This project pairs my experience visiting the Yale Farm with my mother's adolescent experience being sent down to a farm in China as part of the nationwide “Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside” movement (1950s-1970s). This movement mobilized around 17 million “sent-down” youth with the stated purpose of educating them amongst the peasantry, but really ended up burdening the peasants and exiling the youth from their homes, sometimes for life.

The action of tracing is the central gesture of this project, embodying the attempt to imagine and recreate a memory. In this project, tracing activates the spoken memories of my mother and I across two devices. On the phone, Chinese characters compose the shapes of the crops I handled while on the Yale Farm. Tracing them prompts the phone to play audio of me recounting my experience in English. At the same time, the tracing activates audio on the companion tablet device, where my mother simultaneously recounts her experience on her farm in Chinese, while propaganda photographs depicting sent-down youth fade into view.