Lok

Part of Infinity, Half of Forever

When I was 6 or 7, I had to finish a homework on writing about family pictures. It was the first time I realized the weight of a photo. I asked mom for a family photo to stick on the worksheet. She flipped through the piles of photo albums, found one in which we were all smiling in a theme park. The photo looked glossy when taken out and smelled like pages of a new book. It was stored carefully at the hands of a domestic archivist, waiting to prove how loving this family is. For the assignment, we had to write about what we and our family did together, except I couldn’t tell the truth. We were smiling in the photo but we had an argument that day. What was the reason, I don’t remember, nor does it matter. We chose to believe a better truth. Arguing is a speech act. People rarely argue to settle their differences; they argue to make themselves feel better. From an early age, I took it to the heart that it was unnatural to be sad in a photo. “Cheers” is a spell and the camera a wand. How do we dare act otherwise? I scribbled a few lines of random description on the worksheet and turned it in.

My mother had always wanted all of us to take a family photo together. She had the whole family go to a studio in Tsim Sha Tsui for a photoshoot. I was 15 that year. It was in the kind of studio that has people do your make-up, dressing you nicely before sending you to the photographer who executes both the shoot and you. Being a puppet to a photographer is not my favorite thing, especially when the photographer doesn’t like his job. When giving directions on how to pose, his voice sounded monotonous, like the way a TV finance reporter reads stock prices listed on the screen. Probably that guy didn’t want to shoot family photos either. Maybe he had bigger aspirations; shooting world-famous models, art photography, or working for a movie set. We were all orphans of a disappointing world. We were all trapped in photos by the rules of God-knows-who.

Once when I was in kindergarten, the teacher asked every student to draw and share what they did in a day. I learned other kids had their parents tell them bedtime stories before they went to bed, like Frog Prince or Princess and the pea. I came home to ask my father to do the same. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t tell me a story. Not the three little piggies, or the clever crow, nothing about himself. I guess storytelling is not a common skill after all. He would leave a kiss on my forehead when I was falling asleep though. He didn’t do it all the time. He only kissed my forehead when I was nearly asleep. If I wasn’t asleep altogether, I shut my eyes and pretended I was. Years later I learned it was not my father’s idea to give me a kiss; mom told him to do so.

If there’s anything similar between my parents, it is their obsession with photographs. My mother is a perfectionist. She cannot tolerate untidied clothes, hair blown messy by the wind, or a passerby in the far background. So when my father takes pictures for us, there is always something my mom does not like. It takes too long, the composition is not natural, the sunlight is bad. For quite a while, I really believed her opinions were about photography. Though when I take photos for her, she never complains.

My father is a photography aficionado. Funny though, he never learned how to take photos. His knowledge of photography was built from stacks and stacks of photography magazines. Some of them were mailed by subscription, others bought in the convenience store downstairs. Now and then, he’d go out alone and test out new methods, shooting photos of the new year fireworks, bandwagon parades, or painting exhibitions. He never showed me his pictures. He’d edit the photos on his computer on a Saturday night, a personal time that I was not so keen to share. He put his camera in a rectangular bag in the rectangular box, the one that I was not allowed to play with as a kid but I did anyway. I never understood his love for the camera.

When the family went out together, my mom loved taking a lot of photos of me and my brother, like we playing on a swing, eating ice-cream cones. She said those are memories of the cheerful moments in life, pieces of record you can look at when you get old. Of course, not everything lives long enough to get old. She put grandpa and grandma’s wedding picture in her black leather purse, taking it out to have a look every now and then. She said they looked like Eason Chan, the singer, and her wife. I’m not sure what that’s like. I wondered, would I do the same? Would I put my parents’ wedding picture in my wallet?

Before I reached 18, every birthday was about taking photos. My father was the photographer, and my mother a director. They bought me a birthday cake, put it on the table to find its best angle. They put me by the table, the model of this photoshoot. After a dozen shots, they switched in. Here, my brother joins me at the square table, then my mother. There, she walks away and my father comes in. It is not that a camera can’t fit four people in the frame; it never felt right for my ma and pa to sit together. After everyone took enough photos, they sang me a “Happy Birthday to you.” I see us, eating the cake in silence. If we didn’t finish it, we left it in the fridge. After a few days, cake turned bad and it ended up in the bin.

The more I think about this the more vulgar it appears. People shooting and being shot at by one another, the epitome of brutality, in disguise of civilization. When the laughing crowd takes a group photo, are they happy? Are those Instagram poets who post selfies with lines of rhymes real? Susan Sontag told me that photographs link us to our surroundings through a chronic voyeuristic relationship, and you bet she’s right. The moment you press the shutter, time freezes and reality is dissected into the severed limbs call 4R. There’s something quirky about this that I can’t point my finger at. Why is everyone enjoying themselves in this photographic party? Am I alone?

When I was 19, I moved out. I didn’t take pictures with people, for people, or viewed by people. I lived in a long, narrow room in the dormitory, a room that was just enough to put in a single bed, a wooden study table with cabinets, leaving a little trail for strolling. I used to walk back and forth around my room arguing with myself about art or what I should do to be an artist. So I bought all the art supplies that my little salary could afford, played and experimented. After all the searches, I never imagined photography could find me again. It was so effortless to reproduce my life with a simulacrum. Perhaps it is a generational difference, where people thought of photos in material terms. Like film or polaroid, images as objects to be put into form. Photos now are combinations of pixels; we can make them or unmake them in a button. Digital camera is a very lovely tool. Now we edit memories. When the camera was not pointing at me anymore, I felt relieved. I didn’t need to take pictures anymore, what for? What did I take? What did I take away?

With the help of a scholarship, I stayed in Tokyo for two weeks. During those 14 days, I took more photos than I ever did for the last 5 years. I memorized the sunset on a bridge, the empty swing in playground, the kid that rode on her father’s shoulder. Everything Japanese felt similar, even their language. Some Hongkongers think of Japan as their second home. We can lie to ourselves, that we know their culture, or at least revel at the brink of understanding. They are our rip-off, or we are theirs. Tokyo’s streets, misty morning that embraces shadows of a manhole, a slanted bicycle locked by the metal rods, the old lady and her white plastic bag with a carrot tip hanging out. All see-sawing, apathetic, serene, and alone. I shot my first series of cityscape there, random moments that I found special to remember; I don’t need the photos. I want an exercise of memory, a version of things that spoke to my mind. These memories are fragments of my personal secrets. They do not demand understanding from others. A chaotic system governs all things to exist finitely in fleeting time. I’m here to experience whatever eventually runs away. After I have done, I was no longer disturbed by photography. I got what I needed to understand.

More from Creative Nonfiction & Fiction: Read No Place Like Home by Lok