hello world. i lost my camera two days ago. i'm very sad. in an attempt to make up for my carelessness, let me tell you about the photos i lost.
We had been on a southern sojourn to shenzhen, guangzhou and hong kong. we took a 24-hour train to the south from beijing. We went to a 50th birthday party on a yacht that meandered in a loop around hong kong island. everyone was dressed as pirates and sailors. there were some beautiful costumes of explorers and sea farers from days gone by. there was a pair of platform shoes with plastic fish in the heels, maidens in corsets, eye patches and inflatable swords. we dressed as makeshift sailors. we went swimming in the sea. i'm so depressed that these photos are gone. they were beautifully funny. of course since it was hong kong, the costumes melted off 30 minutes into the trip. the humidity quickly took its toll, but i managed to capture a few of those initial glorious moments. now i have lost them again.
we went to an art exhibition, but i didn't take any photos there.
We went to a factory town called chang'an. in chang'an we were driven around in a minivan by a mafia boss. he was free to chaperone us that morning, but later that afternoon he would go pick up some extortion money. our friend, who is an artist, was his neighbor while growing up. they both still live in that same town; their lives branching off into polar opposite directions, but with roots intertwined.
The mafia boss drove with pop music pumping and took us to see abandoned factories overgrown with weeds. we went to see fishing villages that have traded the bark used to cover their homes for corrugated steel. the structure of the homes, hovering over the water on stilts, was the same, only a material change of light green ribbed paneling is different. we went to ancestral temples where the faces of the gods were clearly modeled after actual citizens. we saw mosaic tiles covering apartment blocks, endearing in their sense of aspiration. at some point while we were driving around the mafia boss turned to our friend and asked why we'd want to see such strange things. the mafia boss suggested going to a park to see the scenery, but our friend didn't take his advice.
we went to eat food from what is supposedly my hometown, although i've never been there. I took photos of Shunde homestyle cooking to show my dad. There was a small delicate fish that was dried and then re-steamed. There was a light green leafy vegetable whose veins glowed a shade of purple. there was soup that tasted of my grandmother's cooking (although she wasn't from Shunde). there was homemade tofu with a small pinch of pork stuffed into it. a photo is really a poor substitute for tasting this food, so perhaps having no photos is ok. I'll have to tell my dad about it instead of lazily showing him.
i went to an art fair, but didn't take any photos there either.
