An overcast morning in July on a train to San Francisco. In my coat pocket, a blank page torn from the back of a book, on which I’d written: “4th floor, Dome Room, South Wall, Tier 3, Niche 2.” Coordinates for finding you, or rather what remains of you, interred inside a niche at the Columbarium.
I once read that the late writer Kevin Killian used to drive out-of-town guests to a cemetery in Colma, a small, foggy town on the outskirts of San Francisco that, in the twenties, became a necropolis. The city dug up thousands of graves and transported them to make room for the living. The Columbarium stayed put thanks to its spatial economy: niches that contain the funeral urns are stacked on top of one another like multiple-dwelling units for the dead.
The purpose of Killian’s day trips to Cypress Lawn was to pay homage to the poet Jack Spicer, whose ashes were stored in a niche there. But you get the sense that these drives were occasions to spend a few hours with poets he didn’t know well but who he thought might share his frequency. He was genuinely enthused about visiting the final resting places of his artistic heroes. “For a man like me,” he wrote, “there’s no closure unless I go to the grave and fall down on it … and embrace spectral memory as a living thing in my arms.”
As for a woman like me, I’ve never felt compelled by graveside visits. What lives on in the dead lives elsewhere, I figure, not under the dirt. When I traveled to Paris for the first time, I did make my way to Montparnasse Cemetery, where Samuel Beckett, César Vallejo, and Simone de Beauvoir are buried, but it was mostly to see the local colony of feral cats.
With you, it’s different. I’d come to your art late. Not because I didn’t know who you were; I’m of a generation that remembers searching reflexively for evidence of other Asian Americans—in books, on screens, and on gallery walls—back when there were so few of us it seemed possible to know every name. I’d managed to see your paintings here and there, though only ever online.
About ten years ago I went to see an exhibit of yours at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In those rooms I encountered, face-to-face, the sublunary valediction of your cosmos. Your paintings pulse with granular intensity for a lost time in a now-vanished city: the hollowed canyons of Lower East Side tenements left to ruin appear lit from within by fires at once terrene and celestial. The working-class neighborhood of Loisaida was not only your home but your church; your Nuyorican neighbors and friends your congregants, subjects, and muses. I saw that, as your friend the filmmaker Charlie Ahearn once said, you painted each brick with a lover’s gaze. You had a feel for the romance of the marginal and the lawless.
***
It wasn’t only your art that drew me to your niche at the Columbarium, though; it was your curio collection. Amassed over a period of decades alongside your mother, Florence Wong Fie, the collection totals some ten thousand objects—a cornucopia of fanciful tchotchkes, kitsch, and folk art. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck lunch boxes, cow-shaped creamers, porcelain Buddhas, mammies, clowns, elephants carved from ivory, bovine and lagomorphic cookie jars, snuff bottles, red lacquerware, a towering accent lamp with a base the shape of a double-decker hamburger. High/low, East/West, Americana/Orientalia—a mishmash that could only have been borne of a middle-class Chinese American sensibility, mirroring this country’s genius for pop as well as its propensity for racial caricature, novelty, and waste.
When you were small, your mother would shop for toys on her lunch break from Bechtel, where she worked as a draftsperson, to delight you with when she picked you up from day care. Probably you were spoiled. Not only because you were a boy and an only child but because when you were five, your young father died unexpectedly, and your mother lost you temporarily to foster care. The ordeal rewired something in both of you, made you closer. Even after you moved to New York in 1978, you and your ma continued to collect together.
I wanted to know more about this lifelong conversation between the two of you. I didn’t yet know what I wanted to know or say about it, but I knew it would be impossible to begin unless I learned which mementos were arranged in your funeral niche, the place where the conversation finally ended.
***
The trip to the Columbarium was tacked on to the end of a visit with my partner A.’s mother in the San Jose area to celebrate her eighty-eighth birthday. She’s of a generation that took reverential care of the things they owned, back when appliances were built to last. Ever since I’ve known her, she’s been engaged in some form of decluttering, doing what she can to shrink the amount of stuff her children will have to deal with when she’s gone. The Swedes have a name for this: döstädning, or “death cleaning.”
