Family Amnesia

Family Amnesia is a visual tribute and love letter honouring the artist's Chinese American family roots in the U.S. The art book explores her family's multi-generational resilience and resistance through mixed media collages, her grandfather's photographs, her own captured images, and archival material.

The book project honours the past and current lives of Asian Americans and immigrants in the U.S. by examining the incalculable and traumatic impact that historical events like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act continue to have on the Asian American experience. This is a painful part of our American history. Betty Yu is reclaiming that narrative through her own personal family's story. The book features her grandfather's role as a founding member of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of NY, her mother's plight as a garment worker who became a labour organiser, as well as her sister's legacy as a community activist. Yu knows that her family's story is not unique. It is part of the larger collective Asian-American immigration experience.

This book project reminds us that the rise of COVID-related anti-Asian violence is part of a larger history of systemic racism. As the U.S. government and corporate-run media continue to vilify China as a global threat, Family Amnesia recalls the anti-China and anti-Asian paranoia and hysteria that created policies like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1942 Executive Order that placed Japanese-Americans into internment camps. The book will also draw visually on geo-political history, recalling narratives that mocked China as the "sick man of Asia" and that demonised Chinese as "Yellow Peril".