Negative: In Response to Place

translated from the chapter in “Above Flames” ：「負片：對場所的回應」

I’ve had two experiences of encountering my own home in movies.

We all tend to have nostalgic memories of certain places — the alley where we played hopscotch as children, the storage room where winter quilts were kept, or the space under the bed filled with cobwebs. These are places where we could hide, play, or daydream, and they continue to live in our hippocampus. Sometimes I think that, for me, a country feels distant, and what truly exists are the places where we once spent our golden years. But inevitably, the places that cradled our growth will one day turn into dream spaces, demolished, relocated, and worn away into oblivion. A few years ago, I read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, where he suggests that we haven’t truly lost our childhood home. The way to return is by placing oneself back in a dream state, to “put oneself on the threshold of daydreaming, to dwell in the time of the past…towards dreams, rather than fully realizing them.” Is this true?

Bachelard’s grandfather was a cobbler, and his father later ran a small shop selling newspapers and cigarettes. This reminds me that many of us may have spent our childhoods living with similar small shop smells. Bachelard, who came from a postal clerk family, worked hard to gain knowledge, eventually becoming a natural science teacher after the war. Most astonishingly, he earned a doctorate with theses on The Approximate Knowledge and The Heat Conduction in Solids. He also qualified as a philosophy assistant, and from then on, his series of works established his irreplaceable status in the field of the philosophy of science. The philosophy of science refers to using philosophy to explain scientific content, such as physics and mathematics. Nowadays, few scholars dare to attempt this. The Poetics of Space is a fascinating work that blends poetry and philosophy to discuss architectural concepts.

This book was written long before I was born, even before the Zhonghua Commercial Complex (中華商場) in Taipei broke ground. But when I first read it, I immediately thought of my own market, where my childhood was spent. My home was nestled in one of the eight buildings of the commercial complex that lined Zhonghua Road in Taipei, where both men and women were laborers (almost no one held an office job). Everyone there dreamed of one day leaving that place of poverty, gazing from the rooftop at the tall buildings across the way.

Bachelard says that the house is everyone’s first “universe” in life. He believes the house is imagined as both a “vertical being” and a “concentrated being.” Using French countryside architecture as an example, he explains that houses are always built on the ground, with roofs providing shelter from the elements, their slanting design reflecting human rationality in facing wind and rain. Usually, the attic is located under the roof, and in that highest part of the house, our vision and thoughts become clear. Not only can we see outside clearly, but we can also look inward, seeing the edges of the roof and how the carpenter’s solid geometry protects the family within.

Conversely, the cellar plays the role of the “dark part” of the house, like a hidden force. When we occasionally sleep in the cellar and dream, we find it resonates with irrational fears buried deep within us. There, we become small frightened animals, startled by every sound. For those living in a house, the attic holds its own terrors, and so does the cellar, though they differ: the attic’s fears flee the moment the light is turned on, but the cellar’s fears have deep roots, always present. Literature often loves to describe how beautiful things are imprisoned in cellars (like in The Butterfly Dream).

The houses of the children of Zhonghua Commercial Complex, of course, differ from those described by Bachelard. They are not cottages with attics and cellars, nor are they simply two-ping (6.6 square meters) storefronts. The children of the market had truly vast, sprawling homes stretching from one city gate to another, divided into eight buildings, three stories high, spanning a length of 1,171 meters. Each small store had a loft of about one meter in height, carved out of a space within the house. These homes were both commercial spaces for displaying and receiving goods and residences. The loft was like a cave, tucked behind a small square hole in the store, reachable only by a wooden ladder — the place where dreams were made.

Sometimes the people of the market think the market has been demolished, but it hasn’t. It still exists in the daydreams and photo albums of every child of the market. Although the structure differs from French homes, they seem somehow similar. Upon closer thought, you’ll realize that as a home, the market also has its cellar, attic, and center point.

The Cellar

People in the marketplace were accustomed to referring to the side near Zhonghua Road as “Tsuā at the front” (頭前逝), and the side near the railroad tracks as “Tsuā at the back” (後壁逝). The word “tsuā” sometimes closely resembles the Chinese words “zhao” or “hui,” meaning “a round” or “a time.” In Taiwanese, we say “one tsuā” (一逝) in place of “one round,” and it can also refer to a long, strip-like shape or seam. Additionally, it can be used as the character 行, meaning “to walk.” I like to write this word as “逝,” because it conveys a sense of something disappearing when you reach the end of it.