I first learned about your collection through the artist Danh Võ. After acquiring one of your paintings, Võ met your mother and visited her at Ewing Terrace several times. By then in her nineties, she was trying to interest someone in buying the curio collection. No one was biting. Võ tried his contacts, too, to no avail. When your mother began talking about unloading everything at a garage sale, Võ intervened and bought the collection himself, or, rather, a heavily curated selection of it, which he turned into an installation work he called I M U U R 2—a title borrowed from a slogan you had printed on your business card. “I didn’t conceive it as an idea,” Võ said. “I always felt that it was a necessity.”
When A. and I got to the city, we barreled along Pine Street in a rideshare, from the financial district past a sliver of Chinatown, through the Tenderloin and Pacific Heights. I wasn’t homesick, exactly; memorysick, maybe. I must have passed the Columbarium dozens, if not hundreds, of times without giving it any thought. I was in my twenties. What did I know, or care, about death?
We might have overlapped in the city in 1994, the year you moved back home. It was not by choice: You were sick with HIV/AIDS. That first year at Ewing Terrace was bleak; you spent most of it in bed, weakened and depressed. But then you got stronger—at least for a while—under the watchful care of your mother and stepfather. I had thought you moved to San Francisco to die.
In fact, you’d held on to your walk-up on Ridge Street in the Lower East Side and continued to travel back to New York every few months or so over the next three years. Was there part of you that dared to hope you might one day resume your old life, taking the stairs to the sixth floor with your six-foot-tall stride, sleeping under the candy-striped sheets in your twin bed, losing yourself once more in the sweet oblivion of painting by the afternoon light that streamed from the windows?
But eventually, you got worse. After you died, your mother entrusted your friend Peter Broda to clear out the apartment. He made sure that your gallery got the paintings it wanted, and that NYU got the papers it wanted, which left him with a whole bunch of other stuff that nobody wanted. He kept the splattered drop cloth that used to cover the floor of your studio. He kept your refrigerator, nearly unrecognizable as an appliance under the layers of graffiti tagged by friends who had crashed at your place or otherwise passed by. He kept your signature cowboy shirts, the ones with arrows embroidered over the collarbone, and multiple pairs of your ripped-up Levi’s. He kept the hand-painted leather jacket that would end up on a museum wall, part of a massive survey of your work that traveled recently through London, Madrid, Berlin, and Amsterdam.
Asked in an interview why he kept your things after all these years, Broda deflected, insisting several times that he really didn’t know the reason. “Realistically it makes no sense to keep them.” He never looks at your old things, which have been mummified in boxes now for over a quarter of a century. Maybe, Broda mused, he’s simply a hoarder. And yet, these objects are “so ‘Martin’ that … I just couldn’t let them go.”
Wasn’t that reason enough to keep them? But there’s something inadequate, even abysmal, about keepsaking. Because things can feel stupid. They’re stupid on account of their very thingness—the mute, hapless way they prey on your sentimentality despite being pieces of fabric or wood or ceramic or plastic or paper that, with each year, become more and more removed from the person who, in the first place, made the matter matter.
***
Our driver turned into a cul-de-sac of houses painted the chalky shades of TUMS and dropped us off on a circular driveway in front of the Columbarium. The neoclassical rotunda, half of which was draped in construction netting, was flanked on both sides by two modern-looking extensions.
It’s Chinese custom for the eldest, or in your case the only, son to arrange for his family’s burial site. The Columbarium, I knew, had been your idea. Even so, my hand flew to my throat when a brochure (“A Unique Cemetery Alternative”) shook loose from the manila folder I was sifting through in your archives at NYU last winter. Was it premonition, plague, or both that had spurred you to send away for it?
Before you moved to New York, you studied ceramics at Humboldt State. You made sculptures with big sunflower heads and dorsal spikes that resembled biomorphic totems of alien clans. Even though you left ceramics behind for painting, you never lost your feel for things. Your sculptures made me wonder if you knew about the tsukumogami—folklore figures from old Japan that were once everyday household objects (think umbrellas, slippers, kettles) but attained souls after a hundred years of service.
