...the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

- Salman Rushdie

...I have never felt "Chinese." I was born in Toronto, Canada and have only twice been to Hong Kong, where my parents were born. I remember having to attend Chinese language school on Saturdays and feeling both amused and lost when the teacher read to us Cantonese storybooks. Both my brother and I soon "dropped out" as my mother could not stand our constant complaining. I used to be able to speak Cantonese but I lost most of m y ability by the time I was in kindergarten. I grew up wanting to be known as "Canadian" and associated with "Canadian things" (whatever those are) - I did not want a Chinese identity. I despised the fact that I was supposed to know the proper term for what to call each relative, whenever the families got together for dinners - I felt a sense of inferiority , of being stupid. I resented the unspoken expectation from relatives that I should be able to converse in Cantonese, when they were not expected to learn English. Even today, in a Chinese restaurant or bakery, people automatically speak to me in Cantonese. Embarrassed, I will have to reply in English. There is a disconnection between the colour of my skin and who I am underneath. In some ways it feels like a failure.

...Now I regret not being able to speak my parents' language. The last time I was in Hong Kong, I felt like a foreigner - I was a foreigner. I dressed differently; I was a big, blocky North American compared to the tiny Chinese girls. Unable to really communicate with my grandparents, I felt like I didn't belong in their world.

...I do not know who my grandparents are. They are a mystery to me - they still live in Hong Kong and as a child, I saw them infrequently. I used to have this desire, this image of the stereotypical grandmother who bakes you cookies and reads stories to you, and I think this ideal existed subconsciously throughout my childhood. It was a longing for a family connection that did not exist for me the way I wanted. I am not close to my grandparents. But I am close to my mother, and she's told me many stories about her childhood and her parents' experiences. The stories are classic: wartime adventures, dramatic school experiences. I think I'm fascinated by these stories because they "fill out" the image I have of my grandparents. I love the stories - they make me feel connected to history. Besides the pleasure of just hearing a great story , perhaps there is some validation of myself.

...Recently my mother returned from a visit to Hong Kong and brought back many of my grandparents' photographs. Going through the albums and small stacks of photographs, it's like looking at artifacts from which you can construct a whole life. It fills out my vision of their world, who they were, and who they are. My grandfather photographed a lot and I'm proud of his photographs. I feel they capture something - something essential to that time and to the subjects, something more that I can draw upon and feel more connected.

...When I look at the pictures I've selected, I feel a sense of mystery, of lost time - of concrete artifacts before me, but I can't decipher everything. Who is Kitty? Who is the woman on the bridge? And why does she turn away from the camera? The image of my mother on the balcony as a baby: I see the shadow of my grandmother running to catch her and there is the moment of "Don't fall!" I see my grandfather and he is so silent and so handsome, I see my grandmother and she is like a movie star. There is my great-grandmother posing in a studio with my grandpa's older brother, and I know that she - in her serenity, her confident clasp of her son's hand, and despite her bound feet - is somehow connected to me. It's so strange - they are distanced from me, yet they are so important to my story. They are part of my story.

...Memories as remains. The legacy of what was gives context and depth to what is and what will be. Understanding lies in the pieces of the past - something happened: someone lived - and this is what remains.

...I feel I am constantly, whether consciously or unconsciously, trying to define myself. Trying to find what makes me, what doesn't, what I stand for, what I despise. As it were, I have a great interest in discovering my identity and it seems my past three projects for 3rd year have all stemmed from that. This project, though it seems the most concrete and obvious in terms of self-identity, is in fact the one that confuses me the most. It's the most unclear - it's shrouded mostly by what I do not know.

...I find this project very hard to articulate, not because it's a huge intellectual idea I'm unable to grasp, but because it's so personal. What is it about the past that remains a mystery - like looking back at a dim, dark and blurry image. Yet sometimes a memory is so clear - the sense of it so three-dimensional, it's almost enough to reach out and grasp. I look at these images and they are so visually distinct, luminous as to be alive, and I am fooled into thinking that I know these people: they are my family.

...Mimi took a photograph of me that I feel is so perfect - it is blurred and indistinct, and small - like a memory. And there I am looking at myself. And what makes it blurred and indistinct is the distance. The fact that I can't "go back" just like how an immigrant can never really go back to her homeland. I can't go back to my childhood, I can't go back to an ideal of my family - everyone close and connected - because people change, and some people I never really got to know. So I am left with a feeling of loss. How is a culture translated, how are the experiences of the past translated? I am faced with the final untranslatability of that which seems so important, so deep - it runs in my veins, the stories which led to me. I'm faced with a history I don't know and a culture I don't know, at least not fully; and I am trying to find myself in that.

...My project is burrowing deep. What does it mean to have a certain heritage - does it mean anything at all? Am I my own person, a Canadian, with no significant connection to my family's past in Hong Kong and China? I sense that this is not the case - but I cannot articulate what that connection is, what it means. I have no idea how it defines me.

...How do I relate to my mother's memories? How do I relate to the memories of my grandparents' lives, their memories? What is the texture of memory - what are the colours, the smells, the feel of the past - Antonella talked of echoes, talked of texture. And what is the truth that you discover - not fact, but the "interior life" - when imagination plays with memory and story and you set upon something you understand to be valid. And valuable.

...Ultimately, I am what remains of my grandparents, and of my parents. I wonder if the distances will ever be closed. I wonder if I need them to be - if I can love and belong to my family nonetheless.

- Melodie Jocelyn Ng, April 2005