Performance film, 6 minutes. Images from rehearsal footage. A group of aquatic mammals once dwelled in the Yangtze River. To the villagers and townsfolk along the riverbanks, these species were unnamed, often referred to simply as “white river pigs.” When my grandfather was a young laborer at a river port, he encountered their mysterious presence on several occasions. He would speak of their eyes, eerily like our own and skin that shimmered like pearls. He cherished the memory of watching one pass in procession, gliding upstream, defiantly moving against the river’s current. My grandfather’s affection for these creatures ran deep. Yet in those famine-stricken years, there were stories he kept to himself. I only came to know their species later, through school textbooks and with that knowledge came the sorrow of their extinction: the Baiji dolphin (白鰭豚)—the white-finned river dolphin. In the performance, a reel-to-reel tape captures my grandfather’s recollection of an encounter with a stranded Baiji along the Yangtze riverbank in 1961, during the Great Famine. I embody a mythical being—plural, ambiguous, and beyond time, accompanied by his recorded voice and a haunting soundscape. Through the act of ventriloquism, I channel his voice and the traumatic history that continues to shape us in its absence. This performance becomes a spectral presence, an echo through which my grandfather’s secret memory, my present relation to the past, and his untold sorrows reverberate. I perform in his absence, allowing his voice and emotions to inhabit my body, a living sound of haunting history.