It has been one year and four months since I left China.
It has been four years and three months since the pandemic began.
It has been nearly sixteen years since my student life was over.
It has been thirty two years since my parents took me to experience the first travel outside our province.
Long long ago, in the countryside of my hometown, my grandfather told me how to recognize Chinese wolfberry and Chinese motherwort.
I experienced the days that daylight saving time was implemented in China, and I was a witness about the great changes brought by the economic reform of China.
In the 1980s, my family had no camera, but my father tried to record voice using tapes through a socalled “the machine with triple functions”. The machine had the functions of recording, playing and radio. It was a popular household appliance at that time.
However, the tapes had been broken because of dampness. Since the digital period took the place of the analog period in the beginning of the 21st century, my father didn’t know how to use a computer, but I had never tried to realize my idea about transferring analog signals recorded in the tapes into data stored in a computer. Therefore, I had lost my voice from childhood for ever.
In 1992, my family travelled to Jinan, Qingdao, Shanghai and Hangzhou, with a camera using colour films. The brand of the camera should be Seagull, a brand from Shanghai. This is the first time that my family took a lot of colourful photos.
My albums of developed photoes are in China, but I scanned several of the photos.
In early 1990s, in my hometown family users of landline telephones were not many, so that a phone book that recorded the numbers of all users was released to every user. After my home had a landline telephone installed, I excitedly made calls to my friends.
In the 1990s, when Chinese wanted to study how to operate a computer, they would like to buy a cheap alternative of a computer. The alternative is called a learning machine. The early products couldn’t save data, so after power off all data were lost. In late 1990s, high-end learning machines equipped a floppy drive. They had a simple DOS system.
In the first years of the new century, the lifestyle of Chinese people had a great crossover. The prosperity of learning machines was replaced by personal computers. A lot of families skipped the period of dial-up connections, and started to connect Internet through ADSL.
Meanwhile, the prosperity of beepers was also replaced by mobile phones. In late 1990s, my father had to borrow a mobile phone when he visited other cities. However, in the first five years of the new century, he was fascinated with trying new mobile phones, and I became the user of his old mobile phones. Around 2005, he had a Panasonic mobile phone with a camera of 300K pixels.
In 2006 my father bought a Sony Ericsson K750c mobile phone for me. The phone had a camera with 2M pixels. Since then I started to have a chance to take photos as my will. I took a lot of photos when I was a post graduate student in Shaanxi Province.
On the website, you will see a large number of pictures taken by myself since that time. The memory should not sleep as data, but should be shown vividly to the world online.
Between the wax figures of Yan Di and Huang Di, in a museum located in Taian of Shandong, in 1992
Yue Fei Temple, in Hangzhou of Zhejiang, in 1992
I can’t remember the exact year of the photo. It should be taken in early 1990s. The photo was taken with an indoor scenery in a photo studio. As a person who grew up in the south, it was the first time I experience riding a horse.
My mother and me in early 1990s. In the beginning of the 1990s, my family moved from a narrow room to a new apartment with three rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. At that time, workers still got apartments as welfare distributed from their work units. It was the last calm period before a great reform of marketization. It should be the happiest time of my childhood.
My dog. In 1996, my home moved to a house built by my family. The house had four floors. However, it had no yard. Before a neighbour built a high house in front of my home, the new residence of my family was pleased, and every summer on the balconies I could see swallows which were singing in their nests. Around 1997, someone gave a little dog to my family. The dog accompanied me for about one year. As my parents wanted me to be dedicated into heavy studies, my cousin and I sent the dog to a relative who lived in a village. Later the relative told us that the dog was lost. I cried for a long time. At that time, the people of my hometown had a crazy desire to eat dogs. It has been a forever regret to send the dog to the relative.
The photo was taken before I left my hometown for starting my college life in September 1999. It was a new beginning of my life. Since then, I only returned to my hometown in vacations. In the past twenty five years, there have been large changes in my hometown. The schools I once stayed and the alleys I once walked disappeared, and a lot of very high apartment buildings were built. From early 1990s to the years before the pandemic, during the great changs of Chinese economy, a lot of people in the small town always caught business opportunities and accumulated a large number of wealth. But eventually they lost themselves and lost their wealth. I miss the times that gave a lot of opportunities to people. Only Chinese can understand the literature work “Dream of the Red Chamber”.
