Song of Mud and Fire

Lin Xiao has a pair of hands born for clay. These hands once produced works that won national gold medals, but during the eleven years of marriage they were domesticated into tools for ironing shirts and doing housework. In the autumn when she was thirty-five, her husband Chen Weiyuan sentenced her to her final mental death sentence by saying, "It's not respectable to be muddy." She picked up scissors, cut into pieces seven of her husband's custom-made shirts, and also cut into pieces the mask of the "perfect wife", and fled to the mountains of Yunnan alone. In Aqiluo, a village of the Lisu people, she met the 62-year-old Granny Apu, an old man who used the oldest pit-fired method to make pottery. Grandma Apu read her history from Lin Xiao's muddy palms: "I still remember it with my hands, but not in my heart." During the repetitive work of kneading mud, pulling bricks, and firing kilns, Lin Xiao gradually regained her body memory that had been blunted by city life. A crooked bowl was called "living" by Grandma Apu - every ups and downs of the mouth of the bowl were traces of her inner struggle. A mudslide and a late-night phone call with their mother revealed the suppressed desires of three generations of women: my grandmother was once the best embroiderer in the town, but after marriage she was forced to put away her embroidery needles and spend the rest of her life turning herself into a ball of "soft mud" that could be kneaded by others; my mother wrote countless poems when she was young, but in the end she was unable to write a single word due to her husband's sighs and her mother-in-law's discipline. The mother choked and said, "It's your grandma's fault. If she left, she would tell me that women don't have to go back." The silence of three generations must make a sound here in Lin Xiao. She returned to the city, got divorced, and built her own ceramics studio, Mud and Fire. Her work "Cocoon·Rebirth" series uses gold repair technology to repair cracks