Liquidity and Liquefaction

This article considers the collision of earthly and monetary phase shifts. It situates itself in Richmond, British Columbia, a seam where multiple and disparate processes of landing collaborate in the ongoing transformation and modulation of the earth’s surface. It poses a Chinese-funded construction boom on an island in western Canada as a geological formation, a physical outcropping at the collision of nineteenth-century Chinese terraforming labor and twenty-first-century flyaway Asian wealth. These collisions articulate fault lines in transpacific tectonic and geopolitical relations, even as the fluid dynamics of wealth and islands of impounded silt evince multiple figurations of Asian-ness. Through the juxtaposition of two permutations of land, economics, and racial formation across multiple centuries in the Fraser River Delta, I offer a notion of orogeny, the geological process of mountain building and crustal deformation, to attend to the earthmoving dynamisms of rivers, wealth, and Asian racialization.