In 2014, my living space is a bedsit on the rooftop of my mother’s top floor flat, where I live and work in the city that was home, to help care for a woman who no longer knows who I am.

For awhile, my sibs and I had contemplated the China Coast, the only English speaking home for the aged in Hong Kong.  Mum’s Cantonese has never been fluent, and, as the prions continued their maniacal play doh twists and turns, her tongue lost more Cantonese—her fourth, mostly illiterate language—than her literate third one, English.   

Photo credit: Paul Hilton

My mother was raking leaves in the front yard one late December afternoon, just after a light, sneeze-like rain had fallen over Los Angeles. The sky was pink on account of the sunset, with grey, billowing clouds piled up on top of one another above us. They covered the entire sky, except for a patch or two of dull blue that would uncover itself before being swallowed by the rolling grey.

Amid the poverty and suffering in and around his Harlem childhood in the 1930s, James Baldwin sensed he’d grown up amidst the performance rhythms in a cultural tradition that kept people from becoming dominated by their circumstances by enabling a nuanced and vital traffic between interior and social worlds. That tradition enacted a level of experience at the border of the secret and the unconscious. For him, it took its most profound and complex form in black music.