If you ventured into another section of the marketplace, people would ask you, a strange child, “Which building are you from?” If you lived on the first floor, they would also ask whether you lived in “Tsuā at the front” or “Tsuā at the back.” My home was in the back Tsuā of the Ai Building, where the shops were only three meters from the train tracks, separated by nothing but a concrete wall. This wall had regular openings chiseled out for ventilation, and kids often stood there, pressing their faces against the holes to watch the trains go by. Sometimes, younger kids were allowed to pee right in front of this wall because there were holes at the bottom that drained directly into the ditch next to the tracks. This spot, which served as a temporary toilet, was also our kitchen. Families in the marketplace placed gas cylinders and simple stoves here, and they would put up a piece of “lead sheet” (which was actually aluminum) to squat and cook meals.

Every twenty minutes or so, a train would pass by outside the wall. Sometimes it was heading from the countryside to Taipei, other times it was Taipei residents heading back to the countryside. Before the train arrived, the crossing gate would ring loudly, warning that the barriers were about to lower. The deafening sound of the train as it passed often drowned out our conversations and even our dreams.

Our home consisted of two connected shopfronts, and the five-ping (approximately 16.5 square meters) loft spanned the two rooms, where nine members of our family slept. My father carved out a small hole between the two shopfronts, just big enough for one person to crawl through. Like baby animals, we would crawl from one shop to the other through this hole, climb the stairs up to the loft, crawl through another hole to the loft in the other shop, and then climb down the stairs to return to the shop below. However, this labyrinth of space did not include a proper toilet. At night, my mother would place a red bucket to serve as a makeshift “chamber pot,” which she would try to keep away from the stairs to prevent any of us from falling into the shop below when we got up, groggy, to pee. Every morning, my mother’s first task was to “wash the chamber pot.” Of course, if someone had stomach trouble during the night, there was no choice but to pull up the iron shutters and head out to the public toilet.

The public toilets in the marketplace were built at the ends of the staircases, and in the longer sections of the marketplace (such as Building Five), there were additional staircases and toilets in the middle. Around a hundred households shared three floors of toilets — three for men and three for women. Each toilet had only four stalls. You can imagine how hard these toilets worked to accommodate our waste.

The marketplace toilets were like our cellars — places filled with shadows, wild stories, and deep-seated fears. Before I started school, I was terrified of going to the toilet, especially the men’s toilet, where the lights often didn’t work. Each stall had only a flimsy door made of wooden slats, about 140 centimeters high, like a half-opened shutter. Sitting inside, you could see outside, and if someone was peeing outside and felt like it, they could turn around and see in. My older brother once told me that, at night, sometimes a hand would reach out from the toilet to wipe your bottom. All this contributed to my severe fear of using the toilet. My mother gradually refused to take me to the women’s toilet, even though it felt safer. There were two reasons: one, there was an old woman who would charge five cents and give you three thin sheets of toilet paper, and many women in the marketplace developed bladder infections at a young age because they were trying to save those five cents. Two, my mother feared people would say I was “an irresponsible bird” (a derogatory term for a boy who relies on women).

Sometimes, when forced to hide near the edge of the toilet, kids from “Tsuā at the front” (頭前逝) would encounter kids from “Tsuā at the back” (後壁逝) also playing hide-and-seek. They would exchange glances and then place their index fingers on their lips in a gesture of silence.

The stairwell extending from the toilet was also one of our playgrounds, and its range of gameplay was surprisingly diverse. Like all children, we would slide down from the third floor to the first, using our hips to glide along the stair rail, step by step. Sometimes, we played a rock-paper-scissors game: two people would stand at opposite ends of the stairwell, with one at the top and the other at the bottom. Rock beats scissors, so you could move up one step. Scissors beats paper, so you could advance two steps, and paper beats rock, allowing you to move five steps. Sometimes, these games would stretch across long periods and spaces because one person would be standing at the very top of the stairs on the third floor, while the other was at the very bottom on the first floor. In these cases, there would be a designated messenger running between the two floors, relaying which hand gesture had been made.

We would also compete in jumping stairs, starting by jumping over one step, then two, and eventually five, six, seven, or even eight steps until one side gave up. Every day, when running from the third floor to the first, I would practice this. I always believed that the only thing you needed to overcome in this game was fear. Jumping stairs was sometimes forbidden by the adults in the market because there had been a kid who, trying to show off, ended up breaking a toe.

