A Year in Property

Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s Property Journal is what it sounds like: a 13-month diary recorded through the lens of property. In her first work of long-form non-fiction, Lam, an artist, at once demonstrates the ubiquity of property (i.e. a set of relations and system of rights that gives people legal possession of things, and the wider infrastructure supporting or denying this, such as the real estate market, the availability of affordable housing, etc.) as a means of engaging with the world, and the absolute inadequacy of property in the face of less fungible desires. It’s easier to buy a house for your parents than to hope against hope that they’ll live forever.

Lam spends most of the book’s 208 pages detailing all the things we might call “property.” Houses are property. Miniature houses on a reality show are property. Cars are property. Clothes are property. Even people can be property — as is suggested by the author’s choice to use household objects as pseudonyms for the people she would otherwise mention by name. Her partner is “Rice Cooker,” and her niece “baby Broom.” Specific kinds of property, such as Lam’s childhood home in Calgary or the co-op apartment of her dreams in Toronto and/or Montreal, take on a totemic quality, steeped in the dreams and disappointments that cannot be articulated via a cost-benefit analysis.

Amidst the typology that Lam presents, the most prominent type of property is housing, as evidenced by its centrality in the book’s overarching storylines. For instance, Lam, keen to live with Rice Cooker, details a series of misadventures with Montreal’s various co-op boards — gatekeepers of one of Canada’s few remaining affordable housing options — in their quest to find a new home. In the end, the pair abandons this pursuit and Rice Cooker decides to move into the apartment Lam already rents. Meanwhile, the author’s sister, Blender, is having a baby, and their parents are too old to stay in their Calgary home alone. Mom and Dad’s efforts to sell their house (though this sale doesn’t come to fruition) and Blender’s to buy a house that can accommodate a larger family are Property Journal’s B-plot. Notably, the parents never receive object pseudonyms of their own. Presumably they come from the time before the author learned to worry about property.

Lam articulates property as a deeply taxing and apparently inescapable aspect of our lives. She alludes to the present politics of this construct. What she doesn’t spend much time on, though, is analyzing how this political reality came to be. The focus on the “what” over the “how” makes sense when placed in the context of Lam’s practice as a visual artist and poet. These are not typically the mediums of the manifesto. While Property Journal is laced with a sense of discontent over our current state of affairs, it doesn’t conjure the arguments of Marx. Rather, Lam’s narrative offers other ways one might go about relating to objects and entities outside the relations of property.

You might think that a book so focused on real estate, property, and housing would feel emotionally vacant, but for me that wasn’t the case. Through Property Journal, I feel I understand 13 months of Lam’s life — her desires, her fears, her loves, her losses. That may be due to her strength as a writer and conceptual artist, but it also betrays the extent to which property feels as foundational as the concrete that sits below her parents’ house. It feels especially real when Lam and Rice Cooker walk around a poor neighborhood “acting like settlers,” wondering how much it might cost to buy a house. “What else is there?” Lam asks, besides owning a house. She seems in some ways resigned to the idea that property will dictate our social relations and economic solvency forever and ever, amen — at least, for the foreseeable future.

But I’d argue that property — one of the crown jewels of settler-colonial ideology — is not inevitable. By invoking the notion of property in her quotidian reality, Lam reveals a larger concept borne of genocide, displacement, and enclosure, that relies upon a commitment to scarcity and the dehumanization of the other. Claim-staking via subjugation. Ownership over stewardship. A concept that relies on near constant reification. At its worst, this kind of property is realized through a “bizarre form of evil,” to use the phrasing from Toni Morrison’s Wikipedia page, quoted in Lam’s entry on Wednesday, April 27, 2022. Evil like a landlord setting fire to their own apartment building while tenants are still inside because they couldn’t pay the rent. Or locking your factory employees inside their work room, leaving them to either choke on smoke or jump to their deaths. Or placing spikes on any surface that could be construed as a place to sit down.

In her April 29, 2024 entry, functionally an addendum, Lam discusses her own country’s colonial past. The Wet’suwet’en people, indigenous to what is now British Columbia, Canada, have led ardent opposition to a natural gas pipeline on their unceded territories with the underlying belief being that the Wet’suwet’en “belong to the river, not the other way around.” There are environmental and economic implications to such a statement: how might we treat our environs if we were not trying to profit from them? Property Journal is definitionally a record of what was, not of what could be, but Lam has engaged in projects of speculative fiction in the past (see her 2022 work Looty Goes to Heaven, a short volume imagining the life and afterlife of a small Pekingese dog looted by the British from the Summer Palace in Beijing at the end of the Second Opium War). It makes me pine for the perspective of someone who, even in the muck of capitalism, aspires to stewardship rather than ownership.

But to speculate on alternatives, one first needs to diagnose reality. The most extended discussion of property in relation to the structures that created it comes at the end of the book, after 13 months of active journaling and another 14 months of living. I wonder what Lam lived through in between. And I wonder what else she might now have to say about property, after over two years of pointed reflection and experience. With Property, Lam has put the key in the lock and turned, and all that’s left is to push open the door. What lives on the other side?