Soy Boy

Performance, screening, and exhibition at The Soil Factory, Ithaca, NY, 2025

In the summer of 2024, I made a short film called Ithaca, Soy, and My Son, with the support of the Rural Humanities initiative at Cornell University. In the film, a Cantonese immigrant mother’s yearning for her tofu-loving son unfolds a series of meanderings and dreams through Ithaca and Central New York. The film sketches the search for home across the nexus of Chinese and American identities and cuisines in the rural city of Ithaca, where people come together from the surrounding New York countryside and the regions of the world.

The Soil Factory presented this film, along with a performance of cookery and several new paintings of the “soy boy.” As the son, I prepared 3 tofu dishes live for the audience: fried tofu fried rice, tofu caprese salad, and tofu pudding with ginger syrup. At the end, the son invited guests to start the meal themselves.