Normally, I will probably slap on a gallery of random photos and call it a day, but for this topic, I don’t think it will make sense since the photos will be random and you, as the audience will probably have no clue why I feel nostalgic toward the photo.

First, though, I would like define Nostalgia.

Per Merriam-Webster dictionary, Nostalgia is:  a sad pleasure experienced in recalling what no longer exists : a wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to or the return of some real or romanticized past period or some irrecoverable past condition or setting.

Four years ago this week, I undertook the enormous task of scanning and digitizing all of the old photos spanning the last 6 decades. I don’t recall how many days the project took but according to the daily memories my cloud storage shows me, it started on December 26 and it was still going on as of December 30.

I don’t usually look at old photos because, for some reason, I don’t like seeing the younger version of myself. Maybe it’s because I look mostly the same? In the last few days, though, I found myself swiping through these old photos on my tablet and thinking about my early years in the US when I was just following my mom around while trying to adapt to my new home. Now, 24 years later, I can’t help but feel how much has changed and how much I feel for those simpler days.

When I visited my hometown in China in 2017, the small town I left was no longer recognizable. It was no longer called, “a small town,” it had become a what’s called “tier-2 city,” which is a tier short of being called a metropolis. I asked my aunt if there was any part of the city I knew left and she took me on a walk down memory lane.

The place she brought me to was the elementary school in which I attended until I moved to the US. Since the school was in the process of being renovated, all the students had been moved to a nearby school and we got the okay from the guard to take a look. It was most likely not the first renovation since I’ve left because I didn’t recognize the school I went to. However, when we reached this covered corridor, a lot of memories came flooding back.

Except for the wooden benches and the desk and chair, this corridor was just as I remembered of all the PE classes where the teacher made me do all kinds of grueling exercises like sprints, crawls, and jumps. In the area to the right, that was when I was forced to humiliate myself in front of the whole school because I couldn’t jump rope. Looking back, I had the most miserable time at that school but thankfully, the misery only lasted 3 years.

CFFC