The Book Column : Betty Yu : Family Amnesia. Chinese American Resilience

In Family Amnesia: Chinese American Resilience, published by Daylight Books, American artist and activist Betty Yu uses collage as a powerful tool to capture the Chinese diasporic experience in the United States, told through the lens of her own family story.

Betty Yu is a child of Sunset Park. Often called Brooklyn’s Chinatown, it is one of the largest Chinese communities outside Asia, and among the most multicultural neighborhoods in Brooklyn. It was here that her parents settled after emigrating to the U.S. in 1972. Before them, both her great-grandfather and grandfather had emigrated from China to the United States. Each of these generations was confronted with the racism embedded in American society, something the Chinese diaspora had faced since 1882 with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act—the first U.S. law restricting immigration on the basis of ethnicity or nationality.

Political engagement was also part of this legacy. Betty Yu’s grandfather helped establish the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, an organization that fought back against anti-Chinese legislation. As a teenager, when she turned to photography, her first project was to document her sister as she took part in a hunger strike for Chinese workers’ rights—a struggle their mother would soon join as well.

It is this intergenerational story of resistance and resilience that Betty Yu retraces in Family Amnesia. Organized in sixchapters, the book follows the family line across time: her grandfather’s trajectory, her own childhood as the daughter of immigrants in Sunset Park, a shared political commitment, and her return to China in search of ancestral roots. She uses collage as her storytelling tool, weaving together her own photographs, images made by her grandfather—himself a photographer—and a constellation of archival documents, both personal and historical. These fragments bear witness to the anti-Chinese propaganda once common in the United States and the stereotypes entrenched in visual culture, what she refers to as “cultural erasure.”

Collage, a slow, layered process of displacement and reconstruction, became a way for Betty Yu to process this history. She describes it as a meditation, an act of healing, both for herself and her community. By revisiting her own family’s story, she opens the possibility for an entire community to reclaim its history:  « This book is an open invitation to Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, and others to reflect on their own family photographs, ephemera, traditional artifacts, archival material, oral histories, and voices that defy the yellow-peril legacy while reclaiming our collective identity. »

The image of the “yellow peril” remains stubbornly alive. One striking example is the surge of unabashed racism triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, which Yu explores in the final chapter of the book, before concluding with « An (Incomplete) Timeline of Asian Immigration, Racism, and Exclusion in the US » that she intertwines with her own family’s timeline.

Between historical record and personal narrative, act of resistance and love letter, Family Amnesia is Betty Yu’spowerful tribute to her family’s history and to the Chinese presence in the United States. A personal and collective memory, which her ancestors may have tried to set aside in order to move forward, but which the photographer strives to preserve : « I hope this book reminds us of the power of collective storytelling, generational survival, and creative resistance as medicine.