Words and Light

Analog: Homelandcoming «Arrival»

September 25, 2019 8:50 pm

First, we flew halfway around the world to meet my grandmother in Taiwan. Then, all together, she and my husband, my uncles, and I left her Taipei high-rise to take a cab to take a flight to the mainland. There, we were met by two young men — one a distant cousin, the other a friend of his — who greeted us, loaded our bags into a Honda and an Audi, and drove us through Xiamen, past industrial spaces, banana tree groves, and roadside villages, for three hours into mountainous Yongding County.

Finally, as the sun began to creep behind a neighboring mountain ridge, we arrived and, for the first time since 1943, my grandmother saw with her own eyes the «tulou» where she’d arrived as a 5-year-old and last seen as a 12-year-old.

She was home, and so were we.

This «homelandcoming» series features film I shot when I traveled with my grandmother in 2017 to her ancestral home in China, which she had not seen in 74 years.

Some frames show the postcard-perfect scenery of «tulou» (“earthen buildings”) practically untouched by time; others reveal the everyday details that fascinated or amused us, and served to remind us that modern-day life continues for the residents who remain.

As a whole, this series is not a comprehensive visual diary of our trip — rather, it is a selection of a selection, showing the intersections of history and modernity, of authenticity and tourism, and of foreign and familiar.