Zeng Hong
This is the second time in my life that I am not at home with my parents to celebrate the Chinese Spring Festival. The first time was last year, I was at New Haven doing my arts fellowship and I got to experience the festive vibe together with friends of Yale-China Association and Ely Center. I feel like it just happened quite recently but actually one year has already passed. Because of Covid, this year I wasn’t be able to come back to my hometown, but stay in my apartment in Hong Kong instead. I had a small celebration in the New Year eve with my flat mate, but basically I just had a normal routine during the holiday. I am recently quite interested in how everyday objects express themselves in photography. These ordinary stuffs therefore become the subjects to narrate my 2021 Chinese new year story. Putting together, they also reveal the relationship between me and this apartment where I have been living in the past three and a half years. For a person who have chosen to leave home and to make home somewhere else, the places where I have inhabited and the things which I owned always stay in my mind. I am not good at writing poetry, therefore I decide to let Rilke help me to speak my mind.
“Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.”
― Reiner Maria Rilke
I woke up in the late morning with the remains of my dream. They are all fragments, but in colour. I once heard a friend telling me that it’s quite rare for people to have dreams appeared in colours. But I did have some.
The most of apartments in Hong Kong do not have balcony. So it’s quite common that people will hang their clothes beside the window when there is sunshine. From my window you can see how compressed the residential buildings in Hong Kong are, which has become a spectacle in Michael Wolf’s works.
I opened my wardrobe to put on clothes. My red sweater jumps out, so I decided to dress it.
My flat mate order a whole box of snacks from Taobao. Seven years in Hong Kong haven’t changed her taste. It reminds me the Hong Kong Market as well as the Million Asian Market in New Haven – I could find so many Chinese sauces and snacks there!
We had poon choi — a representative Hong Kong food in the new year eve. As a festival meal composed of many layers of different ingredients, it gives people a feeling of being sumptuous.
The bottles of wine I had during the new year period. Festival is always a good excuse to have booze.
In my hometown people believe better not to clean their house in the first day of the new year, because it will sweep away good luck.
Back to work, I keep a flower as a companion. For me, Rilke’s poetry beautifully portrays the a person who enjoys calmly reading, writing, and reflecting on her life. It’s therefore not totally sad, a bit melancholy maybe, but peaceful and powerful.