Editorial Note: huiyin zhou was a Finalist for our Editors-in-Chief position for our 2024 Community Anthologies. We invited our finalists to write a short piece on the topic of their proposed anthology. Below, get insight into “On Intimacies 缘份,” the anthology topic that huiyin had proposed for their Community Anthology.
In Mandarin Chinese, we often say that relationships and encounters rely on 缘份 (yuán fèn).
I have struggled to translate this concept into English. A quick online search gives me “fate,” “destiny,” and “soulmate” — but they all connote something binding and given, something that has been predetermined and simply needs to be found. But to me, yuán fèn is more elusive than the definitive and static qualities of a noun or a label. It is a way of thinking and living in relations with others, acknowledging the countless tangible and invisible threads of connections across time and space behind seemingly mundane encounters. While yuán fèn is often said to be “天注定” (determined by the Sky), it transforms based on our actions, intentions and other circumstances beyond our conscious control. Each yuán fèn is unique and can never be fully explained or captured.
It recently occurred to me that the concept of “intimacies” — the theme of my proposed community anthology to Seventh Wave from 2024 — may serve as a translation for yuán fèn. In my past life as a student of cultural anthropology and gender studies, I first encountered the framework through queer/feminist scholars such as Lisa Lowe and Sara Ahmed and became fascinated by its capaciousness to uncover hidden relations across oceans, peoples, and histories.
I began noticing the fleeting yet long-lasting moments of intimacies in diasporic organizing spaces that give life to community interdependence: cooking meals together in temporary home-spaces, taking bad photos of each other, massaging a friend’s tired shoulders and (lovingly) laughing at their pain-distorted face. A sudden burst of laughter with undried tears still resting on our faces at a community vigil; handwritten notes from an interrupted dream; imagined conversations with queer feminist ancestors and our future selves. Just like yuán fèn, intimacies refuses to be contained or defined. For me, it is a feeling and intentional practice of being with, of reclaiming our power to still care and love each other amidst the ongoing violences.
In daily conversations with my creative collaborator, Laura Dudu 嘟嘟, we often revisit the radical potential of yuán fèn and intimacies in rethinking relational building, queer feminist kinship, and abolitionist futurity. The synergy between the two – one commonplace vocabulary we received as given in childhood, the other a heuristic we encountered as through the Anglophone academia – has since revealed new meanings through our social practice art and organizing work. We often ask ourselves: How can we recover the intimate relationships between material, affective, residual, and conceptual presences that may or may not be immediately visible or felt?
How can we create new modes of intimate knowledge production alongside spirits, dreams, and erased bodies?
What kind of intimacy and queer kinship can we collectively build beyond rigid identity boxes, manufactured borders, and geopolitical borders?
What is the political potential of an intimate knowing of ourselves, our community, and the earth — rooted in embodied experiences and ancestral knowledge？
How do we even begin to acknowledge all the relations that have brought us here and dream beyond the confines of our current power structures?
These are the questions I wanted to bring forth then, and still do: focusing on BIPOC queer/feminist creatives and collectives with transnational and local perspectives. I chose the framework of intimacies because of its porosity and expansiveness, and for its political intentionality in centering care infrastructures. I wanted to call in grounded reflections and experiments rooted in material and imaginative realities that can expand the ways in which we think about kinship, and might even make the very word “intimacies” obsolete.
While the project doesn’t exist in a Community Anthology form at this time, other kinds of yuán fèn have grown from a last-minute submission to the call. My relationship with Seventh Wave’s community have deepened through a fall 2024 Narrative Shifts digital residency and my photo series called, “Intimate Encounters 一期一会,” was published in the Queer Family anthology edited by Isaiah Back-Gaal.
It is my hope to bring this “On Intimacies” anthology to life at some point, when the timing and resources align. Regardless, I know that these reflections are part of a fluid web of relations — the intimacies and yuán fèn we are all building together.
