Let's try a new format for photography / storytelling.
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Lately, I've been thinking about what it means to have come from the equator. Imagine growing up with no seasons, except 'rain' and 'monsoon' and 'hot' and 'hotter'. Everything around you is green, all year round, never brown. Lush is not just the word they use in magazines about tropical travel, but it's the only world you know.
When I return 'home', home feels like these two photos.
Home is the view from the 30th storey of my parents' home. Home is the sweaty, messy stickiness under your armpits in the food centres nestled in high rise buildings with the roar of woks as loud as jet engines. Home is sweating in 95F / 35C and still electing to drink boiling temperature soup, and hot beverages, in a hot not airconditioned food court inside a high rise building.
Coming from the equator, specifically from the place that tears things down and builds new things in the blink of an eye, means that everything you ever knew as a child is bound to be gone.
After a year away, there are new airport terminals, new train lines. The neighborhood you ran around in as a child is slated for demolition.
In the shiny parts of the equator, nothing lives except my memories.
And in my memories, the ones in which I'm only speaking Hokkien and Malay are the ones that feel the most real to me. But who am I kidding: I haven't lived there for any real length of time for two decades. I am simply a tourist who speaks the languages well, and who knows the best food. I'm the tourist who goes to see this lady before I go to the airport so I can buy my favorite soy sauce brand, so I can feel less alone, 8000 miles away from home.
This is a photo from my favorite restaurant in Indonesia. My best friend and I always stop here for the empal goreng and nasi rawon on the way to Tretes. She asked, 'why are you taking photos of chairs and tables?'
I said, so when I am 8000 miles away and I miss the food and smell and sunlight and you, this photo will make me cry.
And it does. Just looking at it makes me miss all of the things that I miss. And this is why I take photos.
@skinnylatte The green of tropical foliage, the pure red of hibiscus, the bright, vividness of the light, the almost white light. And the smells. Longkang smells, garlic frying, bawang merah rushing out from all the little restaurants, the dried fish and sealife of the markets, the blood of the butcher shops, the sharp crack of crackers in your sinuses.
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