to sew geometric designs on a few worn-out T-shirts. Many years ago, inspired by a book on Korean folk art and craft, I began a crude, autodidactic experiment in stitching.
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