Bye Bye Home Sweet Home

My grandma's 40-year-old home was demolished due to urban development. As we cleared it, I realized the objects she kept, though random, were fragments of her memories. My project captures those items to preserve her story and emotions tied to them.

My grandmother’s house, where she had been living for the past 40 years, was demolished this April because of an urban development project.

When my family and I started to help clear out her house, we couldn’t understand why my grandmother had kept so many random and unnecessary things. There were still tons of my mother’s baby clothes, which had not been worn for 60 years. There were also countless suits belonging to my grandfather, who passed away 30 years ago. Cleaning up all these things was such a laborious job; we were almost angry at my grandmother for hoarding things that she no longer needed.

However, at one point, I realized that her memories were strongly tied to those random objects. When I showed her my mother’s baby clothes to ask if it was okay to throw them away, she started telling a story about when my mother was a baby and wearing those clothes. The story was very detailed, as if it had happened yesterday. For my grandmother, all the things in her house were fragments of her memories. She is 91 years old now, and her memory is deteriorating. She knows it, too. That is why everything, even random and unnecessary things, was important to her. Losing those things was like losing part of her memories, like losing part of who she is.

Her 40-year-old house was not just a place to live. It was a place full of her memories with her family. It was unimaginably heartbreaking for her to lose that house without her choice. For this reason, I decided to photograph her house and the things in it that would soon be thrown away. We cannot keep everything or remember every moment, but at the very least, having photographs of something with sentimental value can remind us of mundane but meaningful moments of our lives.