Some tsukumogami turn mean and vengeful. The Boroboroton—futons left abandoned in boarded-up houses or ones that formerly belonged to lonely people ditched by their spouses—spend their days searching for sleeping victims to strangle. But most aren’t so homicidal; they’re more likely to be up to mere malicious mischief. There’s something of the tsukumogami’s antic glee in the anarchic menagerie that forms your collection. When I look at photos of Võ’s I M U U R 2, I catch the dopamine sparks of pleasure you and your mother must have felt in your mad pursuit of these knickknacks, the rituals of haggling, theatrically feigned indifference, hard-balling—the charge generated between a pair of matching kitten salt and pepper shakers, between Martin and mom.
Now, in midlife, I find that my own relationship to objects has changed. My death is starting to assume shape in the distance, however hazy. So is the recognition that nearly everything I own will turn into junk. And yet I’ve come around to thinking it’s okay not to döstädning so much. True, someone else will end up tasked with disposing of all my things, but they’ll be able to do so with greater dispassion and efficiency than me.
***
Like an old church, the main vestibule of the Columbarium draws your eyes upward to the stained-glass dome above. After the cemetery’s denizens were moved to Colma, the building sat abandoned. Bootleggers occupied it for a while; then raccoons and squatters trashed it. By the seventies, when a man named Emmitt Watson was hired as a groundskeeper, the walls were sporing mushrooms and mold. Watson single-handedly restored the rotunda to its present glory.
It was late morning. I could hear people chatting in Spanish in another wing of the building. A. and I split up and began scanning each row of niches quickly, mindful of the time because we had a plane to catch. The thing you notice right away is how many young men are entombed here, AIDS the unspoken cause of death. A handful of these niches contain a matching urn not yet filled, a deferred reunion.
Your mother never did accept your sexuality. You gave her a generous “don’t ask, don’t tell” berth, but you also didn’t hide who you were. (How, after all, could you conceal a five-foot-tall painting of a bulging brick dick?) You were famously lusty for firemen, claimed to get off on the smell of their char. You used to wear a fireman’s jacket around town like a high school letter jacket. Your paintings of the young Nuyorican men who were your friends are intimate, sometimes erotic; your paintings of Black and brown men in prison even more so, fusing stories you’d heard from friends with your own homoerotic fantasies. You could be charged with objectification, especially by today’s sensibilities. But I want the art that touches itself and sniffs its fingers, the art that is perverted because desire is perverted, race is perverted, capitalism and the carceral system are perverted, the American Experience is perverted.
***
The first people to store their ashes in columbaria were probably Buddhists in Asia; the middle and lower classes in ancient Rome did it too (the root columba is Latin for dove; Romans kept doves and pigeons in nested holes stacked in rows). I don’t know when or where tricking out niches as miniature window displays began, but this impulse to individualize one’s final resting place with memorabilia and favorite things strikes me as particularly American.
To make her laugh, you once told your mother that you wanted your ashes to be kept in a favorite pig-shaped cookie jar from your collection. Robert Glück (whose friend and former lover Ed Aulerich-Sugai is also interred at the Columbarium) called niches “a stage with potential,” where the private and the public converge. A pink tin of Almond Roca. Nips of Bushmills. A favorite mug. Rings, war medals, and eyeglasses. A lot of eyeglasses. A few niches display baby shoes of soft white leather: the photographs of women that accompany them suggest these shoes do not commemorate dead toddlers so much as close a mortal circle.
Here it is, I hear A. say from another room.
And there you are: South Wall, Tier 3, Niche 2. I’d missed it in my haste. Like the photographs I’d seen of your parents’ house, the niche overwhelmed with its abundance of objects, an arrangement that nonetheless felt meticulous, the hand behind it unseen yet gigantic, as with a doll’s house. I had to slow my eyes to take it all in.
***
When I first saw your near life-size paintings of shuttered storefronts on Avenue B, at the Bronx Museum of Art, I hadn’t understood that these padlocked bodegas and street-level Pentecostal churches were either on their way out or already gone from the Lower East Side; I thought they were just closed for the night. The storefront series was conceived as an elegy for a neighborhood since replaced by a sleek, corporatized body double—the version of the city I would move to decades later. “Everything must go,” you wrote, wistful, fatalistic, in the press release that accompanied the East Village gallery show when the series was first displayed. “Like ice like fire like smoke like lightning like dew like a dream.”
