she called it a challenge in black and white, the days numbered incorrectly, but the rules repeated. seven seven seven seven seven seven seven days, seven seven seven seven seven seven seven photos of your everyday life. no explanation, no people. supposed to challenge a friend to join, so 點, a?
filled with initials and dotted with territories (for aka-chan)
Dearest aka-chan,
Has it been a big year for you, preceding and to come after the day yesterday which was indeed a day? i think about you often this year, you know, something like the distance of six months and the time of always. it makes me happy your daughter declares you are four years-old this time.
Actually, i celebrated your day in the city where we travelled, four years and 11 months ago. i wrote a message to z and we will meet after the 14th of this month. and probably i will meet mevrouw a at the beginning of next month. and f later in that month. but there are many more initials that have been lost, and sometimes this feels like the ocean, sometimes it feels sad. but i still don’t want to admit regret, so last week i visited an ocean filled with initials and dotted with territories, an ocean that knows very vast and very small at the same time.
At the bottom of a granite hill, there are many seafood restaurants which make this area a popular place to visit. you have to pass through small alleyways filled with creatures in glass tanks, and when you see a jade green postbox you can turn slightly to the right, then keep walking to get to the sea. this is one of the old postboxes from the colonial era, one of only seven left in the city bearing the cipher of King George V, but its freshly painted green-blue is really just a bad moustache.
when you emerge from the alley and arrive at the ocean, actually it looks not so much like the sea but a river. There is another bank with another hill on the opposite side, with granite that is identically uniform and equigranular (the average grain size is just over 2mm) to the granite on this side. There are some aunties and uncles playing cards on this side. Maybe there are on the other side, too. Although it is less than 500 metres across to the other side, it is wide enough not to see aunties and uncles over there. But my aunt used to live on that side, maybe only for about one or two years. Now she lives closer to this side, closer to where our family grew up, which maybe makes sense because here we are at the gateway for the Fujianese immigrants coming into the city. There were also many immigrants from Chiuchow, which is further east and further north from here as you keep heading along the coast. If you keep going further and further east and further and further north, you will arrive in Japan, and it is through this gateway that many Japanese merchants also passed, as well as Portuguese merchants on their way back from Japan.
The ocean is very vast. But here it is very small, less than 500 metres across, and there is a small temple for the goddess 天后 Tinhau. Actually, it is better luck to call her 媽祖 Matsu. She is the goddess of the seafarers, and you will find many temples in this region dedicated to her. Once i visited her island and sat on the cliff of her knees, looking over to China. I fell asleep at one point, and when I awoke, I was in China. Twice when people awoke here, they saw Matsu resting in the clouds——once in 1953, the year my mother was born, and once just last year, when I was halfway between here and Japan.
If you entered the harbour from the east, perhaps Chiuchow or Fujian or Japan, her presence at this gateway would have calmed you, and upon passing through the inlet the water would have indeed been calmer, and you would have rested easy only to be ransacked by the pirates watching from above on the granite hill. there have been gangs and clans and colonisers here, changing hands and moving around for longer than we know. there have been territories since the beginning of these beginnings… something is always east to somebody else. sometimes the view is long and vast, and sometimes it is less than 500 metres across.
where we used to say words to one another
opportuning: “love is excuse 4 exhibition”、two salons later、後她的後 post the post、inventories pending、雪上加霜 adding insult to、work on work、最爛的編輯 the worst editor、女 woman、that 18:21 song、his 8 year-old golden age、responsibility for fetish、怎麼互相扶持 how do we support one another、怎麼說「nurture」、剝削朋友 exploiting friends、the gathering of failed proposals as a form of depth、schwag politics、不要在我面前說「效率」這個詞、北京徵集 open call to beijing、”it’s complex [emoticon] and rather not over wechat”、。。。
Posted by 丫 | reply »After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
it was our dream come true
the .3 percent
he said, “our progress is not inevitable“.
Posted by 丫 | reply »gnomic notes on a dialogue
我們的發達資本主義 our advanced capitalism #20
surplus Japanese plastic bags circulating in China
she says the ‘E’ possibly stands for “economy”
“I use also my bag.”
before and after the mooon, a process of reading and writing
about one month ago, these knives killed the photocopy machine. i was unsettled where they ignored and just kept on working. and then just a few days ago, the moon sliced my computer in two. in all of these aftermaths, yes——”keep working”, they said. though i was thinking of you.
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fashionista
sports babble
your doctorate
irene
she was this close to you
like divination
generating,
the one who lost interest
please come over
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