Portrait in Sepia (40 page)

"What happened then,
oi poa
?" I asked.

"I did what I had to do, Lai Ming. Then I lay down beside Tao and kissed him for a long time. His last breath stayed with me…

If it weren't for my grandmother Eliza, who came from far away to light the dark corners of my past, and for the thousands of photographs that have collected in my house, how could I tell this story? I would have to create it from my imagination, with no material but the elusive threads of the lives of many others and a few illusory recollections. Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives. Through photography and the written word I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing. With these photographs and these pages I keep memories alive; they are my grasp on a truth that is fleeting, but truth nonetheless; they prove that these events happened and that these people passed through my destiny. Thanks to them I can revive my mother, who died at my birth, my stalwart grandmothers, and my wise Chinese grandfather, my poor father, and other links in the long chain of my family, all of mixed and ardent blood. I write to elucidate the ancient secrets of my childhood, to define my identity, to create my own legend. In the end, the only thing we have in abundance is the memory we have woven. Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story; I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses that luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone for telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia.