Context is rarely tidy. Even as it clarifies, it confounds. Consider this: in 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two Detroit autoworkers on the night of his bachelor party. In the aftermath, he became an enduring icon of the Asian American civil rights movement. Thirty years after Chin’s murder, the photographer Jarod Lew discovered that his mother had been the one engaged to him. If this is context, I wondered, (2021–ongoing), what to do with it?