As I grew older, the cellar became my art studio. Sometimes, I would bring a marker to the toilet and serially draw a comic about UFOs on the walls. I am convinced that some of my readers from back then are still around, though they’ve forgotten to thank me for helping them pass the time. As I emerged from my “studio” with my drawing tools, I would sometimes see strangers using a dirty cloth bundle as a pillow, sleeping there, or sitting in a corner of the stairwell, lost in thought. The adults would say that these people had already “fallen asleep and wandered to another world” or call them “wandering immortals” (散仙). Thinking back now, they were experts in daydreaming. Most of them came from outside the market, and they certainly must have crossed the pedestrian bridge to get there.

The Attic

One of my favorite directors is Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The first film of Abbas’s that I watched was his early masterpiece, *Where Is the Friend’s Home?*. As a pioneer of the Iranian “New Wave,” Abbas told a village story in this film, instead of presenting or arguing against the “evil” image of Iran that the West had at the time.

The story is about the friendship between two schoolboys, Ahmad and Nematzadeh. Nematzadeh had once been scolded by the teacher for not bringing his homework, which upset him greatly. One day after class, Ahmad, who sat next to Nematzadeh, accidentally put Nematzadeh’s notebook in his own bag. When Ahmad got home and found his friend’s notebook, he began to worry that Nematzadeh would be punished. But since his mother insisted he finish his chores and homework before leaving the house, an anxious Ahmad slipped away when she wasn’t looking, taking the notebook to the neighboring village of Poshteh.

Nematzadeh’s home was completely unfamiliar to Ahmad. He asked around, but no one could tell him where it was. At one point, he ran into his classmate Mohammad Reza, who was helping his father carry milk, but Mohammad Reza didn’t have time to take him there and only pointed him in a vague direction.

Ahmad wandered the village, asking for directions to Nematzadeh’s home but finding no luck. After circling the village, he encountered a metalworker named Nematzadeh and thought it might be his classmate’s father. He followed the man, who was riding a donkey, but it turned out to be someone with the same surname by coincidence.

Ahmad then asked an elderly man, who boasted that he knew everyone in the village. The old man took Ahmad around but eventually led him back to the metalworker’s house. As it grew dark, a disappointed Ahmad decided to go home. The old man walked with Ahmad for a while, but his pace was slow, so Ahmad ran ahead. However, a strange dog blocked his way, and in the end, it was the slow-moving old man who rescued him from the situation.

Suddenly, Ahmad had an idea: he could do Nematzadeh’s homework for him and bring it to school the next day. He was a boy of action, and he started writing double the homework, working late into the night. The next day, when the teacher began checking the homework, Nematzadeh, knowing he hadn’t done his, felt disheartened, expecting to be punished. But Ahmad arrived just in time to hand over the notebook, and when Nematzadeh opened it, he saw that the homework was already completed. Overcome with relief, Nematzadeh smiled through his tears.

Even in 1987, when I was in high school, this film seemed simple and lacking in stunning techniques. But in the 1980s, Iran was cut off from the Western world, and many Western nations viewed Iran as a war-hungry, authoritarian country lacking in human rights and women’s rights. Through his portrayal of small village matters, Abbas’s film resonated emotionally with the audience, showing a different side of Iran. Everyone has had a childhood like that — some in city alleyways, where for the first time they venture out to a classmate’s house, others in rural areas, like Ahmad, winding through unfamiliar mountain paths or fields, feeling the panic of being lost. And in most cases, an elderly figure appears, guiding us back to the right path when we’re lost.

Through Ahmad, the audience also sees a glimpse of Iran — a village that seems devoid of young adults, a gradually declining countryside. Women could barely leave their homes, unable to even step outside to pick up dropped clothes. The old man who walked with Ahmad was a wooden window craftsman, but his work had been replaced by metal window makers. As they walked, the old man proudly showed Ahmad the wooden windows he had crafted over forty years, none of which had deformed or broken. It was a small but proud display of his life’s work.

At the time, a relatively young Abbas showed the West a humanized view of Iran — one far removed from the demonized image portrayed by Western newspapers and TV news.

When I watched *Where Is the Friend’s Home?*, the shopping mall where I spent my childhood was about to be demolished. Occasionally, I would return to the mall with my camera, but I could no longer find the homes of some childhood friends. They had moved away. Still, I remember those moments vividly, like knocking on the window grills of my classmates’ homes to wake them up for school. Those memories stick with me stubbornly, like burdock burrs clinging to the heart.

