My copy of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas features two portraits on its cover. The first, depicting a sepia-toned Stein with her famous cropped haircut, takes up over half the page. The second is Toklas’s much smaller black-and-white portrait, fastened to the upper right corner above her name, like a passport photograph. Stein glares off the side, dimly aware of Toklas’s phantom presence. Toklas’s gaze is dreamy and distant, resigned (or so it would seem) to the viewer’s projections.
The cover of Lana Lin’s The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam also features a black-and-white photograph of the two lovers/subjects, but they occupy the same frame—Lin on the right, bowing her head over a desk as she writes in a notebook, and Lam on the left, leaning against the doorway. I wouldn’t describe either of them as natural in front of a camera, per se. Lam in particular appears slightly uncomfortable, as if we have interrupted them in the middle of a sentence. The boundaries of this photograph are clear. We are guests in their and Lin’s private space, their shared home.
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is the video artist and filmmaker Lana Lin’s tribute to, and reckoning with, Stein’s modernist masterpiece. It is also a love story. Like Stein and Toklas, she and Lam have been romantic partners and artistic collaborators for twenty-five-odd years. (They release interdisciplinary projects as the duo ‘Lin + Lam.’) In an essay for LitHub, Lin explains that the cover photo is actually a recreation of Man Ray’s 1933 cover for Stein’s original Autobiography, which featured Stein and Toklas in a similar pose. Like the original, Lin’s version is split into a seven-part structure and is narrated by the author writing as their titular partner. But if Stein’s greatest passion turns out to be “perhaps not Alice so much as the long, precise, well-constructed sentence,” Lin offers us something decidedly more tender-hearted, intimate, and romantic: a portrait of two artists’ lives intertwining and finally becoming one. There is no name-dropping. There are no ruthless judgments cast on the work and aspirations of her compatriots. In fact, there are very few recurring characters outside of Lin and Lam at all, aside from the two partners’ families, an ex, and a handful of friends scattered throughout. This feels like a considered artistic choice as much as a product of historical circumstance.
Apart from the genius of the Autobiography’s central conceit, much of the joy of Stein’s original stems from gossip. Stein insisted on the primacy of surfaces. She wanted to write as a painter paints, with exacting attention to the superficial particulars of her world. As such, her Autobiography is peopled with, well, people—artists and the wives of artists, overpraised or undersung; critics and novelists; not to mention the background cast of cooks, servants, acquaintances, and strangers that keep the whole operation running. There is very little “interiority” as we commonly understand it. Stein and Toklas’s relationship—technically closeted but an open secret at the time—is hardly ever addressed or expanded on in detail. Lin, on the other hand, writes like a filmmaker, with the explicit aim to foreground her and Lam’s positionalities as out Asian queers, inspired by the “understory” of the nameless Chinese refugees displaced by the San Francisco earthquake—the “Nobodies,” to quote Emily Dickinson’s poem, a repeated motif—Toklas describes in her own autobiography, What is Remembered. As a result, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is full of montages, surprising cuts, leaps across time and space. Windows and cameras return as salient metaphors, both of which are compared to two-way mirrors: Lin “could peer out into the urban landscape but was oblivious to those who might return her gaze”; “she could spy on others and pretend that they could not see and therefore not harm her.”
The condition of invisibility, of existing outside of (and at the whims of) a prevailing racial binary, is a familiar aspect of the Asian American condition. Lin brilliantly weaves the seeming impossibilities of this “Nobody” position into the fabric of her Autobiography. Unlike Stein, she does not dominate the narrative with absolute, unquestioned authority; her Lin-as-Lam narrator is reflexive, self-conscious, and at times painfully self-aware, as when she readily admits that “the prohibition against being singled out, or singling herself out, even to accept what is given, causes [Lana] to suppress her memories. That may be why I am writing this autobiography.” The I-who-is-not-I, the I-as-lover, allows what was repressed or otherwise viewed as marginal to rise to the surface—without, however, falling into the easy power dynamics of narrator/narrated, artist/wife. One significant example is Chapter 6, “The War,” which recounts Lam’s experience as a refugee fleeing Mỹ Tho during the Tet Offensive, an echo of Stein and Toklas’s status as de facto Jewish American refugees in Nazi-occupied France. Whereas Toklas readily dissolves beneath the force of Stein’s personality and artistic ambition, Lin and Lam “dance beside each other, neither one leading or following.”
The spirit of collaboration extends to the community of artists, authors, theorists, and filmmakers Lin cites throughout. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Kenji Yoshino, Audre Lorde, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Chris Marker, and others (to say nothing of Stein herself) accompany Lin and Lam through the twists and turns of their joint history—stifling suburban upbringings, hardscrabble days in New York, career successes and disappointments, cancer diagnoses, gender transitions, new home ownership, a global pandemic—supplemented by Lin’s own ephemera in the form of old journal entries, stories, poems, and notes. This emphasis on the collage, fragment, or otherwise “minor” detail adds up to a kind of storytelling ethics of its own. At one point, Lin quotes Maxine Hong Kingston, who praises the minor as “this gossamer substance that . . . fuels dream work, mythmaking, and fantasies and, as Kingston notes of women of color, keeps us alive.” Such meta-fictional interjections may occasionally sound didactic, but they are also instructive. Lin is trying to re-focus our vision.
Toward the end of the Autobiography, Lin-as-Lam writes, “It may be that a great love is shown through listening to another’s story. It may be that a greater love still is shown through telling another’s story. A different kind of love arises when merging another’s story with one’s own.” What kind of love? I find Lin’s use of “different” as opposed to “great” in this last sentence to be crucial. The order of love she is describing can’t be classified with the canonical “greatness” of heroes and individual geniuses. On the contrary, Lin suggests it may lie in the ordinary, everyday language of care—of savoring each precious shared moment, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, like the sweet and tart insides of a mangosteen, and letting it stain your fingers bloody.
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