2 Break the Bank

Anne. In the early 1990s, as my mother began chemotherapy for an aggressive form of breast cancer, my grandmother, who was herself navigating illness, gifted her with a doll. Originally made in Valencia, Spain, the six-inch porcelain Lladró figurine was named “Niña Desparpajo,” which describes a girl with a plucky kind of confidence, free of shame or worry. The doll’s posture channels this pluck—arching back, chin up, and belly out. Her hands form fists resting defiantly on her waist. The gift of la Niña from my grandmother to my mother was a gesture of solidarity in recognition of their shared strength in the face of overlapping experiences of illness and resilience. And a wish for better weather ahead.

A quarter of a century later—years after my grandmother had passed—in the midst of my own “weather,” my mother gifted me with the doll. The porcelain figurine didn’t exactly match my aesthetic taste. Ours is not a house of glass cabinets, formal dishes, and fragile collectibles. Still, knowing the figure’s story and her significance to my mother and grandmother, I was deeply moved by this gift. I placed her on the highest shelf on my living room bookshelf to protect her from my young children’s curious hands and quick moves.

La Niña stood atop our bookshelf for several years before she broke. One day, my partner, on his way into the house from the grocery store with arms full of bags and babies, closed the door a little too hard. In a flash, she was on the floor, smashed into twenty-six pieces; some reduced to dust and others so small we had to collect them with tweezers.

The break exposed some of the object’s past traumas, and I discovered new stories and ways of relating to her. Peering into the doll’s hollow, broken body, I noticed a fine gray line along the inside of her neck that had been painted over by a clear adhesive glue. My mother later disclosed that this was not la Niña’s first fall: My father had dropped her too, decades earlier. It was a clean decapitation then—an easy fix by comparison.

The break also prompted an exploration of the doll’s deeper genealogies. European aristocratic and orientalist roots run deep in sculptural porcelain. Described by seventeenth-century German alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger as “white gold,” porcelains were valued for their fragile durability and exoticized for their Eastern origins (quoted in La Force 2015). The diminutive statues at first were, and later represented, the spoils of colonial power: Generations of wealthy and white Europeans would display their porcelain collections as an index of class and cultural dominance. These are some of the inheritances that get passed down in white culture: colonial myth-making camouflaged as heirlooms and collectibles. Like the invisibly mended fracture line deep inside the doll’s torso, such lineages are often hidden, while their logics, norms, and effects persist intact.

While the doll’s previous breaks were concealed, the current one—more of a shattering, really—could not be cleanly mended, at least not as such. This break was irrevocable. And yet despite her brokenness, or maybe because of it, I had grown more attached to the doll. Preserving her maintained a connection I had with my mother, and my mother’s mother, as well as with histories to which I wanted to attend.

After searching for a while, I met Shuichi, a traditional kintsugi artist living in Toronto who agreed to repair the figure. Repair is perhaps the wrong word. Rooted in the Japanese philosophy and aesthetic of wabi-sabi, this mending practice is rather about a radical acceptance of alteration, imperfection, and change. Not a reparative return to the same but a becoming with and through alteration.

La Niña’s becoming was a severe one, meaning her form was, in both a practical and an aesthetic sense, completely severed from what it was prior to the fall. She was now an intricate collection of tiny fragments and missing pieces, reassembled and precariously held together, first by strips of green painter’s tape and later with hemp cloth and a Japanese lacquer called urushi.

In the ten-thousand-year-old mending tradition of kintsugi, urushi is distilled down from the sap of the urushi tree, indigenous to Eastern Asia. According to Shuichi, the urushi tree is more than a mere resource out of which glue is extracted. It “provides various other blessings,” he writes, “its flowers yield honey, nuts can be used to make tea, new shoots are perfect for tempura, and wood chips can enhance the flavor of hotpot dishes” (Shuichi 2024). To harvest the sap, he explains that “you create scratches on the [tree’s] surface” and the tree “exudes urushi to heal those scars.” The harvesting process is itself somewhat delicate, even dangerous: In its raw form, the sap can be toxic to the touch, and only a small amount can be harvested without harming the tree. Writes Shuichi, “We are grateful to Urushi for its healing properties, which allow us to restore cherished objects.” Interestingly, the urushi sap continues to heal even after it is used in the kintsugi process, possessing antibacterial properties well known to practitioners for centuries: Lacquered cookware was used to preserve food long before refrigeration. In kintsugi practice, the urushi is applied to the break, polished, reapplied, and polished again. Finally, the piece is brushed with a golden dust that draws attention to the breaks, leaving the mended object with distinctive golden sutures.

I am reminded of Eli Clare’s (2017) claiming of broken not as a defect but as a means of assessing entangled relations of care, damage, harm, and resistance. In the doll’s fissures and missing pieces, I find the violence of centuries of orientalism met with a healing balm of Indigenous Eastern epistemologies and practice; I find modern class hierarchies and precious maternal lines of care and solidarity. Irrevocably shattered, and at once broken and whole, the porcelain figure is now a (dis)figure. A crip oracle. A truth teller. A radiant spiderweb spun of shards (see Figure 10).