Zhu Ying Hong
Besides her own name, she liked to add Father’s name, leaving “Zhu Zu Yan” on the dusty window. Sometimes, having to stay clear of the carved wood on the window frame, she was forced to allocate the strokes different sizes, and the last three strokes in “Yan” would be oversized, straying out of the normal frame, looking out of proportion.
She came once each day, at least once every other day, to tend to her calligraphy, so that new dust would not settle on the places laboriously cleaned by her finger and return them to their original, dusty state. When she returned each time, she would trace her earlier handwriting to reclaim some of the clean space. But her finger did not always fall on the exact same spot and the characters would be elongated or puffed up, seemingly floating on dust, like an ever-growing corpse nurtured and nourished by it.
One day Mudan happened to stop by the garden for some used items. She mocked Yinghong when she spotted her busily writing on the windowpanes.
“You’d need a barrel maker to loop your characters together. Otherwise they’ll fall apart so easily you could never put them back together.”
Mother had been the first to poke fun at her handwriting, and when Mudan overheard that, she’d memorized every word and repeated it, even though, as an illiterate, she could not know what was being written.
Upset, Yinghong reached out and erased the characters, spreading columns of floating dust, all but blocking out the light as it lingered in the air. The names had not completely disappeared; parts of the characters were still visible on the cleaner windowpanes, but now they were just fragments, an eerie sight reminiscent of broken limbs. Dust returned slowly and swallowed up the remnants until they were no longer visible. Yinghong ran off in a panic, never to return to trace the names again.
It was during this time, when she was in the fourth grade, that her father recovered enough from his illness to take up photography. She saw the pictures of Lotus Garden when they came home from Taichung — small, black-and-white, glossy photos in which overcrowded houses and scenery seemed to overlap. The inadequate contrast of black and white presented a gray, dusty mess of light and shadows.
The light-gray areas resembled the soft traces her fingers had made on the windowpanes when writing names. The grayish white spots in the middle were places where more dust had accumulated on the messier parts of her handwriting.
In junior high school she continued to hold the view that her father had seen the same dusty Lotus Garden and had been able to freeze the sight into images and retain it as memory. She was an admirer of her father’s magic-like photographic skill.
Many years later when, with Lin Xigeng’s help, she was ready to renovate Lotus Garden, she dug up those photos as a record of the past and the basis for the renovation. Whenever she saw them, she could almost smell the stifling, humid air from the dust stirred up by her fingers as she wiped away the handwriting. It assailed her face, seemingly suffocating her, as if she had in fact breathed it in. For the longest time, she’d thought it was the smell of death.
Father was apparently dissatisfied with the results of his first photographic endeavor, for a few weeks later, Japanese books on photography began to show up in the house. Most of the printed examples were neat and well proportioned, but lacked strong contrast, owing to soft lighting effects, and the human figures looked stiff. Names like Akiyama Shotaro often accompanied the books.
When Father showed her his Leica III camera, he would not let her hold it, telling her that it was the first handheld camera in the town of Lucheng. At the time, photo studios and families owned only primitive first-generation cameras. “Press cameras,” he added in English.
“A press camera is not only heavy and clumsy but it lacks autofocus. So you have to judge the focus with your eyes or use a ruler.”
He continued happily, a rare event:
“Ayako, do you remember the wedding of Zhenyuan, Seventh Grand Uncle’s son, at the Upper House? The photographer measured each photo with a cloth ruler.”
Yinghong smiled and nodded.
“My Leica III has a twin lens reflex,” he said in English with a slight Japanese accent. “You can take a perfectly focused picture when the image overlaps the yellow frame in the lens.”
As he explained, he let her look through the lens to see for herself. She started out looking with both eyes, and naturally saw nothing at all. Then following Father’s instruction, she squeezed one eye shut and saw the yellow frame in the tiny glass frame. She tried for a long time yet failed to see how the images overlapped, despite Father’s repeated explanation, though she nodded and smiled, so as not to disappoint him.
In high spirits, he did not notice her reactions.
“It was a freezing winter when I bought this camera in Germany,” he explained. “Twenty or thirty degrees below zero. I took some pictures in the snow, and when I got inside, I noticed a thin layer of ice on the camera. I was worried that I’d ruined the fine machine.”
“What happened?” She was so eager to know the answer she forgot the family rule of never interrupting one’s elders.
“The camera was in perfect shape after the snow melted,” Father replied in a soft voice, a warm glint reflected in his slightly sunken eyes. His gaze fell on a distant spot, as he was immersed in reminiscence.
“Another time I took pictures of a waterfall and the lens got wet because I was too close. Water is the great enemy of cameras, so I was worried. Fortunately it was dry in Germany and the moisture disappeared in a few days.”
Touching the small, light camera, he continued slowly:
“There are many good things we get from advanced countries.” He paused and then said sadly, “I’d thought I could learn something from these advanced countries and find a use for them in Taiwan, but…”
Then he turned sardonic:
“Now all I can do is use this device from an advanced country to take pictures of useless objects. There’s nothing for me to do. I’m useless too.”
Father enjoyed repeating stories of his life overseas, particularly focusing on cameras and photography, to the point that Yinghong could recite them from memory. But she still loved to hear him talk, for this marked the rare moments when his sad eyes glowed with vitality, even if it was short-lived.
After reading the books purchased from Japan, Father began to pay attention to the grid-of-gold structure, that is, making a grid with nine squares, like the one for a game of tic-tac-toe, placing what he wanted to shoot on the four points where the lines met. By using the grid, he took some well-formed pictures of scenes in Lotus Garden laden with trees and flowers.
In the black-and-white images, the pavilions, the towers, and the terraces were overshadowed by layers of green from the trees, and appeared to be cowering, usually with only the corner of a building, a few stone pillars, and some doors and windows left to struggle to break away from the verdant burial ground. It seemed to presage a not-distant future when everything would deteriorate until nothing was left; the structures and everything else would be gone, tragically swallowed up.
In addition to his Leica III, Father asked a friend to buy a Leica M3, a new model, for him. It came with three lenses, 50mm, 90mm, and 135mm.