A. called a car. While we waited just inside the gate, I stole around the corner to look at the extension that bordered one side of the property. The sign at the entrance said “HALL OF TITANS. Welcome. Feel free to walk around our new addition.” I flashed on a memory of that promotional brochure I found in your archives, which touted a newly constructed wing of the Columbarium. But that was so long ago, it couldn’t have been the same structure I stepped into now, long and L-shaped and outfitted from top to bottom with brass-edged niches, gaping and unoccupied like a gleaming new development in an exurb.
Pop, your stepfather, died of cancer less than a year after you. I don’t like thinking of all the years that followed, when your mother was alone—of all the times a vintage Donald Duck coin bank or creamer must have caught her magpie eye and made her light up with the promise of conquest, before swiftly dimming because you were not there. She kept busy with your archives, fastidiously organizing the materials as well as marshalling the people necessary to maintain them. But something tells me the collection stopped growing after you died. The most kinetic collections feel both infinite and incomplete. Out there, somewhere, is another Mickey Mouse lunch box that would fit perfectly, nested among the others.
***
As we left, A. asked me why you would want to be kept in a place like the Columbarium. Wouldn’t you rather have your ashes resting on a mantelpiece at home, say, or scattered in the ocean?
I didn’t have an answer. My thoughts drifted to a niche that had stopped me in my tracks. It was at knee level, backlit by the sun shining through the glass behind it, and bare except for a tin of hot chocolate. The tin bore no identifying name or marker. A dragon covered the nutrition label, slightly smudged as though imprinted by smoke or pitch.
When I finally did peer inside your niche, I saw a bouquet of paintbrushes fused together by calcified acrylic. I saw an archer’s thumb ring (you collected those). I saw photographs of you and your family. I saw a braided leather belt. In the left-hand corner, I saw a metal X-Acto bulldog clip next to a photo of you wearing it as a tie clip, a visual gag borne of the kind sons perform to remind their mothers of the boys they once were and will always be.
After our visit to the Columbarium, I reread a few articles about you I’d found online. I was surprised to come across a detailed account of the objects inside your family niche in an essay by the curator and writer Julie Ault. Had I printed it out and not gotten around to reading it until now, or had I blocked the memory of it somehow, a mental trick that would compel me to go and see the niche for myself?
***
A.’s question had a blind spot. Your remains can only remain at home if there is a home, and a house remains a home only if the people you love still exist. Online, I found a sales listing for 344 Ewing Place from 2018, when it was last sold. Clicking through the photographs, I saw that the rooms had been stripped bare. The realtor had not bothered to stage the house or even apply a fresh coat of paint. I recognized the same apricot-colored walls I’d seen in pictures of your childhood bedroom.
But for now let’s imagine that your mother is still alive, still making the trip to visit your niche. It turns out the Columbarium is only a fifteen-minute walk from Ewing Terrace. How you must have all had a little laugh about that. Well, you won’t have to go too far! Let’s imagine the first time you must have taken her there to check it out, climbing the stairs to the fourth floor together. You’re a few steps ahead, looking back and grinning, eager to show off the ornate stained-glass interiors, you with your eye for beauty.
“Things make time graspable, and rituals make them something one may enter, like a house,” wrote the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. A niche creates the occasion for ritual, for pilgrimage, as your mother must have known, as Kevin Killian knew as he drove his passengers along the broad, curving boulevards of the cemetery in Colma, lined with Monterey Cypress trees and mausoleums, those tiny homes of granite and marble.
There’s a lovely short film about Emmitt Watson shot some years ago, before he retired. The camera tracks him as he enters the rotunda on his rounds. He shouts out greetings to the dead by name. He likes to call the smaller niches “apartments,” the bigger ones “condos,” and the biggest “villages,” he explains, because once upon a time the dead were alive and residing in such dwellings. “And so we visit our dead where they live now,” he says, these people who were “once upon a time me and I will be them in the future.” I M U U R 2.
There was one object in your funeral niche that had not appeared in the essay I’d read by Ault: your mother’s own urn. It is positioned snug between yours and your stepfather’s—the only time she permitted herself to be the center of things. The urn was missing from Ault’s piece because it had been published in 2013, when Florence Fie Wong was still alive. Standing there before your niche, with the objects arranged in their terminal formation, what I felt was less your presence than the absence of her tender attention, the end of kin.
Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of the novel Activities of Daily Living and the book of poems Mouth.