How far back do memories go? (Singapore)

 

I’ve heard it said over the years, more than once and by lots of sources, that one’s memories of earlier times could’ve been a pastiche of what one’s heard from the adults down the decades, rather than what one actually remembers from first hand experience.  You’ve heard it described so many times that you start to take over the memory as your own experience recollection.

    In my teens, I came across a photo of myself as a one(?)-year-old.

 

    It was obviously posed for the occasion in a photo studio (common in those days when the majority of people wouldn’t have a camera, going to a studio only for a memento to mark the event, usually a wedding as that'd be important enough).  

    I was sat, cross-legged, next to a porcelain Alsatian, also seated but the same height as I.  My right arm was around the dog’s shoulder in a “we’re chums” pose, with my right hand fingers gently holding the dog’s right ear.

    I was kitted out in a pair of dungaree shorts, but the fabric was not denim.  As I looked at the photo, my head flashed up the colour scheme (patchy mixture of subdued lime green and lemon yellow) and the texture (seersucker type with small raised blobs). 

    Now, where would I have got the colour and texture from, since it was a black and white photo?  

    Even if the grown-ups had talked about the photo (but to whom and why? — it was only a posed studio photo of a one-year-old, after all), I doubt that they’d have gone to such detail as the texture and colour scheme on the child’s garment.  They’d more likely have talked about how hard it was to get the child to sit still for the pose, or how much it had cost — IF they had talked about it at all.

    I can only conclude that what flashed up in my head was from my own experience on that day — as a one-year-old at the time of the photo shoot: the feel of the material and the colours that fed onto my eye screen.

(Singapore, 1960s)

The experience of (some) Westerners in China (China)

These three vignettes have come from three different lots of students.

Marian* and Renate* were doing a stint in China.  (*not their real names)  Marian has soft features — light brown hair, blue eyes and a charming smile — and of un-intimidating height.  In contrast, Renate is less feminine looking: quite tall with more angular features and buck teeth.  They’d gone to a photo studio near their dormitory to have some passport-size photos taken — for some application forms (e.g., for permission to travel to places outside Beijing).  When Marian, who wore her hair short, went back to collect her photos, one of the girls at the photo studio asked her colleague, thinking these foreigners couldn’t speak Chinese anyway, “Is that a man or a woman?”  Another day, Renate went back to collect hers, and heard the girl say to her colleague, in Chinese, “It’s the ugly one, here for her photos.”

When Mark went to a restaurant, the waiters and waitresses took fright, as they couldn’t speak English and were convinced the Westerner couldn’t speak any Chinese.  They stood huddled in one corner of the restaurant, shoving each other to go forward and tackle the barbarian, leaving Mark sitting there for half an hour with no-one to attend to him.  Finally, the one who’d picked the short straw approached him in trepidation and asked him, in very broken English, what he wanted to eat.  When Mark said, in Chinese, “I can speak some Chinese,” the waiter nearly fainted with relief.

Siberian Kristina on her Year Abroad one day needed what the Chinese call “daily use goods” (e.g., soap) and went to a local shop.  The shop assistants fled to the back half of the shop as soon as she walked in, and hovered just behind the doorway, timorously peering round the door frame now and then to see if the foreign devil was still there.  Eventually, as the barbarian had not given up and gone away, they had to emerge and come out of their hiding and deal with the onerous task of confronting the barbarian.

(China 1980s / early 1990s)