It wasn’t until I started elementary school that I met children from other buildings. Before that, I could only cross the pedestrian bridge if my mother held my hand. The other side of the bridge was like a foreign land. Crossing it led to another building, or to the other side of the railroad crossing, where there was Movie Street, the Wan Guo Cinema that sold braised snacks, the frozen palace Wan Nian Ice Skating Rink, Thank You Squid Soup, and Simon Fish Cakes. A little farther away, there was a place with an enchanting name: “Thief Market.” I used to think those worlds existed only because of the pedestrian bridge.

The pedestrian bridge was also a lookout point, another attic of ours, from where we could see motorcycles, bicycles, and red buses flowing like fish. The bridge overlooked “the other side of the city” and the National Day fireworks along the Tamsui River. From the bridge, we could see the elementary school, classmates doing homework in their family stores, or a friend sent by their mother to buy soy sauce, rushing across the bridge. My first pet, a turtle, was also bought on the bridge. I kept it in a metal canister that once held pork floss, but it died a few days later. My brother said it was probably killed by rust poisoning.

Before the demolition of Zhonghua Mall, I had my first camera. Sometimes I would take it with me to the mall. Once, while standing on the pedestrian bridge, I saw the old man who had been selling Yakult and milk since I was a child. He was pushing his bicycle beneath the bridge, and as I clicked the shutter, I thought I would return to that time, to the days of slowly sipping Yakult through a small hole punched in the bottle’s lid.

The pedestrian bridge was our mountain path. You could cross it to go on adventures or retrace your steps to the familiar mall. If you felt like it, you could walk up the stairs, and at the top, you’d find a small door, just the height of a sixth grader. As Gaston Bachelard once said, the stairs to a real attic are often steeper because they lead to a quieter, more secluded place.

The door was usually locked, but the lock was just for show — it could easily be opened without tools. From that little door, we could run up to the rooftop, to the top of the roof that sheltered us from the wind and rain. The first time we stood on the roof, we were all struck speechless by the vastness of the sky. It wasn’t that we hadn’t seen the sky before, but we had never seen it from the rooftops of so many homes, never stood atop the dreams of all the people in the mall, gazing up at the sky.

When I was a teenager, whenever I felt like crying, I would want to unlock that door and escape to the rooftop. But if I stayed there too long, a fear would creep in — the fear that I might not be able to come back down. Because that door could be locked permanently by someone. I wouldn’t be able to go up, and I wouldn’t be able to come back down either. Facing the vast sky alone for too long is terrifying. At that moment, I would just want to return to that two-ping (6.6 square meters) warm shop, back to our little thatched hut.

The Hut

Children from the marketplace rarely said “go home.” Instead, they would say “return to the shop.” The word “shop” was so vivid, it made us feel like our homes were facing the world, like a person standing before it. Bachelard once said that the core of a hut is the warmth of the fire, which symbolizes an endless waiting and watching, a powerful force of cohesion. That fire, as the poet Christiane Barucoa described it, is like “a star caught and imprisoned at the moment of freezing.”

The stars in my memory shine brighter than anyone else’s because every shop hung a 100-candlepower lightbulb on a pole outside their doors. When all the lights of the shops in the marketplace were turned on, it resembled a constellation, a river of stars.

Years later, if you gave me a two-ping (6.6 square meters) rectangular space and all the furnishings I needed (I’d need dozens of pairs of sample shoes, a shoehorn, my father’s towel, my mother’s rag, an aluminum bath basin, a ceiling fan nailed to the roof, a bench for customers to try on shoes, the eternally smudged glass display case…), I could recreate that decaying hut without even referencing a single photo.

Many people feel lucky if, for some reason, they still have one or more family photo albums. Family albums are like a faucet of stories. Whoever opens them starts writing family history or essays, essays or diaries, diaries or poetry. Family photos are a delicate lifeline, pulling a submarine full of stories out from caves, lakes, or oceans, avoiding the ambush of forgetfulness, arrest, and search, slowly surfacing into the light. Every photo brings forth a sigh.

