Making Memory Under Capitalism

Photo by nichiiro on Unsplash A performance artist, a coder, and community activist walk into one another’s lives. Rather, they meet as children at a Fourth of July barbecue for Chinese immigrant families. What unfolds in Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece is how their friendship evolves, as they wrestle with their individual ambitions and collective social issues. Ko’s decades-spanning novel takes us from the early days of the Internet in the 1980s to a dystopian future in the 2040s. We stay with Giselle (performance artist), Jackie (web designer and coder), and Ellen (organizer and activist) throughout, seeing how their lives respond to the turbulent world around them. A theme that ties the three characters together is that of the archive. Giselle crafts elaborate, self-documenting archives as part of her art pieces. Meanwhile, Jackie is an early creator of the web archive and Ellen becomes a living archive of community activism. Filtered through the perspectives of these three characters, Ko’s second novel questions why we try to remember and document our lives. Ko also offers a poignant meditation on late-stage capitalism: what it means to exist in an age of surveillance and government tracking, what it means to create art in an era where identity itself is commodified, and what it means to find purpose. It was a joy to chat with Ko on the phone about what it meant to create art under capitalism, how memories are being digitized, and the “leaky container” of Asian American identity. Jaeyeon Yoo: How did Memory Piece begin? Lisa Ko: I started writing it in the fall of 2016, which was that in-between period when I sold my first novel, and before that first novel, The Leavers , came out. I was thinking a lot about making art under capitalism, and reminiscing about being a kid and writing stories—without thinking of it as a career. You know, the fun, unfettered creativity of those times. I started writing about these friends who met in childhood and were collaborators. I was reflecting on the kind of friendships that move in and out of your life, where […]

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