My father, who lives in his hometown, has been suffering an incurable brain damage after a car accident when I was 12 years old. Since then, he lost his sense of time. Even I come home to visit him every year, he often mistakes me for someone else.
On the other hand, in recent years, the “city construction project” promoted by the new mayor has brought a big change to my hometown. But compared with the changed city, most people there seem to speak and dress in the same way as a decade ago. They stay unchanged and there’s a stark contrast between them and the city. In my father’s mind, I might be or am always a student attending a primary school in my hometown. But in reality I live in a world parallel to his. For him, I may have already become a stranger.
Taking pictures of my father and my hometown has given me a chance to face what I had been trying to escape from in my childhood. And I have found that my father, who lives in a different time from the real world, and those who lives in a fast developing city, share the same mind-set. The wind of time has continued to blow, but nothing has ever changed.