We might once again see our parents in those family albums, and like our old home, they might seem like relics. There’s always that sudden realization: “So they were young once.” Our presence in their lives coincides with the time they began to grow old, but the photos tell us, with certainty, that in another space and time, there was a different version of “our parents.” It’s as if youth were an extinct creature, a fossil from the photographic Permian period.

Being isn’t merely the existence we see; in photos, it’s transformed into a frozen state. Just like a wildlife photo must have the time and place marked on it to hold biological significance, a family photo always makes us ask: When was this taken? Where was this taken? We need labels to help us remember that shutter click, much like we fear one day forgetting the name of a butterfly, we worry about forgetting our family. A so-called “good” wildlife photo must have a spirit that haunts us, whether it’s a rock, a mountain, or a tree frog gazing at us with pleading eyes. A good family photo has an aura, like a ghost.

Roland Barthes wrote about his thoughts when he saw a photo of his parents when they were young: “The photo has yellowed, faded, and will one day end up in the trash — if not discarded by me, due to superstition, then certainly after I’m gone. Along with the photo, what will disappear? Not just ‘life’ (that once lived, posed in front of the camera), but sometimes, how to put it? Love. Faced with the only photo of my father and mother together, I know they were in love. I think: What will forever vanish is this love, precious as a treasure; because if I go, too, no one will remain to bear witness to it. Only the indifferent forces of nature will remain.”

In this frozen state, our parents are forever youthful, like a moment I might capture in the wild: a pair of falcons calling to each other with mating cries. That’s why I never feel like I’m taking a wildlife photo but rather intervening in the life of another species, another family. I am their ghostly photographer.

But who is the ghostly photographer of our parents?

Unlike discovering photos of our parents, seeing photos of siblings aging alongside us makes us feel a sense of warmth. Those days of games, quarrels, helping in the shop, crouching to tie strangers’ shoes, or playing puppetry under the covers on the attic bed — those times haven’t really gone far. They are merely escapist believers who have found shelter in seemingly safe havens.

From my father’s family album, I found a photo taken before I was born. In the picture, my older siblings seem to be having a meal. Assuming my father was the photographer, using the Yashica camera he left behind, I wonder why he chose to take their photo on that particular day (my father’s family album was thin and offered no clues about the date or content). Some of them were standing, others seated in front of the shoe cabinet, and my youngest sister was glancing at the food in my third sister’s bowl.

What touches me most about this photo is not just these people I don’t yet know, but the six rows of shoes, the store signs glued to the shoeboxes, the small bowls, the cloth hanging on the wall like part of some arrangement, and the overexposed light in the upper half of the picture. That light, like the stars over our hut, remains steadfast in the frame, waiting, hoping, hypnotizing me, unwilling to leave.

Sometimes I dream that the marketplace has been demolished, but upon waking, it hasn’t. It lies in wait in the movies, ambushing me in dark screening rooms. While making a short film for a college TV production class, we used a script about a high school boy witnessing love in a small town. We searched for the right train station scene and traveled to “Shifen Station,” which had barely any tourists at the time. We brought a bicycle all the way from Taipei for the shot of the protagonist riding across the suspension bridge to school, only to find it had been stolen the day of filming. We had to borrow one from a local resident.

After the initial cut, during discussions about the soundtrack, several classmates suggested we might use an old Taiwanese song. But which song? That was undecided. I bought a collection of old songs on cassette from a nearby record shop and began listening to them one by one. I also started watching old Taiwanese films in a cinema archive near my high school alma mater. When I finally heard Chi Lu-hsia’s version of *Wishing You a Quick Return*, I played the tape for my classmates during a meeting. Everyone fell silent after hearing it and knew it was the one.

Chi Lu-hsia’s voice has a strange visual quality. As soon as the prelude begins, an image of the sunset immediately appears in your mind. Although the lyrics mention “when the crescent moon rises at dusk,” the moon never actually appears — only the sun sinking.

*Wishing You a Quick Return* was written by Yang San-lang, with lyrics by Huang Zhong-xin, who used the pen name Nakano. The reason for writing the song, it’s said, was that after Taiwan’s retrocession, the Central Broadcasting System took over Taipei Broadcasting Bureau. Once renamed the “Taiwan Broadcasting Station,” they could no longer play Japanese songs. The station’s director, Lü Quan-sheng, hoped to have new songs produced continuously, so he gave young Yang San-lang an opportunity. At that time, Nakano was the drummer for the band, and after writing the lyrics, he gave them to Yang San-lang. Initially, Yang thought the lyrics were difficult to compose music for because they were what he called “flawless words,” rarely seen back then. But after reluctantly composing the music, the song became a sensation. Besides the song’s inherent power, after so many years of war, there were too many people in Taiwan “expected to return but who never did.” Families, wives, and lovers with missing loved ones would listen to the song and weep, asking to hear it again and again. That faint hope, like the twilight, could only be found in this song.

