A product of Burma’s diaspora, I’m rooted in a country only familiar to me in its immaterial, unbounded, storied form; evoking a home that is more apparition than physical site. Yet, my roots—my linkages to the non-space of Karen oral histories—are also characterized by an abiding rootlessness: we (myself/my ancestors) dwell not in static spaces but in an ongoing performance of movement and mobility that’s simultaneously by choice and circumstance. In this home-preserving dance, space and time collapses into infinite possibilities of being and becoming. To be unwelcome is a home in itself. (95) [JZ-03]
On Phantom Substrates
