18. Tell-Tale Coffee II : Dream Tall
I once dreamed to become a tree, so I visited the tree outside of our home every day, and prayed to it, "oh, I want to grow up to be like you."
Read More17. Ode to Dead Flowers II
She sat in the corner at the table, her face glowing like a fresh carnation, but on a second glance, her back is bent, her eyes milky.
Read More16. Tell-tale Coffee : Now the Loss Is Ours
The espresso is mine, the sugar yours.
Read More15. S Bahn Rumination I
Door opens, door closes. I find myself a seat next to the window, facing the same direction as the direction in which the train travels, sit down, take out a pen and paper from my cotton tote bag, and start scribbling.
Read More14. Ode to Dead Flowers Series I
He sent her a dead rose every evening.
Read More13. Dreamwalking Into the Wind of Change
About a month ago in Shenzhen, I met a “lady from the West" who told me that she had “dreamwalked” into the reality of "copy painters" in Dafen village in Shenzhen. She was wide-eyed, both curious and critical about everything happening around her, and ready to work, with just about everything around her.
Read More12. Just Kids in Potsdam
My writing partner Ripu and I went to Potsdam to see the Picasso exhibition at Museum Barberini in Potsdam. It was the first time we ever took a trip out of Berlin together. Even it was just going to be a day trip, the prospect of spending a day with her, seeing art, talking about art, excited me.
Read More9. The Chinese Ideology
One day I am going to leave everything behind, I thought. I will leave behind everyone who is dear to me, and move to a place where people won’t know my name. They won’t even know how to pronounce my name when I tell them. This way they cannot prescribe me a future—a university, a job, a marriage, a husband, and a child, nor lay down any laws for my everyday life. I will be free to wake up when I want to, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, just as how Karl Marx describes it in The German Ideology, without ever again being a woman who is given a family name. I will step fully into a name that’s mine.
Read More8. How I Learnt to Lie As A Child
In the adult world, there’s a saying that the best and worst lies are the ones you tell yourself. We children knew it too—the very essence of lying, which was also how I began to acquire this quintessential skill for surviving in the adult world.
Read More7. Unaccustomed Earth
When I moved to Shenzhen to reunite with my migrant parents in the early 90s, we lived in a temporary hut with a tin roof. Every time when there was pouring rain, I would have to make myself earplugs out of cotton balls. The children TV shows I watched before the storm would instantly turn as mute as the battle of rain and thunder on the other side of the tin roof. It came as a surprise to me how quiet rain had become, since we moved to an apartment with concrete walls.
Read More5. I Love You Like the Sun
At one point, even the last faint beams of sunset had vanished, so we needed to take out our torches. The person behind would shed light for the person before. I remembered the moment I stopped and turned around, I saw a mountain covered in streams of light that flowed down the slopes like gleaming water of gold. Above us, there was the Milky Way flowing across the entire sky like a river, as if the universe was reflecting back to us the grandeur of human endeavor. Since that day, I’ve stored that image in the depths of my memories, as if I knew that someday I would have to retrieve from it the missing hints I’d need to carry on.
Read More4. The Storytellers
Making a documentary consists of a series of waiting. We often have shooting days where nothing works as we expect. In documentary, you lose your sense of order of events, as if nothing happens at all through your lens, and all of a sudden, everything happen all at once. And you are never sure whether the nothing that happens or the everything would actually end up being an integral part to your story. So you push the record button, wait around, light a cigarette, take a sip of water, look into the tired eyes of your teammate, and smile with a nod, tacitly informing your teammate that you have not fallen asleep. But to the outsiders, you will look as if you’ve fallen so much in love with that which is in the shot.
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