Watching Taiwanese films sparked my interest, and I seized the opportunity to learn Taiwanese. As a novelist, I realized how much my proficiency in Taiwanese had fallen behind the older generation. Perhaps it’s because time has passed, but the serious Taiwanese love films of the past, with their dialogue and actions, now seem unintentionally comedic. Another unique feature of Taiwanese films from that era was how closely tied they were to popular Taiwanese songs. They not only captured a period but also carried a particular flavor, a sound.

Sometimes, the plot of these films even followed the songs. For instance, in Hong Yi-feng’s first starring film “Lingering Love”, the script awkwardly inserted a scene of the female lead harvesting betel nuts just to fit the song “Picking Betel Nuts”. The first time “Lingering Love” is played in the film, Hong Yi-feng is composing it while playing the violin in his room. The female lead and her friend are eavesdropping outside the window, and to the audience’s surprise, they clap after hearing it, as if they were spectators in the cinema. Later, the plot shows Hong Yi-feng venturing north to Taipei, with scenes of bustling Taipei flashing by in sync with the train’s rhythm, and Zhonghua Market appears briefly on screen.

The second time was while watching Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s ”Dust in the Wind, where I noticed that he had inadvertently captured my home, along with retired soldier Mr. Li, who worked at the bus depot at the back of the street.

I had never prepared myself for the possibility that my home would be captured in a film. It felt like my dreams had been recorded and publicly displayed. It wasn’t until after my home was demolished — along with the memories of doing homework at neighbors’ houses, eating with neighbors, helping them sell things, and feeling like I had

walked all day just to return my classmate’s notebook — that they became poetry. It’s only after leaving that we start to long for the warmth of our beds, the kitchen that was always infested with cockroaches, the half-collapsed bookshelf, the tape player that would play for five minutes after a tap, and the door that never quite shut properly. Spaces long gone, like extinct animals, become cherished in our minds, as we recall every little detail and treasure the rare photos they left behind.

In 1990, not yet twenty years old, I returned to Zhonghua Market with my new camera and took a series of photographs. It was my last glance back at my daydreams, before shedding the skin of a certain age. Fortunately, I didn’t yet know the pain of losing a place; if I had, maybe these photos wouldn’t have been captured the way they were. The light and shadows, the attic, the cellar, the thatched hut — all were quietly posed, like objects arranged in stillness.

More than twenty years later, I used these photographs, along with all the pictures of Zhonghua Market I could find online, to begin painting a scene of the market. The more I painted, the more I realized how little I truly knew about it. What model of Vespa were the young people riding back then? What font was used on the sign for “First Beef Noodle Shop”? How exactly did the windows open on the dog-faced buses with their protruding engines? What kind of films were playing at the Xinsheng Cinema across the street when I was eight? What slogans were written on the pedestrian bridge? I searched through nearly two hundred photographs before I could complete the picture in my memory. My memory needed the photos, and the photos needed my memory.

How fascinated I am by Bachelard’s words. Even though the market is no longer there, for all these years, whenever I pass near Zhonghua Road, I feel again how memory opens the door to time, bringing a dismantled building back into the present. I often slow my pace when I pass by where the market once stood, as if I were still wearing my khaki uniform, waiting at the bus stop. In my left pocket is a monthly bus pass, the kind you had to push out and punch, one notch at a time. It had gone through the wash by accident, so it had become soft and hard to punch, which meant I always got scolded by the conductor when I boarded the bus. In my right pocket, there was a wad of soggy tissue and two coins. My mom made me carry the coins so I could call home in case anything happened.

The flow of memory is so powerful, like an imaginary, curious dog pulling me out for a walk. I went for that walk, and I still stand there. The market is behind me, the train clanks past in front of me, the elevator at Renren Department Store keeps rising, rising, rising…

In that moment, I knew how close I was to the illusion of my memories, how close I was to the illusion itself. And it is that illusory daydream that allows me to live on, strong, in the time and space where that childhood place has already turned to dust. I am the child of illusion. I am the child of illusion.