Images of China
June 9, 1999 - August 12, 1999
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| Images of ChinaJune 9, 1999 - August 12, 1999 |
In the summer of 1999, I went back to China -- the country where I was born
more than twenty years ago. It was quite an experience for me -- even though I
spent the first sixteen years of my life there. Before the trip,
I was expecting things to be different from what they were ten years ago.
Sure enough, many parts of
the country have changed -- and the scale of the change is beyond
anything I have heard or imagined. However, apparently not everything has
changed. In rural areas, in small cities, even in the big cities that have gone
through quite a facelift, many facets of China, amazingly,
remain almost the same. I can still see the same life style,
hear the same noise, maneuver through the same crowd -- just the way
I had experienced when I was living in China.
Now, half year has past since I came back from the trip,
and I finally finished developing the photos I took during the trip.
While I was browsing through them, I felt a strong urge to write a memoir
for the two-month trip -- for one simple reason:
I want to keep this piece of memory as complete
and accurate as possible. This urge, I think, partially came from reading
the travel journals written by my friend Lucy, whom I met while travelling
in China. Reading her journals makes me feel like I am travelling with her --
she is a very good writer of course. I am, on the other hand, a really bad
writer (and a lazy one too -- I did not keep a travel journal at all).
I will have to rely on my memories and the
picutures I took along the way to pull this one off. Hopefully, they can help
me in reconstructing the images of China -- the way I saw it, and the way
I experienced it.
Copyright Hao Wangİ 2000