Let's Not Talk Anymore
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- ¥2,000
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
A five-generation family history told through what is seen and heard, if not said
Let’s Not Talk Anymore weaves together five generations of women from Weng Pixin’s family, each at age fifteen. Her lineage is full of breakages—her great grandmother Kuan is sent away from her family in South China, her grandmother Mèi is adopted by a neighbor to help with housework, and her mother, Bing, is heartbroken by her father’s estrangement. Pixin's own story centers on her feelings of isolation and her rebellion from her mother. She extends the line by envisioning a fictional future daughter, Rita, who questions her family’s legacy. While spanning one hundred years, Pixin moves back and forth in time seamlessly, as each woman experiences loneliness and kinship, hope and longing.
As each story develops, generational traumas are revealed and fraught relationships passed on from mother to daughter. Creative impulses are stifled or nurtured. They struggle with poverty and neglect. And at some point each woman begins to separate herself from her situation and understand the woman she will become.
Pixin’s bold, vibrant paintings fill the aching silences between generations with beauty and emotion. Her paintings conjure complete worlds that these women inhabit. Let's Not Talk Anymore is a family history filled with tender moments as these women find connection with plants, animals, and their own creative pursuits, while struggling to connect with one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With empathy and grace, Pixin explores her matrilineal history through five generations of teenage girls, from her great-grandmother in 1908 to her imagined future daughter in 2032. Kuan migrates from southern China to Singapore, along with her pet cricket, while disguised as a boy; Mèi's unloving adoptive mother puts her to work at her seamstress business; Rita walks in the woods and sketches animals in a peaceful, leafy future. Each girl's life is glimpsed in brief scenes that throw their differences into contrast (the first of the girls to attend school lives a life completely unlike those of her forebears) but also cause their similarities to echo. Themes repeat: love of animals and nature, fear and frustration toward adults, internalizing trauma, finding refuge in art. The later generations speculate about their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, piecing together what they know from family stories: "I wonder also what it would be like to live in a world where you have no control over your life." The art, painted in blocks of bold color, has the crafted look of folk art or textiles, with patterns and flat layouts. Though the images are individually simple, they combine to fill the pages with color and life. This meditation on "the women who made us" will resonate with any reader who's pored over old family photographs in search of themselves.
