sHENZHEN aT dEC 1, 2020, 5:18 PM.
In fall 2020, the travel ban between the US and China made it impossible for me to return school. Thus, I remained in Shenzhen, a city on the south coast of China. It's younger than my parents, only 40 years old.
I have known it almost all my life.
The city itself is the embodiment of a very average 40-year-old. It smells like boiled water with a trace of smoke. The skyline is usually grey and blurred by the smog. It still believes in potentials, always building new malls or skyscrapers. It’s loud with all the drilling and banging and clanging of the construction sites, but nothing can stop it from taking a two-hour nap around noon, when all noise ceases until promptly 2 p.m
I find it easy to get lost here. The city’s middle age panic just creeps into the back of your brain.
When something interesting happens it usually is a false alarm. Two years ago there was an exhibition here on impressionist paintings, which people were very excited about. When I went there with a bunch of friends, we had to wait in line for over 20 minutes. Once I had a good look at the paintings, I realized that they were Manets printed on coated papers.
It sounds like I am complaining, and I really am. The city is my upbringing, my home, the place I return to, a land that is not foreign. I am deeply unimpressed by it, but I am also deeply rooted in it. Often times, I feel trapped in it.
In the past few months, when I was shooting this collection of photographs, I struggled with a hard relapse of depression. I didn’t know what was the purpose of carrying on, and it further troubled me that after all the effort, I was still in the same place, literally.
To take photos for this project, I went on a lot of long walks around the city. Many pictures are taken around the neighborhood where I grew up, of which I know every road and every block.
It was like being reintroduced to the city. The lens alienated me, and I started to see my city in a different light. I was excited by what I saw, and it gave me peace.
I walked, looked, listened, and photographed. I didn’t have a destination, but it was fun. I knew something would appear at some point, and I was ready for it; I just need to keep walking.
I named the collection “Some of These Days.” It is a song mentioned in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, a book I’ve been reading when I was creating this project. The novel was about a man finding a heal for his inexplicable nausea towards everyday life. The song was among the things that cured his nausea, and eventually motivated him to devote himself into a lifelong passion of writing a novel.
The apartment that my family and I live in is about 2 miles away from the coast. We moved in when I was three, and we used to see the glimmering body of water from our little balcony. Almost two decades later we are still here, but in-between us and the sea are two shopping malls and three hundred-floor skyscrapers. We got used to not being able to see very far. And that is okay. Because I know that if I keep walking South, I’ll eventually get to the sea. When I get there, I know I’m not lost.
This Feeling - Alabama Shakes