Sometimes I feel like you have to be the prototype of something that wasn’t so healthy before you can become the healthy one.
Old family photos seem to conjure up some special feelings in people, and just like everyone else they conjure up special feelings for me. I don’t know anything about the second photo because it was way before I was born. I’d suspect it was some time in 1951 or 1952, and the child in it (apart from, obviously, my grandparents) is my eldest aunt. At this point they should be in Beijing (Peking), although it doesn’t really look like it in the picture, because it looks as if they could still be in Shaanxi (the base) or in Hebei, where their eldest son and this aunt’s eldest brother was born. I like this picture a lot because it is a time when I would not have known my grandparents at all, because they look so young and so fresh, like the adults — rather than the old people — that I had gotten to know. I always thought that was a tremendous tragedy, because once the people you love the most in the world were declining when you are getting to know them, it seemed like such a waste.
I am the one in the yellow jumper in the first photo. I really like the fashions and furniture of the 1980s era in China, because everything seems so simple, except I guess it wasn’t all that simple beneath the façade. What strikes me about this family portrait though is how beautiful my mum is, who is behind me. She’s looking down from the camera, and she is wearing make-up, which though isn’t rare in 1980s China (this would have been 1987 or ’88, before her husband moved to the United Kingdom and before she left), it does suggest their middle class roots.
I like my grandpa’s shorts in the third photo. The photo is dated 1963, which would have made my father (second from the left) 13 years old. I like how my grandfather, who was probably in his fifties, is wearing shorts, and has such thin legs.
It is hard to write this and go through all of it, including my grandfather’s legs, when I remember again with anger at all the things that were done to me.