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she’s darker than her own shadows
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These photos are taken in my home city Taichung , the city of eternal sunshine.
She* locates in the middle of Taiwan, where she got her name from: Tai 台= Taiwan, Chung 中= middle, the middle of Taiwan is thus “Taichung”. As you can see, the name is not especially original nor poetic. It is straight as an arrow.
The city has somehow lived up to her name perfectly- she’s just about middle of everything. She’s not the hottest, nor the coldest, not the most populated, nor the sparsest. When an earthquake of the century hit mid-Taiwan area 20 years ago, she got hit bad, but not the worst. She didn’t even get to be the biggest victim in the catastrophe that later on became a national holiday.
She is like one of your old schoolmate, living a fairly mundane but logical life. She works 9-5 in a travel agency, in a city 45 minutes drive away from her hometown. She clams her hobby as photography, but she takes pictures with iPhones. She is the one who’d tell you passionately about the new Cafés that just opened 5 minutes away from her work, which has “ the best maple syrup Cappuccino and sourdough pancakes”.
She is the one who remembers your birthday every year, but always gives you a postcard with a drawing of generic-looking-but-supposedly-cute rabbit on it. You can’t help but imagine that she has a big wooden drawer filled with carefully curated generic looking postcards at home.
* I use the famine pronoun because the german word for city die Stadt is famine. Alternatively this could be read as a vague, uncommitted attempt toward feminism, interprete it as you please.
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I spent most of my adult life escaping her.
Through traveling and making a living far away from her, I attempt to escape the inevitable march into mundaneness. However, is it at all possible to escape averageness? Averageness is a mathematical concept that describes the representative middle, the universal reference point. If you want to be in the demographic majority, stay in the peripheral of this point is somewhat inevitable.
Every time I visit home, it is as if I entered the model town in The Truman Show. The comic book rental store from my childhood still stands, with the exact same interior and pricing as 30 years ago. The swimming pool, where all the slides have long lost their colours to the sun, still has the same open hours and the same local crowd.
The sun shines with the palm leaves swinging softly, life goes on.
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Mom and my silly dad
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photos shot with Fuji XT-3, 35mm f 1.4